Robert Silverberg: The Seventh Shrine

The duke stared at Valentine in bewilderment. “Majesty!”

“Let’s not play games, old friend. There’s no one here right now but you and me. In privacy we’re free to speak unvarnished truths, are we not? And you said it truly enough this afternoon. I did tell you then that we mustn’t jump to conclusions, yes, but sometimes a conclusion is so obvious that it conies jumping right at us. There’s no rational reason why one of the human archaeologists—or one of the Ghayrogs, for that matter—would have murdered one of his colleagues. I don’t see why anyone else would have done it, either. Murder is such a very rare crime, Nascimonte. We can hardly even begin to understand the motivations of someone who’d be capable of doing it. But someone did,”

“Yes.”

“Well, and which race’s motivations are hardest for us to understand, eh? To my way of thinking the killer almost certainly would have to be a Shapeshifter—either a member of the archaeological team, or one who came in from outside for the particular purpose of carrying out the assassination.”

“So one might assume. But what possible purpose could a Shapeshifter have for killing one of his own kind?”

“I can’t imagine. Which is why we’re here as investigators,” said Valentine. “And I have a nasty feeling that I’m not going to like the answer when we find it.”

At dinner that night in the archaeologists’ open-air mess hall, under a clear black sky ablaze now with swirling streams of brilliant stars that cast cold dazzling light on the mysterious humps and mounds of the surrounding ruins, Valentine made the acquaintance of Magadone Sambisa’s entire scientific team. There were seventeen in all: six other humans, two Ghayrogs, eight Metamorphs. They seemed, every one of them, to be gentle, studious creatures. Not by the greatest leap of the imagination could Valentine picture any of these people slaying and dismembering their venerable colleague Huukaminaan.

“Are these the only persons who have access to the archaeological zone?” he asked Magadone Sambisa.

“There are the day-labourers also, of course.”

“Ah. And where are they just now?”

“They have a village of their own, over beyond the last pyramid. They go to it at sundown and don’t come back until the start of work the next day.”

“I see. How many are there altogether? A great many?”

Magadone Sambisa looked across the table towards a pale and long-faced Metamorph with strongly inward-sloping eyes. He was her site supervisor, Kaastisiik by name, responsible for each day’s deployment of diggers. “What would you say? About a hundred?”

“One hundred twelve,” said Kaastisiik, and clamped his little slit of a mouth in a way that demonstrated great regard for his own precision.

“Mostly Piurivar?” Valentine asked.

“Entirely Piurivar,” said Magadone Sambisa. “We thought it was best to use only native workers, considering that we’re not only excavating the city but to some extent rebuilding it. They don’t appear to have any problem with the presence of non-Piurivar archaeologists, but having humans taking part in the actual reconstruction work would very likely be offensive to them.”

“You hired them all locally, did you?”

“There are no settlements of any kind in the immediate vicinity of the ruins, your majesty. Nor are there many Piurivars living anywhere in the surrounding province. We had to bring them in from great distances. A good many from Piurifayne itself, in fact.”

Valentine raised an eyebrow at that. From Piurifayne?

Piurifayne was a province of far-off Zimroel, an almost unthinkable distance away on the other side of the Inner Sea. Eight thousand years before, the great conqueror Lord Stiamot—he who had ended for all time the Piurivars’ hope of remaining independent on their own world—had driven those Metamorphs who had survived his war against them into Piurifayne’s humid jungles and had penned them up in a reservation there. Though the old restrictions had long since been lifted and Metamorphs now were permitted to settle wherever they pleased, more of them still lived in Piurifayne than anywhere else; and it was in the subtropical glades of Piurifayne that the revolutionary Faraataa had founded the underground movement that had sent the War of the Rebellion forth upon peaceful Majipoor like a river of seething lava.

Tunigorn said, “You’ve questioned them all, naturally? Established their comings and goings at the time of the murder?”

Magadone Sambisa seemed taken aback. “You mean, treat them as though they were suspects in the killing?”

They are suspects in the killing,” said Tunigorn.

They are simple diggers and haulers of burdens, nothing more, Prince Tunigorn. There are no murderers among them, that much I know. They revered Dr Huukaminaan. They regarded him as a guardian of their past—almost a sacred figure. It’s inconceivable that any one of them could have carried out such a dreadful and hideous crime. Inconceivable!”

“In this very place some twenty thousand years ago,” Duke Nascimonte said, looking upwards as if he were speaking only to the air, “the King of the Shapeshifters, as you yourself reminded us earlier today, caused two enormous sea-dragons to be butchered alive atop those huge stone platforms back there. It was clear from your words this afternoon that the Shapeshifters of those days must have regarded sea-dragons with even more reverence than you say your labourers had for Dr Huukaminaan. They called them ‘water-kings’, am I not right, and gave them names, and thought of them as holy elder brothers, and addressed prayers to them? Yet the bloody sacrifice took place here in Velalisier even so, the thing that to this very day the Shapeshifters themselves speak of as the Defilement. Is this not true? Permit me to suggest, then, that if the King of the Shapeshifters could have done such a thing back then, it isn’t all that inconceivable that one of your own hired Metamorphs here could have found some reason to perpetrate a similar atrocity last week upon the unfortunate Dr Huukaminaan on the very same altar,”

Magadone Sambisa appeared stunned, as though Nascimonte had struck her in the face. For a moment she could make no reply. Then she said hoarsely, “How can you use an ancient myth, a fantastic legend, to cast suspicion on a group of harmless, innocent—”

“Ah, so it’s a myth and a legend when you want to protect these harmless and innocent diggers and haulers of yours, and absolute historical truth when you want us to shiver with rapture over the significance of these piles of old jumbled stones?”

“Please,” Valentine said, glaring at Nascimonte, “ Please.” To Magadone Sambisa he said, “What time of day did the murder take place?”

“Late at night. Past midnight, it must have been.”

“I was the last to see Dr Huukaminaan,” said one of the Metamorph archaeologists, a frail-looking Piurivar whose skin had an elegant emerald hue. Vo-Siimifon was his name; Magadone Sambisa had introduced him as an authority on ancient Piurivar script. “We sat up late in our tent, he and I, discussing an inscription that had been found the day before. The lettering was extremely minute; Dr HuukaSiinaan complained of a headache, and said finally that he was going out for a walk. I went to sleep. Dr Huukaminaan did not return.”

“It’s a long way,” Mirigant observed, “from here to the sacrificial platforms. Quite a long way. It would take at least half an hour to walk there, I’d guess. Perhaps more, for someone his age. He was an old man, I understand.”

“But if someone happened to encounter him just outside the camp, though,” Tunigorn suggested, “and forced him to go all the way down to the platform area—”