Once more she displayed that look of stunned helplessness, of futility and confusion in the face of violent death, that came over her whenever the topic of the murder of Huukaminaan arose.

  Not all that different in some aspects from things the Piurivars still do today, Valentine repeated silently.

  He considered the way Huukaminaan’s body had been cut apart, the sundered pieces left in various places atop the sacrificial platform, the head carried down into the tunnel beneath the Seventh Pyramid and carefully laid to rest in one of the alcoves of the underground shrine.

  There was something implacably alien about that grisly act of dismemberment that brought Valentine once again to the conclusion, mystifying and distasteful but seemingly inescapable, that had been facing him since his arrival here. The murderer of the Metamorph archaeologist must have been a Metamorph himself. As Nascimonte had suggested earlier, there seemed to be a ritual aspect to the butchery that had all the hallmarks of Metamorph work.

  But still it made no sense. Valentine had difficulty believing that the old man could have been killed by one of his own people.

  “What was Huukaminaan like?” he asked Magadone Sambisa.I never met him, you know. Was he contentious? Cantankerous?”

  “Not in the slightest. A sweet, gentle person. A brilliant scholar. There was no one, Piurivar or human, who didn’t love and admire him.”

  There must have been one person, at least,” said Nascimonte wryly.

  Perhaps Nascimonte’s theory was worth exploring. Valentine said, “Could there have been some sort of bitter professional disagreement? A dispute over the credit for a discovery, a battle over some piece of theory?”

  Magadone Sambisa stared at the Pontifex as though he had gone out of his mind. “Do you think we kill each other over such things, your majesty?”

  “It was a foolish suggestion,” Valentine said, with a smile. “Well, then,” he went on, “suppose Huukaminaan had come into possession of some valuable artefact in the course of his work here, some priceless treasure that would fetch a huge sum in the antiquities market. Might that not have been sufficient cause for murdering him?”

  Again the incredulous stare. The artefacts we find here, majesty, are of the nature of simple sandstone statuettes, and bricks bearing inscriptions, not golden tiaras and emeralds the size of gihorna eggs. Everything worth looting was looted a long, long time ago. And we would no more dream of trying to make a private sale of the little things that we find here than we would—would—than, well, than we would of murdering each other. Our finds are divided equally between the university museum in Arkilon and the Piurivar treasury at Ilirivoyne. In any case—no, no, it’s not even worth discussing. The idea’s completely absurd.” Instantly her cheeks turned flame-red. “Forgive me, majesty, I meant no disrespect.”

  Valentine brushed the apology aside. “What I’m doing, you see, is groping for some plausible explanation of the crime. A place to begin our investigation, at least.”

  “I’ll give you one, Valentine,” Tunigorn said suddenly. His normally open and genial face was tightly drawn in a splenetic scowl that brought his heavy eyebrows together into a single dark line. The basic thing that we need to keep in mind all the time is that there’s a curse on this place. You know that. Valentine. A curse. The Shapeshifters themselves put the dark word on the city, the Divine knows how many thousands of years ago, when they smashed it up to punish those who had chopped up those two sea-dragons. They intended the place to be shunned for ever. Only ghosts have lived here ever since. By sending these archaeologists of yours in here. Valentine, you’re disturbing those ghosts. Making them angry. And so they’re striking back. Killing old Huukaminaan was the first step. There’ll be more, mark my words!”

  “And you think, do you, that ghosts are capable of cutting someone into five or six pieces and scattering the parts far and wide?”

  Tunigorn was not amused. “I don’t know what sorts of things ghosts may or may not be capable of doing,” he said staunchly. “I’m just telling you what has crossed my mind.”

  Thank you, my good old friend,” said Valentine pleasantly. “We’ll give the thought the examination it deserves.” And to Magadone Sambisa he said, “I must tell you what has crossed my mind, based on what you’ve shown me today, here and at the pyramid shrine. Which is that the killing of Huukaminaan strikes me as a ritual murder, and the ritual involved is some kind of Piurivar ritual. I don’t say that that’s what it was; I just say that it certainly looks that way.”

