Robert Silverberg - The Seventh Shrine

“Yes,” said Valentine softly. “Of course.”

The road now took them between the two colossal platforms fashioned from gigantic slabs of blue stone that were known to the modern-day Metamorphs as the Tables of the Gods. Even though they were abutted by the accumulated debris of two hundred centuries, they still rose nearly ten feet above the surrounding plain, and the area of their flat-topped surfaces would have been great enough to hold hundreds of people at a time.

In a low sepulchral tone Magadone Sambisa said, “Do you know what these are, your majesty?”

Valentine nodded. “The sacrificial altars, yes. Where the Defilement was carried out.”

Magadone Sambisa said, “Indeed. It was also at this site that the murder of Huukaminaan happened. I could show you the place. It would take only a moment.”

She indicated a staircase a little way down the road, made of big square blocks of the same blue stone as the platforms themselves. It gave access to the top of the western platform. Magadone Sambisa dismounted and scrambled swiftly up. She paused on the highest step to extend a hand to Valentine as though the Pontifex might be having difficulty in making the ascent, which was not the case. He was still almost as agile as he had been in his younger days. But he reached for her hand for courtesy’s sake, just as she—deciding, maybe, that it would be impermissible for a commoner to make contact with the flesh of a Pontifex—began to pull it anxiously back. Valentine, grinning, leaned forward and took the hand anyway, and levered himself upwards.

Old Nascimonte came bounding swiftly up just behind him, followed by Valentine’s cousin and close counsellor, Prince Mirigant, who had the little Vroonish wizard Autifon Deliamber riding on his shoulder. Tunigorn remained below. Evidently this place of ancient sacrilege and infamous slaughter was not for him.

The surface of the altar, roughened by time and pockmarked everywhere by clumps of scruffy weeds and incrustations of red and green lichen, stretched on and on before them, a stupendous expanse. It was hard to imagine how even a great multitude of Shapeshifters, those slender and seemingly boneless people, could ever have hauled so many tremendous blocks of stone into place.

Magadone Sambisa pointed to a marker of yellow tape in the form of a six-pointed star that was affixed to the stone a dozen feet or so away. “We found him here,” she said. “Some of him, at any rate. And some here.” There was another marker off to the left, about twenty feet farther on. “And here.” A third star of yellow tape.

“They dismembered him?” Valentine said, appalled.

“Indeed. You can see the bloodstains all about.” She hesitated for an instant. Valentine noticed that she was trembling now. “All of him was here except his head. We discovered that far away, over in the ruins of the Seventh Pyramid.”

“They know no shame,” said Nascimonte vehemently. They are worse than beasts. We should have eradicated them all.”

“Who do you mean?” asked Valentine.

“You know who I mean, majesty. You know quite well.”

“So you think this was Shapeshifter work, this crime?”

“Oh, no, majesty, no!” Nascimonte said, colouring the words with heavy scorn. “Why would I think such a thing? One of our own archaeologists must have done it, no doubt. Out of professional jealousy, let’s say, because the dead Shapeshifter had come upon on some important discovery, maybe, and our own people wanted to take credit for it. Is that what you think, Valentine? Do you believe any human being would be capable of this sort of loathsome butchery?”

“That’s what we’re here to discover, my friend,” said Valentine amiably. “We are not quite ready for arriving at conclusions, I think.”

Magadone Sambisa’s eyes were bulging from her head, as though Nascimonte’s audacity in upbraiding a Pontifex to his face was a spectacle beyond her capacity to absorb. “Perhaps we should continue on to your tents now,” she said.

It felt very odd, Valentine thought, as they rode on down the rubble-bordered roadway that led to the place of encampment, to be here in this forlorn and eerie zone of age-old ruins once again. But at least he was not in the Labyrinth. So far as he was concerned, any place at all was better than the Labyrinth.

This was his third visit to Velalisier. The first had been long ago when he had been Coronal, in the strange time of his brief overthrow by the usurper Dominin Barjazid. He had stopped off here with his little handful of supporters—Carabella, Nascimonte, Sleet, Ermanar, Deliamber, and the rest—during the course of his northward march to Castle Mount, where he was to reclaim his throne from the false Coronal in the War of Restoration.

Valentine had still been a young man, then. But he was young no longer. He had been Pontifex of Majipoor, senior monarch of the realm, for nine years now, following upon the fourteen of his service as Coronal Lord. There were a few strands of white in his golden hair, and though he still had an athlete’s trim body and easy grace he was starting to feel the first twinges of the advancing years.

He had vowed, that first time at Velalisier, to have the weeds and vines that were strangling the ruins cleared away, and to send in archaeologists to excavate and restore the old toppled buildings. And he had intended to allow the Metamorph leaders to play a role in that work, if they were willing. That was part of his plan for giving those once-despised and persecuted natives of the planet a more significant place in Majipoori life; for he knew that Metamorphs everywhere were smouldering with barely contained wrath, and could no longer be shunted into the remote reservations where his predecessors had forced them to live.

Valentine had kept that vow. And had come back to Velalisier years later to see what progress the archaeologists had made.

But the Metamorphs, bitterly resenting Valentine’s intrusion into their holy precincts, had shunned the enterprise entirely. That was something he had not expected.

He was soon to learn that although the Shapeshifters were eager to see Velalisier rebuilt, they meant to do the job themselves—after they had driven the human settlers and all other offworld intruders from Majipoor and taken control of their planet once more. A Shapeshifter uprising, secretly planned for many years, erupted just a few years after Valentine had regained the throne. The first group of archaeologists that Valentine had sent to Velalisier could achieve nothing more at the site than some preliminary clearing and mapping before the War of the Rebellion broke out; and then all work there had had to be halted indefinitely.

The war had ended with victory for Valentine’s forces. In designing the peace that followed it he had taken care to alleviate as many of the grievances of the Metamorphs as he could. The Danipiur—that was the title of their queen—was brought into the government as a full Power of the Realm, placing her on an even footing with the Pontifex and the Coronal. Valentine had, by then, himself moved on from the Coronal’s throne to that of the Pontifex. And now he had revived the idea of restoring the ruins of Velalisier once more; but he had made certain that it would be with the full cooperation of the Metamorphs, and that Metamorph archaeologists would work side by side with the scholars from the venerable University of Arkilon in the north to whom he had assigned the task.

In the year just past great things had been done towards rescuing the ruins from the oblivion that had been encroaching on them for so long. But he could take little joy in any of that. The ghastly death that had befallen the senior Metamorph archaeologist atop this ancient altar argued that sinister forces still ran deep in this place. The harmony that he thought his reign had brought to the world might be far shallower than he suspected.