Robert Silverberg - The Seventh shrine

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Scanned by Majecki the seventh shrine

BY ROBERT SILVERBERG

One last steep ridge of the rough, boulder-strewn road lay between the royal party and the descent into

Velalisier Plain. Valentine, who was leading the way, rode up over it and came to a halt, looking down with

amazement into the valley. The land that lay before him seemed to have undergone a bewildering

transformation since his last visit. 'Look there,’ the Pontifex said, bemused. 'This place is always full of

surprises, and here is ours.'

The broad shallow bowl of the arid plain spread out below them. From this vantage point, a little way east

of the entrance to the archaeological site, they should easily have been able to see a huge field of

sand-swept ruins. There had been a mighty city here once, that notorious Shapeshifter city where, in

ancient times, so much dark history had been enacted, such monstrous sacrilege and blasphemy. But -

surely it was just an illusion? - the sprawling zone of fallen buildings at the centre of the plain was almost

completely hidden now by a wondrous rippling body of water, pale pink along its rim and pearly grey at its

middle: a great lake where no lake ever had been.

Evidently the other members of the royal party saw it too. But did they understand that it was simply a

trick? Some fleeting combination of sunlight and dusty haze and the stifling midday heat must have created

a momentary mirage above dead Velalisier, so that it seemed as if a sizable lagoon, of all improbable things,

had sprung up in the midst of this harsh desert to engulf the dead city.

It began just a short distance beyond their vantage point and extended as far as the distant grey-blue wall

of great stone monoliths that marked the city's western boundary. Nothing of Velalisier could be seen.

None of the shattered and time-worn temples and palaces and basilicas, nor the red basalt blocks of the

arena, the great expanses of blue stone that had been the sacrificial platforms, the tents of the

archaeologists who had been at work here at Valentine's behest since late last year.

Only the six steep and narrow pyramids that were the tallest surviving structures of the prehistoric

Metamorph capital were visible - their tips, at least, jutting out of the grey heart of the ostensible lake like a

line of daggers fixed point-upward in its depths.

'Magic,' murmured Tunigorn, the oldest of Valentine's boyhood friends, who held the post now of Minister

of External Affairs at the Pontifical court. He drew a holy symbol in the air. Tunigorn had grown very

superstitious, here in his later years.

'I think not,’ said Valentine, smiling. 'Just an oddity of the light, I'd say,'

And, just as though the Pontifex had conjured it up with some counter-magic of his own, a lusty gust of

wind came up from the north and swiftly peeled the haze away. The lake went with it vanishing like the

phantom it had been. Valentine and his companions found themselves now beneath a bare and merciless

iron-blue sky, gazing down at the true Velalisier -that immense dreary field of stony rubble, that barren and

incoherent tumble of dun-coloured fragments and drab threadbare shards lying in gritty beds of wind-strewn

sand, which was all that remained of the abandoned Metamorph metropolis of long ago.

'Well, now,’ said Tunigorn, 'perhaps you were right, majesty. Magic or no, though, I liked it better the

other way. It was a pretty lake, and these are ugly stones.'

'There's nothing here to like at all, one way or another,’ said Duke Nascimonte of Ebersinul. He had

come all the way from his great estate on the far side of the Labyrinth to take part in this expedition. This is

a sorry place and always has been. If I were Pontifex in your stead, your majesty, I'd throw a dam across

the River Glayge and send a raging torrent this way, that would bury this accursed city and its whole history

of abominations under two miles of water for all time to come.'

Some part of Valentine could almost see the merit of that. It was easy enough to believe that the sombre

spells of antiquity still hovered here, that this was a territory where ominous enchantments held sway.

But of course Valentine could hardly take Nascimonte's suggestion seriously. 'Drown the Metamorphs'

sacred city, yes! By all means, let's do that,' he said lightly. 'Very fine diplomacy, Nascimonte. What a

splendid way of furthering harmony between the races that would be!'

