Tales of Majipoor (37 page)

“Yes,” said Valentine, a little uneasily. “Send him to me, yes. By all means.”

*

As they rode away from the laborers’ village Nascimonte said, “Well, Valentine, I’m pained to confess that I find myself once again forced to question your judgment.”

“You do suffer much pain on my behalf,” said Valentine, with a twinkling smile. “Tell me, Nascimonte: where have I gone amiss this time?”

“You enlisted that man Vathiimeraak as your ally in the investigation. You treated him, in fact, as though he were a trusted constable of police.”

“He seems steady enough to me. And the villagers are terrified of him. What harm is there in asking him to question them for us? If we interrogate them ourselves, they’ll just shut up like clams – or at best they’ll tell us all kinds of fantastic stories. Whereas Vathiimeraak might just be able to bully the truth out of them. Some useful fraction of it, anyway.”

“Not if he’s the murderer himself,” said Nascimonte.

“Ah, is that it? You’ve solved the crime, my friend? Vathiimeraak did it?”

“That could very well be.”

“Explain, if you will, then.”

Nascimonte gestured to Aarisiim. “Tell him.”

The Metamorph said, “Majesty, I remarked to you when I first saw Vathiimeraak that I thought I knew that man from somewhere. And indeed I do, though it took me a little while more to place him. He is a kinsman of the rebel Faraataa. In the days when I was with Faraataa in Piurivayne, this Vathiimeraak was often by our side.”

That was unexpected. But Valentine kept his reaction to himself. Calmly he said, “Does that matter? What of our amnesty, Aarisiim? All rebels who agreed to keep the peace after the collapse of Faraataa’s campaign have been forgiven and restored to full civil rights. I should hardly need to remind you, of all people, of that.”

“It doesn’t mean they all turned into good citizens overnight, does it, Valentine?” Nascimonte demanded. “Surely it’s possible that this Vathiimeraak, a man of Faraataa’s own blood, still harbors powerful feelings of—”

Valentine looked toward Magadone Sambisa. “Did you know he was related to Faraataa when you hired him as foreman?” She seemed embarrassed. “No, majesty, I certainly did not. But I was aware that he had been in the Rebellion and had accepted the amnesty. And he came with the highest recommendation. We’re supposed to believe that the amnesty has some meaning, doesn’t it? That the Rebellion’s over and done with, that those who took part in it and repented deserve to be allowed—”

“And has he truly repented, do you think?” Nascimonte asked. “Can anyone know, really? I say he’s a fraud from top to toe. That big booming voice! That high-flown style of speaking! Those expressions of profound reverence for the Pontifex! Phony, every bit of it. And as for killing Huukaminaan, just look at him! Do you think it could have been easy to cut the poor man up in pieces that way? But Vathiimeraak’s built like a bull-bidlak. In that village of thin flimsy folk he stands out the way a dwikka tree would in a flat meadow.”

“Because he has the strength for the crime doesn’t yet prove that he’s guilty of it,” said Valentine in some annoyance. “And this other business, of his being related to Faraataa – what possible motive does that give him for slaughtering that harmless old Piurivar archaeologist? No, Nascimonte. No. No. No. You and Tunigorn between you, I know, would take about five minutes to decree that the man should be locked away for life in the Sangamor vaults that lie deep under the Castle. But we need a little evidence before we proclaim anyone a murderer.” To Magadone Sambisa he said, “What about this khivanivod, now? Why weren’t we told that there’s a khivanivod living in this village?”

“He’s been away since the day after the murder, your majesty,” she said, looking at Valentine apprehensively. “To be perfectly truthful, I forgot all about him.”

“What kind of person is he? Describe him for me.”

A shrug. “Old. Dirty. A miserable superstition-monger, like all these tribal shamans. What can I say? I dislike having him around. But it’s the price we pay for permission to dig here, I suppose.”

“Has he caused any trouble for you?”

“A little. Constantly sniffing into things, worrying that we’ll commit some sort of sacrilege.
Sacrilege
, in a city that the Piurivars themselves destroyed and put a curse on! What possible harm could we do here, after what they’ve already inflicted on it?”

“This was their capital,” said Valentine. “They were free to do with it as they pleased. That doesn’t mean they’re glad to have us come in here and root around in its ruins. But has he actually tried to halt any part of your work, this khivanivod?”

