Lord Valentine's Castle

by Robert Silverberg

  “No, not apes, I think,” said Deliamber quietly. “There’s something bigger up there.”

  Ermanar flashed a light toward the overhanging ledge of an adjoining structure. For an instant a silhouette that might have been human was in view; then it vanished. Without hesitating, Lisamon Hultin began to run to the far side of the building, followed by Zalzan Kavol, who brandished his energy-thrower. Sleet and Carabella went the other way. Valentine would have gone with them, but Ermanar caught him by the arm and held him with surprising strength, saying apologetically, “I may not permit you to place yourself in risk, my lord, when we have no idea—”

  “Halt!” came the mighty booming voice of Lisamon Hultin.

  There was the sound of a scuffle in the distance, and then that of someone clambering over the mounds of fallen masonry in no very ghostlike way. Valentine longed to know what was happening, but Ermanar was right: to go darting off after an unknown enemy in the darkness of an unfamiliar place was a privilege denied to the Coronal of Majipoor.

  He heard grunts and cries, and a high-pitched sound of pain. Moments later Lisamon Hultin reappeared, dragging a figure who wore the starburst emblem of the Coronal on his shoulder. She had her arm locked about his chest and his feet were dangling six inches off the ground.

  “Spies,” she said. “Skulking around up there, keeping watch on us. There were two of them, I think.”

  “Where’s the other?” Valentine asked.

  “Might have gotten away,” said the giantess. “Zalzan Kavol went after him.” She dumped her prisoner down before Valentine, and held him to the ground with a foot pressed against his middle.

  “Let him up,” Valentine said.

  The man rose. He looked terrified. Brusquely Ermanar and Nascimonte checked him for weapons and found none.

  “Who are you?” Valentine asked. “What are you doing here?”

  No reply.

  “You can speak. We won’t harm you. You have the starburst on your arm. Are you part of the Coronal’s forces?”

  A nod.

  “Sent out here to trail us?”

  Again a nod.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  The man stared silently at Valentine.

  “Are you able to speak?” Valentine asked. “Do you have a voice? Say something. Anything.”

  “I—if I—”

  “Good. You can talk. Again: do you know who I am?”

  In a thin whisper the captive replied, “They say you would steal the throne from the Coronal.”

  “No,” Valentine said. “You have it wrong, fellow. The thief is he who sits now on Castle Mount. I am Lord Valentine, and I demand your allegiance.”

  The man stared, bewildered, uncomprehending.

  “How many of you were up there?” Valentine asked.

  “Please, sir—”

  “How many?”

  Sullen silence.

  “Let me twist his arm a little,” Lisamon Hultin begged.

  “That won’t be necessary.” Valentine moved closer to the cowering man and said gently, “You understand nothing of this, but all will be made clear in time. I am the true Coronal, and by the oath that you swore to serve me, I ask you now to answer. How many of you were up there?”

  Conflicts raged in the man’s face. Slowly, reluctantly, bewilderedly, he replied, “Just two of us, sir.”

  “Can I believe that?”

  “By the Lady, sir!”

  “Two of you. All right. How long were you following us?”

  “Since—since Lumanzar.”

  “Under what orders?”

  Hesitation again. “To—to observe your movements and report to camp in the morning.”

  Ermanar scowled. “Which means that other one is probably halfway to the lake by now.”

  “You think so?”

  It was the rough, harsh voice of Zalzan Kavol. The Skandar strode into their midst and dumped down before Valentine, as though it were a sack of vegetables, the body of a second figure wearing the starburst emblem. Zalzan Kavol’s energy-thrower had seared a hole through him from back to front. “I chased him about half a mile, my lord. A quick devil he was, too! He was moving more easily than I over the heaps of stones, and starting to pull away from me. I ordered him to stop, but he kept going, and so—”

  “Bury him somewhere off the path,” Valentine said curtly.

  “My lord? Did I do wrong to kill him?”