Nascimonte, a lean and hard-bitten man of eighty years, with keen sapphire eyes that blazed like fiery

gems in his broad furrowed forehead, said pleasantly, 'Your words tell us what we already know, majesty:

that it's just as well for the world that you are Pontifex, not I. I lack your benign and merciful nature -

especially, I must say, when it comes to

the filthy Shapeshifters. I know you love them and would bring them up out of their degradation. But to

me, Valentine, they are vermin and nothing but vermin. Dangerous vermin at that.'

'Hush,' said Valentine. He was still smiling, but he let a little annoyance show as well, 'The Rebellion's

long over. It's high time we put these old hatreds to rest for ever.'

Nascimonte's only response was a shrug.

Valentine turned away, looking again towards the ruins. Greater mys-teries than that mirage awaited

them down there. An event as grim and terrible as anything out of Velalisier's doleful past had lately

occurred in this city of long-dead stones: a murder, no less.

Violent death at another's hands was no common thing on Majipoor. It was to investigate that murder

that Valentine and his friends had journeyed to ancient Valalisier this day.

'Come,' he said. 'Let's be on our way.'

He spurred his mount forward, and the others followed him down the stony road into the haunted city.

The ruins appeared much less dismal at close range than they had on either of Valentine's previous two

visits. This winter's rains must have been heavier than usual, for wildflowers were blooming everywhere

amidst the dark, dingy waste of ashen dunes and overturned building-blocks. They dappled the grey

gloominess with startling little bursts of yellow and red and blue and white that were almost musical in their

emphatic effect. A host of fragile bright-winged kelebekkos flitted about amongst the blossoms, sipping at

their nectar, and multitudes of tiny gnat-like ferushas moved about in thick swarms, forming broad misty

patches in the air that glistened like silvery dust.

But more was happening here than the unfolding of flowers and the dancing of insects. As he made his

descent into Velalisier, Valentine's imagination began to teem suddenly with strangenesses, fantasies,

mar-vels. It seemed to him that inexplicable flickers of sorcery and wonder were arising just beyond the

periphery of his vision. Sprites and visitations, singing wordlessly to him of Majipoor's infinite past, drifted

upward from the broken edge-tilted slabs and capered temptingly about him, leaping to and fro over the

porous, limy soil of the site's surface with frantic energy. A subtle shimmer of delicate jade-green

iridescence that had not been apparent at a distance rose above everything, tinting the air: some effect of

the hot noontime light striking a luminescent mineral in the rocks, he supposed. It was a wondrous sight all

the same, whatever its cause.

These unexpected touches of beauty lifted the Pontifex's mood. Which,

ever since the news had reached him the week before of the savage and perplexing death of the

distinguished Metamorph archaeologist Huukaminaan amidst these very ruins, had been uncharacteristically

bleak. Valentine had had such high hopes for the work that was being done here to uncover and restore the

old Shapeshifter capital; and this murder had stained everything.

The tents of his archaeologists came into view now, lofty ones gaily woven from broad strips of green,

maroon, and scarlet cloth, billowing atop a low sandy plateau in the distance. Some of the excavators

them-selves, he saw, were riding towards him down the long rock-ribbed avenues on fat plodding mounts:

about half a dozen of them, with chief archaeologist Magadone Sambisa at the head of the group.

'Majesty,' she said, dismounting, making the elaborate sign of respect that one would make before a

Pontifex. 'Welcome to Velalisier.'

Valentine hardly recognized her. It was only about a year since Magadone Sambisa had come before him

in his chambers at the Labyrinth. He remembered a dynamic, confident, bright-eyed woman, sturdy and

strap-ping, with rounded cheeks florid with life and vigour and glossy cascades of curling red hair tumbling

down her back. She seemed oddly diminished now, haggard with fatigue, her shoulders slumped, her eyes

dull and sunken, her face sallow and newly-lined and no longer full. That great mass of hair had lost its

sheen and bounce. He let his amazement show, only for an instant, but long enough for her to see it. She

pulled herself upright immediately, trying, it seemed, to project some of her former vigour.

