“Take. Drink. Join.”
She realized she was holding up the passing of the bowl. She turned to the man on her right with a silly grin and an apology, but he was staring rigidly forward and paid no heed to her; so with a shrug she put the bowl to her lips and took a deep reckless gulp, and then another, and handed the bowl onward.
Almost at once she felt the effect. She swayed, blinked, had to struggle to keep her head from falling forward against her knees. It’s because I drank it on an empty stomach, she told herself. She crouched down, leaned forward, began to chant along with the congregation, a low wordless meaningless repetitious murmur, oo wah vah mah, oo wah vah mah, just as absurd as what those others had been shouting in the street, but somehow gentler, a tender crooning yearning cry, oo wah vah mah, oo wah vah mah. And as she chanted it seemed to her that she heard a distant music, weird, otherworldly, the sound of many bells far away, ringing in patterns of overlapping changes that were impossible to follow for long, since one strand of melody quickly became lost inside its successor, and that one in the next. Oo wah vah mah, she sang, and back to her came the song of the bells, and then she had a sense of something immense very close by, perhaps even in this very room, something colossal and winged and ancient and enormously intelligent, something whose intellect was as far beyond her comprehension as hers would be beyond a bird’s. It was turning and turning and turning in vast unhurried orbits, and each time it turned it unfolded its giant wings and spread them to the ends of the world, and when it folded them again they brushed against the gates of Millilain’s mind—just a tickle, just the lightest of touches, a feather-whisk, and yet she felt herself transformed by it, lifted out of herself, made part of some organism of many minds, unimaginable, godlike. Take. Drink. Join. With each touch of those wings she joined more profoundly. Oh wah vah mah. Oo wah vah mah. She was lost. There was no more Millilain. There was only the water-king whose sound was the sound of bells, and the many-minded mind of which the former Millilain had become a part. Oo. Wah. Vah. Mah.
It frightened her. She was being drugged down to the bottom of the sea, and her lungs were filling with water, and the pain was terrible. She fought. She would not let the great wings touch her. She pulled back, and pounded with her fists, and forced her way upward, up toward the surface—
Opened her eyes. Sat up, dazed, terrified. All about her the chanting was going on. Oo, wah, vah, mah. Millilain shuddered. Where am I? What have I done? I’ve got to get out of here, she thought. In panic she struggled to her feet and went blundering down the row to the aisle. No one stopped her. The wine still muzzed her mind and she found herself lurching, staggering, clutching at the walls. She was out of the room, now. Stumbling down that long dark fragrant corridor. The wings were still beating about her, enfolding her, reaching toward her mind. What have I done, what have I done?
Out into the alleyway, the darkness, the rain. Were they still marching around out here, the Knights of Dekkeret and the Order of the Triple Sword and whoever those others were? She did not care. Let whatever come that may. She began to run, not knowing which way she ran. There was a dull heavy booming sound far away that she hoped was the Confalume Geyser. Other sounds pounded in her mind. Yah-tah yah-tah yah -tah voom. Oo, wah, vah, mah. She felt the wings closing about her. She ran, and tripped and fell, and rose and went on running.
7
The deeper they journeyed into the Shapeshifter province, the more familiar everything began to look to Valentine. And yet at the same time the conviction had come to grow in him that he was making some ghastly and terrible mistake.
He remembered the scent of the place: rich, musky, complex, the sweet heavy aroma of growth and decay going forward with equal intensities under the constant warm rainfall, an intricate mix of flavors that flooded the nostrils to dizzying effect at every intake of breath. He remembered the close, clinging, moist air, and the showers that fell almost hourly, pattering against the forest roof high overhead and trickling down from leaf to shiny leaf until just a little reached the ground. He remembered the fantastic profusion of plant life, everything sprouting and uncoiling almost while one watched, and yet somehow oddly disciplined, everything fitting into well-defined layers—the towering slender trees bare of branches for seven eighths of their height, then flaring out into great umbrellas of leaves tied together into a tight canopy by a tangle of vines and creepers and epiphytes, and under that a level of shorter, rounder, fuller, more shade-tolerant trees, and a stratum of clumping shrubbery below that, and then the forest floor, dark, mysterious, all but barren, a stark expanse of damp thin spongy soil that bounced jauntily underfoot. He remembered the sudden shafts of light, deep-hued and alien, that came spearing at unpredictable intervals through the canopy to provide quick startling moments of clarity in the dimness.
But the Piurifayne rain-forest spread over thousands of square miles of the heart of Zimroel, and one part of it very likely looked much like any other part. Somewhere in here was the Shapeshifter capital, Ilirivoyne: but what reason do I have, Valentine asked himself, to think that I am near it, merely because the smells and sounds and textures of this jungle are similar to the smells and sounds and textures I recall from years ago?
That other time—traveling with the wandering jugglers, when they had taken the mad notion that they might earn a few royals by going to perform at the Metamorphs’ harvest festival—there had at least been Deliamber to cast a few Vroonish spells to sniff out the right fork in the road, and the valiant Lisamon Hultin, also wise in the ways of jungle lore. But on this second venture into Piurifayne Valentine was entirely on his own.
Deliamber and Lisamon, if they were still alive at all—and he was gloomy on that score, for in all these weeks he had had no contact with them even in dreams—were somewhere hundreds of miles behind him, on the far side of the Steiche. Nor had he had any sort of report from Tunigorn, whom he had sent back to look for them. He rode now only with Carabella and Sleet and a bodyguard of Skandars. Carabella had courage and endurance but little skill as a pathfinder, and the Skandars were strong and brave but not very bright, and Sleet, for all his shrewd, sober-minded ways, was in this region hampered greatly by the paralyzing dread of Shapeshifters that had been laid upon him in a dream while he was young, and which he had never fully been able to throw off. It was folly for a Coronal to be roaming the jungles of Piurifayne with so skimpy an entourage: but folly seemed to have become the hallmark of recent Coronals, Valentine thought, considering that his two predecessors, Malibor and Voriax, had met early and violent deaths while off doing foolish things. Perhaps it has become the custom, this rashness of kings.
And it seemed to him that from day to day he was neither getting closer to Ilirivoyne nor farther from it; that it was everywhere and nowhere, in these jungles; that perhaps the whole city had picked itself up and was moving onward just ahead of him, maintaining a constant distance from him, a gap he could never close. For the Shapeshifter capital, as he recalled it from that other time, was a place of flimsy wicker-work buildings, and only a few more substantial ones, and it had seemed to him then a makeshift phantom city that might well flit from one site to another at the whim of its inhabitants: a nomad-city, a dream city, a jungle will-o’-the-wisp.