In midmorning word came that Yarmuz Khitain, the curator of the Park of Fabulous Beasts, had been brought to Nissmorn Prospect and was presently at work in the courtyard dissecting one of the dead birds. Hissune had met with him some days earlier, for Ni-moya was infested with all sorts of strange and lethal creatures spawned by the Metamorph rebels, and the zoologist had had valuable advice to offer on coping with them. Going downstairs now, Hissune found Khitain, a somber-eyed, hollow-chested man of late middle years, crouching over the remains of a bird so huge that at first Hissune thought there must be several of them outspread on the pavement.
“Have you ever seen such a thing as this?” Hissune asked.
Khitain looked up. He was pale, tense, trembling. “Never, my lord. It is a creature out of nightmares.”
“Metamorph nightmares, do you think?”
“Beyond doubt, my lord. Plainly it is no natural bird.”
“Some kind of synthetic creature, you mean?” Khitain shook his head. “Not quite, my lord. I think these are produced by genetic manipulation from existing life-forms. The basic shape is that of a milufta, that much seems clear—do you know of it? The largest carrion-feeding bird of Zimroel. But they have made it even larger, and turned it into a raptorial bird, a predator, instead of a scavenger. These venom glands, at the base of the claws—no bird of Majipoor has those, but there is a reptile of Piurifayne known as the ammazoar that is armed in such a way, and they seem to have modeled them after those.”
“And the wings?” Hissune said. “Borrowed from sea dragons, are they?”
“Of similar design. That is, they are not typical bird-wings, but rather the kind of expanded fingerwebs that mammals sometimes evolve—dhiims, for instance, or bats, or sea dragons. The sea dragons, my lord, are mammals, you know.”
“Yes, I know,” said Hissune drily. “But dragons don’t use their wings for flying. What purpose is served, would you say, by putting dragon wings on a bird?” Khitain shrugged. “No aerodynamic purpose, so far as I can tell. It may have been done merely to make the birds seem more terrifying. When one is designing a life-form to use as an instrument of war—”
“Yes. Yes. So it is your opinion without any question that these birds are yet one more Metamorph weapon.”
“Without question, my lord. As I have said, this is no natural life-form of Majipoor, nothing that has ever existed in the wild. A creature this large and dangerous could certainly not have gone undiscovered for fourteen thousand years.”
“Then it is one more crime we must add to their score. Who could have supposed, Khitain, that the Shapeshifters were such ingenious scientists?”
“They are a very ancient race, my lord. They may have many secrets of this sort.”
“Let us hope,” Hissune said, shuddering, “that they have nothing nastier than this ready to launch at us.”
But by early afternoon the assault seemed all but over. Hundreds of the birds had been shot down—the bodies of all that could be recovered were dumped in the great plaza outside the main gate of the Grand Bazaar, where they made an enormous foul-smelling mound—and those that survived, at last comprehending that nothing better than arrows awaited them in Ni-moya, had mainly flown off into the hills to the north, leaving only a scattered few behind in the city. Five archers had perished in the defense of Ni-moya, Hissune was dismayed to learn—struck from behind as they searched the skies for the birds. A heavy price, he thought; but he knew it had been a necessary one. The greatest city of Majipoor could not be allowed to be held hostage by a flock of birds.
For an hour or more Hissune toured the city by floater to assure himself that it was safe to lift the restrictions on going out of doors. Then he returned to Nissimorn Prospect, just in time to learn from Stimion that the forces under the command of Divvis had begun to arrive at the docks of Strand Vista.
Through all the months since Valentine had given him the crown at Inner Temple, Hissune had looked forward apprehensively to his first encounter as Coronal with the man he had defeated for the office. Show any sign of weakness, he knew, and Divvis would see it as an invitation to shove him aside, once this war was won, and take from him the throne he coveted. Though he had never once heard an overt hint of such treason from Divvis, Hissune had no reason to place much faith in his good will.