Valentine had intended to introduce her to Duke Nascimonte and Prince Mirigant and the rest of the

visiting group. But before he could do it, Tunigorn came officially forward to handle the task.

There had been a time when citizens of Majipoor could not have any sort of direct conversation with the

Pontifex. They were required then to channel all intercourse through the court official known as the High

Spokesman. Valentine had quickly abolished that custom, and many another stifling bit of imperial etiquette.

But Tunigorn, by nature conservative, had never been comfortable with those changes. He did whatever he

could to preserve the traditional aura of sanctity in which Pontifexes once had been swathed. Valentine

found that amusing and charming and only occasionally irritating.

The welcoming party included none of the Metamorph archaeologists connected with the expedition.

Magadone Sambisa had brought just five human archaeologists and a Ghayrog with her. That seemed odd,

to have left the Metamorphs elsewhere. Tunigorn formally repeated the

archaeologists' names to Valentine, getting nearly every one garbled in the process. Then, and only then,

did he step back and allow the Pontifex to have a word with her.

The excavations,' he said. Tell me, have they been going well?' 'Quite well, majesty. Splendidly, in fact,

until - until -' She made a despairing gesture: grief, shock, incomprehension, helplessness, all in a single

poignant movement of her head and hands.

The murder must have been like a death in the family for her, for all of them here. A sudden and

horrifying loss. 'Until, yes. I understand.'

Valentine questioned her gently but firmly. Had there, he asked, been any important new developments in

the investigation? Any clues discov-ered? Claims of responsibility for the killing? Were there any suspects

at all? Had the archaeological party received any threats of further attacks? But there was nothing new at

all. Huukaminaan's murder had been an isolated event, a sudden, jarring, and unfathomable intrusion into the

serene progress of work at the site. The slain Metamorph's body had been turned over to his own people

for interment, she told him, and a shudder that she made an ineffectual effort to hide ran through the entire

upper : half of her body as she said it. The excavators were attempting now to put aside their distress over

the killing and get on with their tasks.

The whole subject was plainly an uncomfortable one for her. She escaped from it as quickly as she

could. 'You must be tired from your journey, your majesty. Shall I show you to your quarters?'

Three new tents had been erected to house the Pontifex and his entourage. They had to pass through the

excavation zone itself to reach them. Valentine was pleased to see how much progress had been made in

clearing away the clusters of pernicious little ropy-stemmed weeds and tangles of woody vines that for so

many centuries had been patiently at work pulling the blocks of stone one from another.

Along the way Magadone Sambisa poured forth voluminous streams of information about the city's most

conspicuous features as though Valentine were a tourist and she his guide. Over here, the broken but still

awesome aqueduct. There, the substantial jagged-sided oval bowl of the arena. And there, the grand

ceremonial boulevard, paved with sleek greenish flagstones.

Shapeshifter glyphs were visible on those flagstones even after the lapse

of twenty thousand years, mysterious swirling symbols, carved deep into

the stone. Not even the Shapeshifters themselves were able to decipher

them now. The rush of archaeological and mythological minutiae came gushing

from her with scarcely a pause for breath. There was a certain frantic, even desperate, quality about it all,

a sign of the uneasiness she must feel in the presence of the Pontifex of Majipoor. Valentine was

accustomed enough to that sort of thing. But this was not his first visit to Velalisier and he was already

familiar with much of what she was telling him. And she looked so weary, so depleted, that it troubled him

to see her expending her energy in such needless outpourings.

But she would not stop. They were passing, now, a huge and very dilapidated edifice of grey stone that

appeared ready to fall down if anyone should sneeze in its vicinity. This is called the Palace of the Final

King,’ she said. 'Probably an erroneous name, but that's what the Piurivars call it, and for lack of a better

one we do too.'

Valentine noted her careful use of the Metamorphs' own name for themselves. Piurivars, yes.

