Robert Silverberg: Valentine Pontifex

A certain slyness entered Divvis’s eyes. “Ah, I see how you deal with your problem, my lord.”

“And what problem is that?”

“Of being Coronal, while your Pontifex remains at large, marching about the countryside, instead of hiding himself decently out of sight in the Labyrinth. I think that could be a great embarrassment to a new young Coronal, and I would like it very little if I faced such a situation myself. But if you take care to keep a great distance between the Pontifex and yourself, and you credit any differences between your policies and his to that great distance, why, then, you could manage to function almost as though you had a completely free hand, eh, my lord?”

“I think we tread now on dangerous ground, Divvis.”

“Ah. Do we?”

“We do indeed. And you overestimate the differences between my outlook and Valentine’s. He is not himself a man of war, as we all well understand; but perhaps that is why he has removed himself from the Confalume Throne in my favor. I believe we understand each other, the Pontifex and I, and let us not carry this discussion any further in that direction. Come, now, Divvis: it would be proper, I think, to invite me to your cabin to share a bowl or two of wine, and then you must come with me to Nissimorn Prospect to share another. And then we should sit down to plan the conduct of our war. What do you say to that, my lord Divvis? What do you say to that?”

The rain was beginning again, washing away the outlines of the map Faraataa had drawn in the damp mud of the river-bank. But that made little difference to him. He had been drawing and redrawing the same map all day, and no need for doing any of that, for every detail of it was engraved in the recesses and contours of his brain. Ilirivoyne here, Avendroyne there, New Velalisier over here. The rivers, the mountains. The positions of the two invading armies—

The positions of the two invading armies —

Faraataa had not anticipated that. It was the one great flaw in his planning, that the Unchanging Ones should have invaded Piurifayne. The coward weakling Lord Valentine would never have done anything like that; no, Valentine would rather have come groveling with his nose in the mud to the Danipiur and begged humbly for a treaty of friendship. But Valentine was no longer the king—or, rather, he had become the other king, now, the one with the greater rank but the weaker powers—how could anyone understand the mad arrangements of the Unchanging Ones?—and there was a new king now, the young one, Lord Hissune, who appeared to be a very different sort of man. …

“Aarisiim!” Faraataa called. “What news is there?”

“Very little, O King That Is. We are awaiting reports from the western front, but it will be some while.”

“And from the Steiche battle?”

“I am told that the forest-brethren are still being uncooperative, but that we are at last succeeding in compelling their assistance in laying the birdnet vine.”

“Good. Good. But will it be laid in time to stop Lord Hissune’s advance?”

“That is most likely, O King That Is.”

“And do you say that,” Faraataa demanded, “because it is true, or because it is what you think I prefer to hear?”

Aarisiim stared, and gaped, and in his embarrassment his shape began to alter, so that for a moment he became a frail structure of wavy ropes that blew in the breeze, and then a tangle of elongated rigid rods swollen at both ends; and then he was Aarisiim once again. In a quiet voice he said, “You do me great injustice, O Faraataa!”

“Perhaps I do.”

“I tell you no untruths.”

“If that is true, then all else is, and I will accept it that that is true,” said Faraataa bleakly. Overhead the rain grew more clamorous, battering against the jungle canopy. “Go, and come back when you have the news from the west.”

Aarisiim vanished amidst the darkness of the trees. Faraataa, scowling, restless, began drawing his map once again.

There was an army in the west, uncountable millions of the Unchanging Ones, led by the hairy-faced lord whose name was Divvis, that was a son of the former Coronal Lord Voriax. We slew your father while he hunted in the forest, did you know that, Divvis? The huntsman who fired the fatal bolt was a Piurivar, though he wore the face of a Castle lord. See, the pitiful Shapeshifters can kill a Coronal! We can kill you also, Divvis. We will kill you also, if you are careless, as your father was.

But Divvis—who surely had no knowledge of how his father had died; there was no secret more closely guarded than that among the Piurivar folk—was not being at all careless, Faraataa thought gloomily. His headquarters was tightly protected by devoted knights, and there was no possibility of slipping an assassin through that line, no matter how shrewdly disguised. With angry stabbing gestures of his keenly honed wooden dirk Faraataa dug the lines of Divvis’s march deeper and deeper into the riverbank. Down from Khyntor, and along the inside wall of the great western mountains, making roads through wild country that had been roadless since the beginning of time—sweeping everything before him, filling Piurifayne with his innumerable troops, closing off the countryside, polluting the sacred streams, trampling the sacred groves.…

Against that horde of troops Faraataa had been compelled to unleash his army of pilligrigorms. He regretted that, for they were very nearly the nastiest of his biological weapons, and he had been hoarding them to dump into Ni-moya or Khyntor at some later phase of the war: land-dwelling crustaceans the size of a fingertip, they were, with armored shells that could not be crushed with a hammer, and a myriad busy fast-moving legs that Faraataa’s genetic artists had altered so that they were as sharp as saws. The appetite of a pilligrigorm was insatiable—it demanded fifty times its own weight in meat each day—and its method of satisfying that appetite was to carve openings in any sort of warmblooded animal life that lay in its path, and devour its flesh from the inside out.

Fifty thousand of them, Faraataa had thought, could bring a city the size of Khyntor into total turmoil in five days. But now, because the Unchanging Ones had chosen to invade Piurifayne, he had had to release the pilligrigorms not within a city, but on Piurifayne’s own soil, in the hope that they would drive Divvis’s immense army into confusion and retreat. No reports had come in yet, though, on the success of that tactic.

On the other side of the jungle, where the Coronal Lord Hissune was leading a second army southward on another impossible route along the west bank of the Steiche, it was Faraataa’s plan to string a net of the infinitely sticky and impenetrable birdnet vine for hundreds of miles in their path, so that they were forced to take wider and ever wider detours until they were hopelessly lost. The difficulty with that stratagem was only that no one could handle birdnet vine effectively except the forest-brethren, those maddening little apes who secreted in their perspiration an enzyme that rendered them immune to the vine’s stickiness. But the forest-brethren had little reason to love the Piurivars, who had hunted them for centuries for the rich flavor of their flesh, and gaining their assistance in this maneuver was apparently not proving easy.

Faraataa felt the rage rising and boiling over within him.

It had all gone so well, at first. Releasing the blights and plagues into the farming districts—bringing agriculture into collapse over such a wide region—the famine, the panic, the mass migrations—yes, all according to plan. And setting loose the specially bred animals had worked nicely too, on a smaller scale: that had intensified the fears of the populace, and made life more complicated for the city-dwellers…