“Yes.” In a very small voice.

  “Why was that?”

  “He saw it as a crime against the truth,” Magadone Sambisa said, still speaking very quietly now, “You have to understand, majesty, that Dr Huukaminaan was utterly dedicated to his work. Which was, as it is for us all, the recovery of the lost aspects of our past through rigorous application of formal archaeological disciplines. He was totally committed to this, a true and pure scientist.”

  “Whereas you are not committed quite so totally?”

  Magadone Sambisa reddened and glanced shamefacedly to one side. “I admit that my actions may make it seem that way. But sometimes even the pursuit of truth has to give way, at least for a time, before tactical realities. Surely you, a Pontifex, would not deny that. And I had reasons, reasons that seemed valid enough to me, for not wanting to let news of this tomb reach the public. Dr Huukaminaan didn’t agree with my position; and he and I battled long and hard over it. It was the only occasion in our time as co-leaders of this expedition that we disagreed over anything.”

  “And finally it became necessary, then, for you to have him murdered? Because he yielded to you only grudgingly, and you weren’t sure he really would keep quiet?”

  “Majesty!” It was a cry of almost inexpressible shock.

  “A motive for the killing can be seen there. Isn’t that so?”

  She looked stunned. She waved her arms helplessly about, the palms of her hands turned outward in appeal. A long moment passed before she could bring herself to speak. But she had recovered much of her composure when she did.

  “Majesty, what you have just suggested is greatly offensive to me. I am guilty of hiding the tomb discovery, yes. But I swear to you that I had nothing to do with Dr Huukaminaan’s death. I can’t possibly tell you how much I admired that man. We had our professional differences, but…” She shook her head. She looked drained. Very quietly she said, “I didn’t kill him. I have no idea who did.”

  Valentine chose to accept that, for now. It was hard for him to believe that she was merely play-acting her distress.

  “Very well, Magadone Sambisa. But now tell me why you decided to conceal the finding of that tomb.”

  “I would have to tell you, first, an old Piurivar legend, a tale out of their mythology, one that I heard from the khivanivod Torkinuuminaad on the day that we found the tomb.”

  “Must you?”

  “I must, yes.”

  Valentine sighed. “Go ahead, then.”

  Magadone Sambisa moistened her lips and drew a deep breath.

  “There once was a Pontifex, so the story goes,” she said, “who lived in the years soon after the conquest of the Piurivars by Lord Stiamot. This Pontifex had fought in the War of the Conquest himself when he was a young man, and had had charge over a camp of Piurivar prisoners, and had listened to some of their campfire tales. Among which was the story of the Defilement at Velalisier—the sacrifice by the Final King of the two sea-dragons, and the destruction of the city that followed it. They told him also of the broken Seventh Pyramid, and of the shrine beneath it, the Shrine of the Downfall, as they called it. In which, they said, certain artefacts dating from the day of the Defilement had been buried—artefacts that would, when properly used, grant their wielder godlike power over all the forces of space and time. This story stayed with him, and many years later when he had become Pontifex he came to Velalisier with the intention of locating the shrine of the Seventh Pyramid, the Shrine of the Downfall, and opening it.”

  “For the purpose of bringing forth these magical artefacts, and using them to gain godlike power over the forces of space and time?”

  “Exactly,” said Magadone Sambisa.

  “I think I see where this is heading.”

  “Perhaps you do, majesty. We are told that he went to the site of the shattered pyramid. He drove a tunnel into the ground; he came upon the stone passageway that leads to the wall of the shrine. He found the wall and made preparations for breaking through it.”

  “But the seventh shrine, you told me, is intact. Since the time of the abandonment of the city no one has ever entered it. Or so you believe.”

  “No one ever has. I’m sure of that.”

  This Pontifex, then … ?”

  “Was just at the moment of breaching the shrine wall when a Piurivar who had hidden himself in the tunnel overnight rose up out of the darkness and put a sword through his heart.”

