—And how does he plan to cross it?
—That I do not know. But —
“Now! Grab him!”
At the sudden outcry all contact with Faraataa was lost. Two huge forms loomed in the darkness and pounced. Y-Uulisaan, astonished, unprepared, gasped in surprise.
He perceived that it was the vast warrior-woman Lisamon Hultin and the fierce shaggy Skandar Zalzan Kavol who gripped him. The Vroon Deliamber hovered somewhere at a safe distance, tentacles coiling in intricate patterns.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Y-Uulisaan demanded. “This is an outrage!”
“Ah, that it is,” replied the Amazon cheerfully. “Most certainly it is.”
“Let go of me at once!”
“Very small chance of that, spy!” the Skandar rumbled.
Desperately Y-Uulisaan tried to free himself from the grasp of his assailants, but he was like a mere doll in their hands. Panic seized him, and he felt his form-control begin to break down. He could do nothing to reassert it, though the loss of it revealed him for what he truly was. They held him as he writhed and twisted and frantically ran through a host of shapechanges, becoming now this creature or that, this mass of spines and knobs or that length of sinuous serpent. Unable to free himself, his energies so depleted by the contact with Faraataa that he could not generate any of his defensive abilities, the electric shocks and the like, he screamed and roared in frustration until, abruptly, the Vroon slipped a tentacle against his forehead and administered a short stunning jolt. Y-Uulisaan went limp and lay half conscious.
“Take him to the Coronal,” Deliamber said. “We will interrogate him in Lord Valentine’s presence.”
4
As he rode westward toward the Steiche all that day with the vanguard of the royal caravan, Valentine saw the landscape hourly undergoing dramatic change: drab Gihorna was giving way to the mysterious lushness of the Piurifayne rain forest. Behind him lay a scruffy seacoast of dunes and sand drifts, of sparse shaggy tufts of saw-edged grass and small stunted trees with limp yellow leaves. Now the soil was no longer so sandy, but grew ever darker, ever more rich, and supported a riotous lushness of growth; the air no longer carried the acrid flavor of the sea, but had taken on the sweet, musky aroma of a jungle. Yet this was mere transitional country, Valentine knew. The true jungle lay ahead, beyond the Steiche, a realm of mists and strangeness, dense dark greenery, fog-swept hills and mountains: the kingdom of the Shapeshifters.
An hour or so before twilight they reached the river. Valentine’s floater was the first to arrive at it, the other two appearing a few minutes later. He signaled to their captains to pull the vehicles into parallel formation along the bank. Then he left his floater and walked to the water’s edge.
Valentine had reason to remember this river well. He had come to it in his years of exile, that time when he and his fellow jugglers were fleeing the wrath of the Metamorphs of Ilirivoyne. Now, standing beside its swift waters, his mind journeyed back across time to glimpse again that wild ride across rain-soaked Piurifayne, and the bloody battle with Shapeshifter ambushers in the depths of the jungle, and the little apelike forest brethren who had saved them afterward by leading them to the Steiche. And then the terrifying and ill-fated raft ride down the turbulent river, among its menacing boulders and whirlpools and rapids, in the hope of reaching the safety of Ni-moya—
But here there were no rapids, no fanged rocks splitting the swirling surface, no high rocky walls flanking the channel. The river here was fast of flow, but broad and smooth and manageable.
“Can this really be the Steiche?” Carabella asked. “It hardly seems to be the same river that gave us such pain.”
Valentine nodded. “All that lies north of here. This stretch of the river seems more civil.”
“But hardly gentle. Can we get across?”
“We must,” said Valentine, staring at the distant western bank and Piurifayne beyond it.
Dusk was beginning to descend now, and in the gathering darkness the Metamorph province seemed impenetrable, unfathomable, hermetic. The Coronal’s mood began to turn somber once more. Was it folly, he wondered, this wild expedition into the jungle? Was this enterprise absurd, naive, foredoomed? Perhaps so. Perhaps the only outcome of his rash quest for the Shapeshifter queen’s forgiveness would be mockery and shame. And perhaps then he would do well to resign this crown that he had never truly coveted, and turn the government into the hands of some more brutal and decisive man.
Perhaps. Perhaps.
He noticed that some strange sluggish creature had emerged from the water on the other shore and was moving slowly about over there at the river’s edge—a long, baggy-bodied thing with pale blue skin and a single huge sad eye at the top of its blunt, bulbous head. As Valentine watched, bemused by the ugliness and clumsiness of the animal, it put its face to the muddy soil of the bank and began rocking from side to side, as though trying to excavate a pit with its chin.
Sleet approached. Valentine, entirely caught up in observing the odd beast across the way, allowed him to wait in silence a moment before turning to him.
It seemed to Valentine that Sleet’s expression was pensive, even troubled. He said, “We’re going to pitch camp here for the night, is that right, lordship? And wait until morning before we try to see if the floaters will travel over water that moves as fast as this?”
“So I intend, yes.”
“With all respect, my lord, you might consider crossing the river tonight, if it’s possible.”
Valentine frowned. He felt curiously detached: Sleet’s words appeared to be reaching him from a great distance. “As I recall, our plan was to spend tomorrow morning experimenting with the floaters, but to wait on this side of the river until the other half of the caravan had caught up with us before making the actual crossing into Piurifayne. Is that not so?”
“Yes, my lord, but—”
Valentine cut him off “Then the order should be given to pitch camp before it’s dark, eh, Sleet?” The Coronal put the issue from his mind and turned back toward the river. “Do you see that peculiar animal on the far bank?”
“The gromwark, you mean?”
“Is that what it is? What do you think it’s up to, rubbing its face in the ground like that?”
“Digging a burrow, I’d say. To hunker down in when the storm strikes. They live in the water, you know, but I suppose it figures the river will be too badly stirred up, and—”
“Storm?” Valentine asked.
“Yes, my lord. I was trying to tell you, my lord. Look at the sky, my lord!”
“The sky darkens. Night’s coming on.”
“Look to the east, I mean,” said Sleet.
Valentine swung around and stared into Gihorna. The sun should already be nearly down, back there; he would have expected the sky to have turned gray or even black by this time of day. But instead a weird kind of sunset seemed to be going on in the east, against all nature: a strange pastel glow streaked the sky, pink tinged with yellow, and pale green at the horizon. The colors had an odd throbbing intensity, as though the sky were pulsating. The world seemed extraordinarily stilclass="underline" Valentine heard the rushing of the river, but no other sound, not even the nightfall song of birds or the insistent high-pitched notes of the little scarlet tree-frogs that dwelled here by the thousands. And there was a desert dryness to the air, a combustible quality.
“Sandstorm, my lord,” Sleet said quietly.
“Are you certain?”
“It must be blowing up just now, on the coast. The wind was out of the east all day, and that’s where the Gihorna storms come from, off the ocean. A dry wind off the ocean, lordship, can you reckon that? I can’t.”