Yet as he made ready to go down to Strand Vista to greet the older prince, Hissune felt a strange calmness settling over himself. He was, after all, Coronal by true succession, the free choice of the man who was now Pontifex: like it or not, Divvis must accept that, and Divvis would.
When he reached the riverfront at Strand Vista Hissune was astounded by the vastness of the armada that Divvis had gathered. He seemed to have commandeered every rivergoing vessel between Piliplok and Ni-moya, and the Zimr was choked with ships as far as Hissune could see, an enormous fleet stretching halfway out toward the distant confluence—a colossal freshwater sea—where the River Steich flowed south from the Zimr.
The only vessel that had tied up thus far at its pier, Stimion said, was Divvis’s flagship. And Divvis himself waited aboard it for Lord Hissune’s arrival.
“Shall I tell him to come ashore and greet you here, my lord?” Stimion asked.
Hissune smiled. “I will go to him,” he said.
Dismounting from his floater, he walked solemnly toward the arcade at the end of the passenger terminal, and out onto the pier itself. He was in his full regalia of office, and his counsellors also were bedecked at their most formal, as were the members of his guard; and a dozen archers flanked him on either side, in case the deadly birds should choose this moment to reappear. Though Hissune had elected to go to Divvis, which perhaps was in violation of protocol, he knew that the image he projected was a lordly one, that of a king deigning to confer an unusual honor upon a loyal subject.
Divvis stood at the head of his ship’s entrance-way. He too had taken care to make himself look majestic, for he was clad—despite the heat of the day—in a great black robe of fine haigus hides and a splendid gleaming helmet that seemed almost to be a crown. As Hissune went upward onto the deck, Divvis loomed above him like a giant.
But then at last they were face to face, and though Divvis was by far the bigger man, Hissune regarded him with a steadiness and coolness that did much to minimize the difference in their size. For a long moment neither spoke.
Then Divvis—as Hissune knew he must do, or be in open defiance—made the starburst gesture and went down to one knee, and offered his first homage to the new Coronal:
“Hissune! Lord Hissune! Long life to Lord Hissune!”
“And long life to you, Divvis—for we will have need of your bravery in the struggle that lies before us. Get up, man. Get up!” Divvis rose. His eyes unhesitatingly met Hissune’s; and across his features there played such a succession of emotions that Hissune could hardly interpret them all, though it seemed to him that he saw envy there, and anger, and bitterness—but also a certain degree of respect, and even a grudging admiration, and something like a tinge of amusement, as if Divvis could not resist smiling at the strange permutations of fate that had brought them together in this place in these new roles.
Waving a hand behind him at the river, Divvis said, “Have I brought you sufficient troops, my lord?”
“An immense force, yes: a brilliant accomplishment, recruiting an army of such size. But who knows what will be sufficient, Divvis, in fighting an army of phantoms? The Shapeshifters will have many ugly surprises for us yet.”
With a light laugh Divvis said, “I heard, my lord, of the birds they sent you this morning.”
“No laughing matter, my lord Divvis. These were dread monsters of a most frightful sort that struck down people in the streets and fed upon their bodies before they were cold. I saw that done to a child, myself, from the window of my own bedroom. But I think we have slain them all, or nearly. And in due course we will slay their makers, too.”
“It surprises me to hear you so vengeful, my lord.
”
“Am I vengeful?” Hissune said. “Why, then, if you say it, I suppose it must be so. Living here for weeks in this shattered city makes one vengeful, perhaps. Seeing monstrous vermin turned loose upon innocent citizens by our enemies makes one vengeful. Piurifayne is like some loathsome boil, from which all manner of putrescence comes spilling out into the civilized lands. I intend to lance that boil and cauterize it entirely. And I tell you this, Divvis: with your help I will impose a terrible vengeance upon those who have made this war on us.”
“You sound very little like Lord Valentine, my lord, when you speak of vengeance that way. I think I never knew him to use the word.”
“And is there any reason why I should sound like Lord Valentine, Divvis? I am Hissune.”
