Robert Silverberg - The Seventh Shrine

Twilight was coming on by the time Valentine was settled in his tent. By a custom that even he was reluctant to set aside, he would stay in it alone, since his consort Carabella had remained behind in the Labyrinth on this trip. Indeed, she had tried very strongly to keep him from going himself. Tunigorn, Mirigant, Nascimonte, and the Vroon would share the second tent; the third was occupied by the security forces that had accompanied the Pontifex to Velalisier.

He stepped out into the gathering dusk. A sprinkling of early stars had begun to sparkle overhead, and the Great Moon’s bright glint could be seen close to the horizon. The air was parched and crisp, with a brittle quality to it, as though it could be torn in one’s hands like dry paper and crumbled to dust between one’s fingers. There was a strange stillness in it, an eerie hush.

But at least he was out of doors, here, gazing up at actual stars, and the air he breathed here, dry as it was, was real air, not the manufactured stuff of the Pontifical city. Valentine was grateful for that.

By rights he had no business being out and abroad in the world at all.

As Pontifex, his place was in the Labyrinth, hidden away in his secret imperial lair deep underground beneath all those coiling levels of subterranean settlement, shielded always from the view of ordinary mortals. The Coronal, the junior king who lived in the lofty castle of forty thousand rooms atop the great heaven-piercing peak that was Castle Mount, was meant to be the active figure of governance, the visible representative of royal majesty on Majipoor. But Valentine loathed the dank Labyrinth where his lofty rank obliged him to dwell. He relished every opportunity he could manufacture to escape from it.

And in fact this one had been thrust unavoidably upon him. The killing of Huukaminaan was serious business, requiring an enquiry on the highest levels; and the Coronal Lord Hissune was many months’ journey away just now, touring the distant continent of Zimroel. And so the Pontifex was here in the Coronal’s stead.

“You love the sight of the open sky, don’t you?” said Duke Nascimonte, emerging from the tent across the way and limping over to stand by Valentine’s side. A certain tenderness underlay the harshness of his rasping voice. “Ah, I understand, old friend. I do indeed.”

“I see the stars so infrequently, Nascimonte, in the place where I must live.”

The duke chuckled. “ Must live! The most powerful man in the world, and yet he’s a prisoner! How ironic that is! How sad!”

T knew from the moment I became Coronal that I’d have to live in the Labyrinth eventually,” Valentine said. “I’ve tried to make my peace with that. But it was never my plan to be Coronal in the first place, you know. If Voriax had lived—”

“Ah, yes, Voriax.” Valentine’s brother, the elder son of the High Counsellor Damiandane: the one who had been reared from childhood to occupy the throne of Majipoor. Nascimonte gave Valentine a close look. “It was a Metamorph, was it not, who struck him down in the forest? That has been proven now?”

Uncomfortably Valentine said, “What does it matter now who killed him? He died. And the throne came to me, because I was our father’s other son, A crown I had never dreamed of wearing. Everyone knew that Voriax was the one who was destined for it.”

“But he had a darker destiny also. Poor Voriax!”

Poor Voriax, yes. Struck down by a bolt out of nowhere while hunting in the forest eight years into his reign as Coronal, a bolt from the bow of some Metamorph assassin skulking in the trees. By accepting his dead brother’s crown, Valentine had doomed himself inevitably to descend into the Labyrinth some day, when the old Pontifex died and it became the Coronal’s turn to succeed to the greater title, and to the cheerless obligation of underground residence that went with it.

“As you say, it was the decision of fate,” Valentine replied, “and now I am Pontifex. Well, so be it, Nascimonte. But I won’t hide down there in the darkness all the time. I can’t.”

“And why should you? The Pontifex can do as he pleases.”

“Yes. Yes. But only within our law and custom.”

“You shape law and custom to suit yourself, Valentine. You always have.”

Valentine understood what Nascimonte was saying. He had never been a conventional monarch. For much of the time during his exile from power in the period of the usurpation he had wandered the world earning a humble living as an itinerant juggler, kept from awareness of his true rank by the amnesia that the usurping faction had induced in him. Those years had transformed him irreversibly; and after his restoration to the royal heights of Castle Mount he had comported himself in a way that few Coronals ever had before—mingling openly with the populace, spreading a cheerful gospel of peace and love even as the Shapeshifters were making ready to launch their long-cherished campaign of war against the conquerors who had taken their world from them.

And then, when the events of that war made Valentine’s succession to the Pontificate unavoidable, he had held back as long as possible before relinquishing the upper world to his protege Lord Hissune, the new Coronal, and descending into the subterranean city that was so alien to his sunny nature.

In his nine years as Pontifex he had found every excuse to emerge from it. No Pontifex in memory had come forth from the Labyrinth more than once a decade or so, and then only to attend high rites at the castle of the Coronal; but Valentine popped out as often as he could, riding hither and thither through the land as though he were still obliged to undertake the formal grand processionals across the countryside that a Coronal must make. Lord Hissune had been very patient with him on each of those occasions, though Valentine had no doubt that the young Coronal was annoyed by the senior monarch’s insistence on coming up into public view so frequently.

“I change what I think needs changing,” Valentine said. “But I owe it to Lord Hissune to keep myself out of sight as much as possible.”

“Well, here you are above ground today, at any rate!”

“It seems that I am. This is one time, though, when I would gladly have forgone the chance to come forth. But with Hissune off in Zimroel—”

“Yes. Clearly you had no choice. You had to lead this investigation yourself.” They fell silent. “A nasty mess, this murder,” Nascimonte said, after a time. “Pfaugh! Pieces of the poor bastard strewn all over the altar like that!”

“Pieces of the government’s Metamorph policy, too, I think,” said the Pontifex, with a rueful grin.

“You think there’s something political in this, Valentine?”

“Who knows? But I fear the worst.”

“You, the eternal optimist!”

“It would be more accurate to call me a realist, Nascimonte. A realist.”

The old duke laughed. “As you prefer, majesty.” There was another pause, a longer one than before. Then Nascimonte said, more quietly now, “Valentine, I need to ask your forgiveneness for an earlier fault. I spoke too harshly, this afternoon, when I talked of the Shapeshifters as vermin who should be exterminated. You know I don’t truly believe that, I’m an old man. Sometimes I speak so bluntly that I amaze even myself.”

Valentine nodded, but made no other reply.

“And telling you so dogmatically that it had to be one of his fellow Shapeshifters who killed him, too. As you said, it’s out of line for us to be jumping to conclusions that way. We haven’t even started to collect evidence yet. At this point we have no justification for assuming—”

“On the contrary. We have every reason to assume it, Nascimonte.”