  “And if it does?”

  Then we have our starting point. It’s time now to move to the next phase of our work, I think. Please have the kindness to call your entire group of Piurivar archaeologists together this afternoon. I want to speak with them.”

  “One by one, or all together?”

  “All of them together at first,” said Valentine. “After that, we’ll see.”

  * * *

  But Magadone Sambisa’s people were scattered all over the huge archaeological zone, each one involved with some special project, and she begged Valentine not to have them called in until the working day was over. It would take so long to reach them all, she said, that the worst of the heat would have descended by the time they began their return to camp, and they would be compelled to trek across the ruins in the full blaze of noon, instead of settling in some dark cavern to await the cooler hours that lay ahead. Meet with them at sundown, she implored him. Let them finish their day’s tasks.

  That seemed only reasonable. He said that he would.

  But Valentine himself was unable to sit patiently by until dusk. The murder had jarred him deeply. It was one more symptom of the strange new darkness that had come over the world in his lifetime. Huge as it was, Majipoor had long been a peaceful place where there was comfort and plenty for all, and crime of any sort was an extraordinary rarity. But, even so, just in this present generation there had been the assassination of the Coronal Lord Voriax, and then the diabolically contrived usurpation that had pushed Voriax’s successor—Valentine—from his throne for a time.

  The Metamorphs, everyone knew now, had been behind both of those dire acts.

  And after Valentine’s recovery of the throne had come the War of the Rebellion, organized by the embittered Metamorph Faraataa, bringing with it plagues, famines, riots, a worldwide panic, great destruction everywhere. Valentine had ended that uprising, finally, by reaching out himself to take Faraataa’s life—a deed that the gentle Valentine had regarded with horror, but which he had carried out all the same, because it had to be done.

  Now, in this new era of worldwide peace and harmony that Valentine, reigning as Pontifex, had inaugurated, an admirable and beloved old Metamorph scholar had been murdered in the most brutal way. Murdered here in the holy city of the Metamorphs themselves, while he was in the midst of archaeological work that Valentine had instituted as one way of demonstrating the newfound respect of the human people of Majipoor for the aboriginal people they had displaced. And there was every indication, at least at this point, that the murderer was himself a Metamorph.

  But that seemed insane.

  Perhaps Tunigorn was right, that all of this was merely the working out of some ancient curse. That was a hard thing for Valentine to swallow. He had little belief in such things as curses. And yet—yet—

  Restlessly he stalked the ruined city all through the worst heat of the day, heedless of the discomfort, pulling his hapless companions along. The sun’s great golden-green eye stared unrelentingly down. Heat-shimmers danced in the air. The leathery-leaved little shrubs that grew all over the ruins seemed to fold in upon themselves to hide from those torrid blasts of light. Even the innumerable skittering lizards that infested these rocks grew reticent as the temperature climbed.

  “I would almost think we had been transported to Suvrael,” said Tunigorn, panting in the heat as he dutifully laboured along beside the Pontifex. This is the climate of the miserable southland, not of our pleasant Alhanroel.”

  Nascimonte gave him a sardonic squinting smirk. “Just one more example of the malevolence of the Shapeshifters, my lord Tunigorn. In the days when the city was alive there were green forests all about this place, and the air was cool and mild. But then the river was turned aside, and the forests died, and nothing was left here but the bare rock that you see, which soaks up the heat of noon and holds it like a sponge. Ask the archaeologist lady, if you don’t believe me. This province was deliberately turned into a desert, for the sake of punishing those who had committed great sins in it.”

  “All the more reason for us to be somewhere else,” Tunigorn muttered. “But no, no, this is our place, here with Valentine, now and ever.”

  Valentine scarcely paid attention to what they were saying. He wandered aimlessly onward, down one weedy byway and another, past fallen columns and shattered facades, past the empty shells of what might once have been shops and taverns, past the ghostly outlines marking the foundations of vanished dwellings that must once have been palatial in their grandeur. Nothing was labelled, and Magadone Sambisa was not with him, now, to bend his ear with endless disquisitions about the former identities of these places. They were bits and pieces of lost Velalisier, that was all he knew: skeletonic remnants of this ancient metropolis.

