Hissune stared in shock and amazement at the lean little scar-faced man. Sleet’s eyes were shining. He seemed almost to welcome the prospect.
Shaking his head slowly, Hissune said, “With all respect, High Counsellor Sleet, this makes no sense to me. A few millions of them, against twenty billions of us? They fought that war once, and lost it, and however much they hate us, I don’t think they’re going to try it again.”
Sleet pointed toward the Coronal, who seemed barely to be listening. “And the time they put their own puppet on Lord Valentine’s throne? What was that if not a declaration of war? Ah, boy, boy, you know nothing! The Shapeshifters have been scheming against us for centuries, and their time is at hand. The Coronal’s own dreams foretell it! By the Lady, the Coronal himself dreams of war!”
“By the Lady indeed, Sleet,” said the Coronal in a voice of infinite weariness, “there’ll be no war if I can help it, and you know that.”
“And if you can’t help it, my lord?” Sleet shot back.
The little man’s chalk-white face was flushed now with excitement; his eyes gleamed, he made tight rapid obsessive gestures with his hands, as though he were juggling invisible clubs. It had not occurred to Hissune that anyone, even a High Counsellor, spoke so bluntly to Coronals. And perhaps it did not happen often, for Hissune saw something much like anger cross the face of Lord Valentine: Lord Valentine who was reputed never to have known rage, who had gently and lovingly sought even to win the soul of his enemy the usurper Dominin Barjazid, in the last moments of the war of restoration. Then that anger gave way to the dreadful weariness again, which made the Coronal seem to be a man of seventy or eighty years, and not the young and vigorous forty or so that Hissune knew him to be.
There was an endless moment of tense silence. At length Lord Valentine said, speaking slowly and deliberately and addressing his words to Hissune as though no one else were in the room. “Let me hear no more talk of war while hope of peace remains. But the omens were dark, true enough: if there is not to be war, there is certain to be some calamity of another kind. I will not ignore such warnings. We have changed some of our plans this night, Hissune.”
“Will you call off the grand processional, my lord?”
“That I must not do. Again and again I’ve postponed it, saying that there was too much work for me at Castle Mount, that I had no time to go jaunting about the world. Perhaps I’ve postponed it too long. The processional should be made every seven or eight years.”
“And has it been longer than that, sir?”
“Almost ten. Nor did I complete the tour, that other time, for at Til-omon, you know, there was that small interruption, when someone else relieved me for a while of my tasks, without my knowledge.” The Coronal stared past Hissune into an infinitely remote distance. He seemed for a moment to be peering into the misty gulfs of time: thinking, perhaps, of the bizarre usurpation that had been worked upon him by the Barjazid, and of the months or years that he had roamed Majipoor bereft of his mind and of his might. Lord Valentine shook his head. “No, the grand processional must be made. Must be extended, in fact. I had thought to travel only through Alhanroel, but I think we will need to visit both continents. The people of Zimroel also must see that there is a Coronal. And if Sleet is right that the Metamorphs are the ones we must fear, why, then Zimroel is the place we must go, for that is where the Metamorphs dwell.”
Hissune had not expected that. A great surge of excitement arose in him. Zimroel too! That unimaginably distant place of forests and vast rivers and great cities, more than half legendary to him—magical cities with magical names—
“Ah, if that is the new plan, how splendid it sounds, my lord!” he said, smiling broadly. “I had thought never to see that land, except in dreams! Will we go to Ni-moya? And Pidruid, Til-omon, Narabal—”
“Quite likely I will,” said the Coronal in an oddly flat voice that fell upon Hissune’s ears like a cudgel.
“I, my lord?” said Hissune with sudden alarm.
Softly Lord Valentine said, “Another of the changes of plan. You will not be accompanying me on the grand processional.”
A terrible chill swept through Hissune then, as if the wind that blows between the stars had descended and was scouring out the deepest chambers of the Labyrinth. He trembled, and his soul shriveled under that cold blast, and he felt himself withering away to a husk.
“Am I then dismissed from your service, lordship?”
“Dismissed? Not at all! Surely you understand that I have important plans for you!”
“So you have said, several times, my lord. But the processional—”
“Is not the right preparation for the tasks you someday will be called upon to perform. No, Hissune, I can’t afford to let you spend the next year or two bounding around from province to province at my side. You’re to leave for Castle Mount as soon as possible.”
“Castle Mount, my lord?”
“To begin the training appropriate to a knight-initiate.”
“My lord?” said Hissune in amazement.
“You are—what, eighteen? So you’re years behind the others. But you’re quick: you’ll make up for the lost time, you’ll rise to your true level soon enough. You must, Hissune. We have no idea what evil is about to come upon our world, but I know now that I must expect the worst, and prepare for it by preparing others to stand beside me when the worst arrives. So there will be no grand processional for you, Hissune.”
“I understand, my lord.”
“Do you? Yes, I think you do. There’ll be time later for you to see Piliplok and Ni-moya and Pidruid, won’t there? But now—now—”
Hissune nodded, though in truth he hardly dared to think that he comprehended what Lord Valentine appeared to be telling him. For a long moment the Coronal stared at him; and Hissune met the gaze of those weary blue eyes steadily and evenly, though he was beginning to feel an exhaustion beyond anything he had ever known. The audience, he realized, had come to its end, though no word of dismissal had been uttered. In silence he made the starburst gesture and backed from the room.
He wanted nothing more than sleep now, a week of it, a month. This bewildering night had drained him of all his strength. Only two days ago this same Lord Valentine had summoned him to this very room, and told him to make ready at once to leave the Labyrinth, for he was to set forth as part of the royal entourage that was making the grand processional through Alhanroel; and yesterday he had been named one of the Coronal’s aides, and given a seat at the high table of tonight’s banquet; and now the banquet had come and gone in mysterious chaos, and he had beheld the Coronal haggard and all too human in his confusion, and the gift of the grand processional had been snatched back, and now—Castle Mount? A knight-initiate? Making up for lost time? Making up what? Life has become a dream, Hissune thought. And there is no one who can speak it for me.
In the hallway outside the Coronal’s suite, Sleet caught him suddenly by the wrist and pulled him close. Hissune sensed the strange power of the man, the taut energies coiled within him.
“Just to tell you, boy—I meant no personal enmity, when I spoke so harshly to you in there.”
“I never took it that way.”
“Good. Good. I want no enmity with you.”
“Nor I with you, Sleet.”
“I think we’ll have much work to do together, you and I, when the war comes.”
“If the war comes.”
Sleet smiled bleakly. “There’s no doubt of it. But I won’t fight that battle with you all over again just now. You’ll come over to my way of thinking soon enough. Valentine can’t see trouble until trouble’s biting at his boots—it’s his nature, he’s too sweet, has too much faith in the good will of others, I think—but you’re different, eh, boy? You walk with your eyes open. I think that’s what the Coronal prizes the most in you. Do you follow what I say?”