  “You had no choice,” Valentine said in a softer tone, “I wish you had managed to catch him. But you couldn’t, so you had no choice. Very well, Zalzan Kavol.”

  Valentine turned away. The slaying had shaken him, and he could hardly pretend otherwise. This man had died only because he was loyal to the Coronal, or to the person he believed to be the Coronal.

  The civil war had had its first casualty. The bloodshed had begun, here in this city of the dead.

  4

  There was no thought of continuing the tour now. They returned with the prisoner to their camp. And in the morning Valentine gave orders to move on through Velalisier and begin the northeastward swing.

  By day the ruined city seemed not as magical, although no less impressive. It was hard to understand how so frail and unmechanical a folk as the Metamorphs had ever moved these gigantic blocks of stone about; but perhaps twenty thousand years ago they had not been quite so unmechanical. The glowering Shapeshifters of the Piurifayne forests, those people of wicker huts and muddy streets, were only the broken remnant of the race that once had ruled Majipoor.

  Valentine vowed to return here, once this business with Dominin Barjazid was settled, and explore the ancient capital in detail, clearing underbrush and excavating and reconstructing. If possible, he thought, he would invite Metamorph leaders to take part in that work—though he doubted they would care to cooperate. Something was needed to reopen lines of communication between the two populations of the planet.

  “If I am Coronal again,” he said to Carabella as the cavalcade rode past the pyramids and headed out of Velalisier, “I intend—”

  “When you are Coronal again,” she said.

  Valentine smiled. “When I am Coronal again, yes. I intend to examine the entire problem of the Metamorphs. Bring them back into the mainstream of Majipooran life, if that can be done. Give them a place in the government, even.”

  “If they’ll have it.”

  “I mean to overcome that anger of theirs,” said Valentine. “I’ll dedicate my reign to it. Our entire society, our wonderful and harmonious and loving realm, was founded on an act of theft and injustice, Carabella, and we’ve succeeded in teaching ourselves to overlook that.”

  Sleet glanced up. “The Shapeshifters weren’t making full use of this planet. There weren’t twenty million of them on the entire enormous place when our ancestors came here.”

  “But it was theirs!” Carabella cried. “By what right—”

  “Easily, easily,” Valentine said. “There’s no use fighting over the deeds of the first settlers. What’s done is done, and we must live with it. But it’s within our power to change the way we’ve been living with it, and if I’m Coronal again, I—”

  “When,” said Carabella.

  “When,” Valentine echoed.

  Deliamber said mildly, in that far-off way of his that gained the immediate attention of all listeners, “It may be that the present troubles of the realm are the beginning of the retribution for the suppression of the Metamorphs.”

  Valentine stared at him. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Only that we have gone a long way, here on Majipoor, without paying any sort of price for the original sin of the conquerors. The account accumulates interest, you know. And now this usurpation, the evils of the new Coronal, the prospect facing us of war, death and destruction, chaos—perhaps the past is starting to send us its reckoning at last.”

  “But Valentine had nothing to do with the oppression of the Metamorphs,” Carabella protested. “Why should he be the one to su
ffer? Why was he chosen to be cast down from power, and not some high-handed Coronal of long ago?”

  Deliamber shrugged. “Such things are never fairly distributed. What makes you think that only the guilty are punished?”

  “The Divine—”

  “Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that’s in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process.”

  “More than that,” said Valentine suddenly. “It may be that I was chosen to be an instrument of Deliamber’s compensating forces, and it was necessary for me to suffer in order to be effective.”

  “How so?”

  “If nothing unusual had ever happened to me, I might have ruled like all the others before me on Castle Mount, self-satisfied, amiable, accepting things as they were because from where I sat I saw no wrong in them. But these adventures of mine have given me a view of the world I’d never have had if I had remained snug in the Castle. And perhaps now I’m ready to play the role that needs to be played, whereas otherwise—” Valentine let his voice trail away. After a moment he said, “All this talk is mere vapor. The first thing to do is regain the Castle. Then we can debate the nature of the compensating forces of the universe and the tactics of the Divine.”