  It was easy enough, even for him, to imagine this place as the lair of ancient phantoms. A glassy glimmer of light shining out of some tumbled mass of broken columns—odd scratchy sounds that might have been those of creatures crawling about where no creatures could be seen—the occasional hiss and slither of shifting sand, sand that moved, so it would appear, of its own volition—

  “Every time I visit these ruins,” he said to Mirigant, who was walking closest to him now, “I’m astounded by the antiquity of it all. The weight of history that presses down on it.”

  “History that no one remembers,” Mirigant said.

  “But its weight remains.”

  “Not our history, though.”

  Valentine shot his cousin a scornful look. “So you may believe. But it’s Majipoor’s history, and what is that if not ours?”

  Mirigant shrugged and made no answer.

  Was there any meaning, Valentine wondered, in what he had just said? Or was the heat addling his brain?

  He pondered it. Into his mind there came, with a force almost like that of an explosion, a vision of the totality of vast Majipoor. Its great continents and overwhelming rivers and immense shining seas, its dense moist jungles and great deserts, its forests of towering trees and mountains rich with strange and wonderful creatures, its multitude of sprawling cities with their populations of many millions. His soul was flooded with an overload of sensation, the perfume of a thousand kinds of flowers, the aromas of a thousand spices, the savoury tang of a thousand wondrous meats, the bouquet of a thousand wines. It was a world of infinite richness and variety, this Majipoor of his.

  And-by a fluke of descent and his brother’s bad luck he had come first to be Coronal and now Pontifex of that world. Twenty billion people hailed him as their emperor. His face was on the coinage; the world resounded with his praises; his name would be inscribed for ever on the roster of monarchs in the House of Records, an imperishable part of the history of this world.

  But once there had been a time when there were no Pontifexes and Coronals here. When such wondrous cities as Ni-Moya and Alaisor and the fifty great urban centres of Castle Mount did not exist. And in that time before human settlement had begun on Majipoor, this city of Velalisier already was.

  What right did he have to appropriate this city, already thousands of years dead and desolate when the first colonists arrived from space, into the flow of human history here? In truth there was a discontinuity so deep between their Majipoor and our Majipoor, he thought, that it might never be bridged.

  In any case he could not rid himself of the feeling that this place’s great legion of ghosts, in whom he did not even believe, were lurking all around him, and that their fury was still unappeased. Somehow he would have to deal with that fury, which had broken out now, so it seemed, in the form of a terrible act that had cost the life of a studious and inoffensive old man. The logic that infused every aspect of Valentine’s soul balked at any comprehension of such a thing. But his own fate, he knew, and perhaps the fate of the world, might depend on his finding a solution to the mystery that had exploded here.

  “You will pardon me, good majesty,” said Tunigorn, breaking in on Valentine’s broodings just as a new maze of ruined streets opened out before them. “But if I take another step in this heat, I will fall down gibbering like a madman. My very brain is melting.”

  “Why, then, Tunigorn, you should certainly seek refuge quickly, and cool it off! You can ill afford to damage what’s left of it, can you, old friend?” Valentine pointed in the direction of the camp. “Go back. Go. But I will continue, I think.”

  He was not sure why. But something drove him grimly forward across this immense bedraggled sprawl of sand-choked sun-blasted ruins, seeking he knew not what. One by one his other companions dropped away from him, with this apology or that, until only the indefatigable Lisamon Hultin remained. The giantess was ever-faithful. She had protected him from the dangers of Mazadone Forest in the days before his restoration to the Coronal’s throne. She had been his guardian in the belly of the sea-dragon that had swallowed them both in the sea off Piliplok, that time when they were shipwrecked sailing from Zimroel to Alhanroel, and she had cut him free and carried him up to safety. She would not leave him now. Indeed she seemed willing to walk on and on with him through the day and the night and the day that followed as well, if that was what he required of her.

