Lord Valentine's Castle: Book One of the Majipoor Cycle

  “Long life to Lord Valentine!” Sleet called out.

  “Long life! Long life!”

  Valentine lifted his arms, both as an acknowledgment and to silence their uproar.

  “We celebrate tomorrow,” he said. “Tonight we give battle, and may it be the last!”

  13

  How strange it felt, finally to be passing under the Dizimaule Arch, and to see the baffling myriad splendors of the Castle before him!

  As a boy he had played in these boulevards and avenues, had lost himself in the wonders of the endlessly intertangling passageways and corridors, had stared in awe at the mighty walls and towers and enclosures and vaults. As a young man in the service of Lord Voriax his brother, he had dwelled within the Castle, over yonder in the Pinitor Court, where high officials had their residences, and many a time he had strolled on the parapet of Lord Ossier, with its stupendous view of the Morpin Plunge and the High Cities. And as Coronal, that brief time he had occupied the innermost zones of the Castle, he had with delight touched the ancient weather-beaten stones of Stiamot Keep, and walked alone through the vast echoing chamber of the Confalume throne-room, and studied the patterns of the stars from Lord Kinniken’s Observatory, and pondered what additions he would make to the Castle himself in years to come. Now that he was back, he realized how much he loved this place, and not merely because it was a symbol of power and imperial grandeur that had been his, but mainly because it was such a fabric of the ages, such a living, breathing weave of history.

  “The Castle is ours!” cried Elidath jubilantly as Valentine’s army burst through the unguarded gate.

  But what good was that, Valentine thought, if death for all the Mount and its squabbling mortals lay just a few hours away? Already too much time had elapsed since the thinning of the atmosphere had begun. Valentine wanted to reach out, to claw the fleeing air and hold it back.

  The deepening chill that now lay like a terrible weight on Castle Mount was nowhere more manifest than in the Castle itself, and those within it, already dazed and bewildered by the events of the civil war, stood like waxen figures, unblinking and numb, shivering and immobile, while the invading parties rushed inward. Some, shrewder or quicker of wit than the others, managed to croak, “Long live Lord Valentine!” as the unfamiliar golden-haired figure rode by; but most behaved as though their minds had already begun to freeze.

  The hordes of attackers, flowing inward, moved swiftly and precisely toward the tasks Valentine had assigned. Duke Heitluig and his Bibiroon warriors had charge of seizing control of the Castle perimeter, flushing out and neutralizing any hostile forces. Asenhart and six detachments of valley people had the work of sealing all of the Castle’s many gates, so none of the usurper’s followers might escape. Sleet and Carabella and their troops went upward, toward the imperial halls of the inner sector, to take possession of the seat of government. Valentine himself, with Elidath and Ermanar and their combined forces, set out on the spiraling lower causeway to the vaults where the weather-machines were housed. The rest, under command of Nascimonte, Zalzan Kavol, Shanamir, Lisamon Hultin, and Gorzval, went forth in random streams, spreading out over the Castle in search of Dominin Barjazid, who might be hiding in any of the thousands of rooms, even the meanest.

  Down the causeway Valentine raced, until in the murky depths of the cobbled passage the floater-car could go no farther, and then on foot he sped toward the vaults. The cold was numbing against his nose and lips and ears. His heart pounded, his lungs worked fiercely in the thin air. These vaults were all but unknown to him. He had been down here only once or twice, long ago. Elidath, though, seemed to know the way.

  Through corridors, down endless flights of wide stone stairs, into a high-roofed arcade lit by twinkling points far overhead—and all the time the air grew perceptibly more chilly, the unnatural night gripped the Mount more tightly—

  A great arched wooden door, banded with thick metal inlays, loomed up before them.

  “Force it,” Valentine ordered. “Burn through it, if we must!”

  “Wait, my lord,” a mild quavering voice said.

  Valentine whirled. An ancient Ghayrog, ashen-skinned, his serpent hair limp in the cold, had stepped from a doorway in the wall and came shambling uncertainly toward them.

  “The keeper of the weather-machines,” Elidath muttered.

