“Go, then. If you must.” And she kissed him on the tip of the nose, for they were not in the custom of quarrelling, 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 un-questioningly 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 travelling upwards 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 downwards, 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 backwards to him out of the darkness. The air was moist and hot and rank. The pull of gravity was oppressive. As he descended, travelling through level after endless level, momentary flares of dizzying yellow light showed him caverns twisting away from him on all sides, radiating outwards 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 towards him from the depths ahead, a harsh, menacing glare.
Valentine found himself drawn helplessly towards 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 towards 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 centre 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?”
“The Hour of the Haigus, majesty.”
Past the middle of the night, that was. Well along towards dawn.
Valentine forced himself the rest of the way into wakefulness. Eyes fully open now, he stared up into the practically featureless face. “There’s news, you say? What news?”
The Metamorph’s colour deepened from pale green to a rich chartreuse, and his eye-slits fluttered swiftly three or four times.I have had a conversation this night with one of the archaeologists, the woman Hieekraad, she who keeps the records of the discovered artefacts. The foreman of the diggers brought her to me, the man Vathnmeraak, from the village. He and this Hieekraad are lovers, it seems.”
Valentine stirred impatiently. “Get to the point, Aarisiim.”
T approach it, sir. The woman Hieekraad, it seems, has revealed things to the man Vathiimeraak about the excavations that a mere foreman might otherwise not have known. He has told those things to me this evening.”
“Well?”
“They have been lying to us, majesty—all the archaeologists, the whole pack of them, deliberately concealing something important. Something quite important, a major discovery. Vathiimeraak, when he learned from this Hieekraad that we had been deceived in this way, made the woman come with him to me, and compelled her to reveal the whole story to me.”
“Go on.”
“It was this,” said Aarisiim. He paused a moment, swaying a little as though he were about to plunge into a fathomless abyss. “Dr Huukaminaan, two weeks before he died, uncovered a burial site that had never been detected before. This was in an otherwise desolate region out at the western edge of the city. Magadone Sambisa was with him. It was a post-abandonment site, dating from the historic era. From a time not long after Lord Stiamot, actually.”
“But how could that be?” said Valentine, frowning. “Completely aside from the little matter that there was a curse on this place and no Piurivar would have dared to set foot in it after it was destroyed, there weren’t any Piurivars living on this continent at that time anyway. Stiamot had sent them all into the reservations on Zimroel. You know that very well, Aarisiim. Something’s wrong here,”
This was not a Piurivar burial, your majesty.”
“What?”
“It was the tomb of a human,” Aarisiim said. “The tomb of a Pontifex, according to the woman Hieekraad.”
Valentine would not have been more surprised if Aarisiim had set off an explosive charge. “A Pontifex?” he repeated numbly. “The tomb of a Pontifex, here in Velalisier?”
“So did this Hieekraad say. A definite identification. The symbols on the wall of the tomb—the Labyrinth sign, and other things of that sort—the ceremonial objects found lying next to the body—inscriptions—everything indicated that this was a Pontifex’s grave, thousands of years old. So she said; and I think she was telling the truth. Vathiimeraak was standing over her, scowling, as she spoke. She was too frightened of him to have uttered any falsehoods just then.”
Valentine rose and paced fiercely about the tent. “By the Divine, Aarisiim! If this is true, it’s something that should have been brought to my attention as soon as it came to light. Or at least mentioned to me upon my arrival here. The tomb of some ancient Pontifex, and they hide it from me? Unbelievable. Unbelievable!”
“It was Magadone Sambisa herself who ordered that all news of the discovery was to be suppressed. There would be no public announcement whatever. Not even the diggers were told what had been uncovered. It was to be a secret known to the archaeologists of the dig, only.”
“This according to Hieekraad also?”
“Yes, majesty. She said that Magadone Sambisa gave those orders the very day the tomb was found. This Hieekraad furthermore told me that Dr Huukaminaam disagreed strenuously with Magadone Sambisa’s decision, that indeed they had a major quarrel over it. But in the end he gave in. And when the murder happened, and word came that you were going to visit Velalisier, Magadone Sambisa called a meeting of the staff and reiterated that nothing was to be said to you about it. Everyone involved with the dig was specifically told to keep all knowledge of it from you,”
“Absolutely incredible,” Valentine muttered.
Earnestly Aarisiim said, “You must protect the woman Hieekraad, majesty, as you investigate this thing. She will be in great trouble if Magadone Sambisa learns that she’s the one who let the story of the tomb get out.”
“Hieekraad’s not the only one who’s going to be in trouble,” Valentine said. He slipped from his nightclothes and started to dress.
“One more thing, majesty. The khivanivod—Torkkinuuminaad? He’s at the tomb site right now. That’s where he went to make his prayer retreat. I have this information from the foreman Vathiimeraak.”
“Splendid,” Valentine said. His head was whirling. “The village khivanivod mumbling Piurivar prayers in the tomb of a Pontifex! Beautiful! Wonderful! Get me Magadone Sambisa, right away, Aarisiim.”
“Majesty, the hour is very early, and—”
“Did you hear me, Aarisiim?”
“Majesty,” said the Shapeshifter, more subserviently this time. He bowed deeply. And went out to fetch Magadone Sambisa.
“An ancient Pontifex’s tomb, Magadone Sambisa, and no announcement is made? An ancient Pontifex’s tomb, and when the current Pontifex comes to inspect your dig, you go out of your way to keep him from learning about it? This is all extremely difficult for me to believe, let me assure you,”
Dawn was still an hour away. Magadone Sambisa, called from her bed for this interview, looked even paler and more haggard than she had yesterday, and now there might have been a glint of fear in her eyes as well. But for all that, she still was capable of summoning some of the unrelenting strength that had propelled her to the forefront of her profession: there was even a steely touch of defiance in her voice as she said, “Who told you about this tomb, your majesty?”
Valentine ignored the sally. “It was at your order, was it, that the story was suppressed?”
“Yes,”