Robert Silverberg - Valentine Pontifex

“Valentine! Valentine Pontifex! Valentine Pontifex!”

When the royal expeditionary force was some hours yet downriver from Ni-moya, Lord Hissune called Alsimir to him and said, “Find out whether the great house known as Nissimorn Prospect still exists. If it does, I mean to requisition it as my headquarters while I’m in Ni-moya.”

Hissune remembered that house—remembered all of Ni-moya, its white towers and glittering arcades—as vividly as though he had dwelled there half his life. But he had never set foot on the continent of Zimroel at all before this voyage. It was through the eyes of another that he had seen Ni-moya. Now he cast his mind back to that time in his boyhood when he had covertly peered at the memory-readings on file in the Register of Souls in the depths of the Labyrinth. What was her name, the little shopkeeper from Velathys who had married the duke’s brother, and came to inherit Nissimorn Prospect? Inyanna, he thought. Inyanna Forlana. Who had been a thief in the Grand Bazaar, until the course of her life so amazingly changed.

All that had happened at the end of Lord Malibor’s reign—only some twenty or twenty-five years ago. Very likely she was still alive, Hissune thought. Still living in her wondrous mansion overlooking the river. And then I will go to her and I will say, “I know you, Inyanna Forlana. I understand you as well as I understand myself. We are of the same kind, you and I: fortune’s favorites. And we know that the true favorites of fortune are those who know how to make the best use of their own good luck.”

Nissimorn Prospect still stood, rising splendidly on its rocky headland above the harbor, its cantilevered balconies and porticos floating dreamlike in the shimmering air. But Inyanna Forlana no longer lived there. The great house was occupied now by a brawling horde of squatters, packed five and six to a room, who had scrawled their names on the glass wall of the Hall of Windows and built smoky campfires on the verandas facing the garden and left smeary fingerprints on the shining white walls. Most of them fled like morning mists the moment the Coronal’s forces came through the gates; but a few remained, sullenly staring at Hissune as if he were an invader from some other world.

“Shall I clear the last of this rabble out, my lord?” Stimion asked.

Hissune nodded. “But give them some hod and something to drink first, and tell them that the Coronal regrets that he must have their place for his lodging. And ask them if they know of the Lady Inyanna, whose house this once was.”

Grimly he went from room to room, comparing what he beheld to the radiant vision of this place he had had from the memory-reading of Inyanna Forlana. The transformation was a saddening one. There was no part of the house that was not in some way soiled, spoiled, stained, blemished, ravaged. It would take an army of craftsmen years to restore it to what it had been, Hissune thought.

As with Nissimorn Prospect, so too with all of Ni-moya. Hissune, disconsolately wandering the Hall of Windows with its sweeping views of every part of the city, looked out upon a scene of horrifying ruination. This had been the wealthiest and most resplendent city of Zimroel, equal to any of the cities of Castle Mount. The white towers that had housed thirty million people now were blackened with the smoke of scores of great fires. The Ducal Palace was a shattered stump atop its magnificent pedestal. The Gossamer Galleria, a mile-long span of suspended fabric where the finest shops of the city had been, had been cut loose from its moorings at one side and sprawled like a discarded cloak across the avenue below it. The glass domes of the Museum of Worlds were broken, and Hissune did not want to think of what must have become of its treasures. The revolving reflectors of the Crystal Boulevard were dark. He looked toward the harbor and saw what must have been the floating restaurants, where once it had been possible to dine elegantly on the rarest delicacies of Narabal and Stee and Pidruid and other distant cities, capsized and turned bottomside up in the water.

He felt cheated. To have dreamed so long of seeing Ni-moya, and now at last to be here and find it like this, perhaps beyond repair…

How had this happened? he wondered. Why had the people of Ni-moya, in their hunger and panic and madness, turned against their own city? And was it like this all across the heartland of Zimroel, all the beauty that it had taken thousands of years to create tossed away in a single paroxysm of mindless destruction? We have paid a heavy price, Hissune told himself, for all those centuries of smug self-satisfaction.

Stimion came to him to report the news of the Lady Inyanna that he had learned from one of the squatters: she had fled Ni-moya more than a year ago, he said, when one of the false Coronals had demanded her mansion from her to serve as his palace. Where she had gone, whether she was still alive at all—no one knew that. The Duke of Ni-moya and all his family had fled, too, even earlier, and most of the other nobility.

“And the false Coronal?” Hissune asked.

“Gone also, my lord. All of them, for there was more than one, and toward the end there were ten or twelve, squabbling among themselves. But they ran like frightened bilantoons when the Pontifex Valentine reached the city last month. There is only one Coronal in Ni-moya today, my lord, and his name is Hissune.”

Hissune smiled faintly. “And is this my grand processional, then? Where are the musicians, where are the parades? Why all this filth and destruction? This is not what I thought my first visit to Ni-moya would be like, Stimion.”

“You will return in a happier time, my lord, and all will be as it was formerly.”

“Do you think so? Do you truly think so? Ah, I pray you are right, my friend!”

Alsimir appeared. “My lord, the mayor of this place sends his respects and asks leave to call upon you this afternoon.”

“Tell him to come this evening. We have more urgent things to do just now than meet with local mayors.”

“I will tell him, my lord. I think the mayor feels some alarm, my lord, over the size of the army that you intend to quarter here. He said something about the difficulty of supplying provisions, and some problem of sanitation that he—”

“He will supply provisions as required, Alsimir, or we will supply ourselves with a more capable mayor,” said Hissune. “Tell him that also. You might tell him, also, that my lord Divvis will shortly be here with an army nearly as great as this, or perhaps greater, and my lord Tunigorn will be following, and therefore he can consider his present efforts as merely a rehearsal for the real burdens that will be placed upon him soon. But let him know, also, that the overall food requirements of Ni-moya will be somewhat lessened when I leave here, because I will be taking several million of his citizens with me as part of the army of occupation going to Piurifayne, and ask him what method he proposes for choosing the volunteers. And if he balks at anything, Alsimir, point out to him that we have come here not to annoy him but to rescue his province from chaos, though we would much prefer to be jousting atop Castle Mount just now. If you think his attitude is inappropriate after you have said all that, put him in chains and see if there is a deputy mayor who is willing to be more cooperative, and if there is not, find someone who is.” Hissune grinned. “So much for the mayor of Ni-moya. Has there been any news of my lord Divvis?”

“A great deal, my lord. He has left Piliplok and is following us up the Zimr as swiftly as he can, gathering his army as he goes. We have messages from him from Port Saikforge, Stenwamp, Orgeliuse, Impemonde, and Obliorn Vale, and the last word we have is that he is approaching Larnimisculus.”