  The Ghayrog looked half dead. Bewilderedly he glanced from Elidath to Ermanar, from Ermanar to Valentine; and then he threw himself to the ground before Valentine, plucking at the Coronal’s boots.

  “My lord—Lord Valentine—” He stared up in torment. “Save us, Lord Valentine! The machines—they have turned off the machines—”

  “Can you open the gate?”

  “Yes, my lord. The control-house is in this alley. But they have seized the vaults—his troops are in command, they forced me out—what damage are they doing in there, my lord? What will become of us all?”

  Valentine pulled the quivering old Ghayrog to his feet. “Open the gate,” he said.

  “Yes, my lord. It will be only a moment—”

  An eternity, rather, Valentine thought. But there came the sound of awesome subterranean machinery and gradually the sturdy wooden barrier, creaking and groaning, began to move aside.

  Valentine would have been the first to dart through the opening, but Elidath caught him ungently by the arm and pulled him back. Valentine slapped at the hand that held him as though it were some bothersome vermin, some dhiim of the jungles. Elidath held firm.

  “No, my lord,” he said crisply.

  “Let go, Elidath.”

  “If it costs me my head, Valentine, I will not let you go in there. Stand aside.”

  “Elidath!”

  Valentine glanced toward Ermanar. But he found no support there. “The Mount freezes, my lord, while you delay us,” Ermanar said.

  “I will not allow—”

  “Stand aside!” Elidath commanded.

  “I am Coronal, Elidath.”

  “And I am responsible for your safety. You may direct the offensive from the outside, my lord. But there are enemy soldiers in there, desperate men, defending the last place of power the usurper controls. Let one sharp-eyed sniper see you, and all our struggle has been in vain. Will you stand aside, Valentine, or must I commit treason on your body to push you out of the way?”

  Fuming, Valentine yielded, and watched in anger and frustration as Elidath and a band of picked warriors slipped past him into the inner vault. There was the sound of fighting almost at once within; Valentine heard shouts, energy-bolts, cries, moans. Though guarded by Ermanar’s watchful men, he was a dozen times at the brink of pulling away from them and entering the vault himself, but held back. Then a messenger came from Elidath to say that the immediate resistance was wiped out, that they were penetrating deeper, that there were barricades, traps, pockets of enemy soldiers every few hundred yards. Valentine clenched his fists. It was an impossible business, this thing of being too sacred to risk his skin, of standing about in an antechamber while the war of restoration raged all about him. He resolved to go in, and let Elidath bluster all he liked.

  “My lord?” A messenger from the other direction, breathless, came running up.

  Valentine hovered at the entrance to the vault. “What is it?” he snapped.

  “My lord, I am sent by Duke Nascimonte. We have found Dominin Barjazid barricaded in the Kinniken Observatory, and he asks you to come quickly to direct the capture.”

  Valentine nodded. Better that than standing about idly here. To an aide-de-camp he said, “Tell Elidath I’m going back up. He has full authority to reach the weather-machines any way he can.”

  But Valentine was only a short distance up the passageways when Gorzval’s aide arrived, to say that the usurper was rumored to be in the Pinitor Court. And a few minutes later came word from Lisamon Hultin, that she was pursuing him swiftly down a spiraling passageway leading to Lord Siminave’s reflecting-pool.

  In the main c
oncourse Valentine found Deliamber, watching the action with a look of bemused fascination. Telling the Vroon of the conflicting reports, he asked, “Can he be in all three places?”

  “None, more likely,” the wizard replied. “Unless there are three of him. Which I doubt, though I feel his presence in this place, dark and strong.”

  “In any particular area?”

  “Hard to tell. Your enemy’s vitality is such that he radiates himself from every stone of the Castle, and the echoes confuse me. But I will not be confused much longer, I think.”

  “Lord Valentine?”

  A new messenger—and a familiar face, deep coarse brows meeting in the center, a jutting chin, an easy confident smile. Another unit of the vanished past fitting itself back into place, for this man was Tunigorn, second closest of all Valentine’s boyhood friends, now one of the high ministers of the realm, and now looking at the stranger before him with bright penetrating eyes, as if trying to find the Valentine behind the strangeness. Shanamir was with him.