University people tended to be very formal about that, always referring to the aboriginal folk of Majipoor

that way, never speaking of them as Metamorphs or Shapeshifters, as ordinary people tended to do. He

would try to remember that.

As they came to the ruins of the royal palace she offered a disquisition on the legend of the mythical Final

King of Piurivar antiquity, he who had presided over the atrocious act of defilement that had brought about

the Metamorphs' ancient abandonment of their city. It was a story with which all of them were familiar.

Who did not know that dreadful tale?

But they listened politely as she told of how, those many thousands of years ago, long before the first

human settlers had come to live on Majipoor, the Metamorphs of Velalisier had in some fit of blind madness

hauled two living sea-dragons from the ocean: intelligent beings of mighty size and extraordinary mental

powers, whom the Metamorphs themselves had thought of as gods. Had dumped them down on these

platforms, had cut them to pieces with long knives, had burned their flesh on a pyre before the Seventh

Pyramid as a crazed offering to some even greater gods in whom the King and his subjects had come to

believe.

When the simple folk of the outlying provinces heard of that orgy of horrendous massacre, so the legend

ran, they rushed upon Velalisier and demolished the temple at which the sacrificial offering had been made.

They put to death the Final King and wrecked his palace, and drove the wicked citizens of the city forth into

the wilderness, and smashed its aqueduct and put dams across the rivers that had supplied it with water, so

that Velalisier would be thenceforth a deserted and accursed place, abandoned through all eternity to the

lizards and spiders and jakkaboles of the fields.

Valentine and his companions moved on in silence when Magadone

Sambisa was done with her narrative. The six sharply tapering pyramids that were Velalisier's best-known

monuments came now into view, the nearest rising just beyond the courtyard of the Final King's palace, the

other five set close together in a straight line stretching to the east. 'There was a seventh, once,' Magadone

Sambisa said. 'But the Piurivars themselves destroyed it just before they left here for the last time. Nothing

was left but scattered rubble. We were about to start work there early last week, but that was when -

when -' She faltered and looked away.

'Yes,' said Valentine softly. 'Of course.'

The road now took them between the two colossal platforms fashioned from gigantic slabs of blue stone

that were known to the modern-day Metamorphs as the Tables of the Gods. Even though they were

abutted by the accumulated debris of two hundred centuries, they still rose nearly ten feet above the

surrounding plain, and the area of their flat-topped surfaces would have been great enough to hold

hundreds of people at

a time.

In a low sepulchral tone Magadone Sambisa said, 'Do you know what these are, your majesty?'

Valentine nodded. 'The sacrificial altars, yes. Where the Defilement was carried out.'

Magadone Sambisa said, 'Indeed. It was also at this site that the murder of Huukaminaan happened. I

could show you the place. It would take only a moment.'

She indicated a staircase a little way down the road, made of big square blocks of the same blue stone as

the platforms themselves. It gave access to the top of the western platform. Magadone Sambisa

dismounted and scrambled swiftly up. She paused on the highest step to extend a hand to Valentine as

though the Pontifex might be having difficulty in making the ascent, which was not the case. He was still

almost as agile as he had been in his younger days. But he reached for her hand for courtesy's sake, just as

she - deciding, maybe, that it would be impermissible for a commoner to make contact with the flesh of a

Pontifex - began to pull it anxiously back. Valentine, grinning, leaned forward and took the hand anyway,

and levered himself upwards.

Old Nascimonte came bounding swiftly up just behind him, followed by Valentine's cousin and close

counsellor, Prince Mirigant, who had the little Vroonish wizard Autifon Deliamber riding on his shoulder.

Tunigorn remained below. Evidently this place of ancient sacrilege and infamous slaughter was not for him.

The surface of the altar, roughened by time and pockmarked everywhere by clumps of scruffy weeds and

incrustations of red and green lichen,

stretched on and on before them, a stupendous expanse. It was hard to imagine how even a great multitude

of Shapeshifters, those slender and seemingly boneless people, could ever have hauled so many

tremendous blocks of stone into place.

