And now? It is time for Valentine to move on to the Labyrinth, Divvis had said. Yes. Yes. Somewhat young to be Pontifex, yes, but that was the hard luck of coming to the throne in Tyeveras’s dotage. The old emperor deserved the sleep of the grave, and Valentine must go to the Labyrinth, and the starburst crown must descend—
To me? Lord Elidath? Is this to be Lord Elidath’s Castle?
The thought filled him with awe and wonder: and also with fear. He had seen, these past six months, what it was to be Coronal.
“Elidath! You’ll kill yourself! You’re running like a madman!” That was Mirigant’s voice, from far below, like something blown by the wind out of a distant city. Elidath was nearly at the top of the Ninety-Nine Steps now. There was a booming in his chest, and his vision was beginning to blur, but he forced himself onward, to the last of the steps, and into the narrow vestibule of dark green royal-stone that led to the administrative offices of the Pinitor Court. Blindly he careened around a corner, and felt a numbing impact and heard a heavy grunt; and then he fell and sprawled and lay breathing hard, more than half stunned.
He sat up and opened his eyes and saw someone—a youngish man, slender, dark of complexion, with fine black hair elaborately decked out in some fancy new style—getting shakily to his feet and coming toward him.
“Sir? Sir, are you all right?”
“Crashed into you, did I? Should have—looked where I was going—”
“I saw you, but there was no time. You came running so fast—here, let me help you up—”
“I’ll be fine, boy. Just need to—catch my breath—”
Disdaining the young man’s help, he pulled himself up, dusted off his doublet—there was a great rip up one knee, and bloody skin was showing through—and straightened his cloak. His heart was still thumping frighteningly, and he felt wholly absurd. Divvis and Mirigant were coming up the stairs, now. Turning to the young man, Elidath began to frame an apology, but the strange expression on the other’s face halted him.
“Is something wrong?” Elidath asked.
“Do you happen to be Elidath of Morvole, sir?”
“I do, yes.”
The boy laughed. “So I thought, when I took a close look. Why, you’re the one I was looking for, then! They said I might find you in the Pinitor Court. I bring a message for you.”
Mirigant and Divvis had entered the vestibule now. They came alongside Elidath, and from their look he knew he must be a frightful sight, flushed, sweating, half crazed from his lunatic run. He tried to make light of it, gesturing at the young man and saying, “It seems I ran down this messenger in my haste, and he’s bearing something for me. Who’s it from, boy?”
“Lord Valentine, sir.”
Elidath stared. “Is this a joke? The Coronal is on the grand processional, somewhere west of the Labyrinth.”
“So he is. I was with him in the Labyrinth, and when he sent me to the Mount he asked me to find you as the first thing I did, and tell you—”
“Well?”
He looked uneasily at Divvis and Mirigant. “I believe the message is for you alone, my lord.”
“These are the lords Mirigant and Divvis, of the Coronal’s own blood. You can speak in front of them.”
“Very well, sir. Lord Valentine instructs me to tell Elidath of Morvole—I should say, sir, that I am the Knight-Initiate Hissune, son of Elsinome—instructs me to tell Elidath of Morvole that he has changed his plan, that he is extending the grand processional to the continent of Zimroel as well, and also will visit his mother the Lady of the Isle before he returns, and that therefore you are requested to serve as regent throughout the full time of his absence. Which he estimates to be—”
“The Divine spare me!” Elidath whispered hoarsely.
“—a year or perhaps a year and a half beyond the time already planned,” said Hissune.
11
The second sign of trouble that Etowan Elacca noticed was the drooping leaves on the niyk trees, five days after the falling of the purple rain.
The purple rain itself was not the first sign of trouble. There was nothing uncommon about such a thing over on the eastern slope of the Dulorn Rift, where there were significant outcroppings of fluffy light skuvva-sand of a pale reddish-blue color. At certain seasons the wind from the north that was called the Chafer scoured the stuff free and hurled it high overhead, where it stained the clouds for days, and tinted the rainfall a fine lavender hue. It happened that the lands of Etowan Elacca were a thousand miles west of that district, on the other slope of the Rift entirely, just a short distance inland of Falkynkip; and winds laden with skuvva-sand were not known to blow that far west. But winds, Etowan Elacca knew, had a way of changing their courses, and perhaps the Chafer had chosen to visit a different side of the Rift this year. And in any event a purple rain was nothing to worry about: it merely left a fine coating of sand on everything, that was all, and the next normal rain washed it all away. No, the first sign of trouble was not the purple rain but the shriveling of the sensitivos in Etowan Elacca’s garden; and that happened two or three days before the rain.
Which was puzzling, but not really extraordinary. It was no great task to make sensitivos shrivel. They were small golden-leaved psychosensitive plants with insignificant green flowers, native to the forests west of Mazadone, and any sort of psychic discordance within the range of their receptors—angry shouting, or the growling of forest beasts in combat, or even, so it was said, the mere proximity of someone who had committed a serious crime—was sufficient to make their leaflets fold together like praying hands and turn black. It was not a response that seemed to have any particular biological benefit, Etowan Elacca had often thought; but doubtless it was a mystery that would unfold itself upon close examination, and someday he meant to make that examination. Meanwhile he grew the sensitivos in his garden because he liked the cheerful yellow glint of their leaves. And, because Etowan Elacca’s domain was a place of order and concord, never once in the time he had been growing them had his sensitivos undergone a withering—until now. That was the puzzle. Who could have exchanged unkind words at the border of his garden? What snarling animals, in this province of bland domesticated creatures, might have put the equilibrium of his estate into disarray?
Equilibrium was what Etowan Elacca prized above all else. He was a gentleman farmer, sixty years old, tall and straight-backed, with a full head of dazzling white hair. His father was the third son of the Duke of Massissa, and two of his brothers had served in succession as Mayor of Falkynkip, but government had never interested him: as soon as he came into his inheritance, he had purchased a lordly span of land in the placid rolling green countryside on the western rim of the Dulorn Rift, and there he had built a Majipoor in miniature, a little world, distinguished by its great beauty and its calm, level, harmonious spirit.
He raised the usual crops of the district: niyk and glein, hingamorts, stajja. Stajja was his mainstay, for there was never any wavering of demand for the sweet, buoyant bread that was made from stajja tubers, and the farms of the Rift were hard pressed to produce enough to meet the needs of Dulorn and Falkynkip and Pidruid, with close on thirty million people among them, and millions more in the outlying towns. Slightly upslope from the stajja fields was the glein plantation, row after row of dense, dome-shaped bushes ten feet high, between whose blade-shaped silvery leaves nestled great clusters of the plump, delicious little blue fruits. Stajja and glein were everywhere grown side by side: it had been discovered long ago that the roots of glein bushes seeped a nitrogenous fluid into the soil, which, when washed downslope by the rains, spurred the growth of stajja tubers.