It was easy enough, even for him, to imagine this place as the lair of ancient phantoms. A glassy glimmer of light shining out of some tumbled mass of broken columns—odd scratchy sounds that might have been those of creatures crawling about where no creatures could be seen—the occasional hiss and slither of shifting sand, sand that moved, so it would appear, of its own volition—
“Every time I visit these ruins,” he said to Mirigant, who was walking closest to him now, “I’m astounded by the antiquity of it all. The weight of history that presses down on it.”
“History that no one remembers,” Mirigant said.
“But its weight remains.”
“Not our history, though.”
Valentine shot his cousin a scornful look. “So you may believe. But it’s Majipoor’s history, and what is that if not ours?”
Mirigant shrugged and made no answer.
Was there any meaning, Valentine wondered, in what he had just said? Or was the heat addling his brain?
He pondered it. Into his mind there came, with a force almost like that of an explosion, a vision of the totality of vast Majipoor. Its great continents and overwhelming rivers and immense shining seas, its dense moist jungles and great deserts, its forests of towering trees and mountains rich with strange and wonderful creatures, its multitude of sprawling cities with their populations of many millions. His soul was flooded with an overload of sensation, the perfume of a thousand kinds of flowers, the aromas of a thousand spices, the savory tang of a thousand wondrous meats, the bouquet of a thousand wines. It was a world of infinite richness and variety, this Majipoor of his.
And by a fluke of descent and his brother’s bad luck he had come first to be Coronal and now Pontifex of that world. Twenty billion people hailed him as their emperor. His face was on the coinage; the world resounded with his praises; his name would be inscribed forever on the roster of monarchs in the House of Records, an imperishable part of the history of this world.
But once there had been a time when there were no Pontifexes and Coronals here. When such wondrous cities as Ni-Moya and Alaisor and the fifty great urban centers of Castle Mount did not exist. And in that time before human settlement had begun on Majipoor, this city of Velalisier already was.
What right did he have to appropriate this city, already thousands of years dead and desolate when the first colonists arrived from space, into the flow of human history here? In truth there was a discontinuity so deep between their Majipoor and our Majipoor, he thought, that it might never be bridged.
In any case he could not rid himself of the feeling that this place’s great legion of ghosts, in whom he did not even believe, were lurking all around him, and that their fury was still unappeased. Somehow he would have to deal with that fury, which had broken out now, so it seemed, in the form of a terrible act that had cost the life of a studious and inoffensive old man. The logic that infused every aspect of Valentine’s soul balked at any comprehension of such a thing. But his own fate, he knew, and perhaps the fate of the world, might depend on his finding a solution to the mystery that had exploded here.
“You will pardon me, good majesty,” said Tunigorn, breaking in on Valentine’s broodings just as a new maze of ruined streets opened out before them. “But if I take another step in this heat, I will fall down gibbering like a madman. My very brain is melting.”
“Why, then, Tunigorn, you should certainly seek refuge quickly, and cool it off! You can ill afford to damage what’s left of it, can you, old friend?” Valentine pointed in the direction of the camp. “Go back. Go. But I will continue, I think.”
He was not sure why. But something drove him grimly forward across this immense bedraggled sprawl of sand-choked sun-blasted ruins, seeking he knew not what. One by one his other companions dropped away from him, with this apology or that, until only the indefatigable Lisamon Hultin remained. The giantess was ever-faithful. She had protected him from the dangers of Mazadone Forest in the days before his restoration to the Coronal’s throne. She had been his guardian in the belly of the sea-dragon that had swallowed them both in the sea off Piliplok, that time when they were shipwrecked sailing from Zimroel to Alhanroel, and she had cut him free and carried him up to safety. She would not leave him now. Indeed she seemed willing to walk on and on with him through the day and the night and the day that followed as well, if that was what he required of her.
But eventually even Valentine had had enough. The sun had long since moved beyond its noon height. Sharp-edged pools of shadow, rose and purple and deepest obsidian, were beginning to reach out all about him. He was feeling a little light-headed now, his head swimming a little and his vision wavering from the prolonged strain of coping with the unyielding glare of that blazing sun, and each street of tumbled-down buildings had come to look exactly like its predecessor. It was time to go back. Whatever penance he had been imposing on himself by such an exhausting journey through this dominion of death and destruction must surely have been fulfilled by now. He leaned on Lisamon Hultin’s arm now and again as they made their way toward the tents of the encampment.
Magadone Sambisa had assembled her eight Metamorph archaeologists. Valentine, having bathed and rested and had a little to eat, met with them just after sundown in his own tent, accompanied only by the little Vroon, Autifon Deliamber. He wanted to form his opinions of the Metamorphs undistracted by the presence of Nascimonte and the rest; but Deliamber had certain Vroonish wizardly skills that Valentine prized highly, and the small many-tentacled being might well be able to perceive things with those huge and keen golden eyes of his that would elude Valentine’s own human vision.
The Shapeshifters sat in a semicircle with Valentine facing them and the tiny wizened old Vroon at his left hand. The Pontifex ran his glance down the group, from the site-boss Kaastisiik at one end to the paleographer Vo-Siimifon on the other. They looked back at him calmly, almost indifferently, these seven rubbery-faced slope-eyed Piurivars, as he told them of the things he had seen this day, the cemetery and the shattered pyramid and the shrine beneath it, and the alcove where Huukaminaan’s severed head had been so carefully placed by his murderer.
“There was, wouldn’t you say, a certain formal aspect to the murder?” Valentine said. “The cutting of the body into pieces? The carrying of the head down to the shrine, the placement in the alcove of offerings?” His gaze fastened on Thiuurinen, the ceramics expert, a lithe, diminutive Metamorph woman with lovely jade-green skin. “What’s your reading on that?” he asked her.
Her expression was wholly impassive. “As a ceramicist I have no opinion at all.”
“I don’t want your opinion as a ceramicist, just as a member of the expedition. A colleague of Dr. Huukaminaan’s. Does it seem to you that putting the head there meant that some kind of offering was being made?”
“It is only conjecture that those alcoves were places of offering,” said Thiuurinen primly. “I am not in a position to speculate.”
Nor would she. Nor would any of them. Not Kaastisiik, not Vo-Siimifon, not the stratigrapher Pamikuuk, not Hieekraad, the custodian of material artifacts, nor Driismiil, the architectural specialist, nor Klelliin, the authority on Piurivar paleo-technology, nor Viitaal-Twuu, the specialist in metallurgy.
Politely, mildly, firmly, unshakably, they brushed aside Valentine’s hypotheses about ritual murder. Was the gruesome dismemberment of Dr. Huukaminaan a hearkening-back to the funereal practices of ancient Velalisier? Was the placing of his head in that alcove likely to have been any kind of propitiation of some supernatural being? Was there anything in Piurivar tradition that might countenance killing someone in that particular fashion? They could not say. They would not say. Nor, when he inquired as to whether their late colleague might have had an enemy here at the site, did they provide him with any information.