“You are his chosen successor.”
“Yes, and Valentine is no longer Coronal, by that very choice. It may be that my way of dealing with our enemies will not be much like Lord Valentine’s way.”
“Then you must tell me what your way is.”
“I think you already know it. I mean to march down into Piurifayne by way of the Steiche, while you go around from the western side, and we will squeeze the rebels between us, and take this Faraataa and bring a halt to his loosing of monsters and plagues against us. And afterward the Pontifex can summon the surviving rebels, and in his more loving way negotiate some resolution of the Shapeshifters’ valid grievances against us. But first we must show force, I think. And if we must shed the blood of those who would shed ours, why, then we must shed their blood. What do you say to that, Divvis?”
“I say that I have not heard greater sense from the lips of a Coronal since my father held the throne. But the Pontifex, I think, would answer otherwise, if he had heard you speaking so belligerently. Is he aware of your plans?”
“We have not yet discussed them in great detail.”
“And will you, then?”
“The Pontifex is currently in Khyntor, or west of there,” said Hissune. “His work will occupy him there some time; and then it will take him a very long while to come this far east again, and I will be deep into Piurifayne, I think, by that time, and we will have little opportunity for consultation.”
A certain slyness entered Divvis’s eyes. “Ah, I see how you deal with your problem, my lord.”
“And what problem is that?”
“Of being Coronal, while your Pontifex remains at large, marching about the countryside, instead of hiding himself decently out of sight in the Labyrinth. I think that could be a great embarrassment to a new young Coronal, and I would like it very little if I faced such a situation myself. But if you take care to keep a great distance between the Pontifex and yourself, and you credit any differences between your policies and his to that great distance, why, then, you could manage to function almost as though you had a completely free hand, eh, my lord?”
“I think we tread now on dangerous ground, Divvis.”
“Ah. Do we?”
“We do indeed. And you overestimate the differences between my outlook and Valentine’s. He is not himself a man of war, as we all well understand; but perhaps that is why he has removed himself from the Confalume Throne in my favor. I believe we understand each other, the Pontifex and I, and let us not carry this discussion any further in that direction. Come, now, Divvis: it would be proper, I think, to invite me to your cabin to share a bowl or two of wine, and then you must come with me to Nissimorn Prospect to share another. And then we should sit down to plan the conduct of our war. What do you say to that, my lord Divvis? What do you say to that?”
THE RAIN WAS BEGINNING AGAIN, washing away the outlines of the map Faraataa had drawn in the damp mud of the riverbank. But that made little difference to him. He had been drawing and redrawing the same map all day, and no need for doing any of that, for every detail of it was engraved in the recesses and contours of his brain. Ilirivoyne here, Avendroyne there, New Velalisier over here. The rivers, the mountains. The positions of the two invading armies—
The positions of the two invading armies—
Faraataa had not anticipated that. It was the one great flaw in his planning, that the Unchanging Ones should have invaded Piurifayne. The coward weakling Lord Valentine would never have done anything like that; no, Valentine would rather have come groveling with his nose in the mud to the Danipiur and begged humbly for a treaty of friendship. But Valentine was no longer the king—or, rather, he had become the other king, now, the one with the greater rank but the weaker powers—how could anyone understand the mad arrangements of the Unchanging Ones?—and there was a new king now, the young one, Lord Hissune, who appeared to be a very different sort of man . . . .
“Aarisiim!” Faraataa called. “What news is there?”
“Very little, O King That Is. We are awaiting reports from the western front, but it will be some while.”
“And from the Steiche battle?”
“I am told that the forest-brethren are still being uncooperative, but that we are at last succeeding in compelling their assistance in laying the birdnet vine.”
“Good. Good. But will it be laid in time to stop Lord Hissune’s advance?”
“That is most likely, O King That Is.”
“And do you say that,” Faraataa demanded, “because it is true, or because it is what you think I prefer to hear?”