  “Tunigorn!” Valentine cried.

  “My lord! Elidath said you were altered, but I had no idea—”

  “Am I too strange to you with this face?”

  Tunigorn smiled. “It will take some getting used to, my lord. But that can come in time. I bring you good news.”

  “Seeing you again is good news enough.”

  “But I bring you better. The traitor has been found.”

  “I have been told already three times in half an hour that he is in three different places.”

  “I know nothing of those reports. We have him.”

  “Where?”

  “Barricaded in the inner chambers. The last to see him was his valet, old Kanzimar, loyal to the end, who finally saw him gibbering with terror and understood at last that this was no Coronal before him. He has locked off the entire suite, from the throne-room to the robing-halls, and is alone in there.”

  “Good news indeed!” To Deliamber Valentine said, “Do your wizardries confirm any of this?”

  Deliamber’s tentacles stirred. “I feel a sour, malign presence in that lofty building.”

  “The imperial chambers,” said Valentine. “Good.” He turned to Shanamir and said, “Send out the word to Sleet, Carabella, Zalzan Kavol, Lisamon Hultin. I want them with me as we close in.”

  “Yes, my lord!” The boy’s eyes gleamed with excitement.

  Tunigorn said, “Who are those people you named?”

  “Companions of my wanderings, old friend. In my time of exile they became very dear to me.”

  “Then they will be dear to me as well, my lord. Whoever they may be, those who love you are those I love.” Tunigorn drew his cloak close about him. “But what of this chill? When will it begin to lift? I heard from Elidath that the weather-machines—”

  “Yes.”

  “And can they be repaired?”

  “Elidath has gone to them. Who knows what damage the Barjazid has done? But have faith in Elidath.” Valentine looked toward the inner palace high above him, narrowing his eyes as though he could in that manner see through the noble stone walls to the frightened shameless creature hiding behind them.

  “This coldness gives me great grief, Tunigorn,” he said somberly. “But curing it now is in the hands of the Divine—and Elidath. Come. Let’s see if we can pluck that insect from its nest.”

  14

  The moment of final reckoning with Dominin Barjazid was close at hand now. Valentine moved swiftly, onward and inward and upward through all the familiar wonderful places.

  This vaulted building was the archive of Lord Prestimion, where that great Coronal had assembled a museum of the history of Majipoor. Valentine smiled at the thought of installing his juggling clubs alongside the sword of Lord Stiamot and the jewel-studded cape of Lord Confalume. There, rising in amazing swoops, was the slender, fragile-looking watchtower built by Lord Arioc, a strange construction indeed, giving indication perhaps of the greater strangeness that Arioc would perpetrate when he moved on to the Pontificate. That, a double atrium with an elevated pool in its center, was the chapel of Lord Kinniken, adjoining the lovely white-tiled hall that was the residence of the Lady whenever she came to visit her son. And there, sloping glass roofs gleaming in the starlight, was Lord Confalume’s garden-house, the cherished private indulgence of that grandeur-loving pompous monarch, a place where tender plants from every part of Majipoor had been collected. Valentine prayed they would survive this night of wintry blasts, for he longed to go among them soon, with eyes made wiser by his travels, and revisit the wonders he had seen in the forests of Zimroel and on the Stoienzar shores.

  Upward—

  Through a seemingly endless maze of hallways and staircases and galleries and tunnels and outbuildings, onward, onward. “We will die of old age, not cold, before we reach the Barjazid!” Valentine muttered.

  “It will not be long now, my lord,” Shanamir said.

  “Not soon enough to please me.”

  “How will you punish him, my lord?”

  Valentine glanced at the boy. “Punish? Punish? What punishment can there be for what he’s done? A whipping? Three days on stajja-crusts? Might as well punish the Steiche for having jostled us on the rocks.”

  Shanamir looked puzzled. “No punishment at all?”

  “Not as you understand punishment, no.”

  “Turn him lose to do more mischief?”

  “Not that either,” said Valentine. “But first we must catch him, and then we can talk about what to do with him.”