  “Wait a moment,” said Valentine. Exasperation began to stir in him. “A Piurivar popped out of nowhere and killed him, you say? A Piurivar? I’ve just gone through this same thing with Aarisiim. Not only weren’t there any Piurivars anywhere in Alhanroel at that time, because Stiamot had locked them all up in reservations over in Zimroel, but there was supposed to be a curse on this place that would have prevented members of their race from going near it.”

  “Except for the guardians of the shrine, who were exempted from the curse,” said Magadone Sambisa.

  “Guardians?” Valentine said. “What guardians? I’ve never heard anything about Piurivar guardians here.”

  “Nor had I, until Torkinuuminaad told me this story. But at the time of the city’s destruction and abandonment, evidently, a decision was made to post a small band of watchmen here, so that nobody would be able to break into the seventh shrine and gain access to whatever’s in there. And that guard force remained on duty here throughout the centuries. There were still guardians here when the Pontifex came to loot the shrine. One of them tucked himself away in the tunnel and killed the Pontifex just as he was about to chop through the wall.”

  “And his people buried him here? Why in the world would they do that?”

  Magadone Sambisa smiled. To hush things up, of course. Consider, majesty: a Pontifex comes to Velalisier in search of forbidden mystical knowledge, and is assassinated by a Piurivar who has been sneaking around undetected in the supposedly abandoned city. If word of that got around, it would make everyone look bad.”

  “I suppose that it would.”

  “The Pontifical officials certainly wouldn’t have wanted to let it be known that their master had been struck down right under their noses. Nor would they be eager to advertise the story of the secret shrine, which might lead others to come here looking for it too. And surely they’d never want anyone to know that the Pontifex had died at the hand of a Piurivar, something that could reopen all the wounds of the War of the Conquest and perhaps touch off some very nasty reprisals.”

  “And so they covered everything up,” said Valentine.

  “Exactly. They dug a tomb off in a remote corner of the ruins and buried the Pontifex in it with some sort of appropriate ritual, and went back to the Labyrinth with the news that his majesty had very suddenly been stricken down at the ruins by an unknown disease and it had seemed unwise to bring his body back from Velalisier for the usual kind of state funeral. Ghorban, was his name. There’s an inscription in the tomb that names him. Ghorban Pontifex, three Pontifexes after Stiamot. He really existed. I did research in the House of Records. You’ll see him listed there,”

  “I’m not familiar with the name.”

  “No. He’s not exactly one of the famous ones. But who can remember them all, anyway? Hundreds and hundreds of them, across all those thousands of years. Ghorban was Pontifex only a short while, and the only event of any importance that occurred during his reign was something that was carefully obliterated from the records. I’m speaking of his visit to Velalisier.”

  Valentine nodded. He had paused by the great screen outside the Labyrinth’s House of Records often enough, and many times had stared at that long list of his predecessors, marvelling at the names of all-but-forgotten monarchs, Meyk and Spurifon and Heslaine and Kandibal and dozens more. Who must have been great men in their day, but their day was thousands of years in the past. No doubt there was a Ghorban on the list, if Magadone Sambisa said there had been: who had reigned in regal grandeur for a time as the Coronal Lord Ghorban atop Castle Mount, and then had succeeded to the Pontificate in the fulness of his years, and for some reason had paid a visit to this accursed city of Velalisier, where he died, and was buried, and fell into oblivion.

  “A curious tale,” Valentine said. “But what is there in it that would have made you want to suppress the discovery of this Ghorban’s tomb?”

  “The same thing that made those ancient Pontifical officials suppress the real circumstances of his death,” replied Magadone Sambisa. “You surely know that most ordinary people already are sufficiently afraid of this city. The horrible story of the Defilement, the curse, all the talk of ghosts lurking in the ruins, the general spookiness of the place—well, you know what people are like, your majesty. How timid they can be in the face of the unknown. And I was afraid that if the Ghorban story came out—the secret shrine, the search for mysterious magical lore by some obscure ancient Pontifex, the murder of that Pontifex by a Piurivar—there’d be such public revulsion against the whole idea of excavating Velalisier that the dig would be shut down. I didn’t want that to happen. That’s all it was, your majesty. I was trying to preserve my own job, I suppose. Nothing more than that.”

