“No,” Divvis said. “Valentine is not absolute. He requires our consent to this thing.”
“Ah, and would you overrule the will of the Coronal?” asked the Duke of Chorg.
Divvis, after a pause, said, “If my conscience bade me do so, I would, yes. Valentine is not infallible. There are times when I disagree greatly with him. This is one.”
“Ever since the changing of his body,” said Prince Manganot of Banglecode, “I have noted a change also in his personality, an inclination toward the romantic, toward the fantastic, that perhaps was present in him before the usurpation but which never was evident in any significant way, and which now manifests itself in a whole host of—”
“Enough!” said Elidath in exasperation. “We are required to debate this nomination, and we have done so, and I make an end to it now. The Coronal Lord offers us the knight-initiate Hissune son of Elsinome, for elevation to the principate with full privileges of rank. As High Counsellor and Regent I place the nomination before you with my seconding vote. If there is no opposition, I propose it to be recorded that he is elevated by acclamation.”
“Opposed,” said Divvis.
“Opposed,” said Prince Manganot of Banglecode.
“Opposed,” said the Duke of Halanx.
“Are there any others here,” asked Elidath slowly, “who wish to be placed on record in opposition to the will of the Coronal Lord?”
Prince Nimian of Dundilmir, who had not previously spoken, now declared, “There is an implied threat in those words to which I take exception, Elidath.”
“Your exception is duly noted, although no threat is intended. How do you vote, Nimian?”
“Opposed.”
“So be it. Four stand in opposition, which falls well short of a carrying number. Stasilaine, will you ask Prince Hissune to enter the council-chamber?” Glancing about the room, Elidath added, “If any who cast opposing votes wish now to withdraw them, this is the moment.”
“Let my vote stand,” the Duke of Halanx said at once.
“And mine,” said the Prince of Banglecode, and Nimian of Dundilmir also.
“And what says the son of Lord Voriax?” Elidath asked.
Divvis smiled. “I change my vote. The thing is done: let it have my support as well.”
At that Manganot rose halfway from his seat, gaping in astonishment, face coloring. He began to say something, but Divvis cut short his words with an upraised hand and a sharp sudden glare. Frowning, shaking his head in bewilderment, Manganot subsided. The Duke of Halanx whispered something to Prince Nimian, who shrugged and made no reply.
Stasilaine returned, with Hissune beside him, clad in a simple white robe with a golden splash on the left shoulder. His face was lightly flushed, his eyes were unnaturally bright, but he was otherwise calm and contained.
Elidath said, “By nomination of the Coronal Lord Valentine and the acclamation of these high lords, we name you to the principate of Majipoor, with full rank and privilege.”
Hissune bowed his head. “I am moved beyond words, my lords. I can barely express my gratitude to you all for bestowing this unimaginable honor upon me.”
Then he looked up, and his gaze traveled through the room, resting for a moment on Nimian, and on Manganot, and on the Duke of Halanx, and then, for a long while, on Divvis, who returned his stare coolly and with a faint smile.
6
That lone sea dragon, so strangely beating its wings against the water at twilight, was a harbinger of stranger things to come. In the third week of the voyage from Alaisor to the Isle of Sleep an entire herd of the huge creatures suddenly manifested itself off the starboard side of the Lady Thiin.
Pandelume, the pilot, a Skandar with deep blue fur who once had hunted sea dragons for her livelihood, was the first to sight them, just after dawn, as she was taking her sightings from the observation deck. She carried the news to Asenhart the Grand Admiral, who conferred with Autifon Deliamber, who took it upon himself to awaken the Coronal.
Valentine went quickly to the deck. By now the sun had come up out of Alhanroel and cast long shadows upon the waters. The pilot handed him her seeing-tube and he put it to his eye, and she trained it for him on the shapes that moved through the sea far in the distance.
He stared, seeing little at first except the gentle swells of the open sea, then shifting his gaze slightly to the north and refining his focus to bring the sea dragons into view: dark humped shapes thronging the water, moving in close formation, swimming with strange purposefulness. Now and again a long neck rose high above the surface, or vast wings were fanned and fluttered and spread out on the bosom of the sea.
“There must be a hundred of them,” cried Valentine, amazed.
“More than that, my lord,” said Pandelume. “Never while I was hunting them did I encounter a herd so big. Can you see the kings? Five of them, at least. And half a dozen more, nearly as large. And dozens of cows, and young ones, too many to count—”
“I see them,” Valentine said. In the center of the group was a small phalanx of animals of monstrous size, all but submerged, but their spine-ridges cleaving the surface. “Six big ones, I’d say. Monsters—bigger even than the one that shipwrecked me when I sailed on the Brangalyn! And in the wrong waters. What are they doing here? Asenhart, have you ever heard of sea-dragon herds coming up this side of the Isle?”
“Never, my lord,” the Hjort said “somberly. “For thirty years I have sailed between Numinor and Alaisor and never once seen a dragon. Never once! And now an entire herd—”
“The Lady be thanked they’re moving away from us,” said Sleet.
“But why are they here at all?” Valentine asked.
No one had an answer to that. It seemed unreasonable that the movements of sea dragons through the inhabited parts of Majipoor should so suddenly undergo drastic change, when for thousands of years the marine herds had with extraordinary loyalty followed well-worn roads in the sea.
Placidly did each herd take the same route on each of its lengthy migrations around the world, to the dragons’ great loss, for the dragon hunters out of Piliplok, knowing where to find them, fell upon them each year in the proper season and worked a fearful slaughter on them so that dragon meat and dragon oil and dragon milk and dragon bones and many another dragon-derived product might be sold at high profit in the marketplaces of the world. Still the dragons traveled as they always had traveled. The vagaries of winds and currents and temperatures sometimes might induce them to shift some hundreds of miles north or south of their customary paths, probably because the sea creatures on which they fed had shifted, but nothing like this departure had ever been seen before—a whole herd of dragons curving up the eastern side of the Isle of Sleep and apparently making for the polar regions, instead of passing south of the Isle and the coast of Alhanroel to enter the waters of the Great Sea.
Nor was this the only such herd. Five days later another was sighted: a smaller group, no more than thirty, with no giants among them, that passed within a mile or two of the fleet. Uncomfortably close, said Admiral Asenhart: for the ships bearing the Coronal and his party to the Isle carried no weaponry of any significant sort, and sea dragons were creatures of uncertain temper and formidable power, much given to shattering such hapless vessels as might stumble across their paths at the wrong moment.
Six weeks remained to the voyage. In dragon-infested seas that would seem like a very long while.
“Perhaps we should turn back, and make this crossing at another season,” suggested Tunigorn, who had never been to sea before and had not been finding the experience much to his liking even before this.