“My counsel exactly,” Sleet said.
“Very well,” said Valentine. He looked to Sleet and said, “Have our floaters made ready for the crossing.”
“I will, my lord.” He rushed away.
To Elidath Valentine said, “If you are here, who rules at the Castle?”
“I chose three to serve as a Council of Regency: Stasilaine, Divvis, and Hissune.”
“Hissune?”
Color came to Elidath’s cheeks. “It was my belief you wished him to move rapidly forward in the government.”
“So I do. You did well, Elidath. But I suspect that there were some who were less than totally pleased with the choice.”
“Indeed. Prince Manganot of Banglecode, and the Duke of Halanx, and—”
“Never mind the names. I know who they are,” Valentine said. “They’ll change their minds in time, I think.”
“As do I. The boy is astonishing, Valentine. Nothing escapes his notice. He learns amazingly swiftly. He moves surely. And when he makes a mistake, he knows how to gain from an understanding of his error. He reminds me somewhat of you, when you were his age.”
Valentine shook his head. “No, Elidath. He’s not at all like me. That’s the thing I most value about him, I think. We see the same things, but we see them with very different eyes.” He smiled and caught Elidath by the forearm, and held him a moment. Softly he said, “You understand what I intend for him?”
“I think I do.”
“And are you troubled by it?”
Elidath’s gaze was steady. “You know that I am not, Valentine.”
“Yes. I do know that,” the Coronal said.
He dug his fingers hard into Elidath’s arm, and released him, and turned away before Elidath could see the sudden glistening in his eyes.
The wind, now thick with sand and howling eerily, came ripping through the grove of slender-stemmed trees that lay just to the east, cutting their broad leaves to tatters like a host of invisible knives. Valentine felt light showers of sand striking his face with stinging impact, and he turned from it, pulling his cloak up to protect himself. The others were doing the same. At the edge of the river, where Sleet was supervising the conversion of the floaters’ ground-effect mechanisms for use on water, there was a great bustle of activity.
Tunigorn said, “There is much strange news, Valentine.”
“Speak it, then!”
“The agricultural expert who has been traveling with us since Alaisor—”
“Y-Uulisaan? What of him? Has something happened to him?”
“He is a Shapeshifter spy, my lord.”
The words reached Valentine like blows.
“What?”
“Deliamber detected it in the night: the Vroon felt a strangeness somewhere, and prowled about until he found Y-Uulisaan holding mind-speech with someone far away. He instructed your Skandar and the Amazon to seize him, and when they did, Y-Uulisaan began changing forms like a trapped demon.”
Valentine spat in fury. “It goes beyond belief! All these weeks, carrying a spy with us, confiding in him all our plans for overcoming the blights and plagues of the farm provinces— no! No! What have they done with him?”
“They would have brought him to you this night for interrogation,” said Tunigorn. “But then the storm came, and Deliamber thought it wisest to wait it out at the camp.”
“My lord!” Sleet called from the riverbank. “We are ready to attempt the crossing!”
“There is more,” Tunigorn said.
“Come. Tell me about it as we ride across.”
They hurried toward the floaters. The wind now was without mercy, and the trees leaned halfway to the ground under its brunt. Carabella, beside Valentine, stumbled and would have gone sprawling if he had not caught her. He wrapped one arm tightly about her: she was so slight, so buoyant, that any gust might carry her away.
Tunigorn said, “Word of new chaos reached Piliplok just as I set forth. In Khyntor a man named Sempeturn, an itinerant preacher, has proclaimed himself Coronal, and some of the people have acclaimed him.”
“Ah,” Valentine said softly, as though struck in the middle.
“That is not all. Another Coronal has arisen in Dulorn, they say: a Ghayrog named Ristimaar. And we have word of still another in Ni-moya, though his name did not come to me; and it is reported also that at least one false Pontifex has come forth in Velathys, or possibly Narabal. We are not sure, my lord, because the channels of communications have become so disturbed.”
“It is as I thought,” said Valentine in a tone of deadly quiet. “The Divine has in all truth turned against us. The commonwealth is shattered. The sky itself has broken and will fall upon us.”
“Into the floater, my lord!” Sleet shouted.
“Too late,” Valentine murmured. “There will be no forgiveness for us now.”
As they scrambled into the vehicles the full fury of the storm broke upon them. First there was an odd moment of silence, as though the atmosphere itself had fled from this place in terror of the onrushing winds, taking with it all capacity for the transmission of sound; but in the next instant came something like a thunderclap, but dull and without resonance, like a short swift unechoing thud. And on the heels of that arrived the storm, screaming and snarling and turning the air opaque with churning whirlwinds of sand.
Valentine was in the floater by then, with Carabella close beside him and Elidath not far away. The vehicle, clumsily swaying and lumbering like some great amorfibot rousted unwilling from the dune where it had been dozing, drifted riverward and moved out over the water.
Darkness now had come, and within the darkness lay a weird, glowing core of purplish-green light that seemed almost to have been kindled by the force of air flowing over air. The river had turned altogether black and its surface was rippling and swelling alarmingly as sudden calamitous changes in the air pressure above it tugged or thrust against it. Sand pelted down in wild cyclonic sprays, etching pock-marked craters on the heaving water. Carabella gagged and choked; Valentine fought back an overwhelming dizziness; the floater bucked and reared in a berserk, unruly way, nose rising and slapping down against the water and rising again, and again slapping down, thwack thwack thwack. The cascading sand etched patterns of a curious loveliness in the windows, but rapidly it became all but impossible to see through them, though Valentine had the hazy impression that the floater just to the left of his was standing on its tail, balanced immobile in an impossible position for a frozen moment before starting to slip down into the river.
Then everything outside the floater was invisible, and the only sounds that could be heard were the booming of the wind and the steady, abrasive drumbeat of the sand against the floater’s hull.
An odd tranquilizing giddiness began to possess Valentine. It seemed to him that the floater was pivoting rhythmically now along its longitudinal axis, jerking from side to side in ever more abrupt yawing shrugs. Very likely, he realized, the ground-effect rotors were losing whatever little purchase they had had on the river’s wildly unstable surface, and in another few moments the vehicle would surely flip over.
“This river is accursed,” said Carabella.
Yes, Valentine thought. So it did seem. The river was under some dark spell, or else the Steiche was itself some malevolent spirit that sought his doom. And now we will all drown, he thought. But he was curiously calm.
The river, which nearly had me once but somehow allowed me to be cast forth to safety, he told himself, has waited all this while for a second chance. And now that chance has come.
It did not matter. In the final analysis nothing really mattered. Life, death, peace, war, joy, sadness: they were all one and the same, words without meaning, mere noises, empty husks. Valentine felt no regret for anything. They had asked him to serve, and he had served. Surely he had done his best. He had shirked no task, betrayed no trust, forsworn no oath. Now would he return to the source, for the winds had driven the river wild, and the river would devour them all, and so be it: it did not matter. It did not matter.