  It was a humiliating confession. Her tone, which had been vigorous enough during the telling of the tale, now was flat, weary, almost lifeless. To Valentine it had the sound of complete sincerity.

  “And Dr Huukaminaam didn’t agree with you that revealing the discovery of the tomb could be a threat to the continuation of your work here?”

  “He saw the risk. He didn’t care. For him the truth came first and foremost, always. If public opinion forced the dig to be shut down, and nobody worked here again for fifty or a hundred or five hundred years, that was all right with him. His integrity wouldn’t permit hiding a startling piece of history like that, not for any reason. So we had a big battle and finally I pushed him into giving in. You’ve seen how stubborn I can be. But I didn’t kill him. If I had wanted to kill anybody, it wouldn’t have been Dr Huukaminaam. It would have been the khivanivod, who actually does want the dig shut down.”

  “He does? You said he and Huukaminaam worked hand in glove.”

  “In general, yes. As I told you yesterday, there was one area where he and Huukaminaan diverged: the issue of opening the shrine. Huukaminaan and I, you know, were planning to open it as soon as we could arrange for you and Lord Hissune to be present at the work. But the khivanivod was passionately opposed. The rest of our work here was acceptable to him, but not that. The Shrine of the Downfall, he kept saying, is the holy of holies, the most sacred Piurivar place.”

  “He might just have a point there,” Valentine said.

  “You also don’t think we should look inside that shrine?”

  “I think that there are certain important Piurivar leaders who might very much not want that to happen.”

  “But the Danipiur herself has given us permission to work here! Not only that, but she and all the rest of the Piurivar leaders understand that we’ve come here to restore the city—that we hope to undo as much as we can of the harm that thousands of years of neglect have caused. They have no quarrel with that. But just to be completely certain that our work would give no offence to the Piurivar community, we all agreed that the expedition would consist of equal numbers of Piurivar and non-Piurivar archaeologists, and that Dr Huukaminaam and I would share the leadership on a co-equal basis.”

  “Although you turned out to be somewhat more co-equal than he was when there happened to be a significant disagreement between the two of you, didn’t you?”

  “In that one instance of the Ghorban tomb, yes,” said Magadone Sambisa, looking just a little out of countenance. “But only that one. He and I were in complete agreement at all times on everything else. On the issue of opening the shrine, for example.”

  “A decision which the khivanivod then vetoed.”

  The khivanivod has no power to veto anything, majesty. The understanding we had was that any Piurivar who objected to some aspect of our work on religious grounds could appeal to the Danipiur, who would then adjudicate the matter in consultation with you and Lord Hissune.”

  “Yes. I wrote that decree myself, actually.”

  Valentine closed his eyes a moment and pressed the tips of his fingers against them. He should have realized, he told himself, that problems like these would inevitably crop up. This city had too much tragic history. Terrible things had happened here. The mysterious aura of Piurivar sorcery still hovered over the place, thousands of years after its destruction.

  He had hoped to dispel some of that aura by sending in these scientists. Instead he had only enmeshed himself in its dark folds.

  After a time he looked up and said, “I understand from Aarisiim that where your khivanivod has gone to make his spiritual retreat is in fact the Ghorban tomb that you’ve taken such pains to hide from me, and that he’s there at this very moment. Is that true?”

  “I believe it is.”

  The Pontifex walked to the tent entrance and peered outside. The first bronze streaks of the desert dawn were arching across the great vault of the sky.

  “Last night,” he said, “I asked you to send messengers out looking for him, and you said that you would. You didn’t, of course, tell me that you knew where he was. But since you do know, get your messengers moving. I want to speak with him first thing this morning.”

  “And if he refuses to come, your majesty?”

  Then have him brought.”