“He objects to our unsealing the Shrine of the Downfall.”

“Ah. You did say there was some political problem about that. He’s filed a formal protest, has he?” The understanding by which Valentine had negotiated the right to send archaeologists into Velalisier included a veto power for the Piurivars over any aspect of the work that was not to their liking.

“So far he’s simply told us he doesn’t want us to open the shrine,” said Magadone Sambisa. “He and I and Dr. Huukaminaan were supposed to have a meeting about it last week and try to work out a compromise, although what kind of middle ground there can be between opening the shrine and
not
opening it is hard for me to imagine. In any event the meeting never happened, for obvious tragic reasons. Now that you’re here, perhaps you’ll adjudicate the dispute for us when Torkkinuuminaad gets back from wherever he’s gone off to.”

“Torkkinuuminaad?” Valentine said. “Is that the khivanivod’s name?”

“Torkkinuuminaad, yes.”

“These jawbreaking Shapeshifter names,” Nascimonte said grumpily. “Torkkinuuminaad! Vathiimeraak! Huukaminaan!”

He glowered at Aarisiim. “By the Divine, fellow, was it absolutely necessary for you people to give yourself names that are so utterly impossible to pronounce, when you could just as easily have—”

“The system is very logical,” Aarisiim replied serenely. “The doubling of the vowels in the first part of a name implies—”

“Save this discussion for some other time, if you will,” said Valentine, making a chopping gesture with his hand. To Magadone Sambisa he said, “Just out of curiosity, what was the khivanivod’s relationship with Dr. Huukaminaan like? Difficult? Tense? Did he think it was sacrilegious to pull the weeds off these ruins and set some of the buildings upright again?”

“Not at all,” Magadone Sambisa said. “They worked hand in glove. They had the highest respect for each other, though the Divine only knows why Dr. Huukaminaan tolerated that filthy old savage for half a minute. Why? Are you suggesting that
Torkkinuuminaad
could have been the murderer?”

“Is that so unlikely? You haven’t had a single good thing to say about him yourself.”

“He’s an irritating nuisance and in the matter of the shrine, at least, he’s certainly made himself a serious obstacle to our work. But a murderer? Even I wouldn’t go that far, your majesty. Anyone could see that he and Huukaminaan had great affection for each other.”

“We should question him, all the same,” said Nascimonte. “Indeed,” said Valentine. “Tomorrow, I want messengers sent out through the archaeological zone in search of him. He’s somewhere around the ruins, right? Let’s find him and bring him in. If that interrupts his spiritual retreat, so be it. Tell him that the Pontifex commands his presence.”

“I’ll see to it,” said Magadone Sambisa.

“The Pontifex is very tired, now,” said Valentine. “The Pontifex is going to go to sleep.”

*

Alone in his grand royal tent at last after the interminable exertions of the busy day, he found himself missing Carabella with surprising intensity: that small and sinewy woman who had shared his destiny almost from the beginning of the strange time when he had found himself at Pidruid, at the other continent’s edge, bereft of all memory, all knowledge of self. It was she, loving him only for himself, all unknowing that he was in fact a Coronal in baffled exile from his true identity, who had helped him join the juggling troupe of Zalzan Kavol; and gradually their lives had merged; and when he had commenced his astounding return to the heights of power she had followed him to the summit of the world.

He wished she were with him now. To sit beside him, to talk with him as they always talked before bedtime. To go over with him the twisting ramifications of all that had been set before him this day. To help him make sense out of the tangled mysteries this dead city posed for him. And simply to
be
with him.

But Carabella had not followed him here to Velalisier. It was a foolish waste of his time, she had argued, for him to go in person to investigate this murder. Send Tunigorn; send Mirigant; send Sleet; send any one of a number of high Pontifical officials. But why go yourself?

“Because I must,” Valentine had replied. “Because I’ve made myself responsible for integrating the Metamorphs into the life of this world. The excavations at Velalisier are an essential part of that enterprise. And the murder of the old archaeologist leads me to think that conspirators are trying to interfere with those excavations.”

“This is very far-fetched,” said Carabella, then.

“And if it is, so be it. But you know how I long for a chance to free myself of the Labyrinth, if only for a week or two. So I will go to Velalisier.”