Magadone Sambisa pointed to a marker of yellow tape in the form of a six-pointed star that was affixed

to the stone a dozen feet or so away. 'We found him here,' she said. 'Some of him, at any rate. And some

here.' There was another marker off to the left, about twenty feet farther on. 'And here.' A third star of

yellow tape.

'They dismembered him?' Valentine said, appalled.

'Indeed. You can see the bloodstains all about.' She hesitated for an instant. Valentine noticed that she

was trembling now. 'All of him was here except his head. We discovered that far away, over in the ruins

of the Seventh Pyramid.'

'They know no shame,' said Nascimonte vehemently. They are worse than beasts. We should have

eradicated them all.'

'Who do you mean?' asked Valentine.

'You know who I mean, majesty. You know quite well.'

'So you think this was Shapeshifter work, this crime?'

'Oh, no, majesty, no!' Nascimonte said, colouring the words with heavy scorn. 'Why would I think such a

thing? One of our own archaeologists must have done it, no doubt. Out of professional jealousy, let's say,

because the dead Shapeshifter had come upon on some important discovery, maybe, and our own people

wanted to take credit for it. Is that what you think, Valentine? Do you believe any human being would be

capable of this sort of loathsome butchery?'

'That's what we're here to discover, my friend,' said Valentine amiably. 'We are not quite ready for

arriving at conclusions, I think.'

Magadone Sambisa's eyes were bulging from her head, as though Nascimonte's audacity in upbraiding a

Pontifex to his face was a spectacle beyond her capacity to absorb. 'Perhaps we should continue on to your

tents now,' she said.

It felt very odd, Valentine thought, as they rode on down the rubble-bordered roadway that led to the place

of encampment, to be here in this forlorn and eerie zone of age-old ruins once again. But at least he was

not in the Labyrinth. So far as he was concerned, any place at all was better than the Labyrinth.

This was his third visit to Velalisier. The first had been long ago when he had been Coronal, in the

strange time of his brief overthrow by the usurper Dominin Barjazid. He had stopped off here with his little

handful

of supporters - Carabella, Nascimonte, Sleet, Ermanar, Deliamber, and the rest - during the course of his

northward march to Castle Mount, where he was to reclaim his throne from the false Coronal in the War of

Restoration.

Valentine had still been a young man, then. But he was young no longer. He had been Pontifex of

Majipoor, senior monarch of the realm, for nine years now, following upon the fourteen of his service as

Coronal Lord. There were a few strands of white in his golden hair, and though he still had an athlete's trim

body and easy grace he was starting to feel the first twinges of the advancing years.

He had vowed, that first time at Velalisier, to have the weeds and vines that were strangling the ruins

cleared away, and to send in archaeologists to excavate and restore the old toppled buildings. And he had

intended to allow the Metamorph leaders to play a role in that work, if they were willing. That was part of

his plan for giving those once-despised and persecuted natives of the planet a more significant place in

Majipoori life; for he knew that Metamorphs everywhere were smouldering with barely contained wrath,

and could no longer be shunted into the remote reservations where his predecessors had forced them to

live.

Valentine had kept that vow. And had come back to Velalisier years later to see what progress the

archaeologists had made.

But the Metamorphs, bitterly resenting Valentine's intrusion into their holy precincts, had shunned the

enterprise entirely. That was something he had not expected.

He was soon to learn that although the Shapeshifters were eager to see Velalisier rebuilt, they meant to

do the job themselves - after they had driven the human settlers and all other offworld intruders from

Majipoor and taken control of their planet once more. A Shapeshifter uprising, secretly planned for many

years, erupted just a few years after Valentine had regained the throne. The first group of archaeologists

that Valentine had sent to Velalisier could achieve nothing more at the site than some preliminary clearing

and mapping before the War of the Rebellion broke out; and then all work there had had to be halted

indefinitely.