  * * *

  The khivanivod Torkinuuminaad was every bit as disagreeable as Magadone Sambisa had led Valentine to expect, although the fact that it had been necessary for Valentine’s security people to threaten to drag him bodily from the Ghorban tomb must not have improved his temper. Lisamon Hultin was the one who had ordered him out of there, heedless of his threats and curses. Piurivar witcheries and spells held little dread for her, and she let him know that if he didn’t go to Valentine more or less willingly on his own two feet, she would carry him to the Pontifex herself.

  The Shapeshifter shaman was an ancient, emaciated man, naked but for some wisps of dried grass around his waist and a nasty-looking amulet, fashioned of interwoven insect legs and other such things, that dangled from a frayed cord about his neck. He was so old that his green skin had faded to a faint grey, and his slitted eyes, bright with rage, glared balefully at Valentine out of sagging folds of rubbery skin.

  Valentine began on a conciliatory note. “I ask your pardon for interrupting your meditations. But certain urgent matters must be dealt with before I return to the Labyrinth, and your presence was needed for that.”

  Torkkinuuminaad said nothing.

  Valentine proceeded regardless. “For one thing, a serious crime has been committed in the archaeological zone. The killing of Dr Huukaminaam is an offence not only against justice but against knowledge itself. I’m here to see that the murderer is identified and punished.”

  “What does this have to do with me?” asked the khivanivod, glowering sullenly. “If there has been a murder, you should find the murderer and punish him, yes, if that is what you feel you must do. But why must a servant of the Gods That Are be compelled by force to break off his sacred communion like this? Because the Pontifex of Majipoor commands it?” Torkinuuminaad laughed harshly. The Pontifex! Why should the commands of the Pontifex mean anything to me? I serve only the Gods That Are.”

  “You also serve the Danipiur,” said Valentine in a calm, quiet tone. “And the Danipiur and I are colleagues in the government of Majipoor.” He indicated Magadone Sambisa and the other archaeologists, both human and Metamorph, who stood nearby. These people are at work in Velalisier this day because the Danipiur has granted her permission for them to be here. You yourself are here at the Danipiur’s request, I believe. To serve as spiritual counsellor for those of your people who are involved in the work.”

  “I am here because the Gods That Are require me to be here, and for no other reason.”

  “Be that as it may, your Pontifex stands before you, and he has questions to ask you, and you will answer.”

  The shaman’s only response was a sour glare.

  “A shrine has been discovered near the ruins of the Seventh Pyramid,” Valentine went on. “I understand that the late Dr Huukaminaam intended to open that shrine. You had strong objections to that, am I correct?”

  “You are.”

  “Objections on what grounds?”

  That the shrine is a sacred place not to be disturbed by profane hands.”

  “How can there be a sacred place,” asked Valentine, “in a city that had a curse pronounced on it?”

  The shrine is sacred nevertheless,” the khivanivod said obdurately.

  “Even though no one knows what may be inside it?”

  7 know what is inside it,” said the khivanivod.

  “You? How?”

  “I am the guardian of the shrine. The knowledge is handed down from guardian to guardian,”

  Valentine felt a chill travelling along his spine. “Ah,” he said. The guardian. Of the shrine.” He was silent a moment. “As the officially designated successor, I suppose, of the guardian who murdered a Pontifex here once thousands of years ago. The place where you were found praying just now, so I’ve been told, was the tomb of that very Pontifex. Is that so?”

  “It is.”

  “In that case,” said Valentine, allowing a little smile to appear at the corners of his mouth, “I need to ask my guards to keep very careful watch on you. Because the next thing I’m going to do, my friend, is to instruct Magadone Sambisa and her people to proceed at once with the opening of the seventh shrine. And I see now that that might place me in some danger at your hands.”

  Torkinuuminaad looked astounded. Abruptly the Metamorph shaman began to go through a whole repertoire of violent changes of form, contracting and elongating wildly, the borders of his body blurring and recomposing with bewildering speed.