“And I will not. I loathe that place, Valentine. It’s a horrid place of death and destruction. I’ve seen it twice, and its charm isn’t growing on me. If you go, you’ll go without me.”

“I mean to go, Carabella.”

“Go, then. If you must.” And she kissed him on the tip of the nose, for they were not in the custom of quarreling, or even of disagreeing greatly. But when he went, it was indeed without her. She was in their royal chambers in the Labyrinth tonight, and he was here, in his grand but solitary tent, in this parched and broken city of ancient ghosts.

They came to him that night in his dreams, those ghosts.

They came to him with such intensity that he thought he was having a sending – a lucid and purposeful direct communication in the form of a dream.

But this was like no sending he had ever had. Hardly had he closed his eyes but he found himself wandering in his sleep among the cracked and splintered buildings of dead Velalisier. Eerie ghost-light, mystery-light, came dancing up out of every shattered stone. The city glowed lime-green and lemon-yellow, pulsating with inner luminescence. Glowing faces, ghost-faces, grinned mockingly at him out of the air. The sun itself swirled and leaped in wild loops across the sky.

A dark hole leading into the ground lay open before him, and unquestioningly he entered it, descending a long flight of massive lichen-encrusted stone steps with archaic twining runes carved in them. Every movement was arduous for him. Though he was going steadily lower, the effort was like that of climbing. Struggling all the way, he made his way ever deeper, but he felt constantly as though he were traveling upward against a powerful pull, ascending some inverted pyramid, not a slender one like those above ground in this city, but one of unthinkable mass and diameter. He imagined himself to be fighting his way up the side of a mountain; but it was a mountain that pointed downward, deep into the world’s bowels. And the path was carrying him down, he knew, into some labyrinth far more frightful than the one in which he dwelled in daily life.

The whirling ghost-faces flashed dizzyingly by him and went spinning away. Cackling laughter floated backward to him out of the darkness. The air was moist and hot and rank. The pull of gravity was oppressive. As he descended, traveling through level after endless level, momentary flares of dizzying yellow light showed him caverns twisting away from him on all sides, radiating outward at incomprehensible angles that were both concave and convex.

And now there was sudden numbing brightness. The throbbing fire of an underground sun streamed upward toward him from the depths ahead of him, a harsh, menacing glare.

Valentine found himself drawn helplessly toward that terrible light; and then, without perceptible transition, he was no longer underground at all, but out in the vastness of Velalisier Plain, standing atop one of the great platforms of blue stone known as the Tables of the Gods.

There was a long knife in his hand, a curving scimitar that flashed like lightning in the brilliance of the noon sun.

And as he looked out across the plain he saw a mighty procession coming toward him from the east, from the direction of the distant sea: thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, like an army of ants on the march. No, two armies; for the marchers were divided into two great parallel columns. Valentine could see, at the end of each column far off near the horizon, two enormous wooden wagons mounted on titanic wheels. Great hawsers were fastened to them, and the marchers, with mighty groaning tugs, were hauling the wagons slowly forward, a foot or two with each pull, into the center of the city.

Atop each of the wagons a colossal water-king lay trussed, a sea-dragon of monstrous size. The great creatures were glaring furiously at their captors but were unable, even with a sea-dragon’s prodigious strength, to free themselves from their bonds, strain as they might. And with each tug on the hawsers the wagons bearing them carried them closer to the twin platforms called the Tables of the Gods.

The place of the sacrifice.

The place where the terrible madness of the Defilement was to happen. Where Valentine the Pontifex of Majipoor waited with the long gleaming blade in his hand.

“Majesty? Majesty?”

Valentine blinked and came groggily awake. A Shapeshifter stood above him, extremely tall and greatly attenuated of form, his eyes so sharply slanted and narrowed that it seemed at first glance that he had none at all. Valentine began to jump up in alarm; and then, recognizing the intruder after a moment as Aarisiim, he relaxed.

“You cried out,” the Metamorph said. “I was on my way to you to tell you some strange news I have learned, and when I was outside your tent I heard your voice. Are you all right, your majesty?”

“A dream, only. A very nasty dream.” Which still lingered disagreeably at the edges of his mind. Valentine shivered and tried to shake himself free of its grasp. “What time is it, Aarisiim?”