The war had ended with victory for Valentine's forces. In designing the peace that followed it he had taken care

to alleviate as many of the grievances of the Metamorphs as he could. The Danipiur - that was the title of their

queen - was brought into the government as a full Power of the Realm, placing her on an even footing with

the Pontifex and the Coronal. Valentine had, by then, himself moved on from the Coronal's throne to that of

the Pontifex. And now he had revived the idea of restoring the

ruins of Velalisier once more; but he had made certain that it would be with the full cooperation of the

Metamorphs, and that Metamorph archaeologists would work side by side with the scholars from the

vener-able University of Arkilon in the north to whom he had assigned the task.

In the year just past great things had been done towards rescuing the ruins from the oblivion that had

been encroaching on them for so long. But he could take little joy in any of that. The ghastly death that had

befallen the senior Metamorph archaeologist atop this ancient altar argued that sinister forces still ran deep

in this place. The harmony that he thought his reign had brought to the world might be far shallower than he

suspected.

Twilight was coming on by the time Valentine was settled in his tent. By a custom that even he was

reluctant to set aside, he would stay in it alone, since his consort Carabella had remained behind in the

Labyrinth on this trip. Indeed, she had tried very strongly to keep him from going himself. Tunigorn,

Mirigant, Nascimonte, and the Vroon would share the second tent; the third was occupied by the security

forces that had accompanied the Pontifex to Velalisier.

He stepped out into the gathering dusk. A sprinkling of early stars had begun to sparkle overhead, and the

Great Moon's bright glint could be seen close to the horizon. The air was parched and crisp, with a brittle

quality to it, as though it could be torn in one's hands like dry paper and crumbled to dust between one's

fingers. There was a strange stillness in it, an eerie hush.

But at least he was out of doors, here, gazing up at actual stars, and the air he breathed here, dry as it

was, was real air, not the manufactured stuff of the Pontifical city. Valentine was grateful for that.

By rights he had no business being out and abroad in the world at all.

As Pontifex, his place was in the Labyrinth, hidden away in his secret imperial lair deep underground

beneath all those coiling levels of subter-ranean settlement, shielded always from the view of ordinary

mortals. The Coronal, the junior king who lived in the lofty castle of forty thousand rooms atop the great

heaven-piercing peak that was Castle Mount, was meant to be the active figure of governance, the visible

representative of royal majesty on Majipoor. But Valentine loathed the dank Labyrinth where his lofty rank

obliged him to dwell. He relished every opportunity he could manufacture to escape from it.

And in fact this one had been thrust unavoidably upon him. The killing of Huukaminaan was serious

business, requiring an enquiry on the highest levels; and the Coronal Lord Hissune was many months'

journey away just

now, touring the distant continent of Zimroel. And so the Pontifex was here in the Coronal's stead.

'You love the sight of the open sky, don't you?' said Duke Nascimonte, emerging from the tent across the

way and limping over to stand by Valentine's side. A certain tenderness underlay the harshness of his

rasping voice. 'Ah, I understand, old friend. I do indeed.'

'I see the stars so infrequently, Nascimonte, in the place where I must live.'

The duke chuckled. 'Must live! The most powerful man in the world, and yet he's a prisoner! How ironic

that is! How sad!'

T knew from the moment I became Coronal that I'd have to live in the Labyrinth eventually,' Valentine

said. 'I've tried to make my peace with that. But it was never my plan to be Coronal in the first place, you

know. If Voriax had lived -'

'Ah, yes, Voriax.' Valentine's brother, the elder son of the High Counsel-lor Damiandane: the one who

had been reared from childhood to occupy the throne of Majipoor. Nascimonte gave Valentine a close look.

'It was a Metamorph, was it not, who struck him down in the forest? That has been proven now?r

Uncomfortably Valentine said, 'What does it matter now who killed him? He died. And the throne came

to me, because I was our father's other son, A crown I had never dreamed of wearing. Everyone knew

that Voriax was the one who was destined for it.'