Aarisiim stared, and gaped, and in his embarrassment his shape began to alter, so that for a moment he became a frail structure of wavy ropes that blew in the breeze, and then a tangle of elongated rigid rods swollen at both ends; and then he was Aarisiim once again. In a quiet voice he said, “You do me great injustice, O Faraataa!”
“Perhaps I do.”
“I tell you no untruths.”
“If that is true, then all else is, and I will accept it that that is true,” said Faraataa bleakly. Overhead the rain grew more clamorous, battering against the jungle canopy. “Go, and come back when you have the news from the west.” Aarisiim vanished amidst the darkness of the trees. Faraataa, scowling, restless, began drawing his map once again.
There was an army in the west, uncountable millions of the Unchanging Ones, led by the hair-faced lord whose name was Divvis, that was a son of the former Coronal Lord Voriax. We slew your father while he hunted in the forest, did you know that, Divvis? The huntsman who fired the fatal bolt was a Piurivar, though he wore the face of a Castle lord. See, the pitiful Shapeshifters can kill a Coronal! We can kill you also, Divvis. We will kill you also, if you are careless, as your father was.
But Divvis—who surely had no knowledge of how his father had died; there was no secret more closely guarded than that among the Piurivar folk—was not being at all careless, Faraataa thought gloomily. His headquarters was tightly protected by devoted knights, and there was no possibility of slipping an assassin through that line, no matter how shrewdly disguised. With angry stabbing gestures of his keenly honed wooden dirk Faraataa dug the lines of Divvis’s march deeper and deeper into the riverbank. Down from Khyntor, and along the inside wall of the great western mountains, making roads through wild country that had been roadless since the beginning of time-sweeping everything before him, filling Piunfayne with his innumerable troops, closing off the countryside, polluting the sacred streams, trampling the sacred groves. . .
Against that horde of troops Faraataa had been compelled to unleash his army of pilligrigorms. He regretted that, for they were very nearly the nastiest of his biological weapons, and he had been hoarding them to dump into Ni-moya or Khyntor at some later phase of the war: land-dwelling crustaceans the size of a fingertip, they were, with armored shells that could not be crushed with a hammer, and a myriad busy fast-moving legs that Faraataa’s genetic artists had altered so that they were as sharp as saws. The appetite of a pilligrigorm was insatiable—it demanded fifty times its own weight in meat each day—and its method of satisfying that appetite was to carve openings in any sort of warm-blooded animal life that lay in its path, and devour its flesh
from the inside out.
Fifty thousand of them, Faraataa had thought, could bring a city the size of Khyntor into total turmoil in five days. But now, because the Unchanging Ones had chosen to invade Piurifayne, he had had to release the pilligrigorms not within a city, but on Piurifayne’s own soil, in the hope that they would drive Divvis’s immense army into confusion and retreat. No reports had come in yet, though, on the success of that tactic.
On the other side of the jurigle, where the Coronal Lord Hissune was leading a second army southward on another impossible route along the west bank of the Steiche, it was Faraataa’s plan to string a net of the infinitely sticky and impenetrable birdnet vine for hundreds of miles in their path, so that they were forced to take wider and ever wider detours until they were hopelessly lost. The difficulty with that strategem was only that no one could handle birdnet vine effectively except the forest-brethren, those maddening little apes who secreted in their perspiration an enzyme that rendered them immune to the vine’s stickiness. But the forest-brethren had little reason to love the Piurivars, who had hunted them for centuries for the rich flavor of their flesh, and gaining their assistance in this maneuver was apparently not proving easy.
Faraataa felt the rage rising and boiling over within him.
It had all gone so well, at first. Releasing the blights and plagues into the farming districts—bringing agriculture into collapse over such a wide region—the famine, the panic, the mass migrations—yes, all according to plan. And setting loose the specially bred animals had worked nicely too, on a smaller scale: that had intensified the fears of the populace, and made life more complicated for the city-dwellers. . . .
Valentine Pontifex Page 40