  But eventually even Valentine had had enough. The sun had long since moved beyond its noon height. Sharp-edged pools of shadow, rose and purple and deepest obsidian; were beginning to reach out all about him. He was feeling a little light-headed now, his head swimming a little and his vision wavering from the prolonged strain of coping with the unyielding glare of that blazing sun, and each street of tumbled-down buildings had come to look exactly like its predecessor. It was time to go back. Whatever penance he had been imposing on himself by such an exhausting journey through this dominion of death and destruction must surely have been fulfilled by now. He leaned on Lisamon Hultin’s arm now and again as they made their way towards the tents of the encampment.

  Magadone Sambisa had assembled her eight Metamorph archaeologists. Valentine, having bathed and rested and had a little to eat, met with them just after sundown in his own tent, accompanied only by the little Vroon, Autifon Deliamber. He wanted to form his opinions of the Metamorphs undistracted by the presence of Nascimonte and the rest; but Deliamber had certain Vroonish wizardly skills that Valentine prized highly, and the small many-tentacled being might well be able to perceive things with those huge and keen golden eyes of his that would elude Valentine’s own human vision.

  The Shapeshifters sat in a semicircle with Valentine facing them and the tiny wizened old Vroon at his left hand. The Pontifex ran his glance down the group, from the site-boss Kaastisiik at one end to the palaeographer Vo-Siimifon on the other. They looked back at him calmly, almost indifferently, these seven rubbery-faced slope-eyed Piurivars, as he told them of the things he had seen this day, the cemetery and the shattered pyramid and the shrine beneath it, and the alcove where Huukaminaam’s severed head had been so carefully placed by his murderer.

  There was, wouldn’t you say, a certain formal aspect to the murder?” Valentine said. The cutting of the body into pieces? The carrying of the head down to the shrine, the placement in the alcove of offerings?” His gaze fastened on Thiuurinen, the ceramics expert, a lithe, diminutive Metamorph woman with lovely jade-green skin. “What’s your reading on that?” he asked her.

  Her expression was wholly impassive. “As a ceramicist I have no opinion at all.”

  “I don’t want your opinion as a ceramicist, just as a member of the expedition. A colleague of Dr Huukaminaan’s. Does it seem to you that putting the head there meant that some kind of offering was being made?”

  “It is only conjecture that those alcoves were places of offering,” said Thiuurinen primly. “I am not in a position to speculate.”

  Nor would she. Nor would any of them. Not Kaastisiik, not Vo-Siimifon, not the stratigrapher Pamikuuk, not Hieekraad, the custodian of material artefacts, nor Driismiil, the architectural specialist, nor Klelliin, the authority on Piurivar palaeotechnology, nor Viitaal-Twuu, the specialist in metallurgy.

  Politely, mildly, firmly, unshakably, they brushed aside Valentine’s hypotheses about ritual murder. Was the gruesome dismemberment of Dr Huukaminaan a hearkening-back to the funeral practices of ancient Velalisier? Was the placing of his head in that alcove likely to have been any kind of propitiation of some supernatural being? Was there anything in Piurivar tradition that might countenance killing someone in that particular fashion? They could not say. They would not say. Nor, when he enquired as to whether their late colleague might have had an enemy here at the site, did they provide him with any information.

  And they merely gave him the Piurivar equivalent of a shrug when he wondered out loud whether there could have been some struggle over the discovery of a valuable artefact that might have led to Huukaminaan’s murder; or even a quarrel of a more abstract kind, a fierce disagreement over the findings or goals of the expedition. Nobody showed any sign of outrage at his implication that one of them might have killed old Huukaminaan over such a matter. They behaved as though the whole notion of doing such a thing were beyond their comprehension, a concept too alien even to consider.

  During the course of the interview Valentine took the opportunity to aim at least one direct question at each of them. But the result was always the same. They were unhelpful without seeming particularly evasive. They were unforthcoming without appearing unusually sly or secretive. There was nothing overtly suspicious about their refusal to cooperate. They seemed to be precisely what they claimed to be: scientists, studious scholars, devoted to uncovering the buried mysteries of their race’s remote past, who knew nothing at all about the mystery that had erupted right here in their midst. He did not feel himself to be in the presence of murderers here.