Robert Silverberg - The Seventh Shrine

There was, wouldn’t you say, a certain formal aspect to the murder?” Valentine said. The cutting of the body into pieces? The carrying of the head down to the shrine, the placement in the alcove of offerings?” His gaze fastened on Thiuurinen, the ceramics expert, a lithe, diminutive Metamorph woman with lovely jade-green skin. “What’s your reading on that?” he asked her.

Her expression was wholly impassive. “As a ceramicist I have no opinion at all.”

“I don’t want your opinion as a ceramicist, just as a member of the expedition. A colleague of Dr Huukaminaan’s. Does it seem to you that putting the head there meant that some kind of offering was being made?”

“It is only conjecture that those alcoves were places of offering,” said Thiuurinen primly. “I am not in a position to speculate.”

Nor would she. Nor would any of them. Not Kaastisiik, not Vo-Siimifon, not the stratigrapher Pamikuuk, not Hieekraad, the custodian of material artefacts, nor Driismiil, the architectural specialist, nor Klelliin, the authority on Piurivar palaeotechnology, nor Viitaal-Twuu, the specialist in metallurgy.

Politely, mildly, firmly, unshakably, they brushed aside Valentine’s hypotheses about ritual murder. Was the gruesome dismemberment of Dr Huukaminaan a hearkening-back to the funeral practices of ancient Velalisier? Was the placing of his head in that alcove likely to have been any kind of propitiation of some supernatural being? Was there anything in Piurivar tradition that might countenance killing someone in that particular fashion? They could not say. They would not say. Nor, when he enquired as to whether their late colleague might have had an enemy here at the site, did they provide him with any information.

And they merely gave him the Piurivar equivalent of a shrug when he wondered out loud whether there could have been some struggle over the discovery of a valuable artefact that might have led to Huukaminaan’s murder; or even a quarrel of a more abstract kind, a fierce disagreement over the findings or goals of the expedition. Nobody showed any sign of outrage at his implication that one of them might have killed old Huukaminaan over such a matter. They behaved as though the whole notion of doing such a thing were beyond their comprehension, a concept too alien even to consider.

During the course of the interview Valentine took the opportunity to aim at least one direct question at each of them. But the result was always the same. They were unhelpful without seeming particularly evasive. They were unforthcoming without appearing unusually sly or secretive. There was nothing overtly suspicious about their refusal to cooperate. They seemed to be precisely what they claimed to be: scientists, studious scholars, devoted to uncovering the buried mysteries of their race’s remote past, who knew nothing at all about the mystery that had erupted right here in their midst. He did not feel himself to be in the presence of murderers here.

And yet—and yet—

They were Shapeshifters. He was the Pontifex, the emperor of the race that had conquered them, the successor across eight thousand years of the half-legendary soldier-king Lord Stiamot who had deprived them of their independence for all time. Mild and scholarly though they might be, these eight Piurivars before him surely could not help but feel anger, on some level of their souls, towards their human masters. They had no reason to cooperate with him. They would not see themselves under any obligation to tell him the truth. And—was this only his innate and inescapable racial prejudices speaking, Valentine wondered?—intuition told him to take nothing at face value among these people. Could he really trust the impression of apparent innocence that they gave? Was it possible ever for a human to read the things that lay hidden behind a Metamorph’s cool impenetrable features?

“What do you think?” he asked Deliamber, when the eight Shapeshifters had gone. “Murderers or not?”

“Probably not,” the Vroon replied. “Not these. Too soft, too citified. But they were holding something back. I’m certain of that,”

“You felt it too, then?”

“Beyond any doubt. What I sensed, your majesty—do you know what the Vroon word hsirthiir means?”

“Not really.”

“It isn’t easy to translate. But it has to do with questioning someone who doesn’t intend to tell you any lies but isn’t necessarily going to tell you the truth, either, unless you know exactly how to call it forth. You pick up a powerful perception that there’s an important layer of meaning hidden somewhere beneath the surface of what you’re being told, but that you won’t be allowed to elicit that hidden meaning unless you ask precisely the right question to unlock it. Which means, essentially, that you already have to know the information that you’re looking for before you can ask the question that would reveal it. It’s a very frustrating sensation, hsirthiir: almost painful, in fact. It is like hitting one’s beak against a stone wall. I felt myself placed in a state of hsirthiir just now. Evidently so did you, your majesty.”

“Evidently I did,” said Valentine.

There was one more visit to make, though. It had been a long day and a terrible weariness was coming over Valentine now. But he felt some inner need to cover all the basic territory in a single sweep; and so, once darkness had fallen, he asked Magadone Sambisa to conduct him to the village of the Metamorph labourers.

She was unhappy about that. “We don’t usually like to intrude on them after they’ve finished their day’s work and gone back there, your majesty.”

“You don’t usually have murders here, either. Or visits from the Pontifex. I’d rather speak with them tonight than disrupt tomorrow’s digging, if you don’t mind,”

Deliamber accompanied him once again. At her own insistence, so did Lisamon Hultin. Tunigorn was too tired to go—his hike through the ruins at midday had done him in—and Mirigant was feeling feverish from a touch of sunstroke; but formidable old Duke Nascimonte readily agreed to ride with the Pontifex, despite his great age. The final member of the party was Aarisiim, the Metamorph member of Valentine’s security staff, whom Valentine brought with him not so much for protection—Lisamon Hultin would look after that—as for the hsirthiir problem.

Aarisiim, turncoat though he once had been, seemed to Valentine to be as trustworthy as any Piurivar was likely to be: he had risked his own life to betray his master Faraataa to Valentine in the time of the Rebellion, when he had felt that Faraataa had gone beyond all decency by threatening to slay the Metamorph queen. He could be helpful now, perhaps, detecting things that eluded even Deliamber’s powerful perceptions.

The labourers’ village was a gaggle of meagre wickerwork huts outside the central sector of the dig. In its flimsy makeshift look it reminded Valentine of Ilirivoyne, the Shapeshifter capital in the jungle of Zimroel, which he had visited so many years before. But this place was even sadder and more disheartening than Ilirivoyne. There, at least, the Metamorphs had had an abundance of tall straight saplings and jungle vines with which to build their ramshackle huts, whereas the only construction materials available to them here were the gnarled and twisted desert shrubs that dotted the Velalisier plain. And so their huts were miserable little things, dismally warped and contorted.

They had had advance word, somehow, that the Pontifex was coming. Valentine found them arrayed in groups of eight or ten in front of their shacks, clearly waiting for his arrival. They were a pitiful starved-looking bunch, gaunt and shabby and ragged, very different from the urbane and cultivated Metamorphs of Magadone Sambisa’s archaeological team. Valentine wondered where they found the strength to do the digging that was required of them in this inhospitable climate.