  He looked back at fallen Velalisier, the accursed city of the ancients, chaotic but yet magnificent on the forlorn desert plain, and then he turned away to sit in silence and contemplate the changing countryside ahead.

  The road now curved about sharply, toward the northeast, passing up and over the range of hills they had crossed to the south, and descending into the fertile floodplain of the Glayge near the northernmost limb of Lake Roghoiz. They were emerging hundreds of miles north of the field where the Coronal’s army had been camped.

  Ermanar, bothered by the presence of the two spies in Velalisier, had sent out scouts to ascertain that the army had not moved north to meet them. Valentine judged that a sensible move; but he did scouting of his own, by way of Deliamber.

  “Cast me a spell,” he ordered the wizard, “that will tell me where enemy armies lie in wait. Can you do that?”

  The Vroon’s great shining golden eyes flickered in amusement. “Can I do that? Can a mount eat grass? Can a sea-dragon swim?”

  “Then do it,” said Valentine.

  Deliamber withdrew and muttered words and waved his tentacles about, coiling and intertwining them in the most intricate of patterns. Valentine suspected that much of Deliamber’s sorcery was staged for the benefit of onlookers, that the real transactions did not involve the waving of tentacles or the muttering of formulas at all, but only the casting forth of Deliamber’s shrewd and sensitive consciousness to pick up the vibrations of outlying realities. But that was all right. Let the Vroon stage his little show. A certain amount of show business, Valentine recognized, was an essential lubricant in many civilized activities, not only those of wizards and jugglers, but those also of the Coronal, the Pontifex, the Lady, the King of Dreams, the speakers of dreams, the teachers of holy mysteries, perhaps even the customs-officials at the provincial boundaries and the sellers of sausages in streetside booths. In plying one’s trade one could not be too bald and blunt; one had to cloak one’s doing in magic, in theater.

  Deliamber said, “The troops of the Coronal appear to remain where they were camped.”

  Valentine nodded. “Good. May they camp there a long while, waiting for us to return from our Velalisier excursion. Can you locate other armies north of here?”

  “Not for a great distance,” said Deliamber. “I feel the presence of knightly forces gathered on Castle Mount. But there always are. I detect minor detachments here and there in the Fifty Cities. But nothing unusual about that either. The Coronal has plenty of time. He’ll simply sit at the Castle and wait for your approach. And then will come the grand mobilization. What will you do, Valentine, when a million warriors march down Castle Mount toward you?”

  “Do you think I’ve given that no thought?”

  “I know you’ve thought of little else. But it needs some heavy thinking about—our hundreds against their millions.”

  “A million is a clumsy size for an army,” said Valentine easily. “Far simpler to do one’s juggling with clubs than with the trunks of dwikka-trees. Are you frightened of what lies ahead, Deliamber?”

  “Not at all.”

  “Neither am I,” Valentine said.

  But of course there was show-business bravado, Valentine knew, in talk of that sort. Was he frightened? No, not really: death comes to all, sooner or later, and to fear it is folly. Valentine knew he had little fear of death, for he had faced it in the forest near Avendroyne, and in the turbulent rapids of the Steiche, and in the belly of the sea-dragon and when wrestling with Farssal on the Isle, and on none of those occasions had he felt anything he could identify as fear. If the army that waited for him on Castle Mount overwhelmed his little force and cut him down, it would be regrettable—as being tumbled to pieces on the rocks of the Steiche would have been regrettable—but the prospect caused him no dread. What he did feel, and it was a more significant thing than fear for his own life, was a degree of fear for Majipoor. If he failed, through hesitation or foolishness or mere inadequacy of strength, the Castle would remain in the hands of the Barjazids, and the course of history would forever change, and ultimately billions of innocent beings would suffer. Preventing that was a high responsibility, and he felt the weight of it. If he died valiantly trying to scale Castle Mount, his hardships at least would be over, but the agonies of Majipoor would only just be beginning.