  Half an hour more—it seemed forever—and Valentine stood before the core of the Castle, the walled imperial chambers, not nearly the oldest but by far the most sacrosanct of all its precincts. Early Coronals had had their governing-halls here, but they had long since been replaced by the finer and more awesome rooms of the great rulers of the past thousand years, and now constituted a glittering palatial seat of power, apart from all the other tangled intricacies of the Castle. The highest ceremonies of state took place in those high-vaulted splendid chambers; but now one single miserable being lurked in there, behind the ancient massive doors, protected by heavy ornate bolts of enormous size and weighty symbolic significance.

  “Poison gas,” Lisamon Hultin said. “Pump one canister of gas through the walls and drop him wherever he is.”

  Zalzan Kavol nodded vehemently. “Yes! Yes! See, a thin pipe slipped through these cracks—there is a gas they use in Piliplok for killing fish, that would do the job in—”

  “No,” Valentine said. “He will be brought out alive.”

  “Can it be done, my lord?” Carabella asked.

  “We could smash the doors,” rumbled Zalzan Kavol.

  “Ruin Lord Prestimion’s doors, that were thirty years making, to fetch one rascal out of hiding?” Tunigorn asked. “My lord, this talk of poison gas does not seem so foolish to me. We should not waste time—”

  Valentine said, “We must take care not to act like barbarians. There will be no poisonings here.” He caught Carabella’s hand, and Sleet’s, and raised them. “You are jugglers, with quick fingers. And you, Zalzan Kavol. Have you no experience at using those fingers for other things?”

  “Picking locks, my lord?” Sleet asked.

  “And things of that order, yes. There are many entrances to these chambers, and perhaps not all are secured by bolts. Go, try to find a way past the barriers. And while you do that I’ll seek another way.”

  He stepped forward to the giant gilded door, twice the height of the tallest of Skandars, carved over every square inch with images in high relief of the reign of Lord Prestimion and his celebrated predecessor Lord Confalume. He put his hands to the heavy bronze handles as though he meant to open the door with a single hearty heave.

  For a long moment Valentine stood that way, casting from his mind all awareness of the tension that swirled about him. He attempted to move to the quiet place at the center of his soul. But a powerful obstacle blocked him:

>   His mind was filled suddenly with overwhelming hatred for Dominin Barjazid.

  Behind that great door was the man who had thrust him from his throne, who had sent him forth as a hapless wanderer, who had ruled rashly and unjustly in his name, and—worst of all, wholly monstrous and unforgivable—who had chosen to destroy a billion blameless and unsuspecting people when his own schemes began to falter.

  Valentine loathed him for that. For that, Valentine ached to destroy Dominin Barjazid.

  As he stood clinging to the handles of the door, fierce violent images assailed his mind. He saw Dominin Barjazid flayed alive, cloaked in his own blood, screaming screams that could be heard from there to Pidruid. He saw Dominin Barjazid nailed to a tree with barbed arrows. He saw Dominin Barjazid crushed beneath a hail of stones. He saw—

  Valentine trembled with the force of his own terrible rage.

  But one did not flay one’s enemies alive in a civilized society, and one did not freely vent one’s anger in violence—not even upon a Dominin Barjazid. How, Valentine wondered, can I claim the right to rule a world, when I can’t even rule my own emotions? So long as this rage roiled his soul he was as unfit to govern, he knew, as Dominin Barjazid himself. He must do battle with it. That pounding in the temples, that rush of blood, that savage hunger for vengeance—all must be purged before he made any move toward Dominin Barjazid.

  Valentine struggled. He let the clenched muscles of his back and shoulders relax, and filled his lungs with the sharp chill air, and moment by moment allowed the tension to drain from his body. He searched his soul where the hot fiery vengeance-lust had so suddenly flared in it, and swept it clean. And then he was able to move at last to the quiet place at the center of his soul and hold himself there, so that he felt himself alone in the Castle but for Dominin Barjazid somewhere on the far side of the door, only the two of them and a single barrier between. Conquest over self was the finest of victories: all else must follow, Valentine knew.