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How, he asked himself, can such a contract be upheld when the Coronal is not the anointed and dedicated prince, but some usurper, lacking in the grace of the Divine through which such fragile social constructs are sustained?
He found himself thinking more and more upon such matters during the long, quiet, monotonous hours of the eastward journey. Such thoughts surprised him with their seriousness, for he had grown accustomed to the lightness and simplicity of his mind since the early days of Pidruid, and he could feel a progressive enrichment and growing complexity of mental powers now. It was as if whatever spell had been laid upon him was wearing thin, and his true intellect was begi
If, that is, any such magic had actually befallen him as his gradually forming hypothesis required.
He was still uncertain. But his doubts were weakening from day to day.
In dreams now he often saw himself in positions of authority. One night it was he, not Zalzan Kavol, who led the band of jugglers; on another he presided in princely robes over some high council of the Metamorphs, whom he saw as eerie fog-like wraiths that would not hold the same shape more than a minute at a time; a night later he had a vision of himself in the marketplace at Thagobar, dispensing justice to the clothsellers and vendors of bangles in their noisy little disputes.
"You see?" Carabella said. "All these dreams speak of power and majesty."
"Power? Majesty? Sitting on a barrel in a market and expounding on equity to dealers in cotton and linen?"
"In dreams many things are translated. These visions are metaphors of high might."
Valentine smiled. But he had to admit the plausibility of the interpretation.
One night as they were nearing the city of Khyntor there came to him a most explicit vision of his supposed former life. He was in a room paneled with the finest and rarest of woods, glistening strips of semotan and ba
"Dark," said Valentine immediately. Then he frowned. "Or is that so? I was sitting at the desk, not looking at the man who was there because I was the man. And yet— and yet—"
Carabella said, "In the world of dreams we often see ourselves with our own eyes."
"I could have been both fair and dark. Now one, now the other — the point escaped me. Now one, now the other, eh?"
"Yes," Deliamber said.
They were almost into Khyntor now, after too many days of steady, wearying overland travel. This, the major city of north-central Zimroel, lay in rugged, irregular terrain, broken by lakes and highlands and dark, virtually impassable forests. The route chosen by Deliamber took the wagon through the city’s southwestern suburbs, known as Hot Khyntor because of the geothermal marvels there — great hissing geysers, and a broad steaming pink lake that bubbled and gurgled ominously, and a mile or two of gray rubbery-looking fumaroles from which, every few minutes, came clouds of greenish gases accompanied by comic belching sounds and deeper, stranger subterranean groans. Here the sky was heavy with big-bellied clouds the color of dull pearls, and although the last of summer still held the land, there was a cool autumnal quality to the thin, sharp wind that blew from the north.
The River Zimr, largest in Zimroel, divided Hot Khyntor from the city proper. When the travelers came upon it, the wagon emerging suddenly from an ancient district of narrow streets to enter a broad esplanade leading to Khyntor Bridge, Valentine gasped with amazement.
"What is it?" Carabella asked.
"The river — I never expected it to be as big as this!"
"Are rivers unfamiliar to you?"
"There are none of any consequence between Pidruid and here," he pointed out. "I remember nothing clearly before Pidruid."
"Compared with the Zimr," said Sleet, "there are no rivers of any consequence anywhere. Let him be amazed."
To the right and left, so far as Valentine could see, the dark waters of the Zimr stretched to the horizon. The river was so broad here that it looked more like a bay. He could barely make out the square-topped towers of Khyntor on the far shore. Eight or ten mighty bridges spa
"But why try to bridge the river at a place where it’s so wide?" Valentine asked in bewilderment.
Deliamber said, "This is one of the narrowest points."
The Zimr’s course, declared the Vroon, was some seven thousand miles, rising northwest of Dulorn at the mouth of the Rift and flowing in a southeasterly direction across all of upper Zimroel toward the coastal city of Piliplok on the I
That night in Khyntor, Valentine dreamed he was entering the Labyrinth to confer with the Pontifex.
This was no vague and misty dream, but one with sharp, painful clarity. He stood under harsh winter sunlight on a barren plain, and saw before him a roofless temple with flat white walls, which Deliamber told him was the gateway to the Labyrinth. The Vroon and Lisamon Hultin were with him, and Carabella too, walking in a protective phalanx, but when Valentine stepped out onto the bare slate platform between those white walls he was alone. A being of sinister and forbidding aspect confronted him. This creature was of alien shape, but belonged to none of the non-human forms long settled on Majipoor — neither Liiman nor Ghayrog nor Vroon nor Skandar nor Hjort nor Su-Suheris, but something mysterious and disturbing, a muscular thick-armed creature with cratered red skin and a blunt dome of a head out of which blazed yellow eyes bright with almost intolerable rage. This being demanded Valentine’s business with the Pontifex in a low, resonant voice.