The palace lay well outside Tolaghai, in a cruel and doleful valley. Valentine had seen it now and then in dreams: an ominous, menacing structure of dark stone, topped with a fantastic array of sharp-tipped towers and angular parapets. Clearly it had been designed to intimidate the eye and inspire dread.
“How hideous!” Carabella whispered, as they neared it.
“Wait,” said Valentine. “Only wait!”
They passed within the great gloomy portcullis and entered a place that on the inside displayed no kinship to its forbidding and repellent exterior. Airy courtyards resounded to the gentle music of splashing fountains, and cool, fragrant breezes replaced the bitter heat of the outer world. As Valentine dismounted from the floater with Carabella on his arm, he saw servitors waiting with iced wines and sherbets, and heard musicians strumming on delicate instruments. In the midst of all waited two figures clad in loose white robes, one soft-faced and pale and round-bellied, the other lean, hawk-faced, tanned almost black by the desert sun. About the forehead of the hawk-faced one rested the dazzling golden diadem that marked him as a Power of Majipoor. Valentine scarcely needed to be told that this was Minax Barjazid, now King of Dreams in his late father’s place. The other and softer man was his brother Cristoph, in all likelihood. Both made the starburst gesture, and Minax came forward to offer Valentine a bowl of chilled blue wine with his own hands.
“My lord,” he said, “these are stark times in which you come calling on us. But we greet you in all joy, no matter how somber the moment seems. We are mightily in your debt, my lord. All that is ours is yours. And all that we command is at your service.” It was obviously a speech he had prepared with care, and the resonance and smoothness of his delivery showed careful rehearsal. But then the King of Dreams leaned forward until his hard and glittering eyes were only inches from the Coronal’s own, and in a different voice, deeper, more private, he said, “You may have refuge here as long as you wish.”
Quietly Valentine replied, “You misunderstand, your highness. I have not come here to take refuge, but to seek your aid in the struggle that lies ahead.”
The King of Dreams seemed startled by that. “Such aid as I can give is yours, of course. But do you truly see any hope that we can fight our way free of the turmoil that assails us? For I must tell you, my lord, that I have looked at the world very closely through this”—he touched his diadem of power—“and I see no hope myself, my lord, none, none at all.”
2
An hour before twilight the chanting started again down in Ni-moya: thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of voices crying out with tremendous force, “Thallimon! Thallimon! Lord Thallimon! Thallimon! Thallimon!” The sound of that fierce jubilant outcry came rolling up the slopes of the outlying Gimbeluc district and swept over the quiet precincts of the Park of Fabulous Beasts like a great unstoppable wave.
It was the third day since the demonstrations in honor of the newest of the new Coronals had begun, and tonight’s uproar was the most frenzied so far. Very likely it was accompanied by rioting, looting, widespread destruction. But Yarmuz Khitain scarcely cared. This had already been one of the most terrifying days he had experienced in all his long tenure as curator of the park, an assault on everything that he considered proper and rational and sane: why should he now be perturbed over a little noise that some fools were making in the city?
At dawn that day Yarmuz Khitain had been awakened by a very young assistant curator who told him timidly, “Vingole Nayila has come back, sir. He is waiting at the east gate.”
“Has he brought much back with him?”
“Oh, yes, sir! Three transport floaters full, sir!”
“I’ll be right down,” said Yarmuz Khitain.
Vingole Nayila, the park’s chief field zoologist, had been exploring for the past five months in the disturbed areas of north central Zimroel. He was not a man of whom Yarmuz Khitain was greatly fond, for he tended to be cocky and overly self-satisfied, and whenever he exposed himself to deadly peril in the pursuit of some elusive beast he made sure that everyone knew just how deadly the peril had been. But professionally he was superb, an extraordinary collector of wild animals, indefatigable, fearless. When news had first begun to arrive that unfamiliar and grotesque creatures were causing havoc in the region between Khyntor and Dulorn, Nayila had lost no time mounting an expedition.
And a successful one, evidently. When Yarmuz Khitain reached the east gate he saw Nayila strutting busily about on the far side of the energy field that kept intruders out and the rare animals in. Beyond that zone of pink haze Nayila was supervising the unloading of a vast number of wooden containers, from which came all manner of hisses and growls and buzzes and drones and yelps. At the sight of Khitain, Nayila looked across and yelled:
“Khitain! You won’t believe what I’ve brought back!”
“Will I want to?” asked Yarmuz Khitain.
The accessioning process, it seemed, had already begun: the entire staff, such as still remained, had turned out to transport Nayila’s animals in their boxes through the gate and off toward the receiving building, where they could be installed in holding cages until enough was understood about them to allow their release into one of the open habitat ranges. “Careful!” Nayila bellowed, as two men struggling with a massive container nearly let it fall on its side. “If that animal gets loose, we’re all going to be sorry—but you first of all!” Turning to Yarmuz Khitain, he said, “It’s a real horror show. Predators—all predators—teeth like knives, claws like razors—I’m damned if I know how I got back here alive. Half a dozen times I thought I was done for, and me not having even recorded any of this for the Register of Souls. What a waste that would have been, what a waste! But here I am. Come—you’ve got to see these things—!”
A horror show, yes. All morning long, and on deep into the afternoon, Yarmuz Khitain found himself witness to a procession of the impossible and the hideous and the wholly unacceptable: freaks, monsters, ghastly anomalies.
“These were running around on the outskirts of Mazadone,” said Nayila, indicating a pair of small furious snarling animals with fiery red eyes and three savagely sharp horns ten inches long rising from their foreheads. Yarmuz Khitain recognized them by their thick reddish fur as haiguses—but never had he seen a haigus with horns, nor any so determinedly vicious. “Nasty little killers,” Nayila said. “I watched them run down a poor blave that had gone wild, and kill it in five minutes by leaping up and goring it in the belly. I bagged them while they were feeding, and then this thing came down to finish off the carcass.” He pointed to a dark-winged canavong with a sinister black beak and a single glowering eye in the center of its distended forehead: an innocent scavenger mysteriously transformed into a thing out of a nightmare. “Have you ever seen anything so ugly?”
“I would never want to see anything uglier,” said Yarmuz Khitain.
“But you will. You will. Uglier, meaner, nastier—just watch what comes out of these crates.”
Yarmuz Khitain was not sure he wanted to. He had spent all his life with animals—studying them, learning their ways, caring for them. Loving them, in a real sense of the word. But these—these—
“And then look at this,” Nayila went on. “A miniature dhumkar, maybe a tenth the size of the standard model, and fifty times as quick. It isn’t content to sit there in the sand and poke around with its snout in search of its dinner. No, it’s an evil little fast-moving thing that comes right after you, and would sooner chew your foot off at the ankle than breathe. Or this: a manculain, wouldn’t you say?”