Magadone Sambisa stared at the Pontifex as though he had gone out of his mind. “Do you think we kill each other over such things, your majesty?”
“It was a foolish suggestion,” Valentine said, with a smile. “Well, then,” he went on, “suppose Huukaminaan had come into possession of some valuable artifact in the course of his work here, some priceless treasure that would fetch a huge sum in the antiquities market. Might that not have been sufficient cause for murdering him?”
Again the incredulous stare. “The artifacts we find here, majesty, are of the nature of simple sandstone statuettes, and bricks bearing inscriptions, not golden tiaras and emeralds the size of gihorna eggs. Everything worth looting was looted a long, long time ago. And we would no more dream of trying to make a private sale of the little things that we find here than we would—would—than, well, than we would of murdering each other. Our finds are divided equally between the university museum in Arkilon and the Piurivar treasury at Ilirivoyne. In any case—no, no, it’s not even worth discussing. The idea’s completely absurd.” Instantly her cheeks turned flame-red. “Forgive me, majesty, I meant no disrespect.”
Valentine brushed the apology aside. “What I’m doing, you see, is groping for some plausible explanation of the crime. A place to begin our investigation, at least.”
“I’ll give you one, Valentine,” Tunigorn said suddenly. His normally open and genial face was tightly drawn in a splenetic scowl that brought his heavy eyebrows together into a single dark line. “The basic thing that we need to keep in mind all the time is that there’s a curse on this place. You know that, Valentine. A curse. The Shapeshifters themselves put the dark word on the city, the Divine knows how many thousands of years ago, when they smashed it up to punish those who had chopped up those two sea-dragons. They intended the place to be shunned forever. Only ghosts have lived here ever since. By sending these archaeologists of yours in here, Valentine, you’re disturbing those ghosts. Making them angry. And so they’re striking back. Killing old Huukaminaan was the first step. There’ll be more, mark my words!”
“And you think, do you, that ghosts are capable of cutting someone into five or six pieces and scattering the parts far and wide?”
Tunigorn was not amused. “I don’t know what sorts of things ghosts may or may not be capable of doing,” he said staunchly. “I’m just telling you what has crossed my mind.”
“Thank you, my good old friend,” said Valentine pleasantly. “We’ll give the thought the examination it deserves.” And to Magadone Sambisa he said, “I must tell you what has crossed my mind, based on what you’ve shown me today, here and at the pyramid shrine. Which is that the killing of Huukaminaan strikes me as a ritual murder, and the ritual involved is some kind of Piurivar ritual. I don’t say that that’s what it was; I just say that it certainly looks that way.”
“And if it does?”
“Then we have our starting point. It’s time now to move to the next phase of our work, I think. Please have the kindness to call your entire group of Piurivar archaeologists together this afternoon. I want to speak with them.”
“One by one, or all together?”
“All of them together at first,” said Valentine. “After that, we’ll see.”
But Magadone Sambisa’s people were scattered all over the huge archaeological zone, each one involved with some special project, and she begged Valentine not to have them called in until the working day was over. It would take so long to reach them all, she said, that the worst of the heat would have descended by the time they began their return to camp, and they would be compelled to trek across the ruins in the full blaze of noon, instead of settling in some dark cavern to await the cooler hours that lay ahead. Meet with them at sundown, she implored him. Let them finish their day’s tasks.
That seemed only reasonable. He said that he would.
But Valentine himself was unable to sit patiently by until dusk. The murder had jarred him deeply. It was one more symptom of the strange new darkness that had come over the world in his lifetime. Huge as it was, Majipoor had long been a peaceful place where there was comfort and plenty for all, and crime of any sort was an extraordinary rarity. But, even so, just in this present generation there had been the assassination of the Coronal Lord Voriax, and then the diabolically contrived usurpation that had pushed Voriax’s successor—Valentine—from his throne for a time.
The Metamorphs, everyone knew now, had been behind both of those dire acts.
And after Valentine’s recovery of the throne had come the War of the Rebellion, organized by the embittered Metamorph Faraataa, bringing with it plagues, famines, riots, a worldwide panic, great destruction everywhere. Valentine had ended that uprising, finally, by reaching out himself to take Faraataa’s life—a deed that the gentle Valentine had regarded with horror, but which he had carried out all the same, because it had to be done.
Now, in this new era of worldwide peace and harmony that Valentine, reigning as Pontifex, had inaugurated, an admirable and beloved old Metamorph scholar had been murdered in the most brutal way. Murdered here in the holy city of the Metamorphs themselves, while he was in the midst of archaeological work that Valentine had instituted as one way of demonstrating the newfound respect of the human people of Majipoor for the aboriginal people they had displaced. And there was every indication, at least at this point, that the murderer was himself a Metamorph.
But that seemed insane.
Perhaps Tunigorn was right, that all of this was merely the working out of some ancient curse. That was a hard thing for Valentine to swallow. He had little belief in such things as curses. And yet—yet—
Restlessly he stalked the ruined city all through the worst heat of the day, heedless of the discomfort, pulling his hapless companions along. The sun’s great golden-green eye stared unrelentingly down. Heat-shimmers danced in the air. The leathery-leaved little shrubs that grew all over the ruins seemed to fold in upon themselves to hide from those torrid blasts of light. Even the innumerable skittering lizards that infested these rocks grew reticent as the temperature climbed.
“I would almost think we had been transported to Suvrael,” said Tunigorn, panting in the heat as he dutifully labored along beside the Pontifex. “This is the climate of the miserable southland, not of our pleasant Alhanroel.”
Nascimonte gave him a sardonic squinting smirk. “Just one more example of the malevolence of the Shapeshifters, my lord Tunigorn. In the days when the city was alive there were green forests all about this place, and the air was cool and mild. But then the river was turned aside, and the forests died, and nothing was left here but the bare rock that you see, which soaks up the heat of noon and holds it like a sponge. Ask the archaeologist lady, if you don’t believe me. This province was deliberately turned into a desert, for the sake of punishing those who had committed great sins in it.”
“All the more reason for us to be somewhere else,” Tunigorn muttered. “But no, no, this is our place, here with Valentine, now and ever.”
Valentine scarcely paid attention to what they were saying. He wandered aimlessly onward, down one weedy byway and another, past fallen columns and shattered facades, past the empty shells of what might once have been shops and taverns, past the ghostly outlines marking the foundation of vanished dwellings that must once have been palatial in their grandeur. Nothing was labeled, and Magadone Sambisa was not with him, now, to bend his ear with endless disquisitions about the former identities of these places. They were bits and pieces of lost Velalisier, that was all he knew: skeletonic remnants of this ancient metropolis.