'But he had a darker destiny also. Poor Voriax!'

Poor Voriax, yes. Struck down by a bolt out of nowhere while hunting in the forest eight years into his

reign as Coronal, a bolt from the bow of some Metamorph assassin skulking in the trees. By accepting his

dead brother's crown, Valentine had doomed himself inevitably to descend into the Labyrinth some day,

when the old Pontifex died and it became the Coronal's turn to succeed to the greater title, and to the

cheerless obligation of underground residence that went with it.

'As you say, it was the decision of fate,' Valentine replied, 'and now I am Pontifex. Well, so be it,

Nascimonte. But I won't hide down there in the darkness all the time. I can't.'

'And why should you? The Pontifex can do as he pleases.'

'Yes. Yes. But only within our law and custom.'

'You shape law and custom to suit yourself, Valentine. You always have.'

Valentine understood what Nascimonte was saying. He had never been a conventional monarch. For much of the

time during his exile from power in the period of the usurpation he had wandered the world earning a

humble living as an itinerant juggler, kept from awareness of his true rank by the amnesia that the usurping

faction had induced in him. Those years had transformed him irreversibly; and after his restoration to the

royal heights of Castle Mount he had comported himself in a way that few Coronals ever had before -

mingling openly with the populace, spreading a cheerful gospel of peace and love even as the Shapeshifters

were making ready to launch their long-cherished campaign of war against the conquerors who had taken

their world from them.

And then, when the events of that war made Valentine's succession to the Pontificate unavoidable, he

had held back as long as possible before relinquishing the upper world to his protege Lord Hissune, the new

Coronal, and descending into the subterranean city that was so alien to his sunny nature.

In his nine years as Pontifex he had found every excuse to emerge from it. No Pontifex in memory had

come forth from the Labyrinth more than once a decade or so, and then only to attend high rites at the

castle of the Coronal; but Valentine popped out as often as he could, riding hither and thither through the

land as though he were still obliged to undertake the formal grand processionals across the countryside that

a Coronal must make. Lord Hissune had been very patient with him on each of those occasions, though

Valentine had no doubt that the young Coronal was annoyed by the senior monarch's insistence on coming

up into public view so frequently.

'I change what I think needs changing,’ Valentine said. 'But I owe it to Lord Hissune to keep myself out

of sight as much as possible.'

'Well, here you are above ground today, at any rate!'

'It seems that I am. This is one time, though, when I would gladly have forgone the chance to come

forth. But with Hissune off in Zimroel -'

'Yes. Clearly you had no choice. You had to lead this investigation yourself.' They fell silent. 'A nasty

mess, this murder,' Nascimonte said, after a time. 'Pfaugh! Pieces of the poor bastard strewn all over the

altar like that!'

'Pieces of the government's Metamorph policy, too, I think,' said the Pontifex, with a rueful grin.

'You think there's something political in this, Valentine?'

'Who knows? But I fear the worst.'

'You, the eternal optimist!'

'It would be more accurate to call me a realist, Nascimonte. A realist.'

The old duke laughed. 'As you prefer, majesty.' There was another pause, a longer one than before. Then

Nascimonte said, more quietly now, 'Valentine, I need to ask your forgiveneness for an earlier fault.

I spoke too harshly, this afternoon, when I talked of the Shapeshifters as vermin who should be

exterminated. You know I don't truly believe that, I'm an old man. Sometimes I speak so bluntly that I

amaze even myself.'

Valentine nodded, but made no other reply.

'And telling you so dogmatically that it had to be one of his fellow Shapeshifters who killed him, too. As

you said, it's out of line for us to be jumping to conclusions that way. We haven't even started to collect

evidence yet. At this point we have no justification for assuming -'

'On the contrary. We have every reason to assume it, Nascimonte.'

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 con-clusion 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 some-one 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 Valen-tine. '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.'

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Robert Silverberg - The Seventh shrine

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