  5

  Now they traveled through placid rural districts, the perimeter of the great agricultural belt that flanked Castle Mount and supplied the Fifty Cities with produce. Valentine chose main highways at all times. The moment for secrecy was past; so conspicuous a caravan as this could hardly be concealed, and the time was at hand when the world had to learn that a struggle for possession of Lord Valentine’s Castle was about to commence.

  The world was starting to learn it, in any case. Ermanar’s scouts, returning from the city of Pendiwane farther up the Glayge, brought news of the usurper’s first countermeasures.

  “No armies lie between us and Pendiwane,” Ermanar reported. “But posters are up in the city, branding you a rebel and a subversive, an enemy of society. The proclamations of the Pontifex in your favor have not yet been announced, it seems. Citizens of Pendiwane are being urged to band together in militias to defend their rightful Coronal and the true order of things against your uprising. And sendings are widespread.”

  Valentine frowned. “Sendings? What sort of sendings?”

  “Of the King. Apparently you can scarcely fall asleep at night but the King is in your dreams, buzzing to you about loyalty and warning of terrible consequences if the Coronal is overthrown.”

  “Naturally,” Valentine muttered. “He’d have the King working for him with all the energy at his command. They must be sending night and day in Suvrael. But we’ll turn that against him, eh?” He looked at Deliamber. “The King of Dreams is telling the people how dreadful it is to overthrow a Coronal. Good. I want them to believe exactly that. I want them to realize that a terrifying thing has already happened to Majipoor, and that it’s up to the people to put things to rights.”

  “Nor is the King of Dreams precisely a disinterested party in this war,” Deliamber said. “We should make them aware of that too—that he stands to gain from his son’s treachery.”

  “We will,” said the hierarch Lorivade vehemently. “Out of the Isle now are coming the sendings of the Lady with redoubled force. They’ll counteract the King’s poisonous dreams. Last night as I slept she came to me and showed me what kind of message will go forth. It is the vision of
the drugging at Til-omon, the changing of the Coronal. She will show them your new face, Lord Valentine, and will surround you with the radiance of the Coronal, the starburst of authority. And will portray the fake Coronal as a traitor, mean and dark of spirit.”

  “When will this begin?” Valentine asked.

  “She waits for your approval.”

  “Then open your mind to the Lady today,” he told the hierarch, “and tell her that the sendings must start.”

  Khun of Kianimot said quietly, “How strange this seems to me! A war of dreams! If ever I doubted I was on an alien world, these strategies would make it certain to me.”

  Valentine said, with a smile, “Better to fight with dreams than with swords and energy-throwers, friend. What we seek is best won by persuasion, not by killing.”

  “A war of dreams,” Khun repeated, bemused. “We do things differently on Kianimot. Who’s to say which way makes more sense? But I think there’ll be fighting as well as sendings before this is done, Lord Valentine.”

  Valentine looked somberly at the blue-skinned being. “I fear you are right,” he said.

  Five days more and they were in the outlying suburbs of Pendiwane. By now news of their advance had spread throughout the countryside; farmers stopped in their fields to stare as the cavalcade of vehicles floated by, the crowds thronged the highway in the more thickly populated sectors.

  Valentine found this all to the good. Thus far no hands were being lifted against them. They were regarded as curiosities, not as menaces. More than that he could not ask.

  But when they were a day’s journey outside of Pendiwane, the advance party returned with news that a force was gathered to meet them near the city’s western gate.

  “Soldiers?” Valentine asked.

  “Citizen-militia,” said Ermanar. “Hastily organized, from the looks of them. They wear no uniforms, only ribbons round their arms, with the starburst emblem on it.”

  “Excellent. The starburst is consecrated to my favor. I’ll go to them and ask their allegiance.”