But the archaeologists too, both the human ones and the two Ghayrogs and the little tight-knit group of Shapeshifters, were staring at Valentine as though he had just said something beyond all comprehension. Even Tunigorn and Mirigant and Nascimonte were flabbergasted. Tunigorn turned to Mirigant and said something, to which Mirigant replied only with a shrug, and Nascimonte, standing near them, shrugged also in complete bafflement.

  Magadone Sambisa said in hoarse choking tones, “Majesty? Do you mean that? I thought you said only a little while ago that the best thing would be to leave the shrine unopened!”

  “I said that? I?” Valentine shook his head. “Oh, no. No. How long will it take you to get started on the job?”

  “Why—let me see …” He heard her murmur, “The recording devices, the lighting equipment, the masonry drills …” She grew quiet, as if counting additional things off in her mind. Then she said, “We could be ready to begin in half an hour.”

  “Good. Let’s get going, then.”

  “No! This will not be!” cried Torkinuuminaad, a wild screech of rage.

  “It will,” said Valentine. “And you’ll be there to watch it. As will I.” He beckoned toward Lisamon Hultin. “Speak with him, Lisamon. Tell him in a persuasive way that it’ll be much better for him if he remains calm.”

  Magadone Sambisa said, wonderingly, “Are you serious about all this, Pontifex?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes. Very serious indeed.”

  * * *

  The day seemed a hundred hours long.

  Opening any sealed site for the first time would ordinarily have been a painstaking process. But this one was so important, so freighted with symbolic significance, so potentially explosive in its political implications, that every task was done with triple care.

  Valentine waited at surface level during the early stages of the work. What they were doing down there had all been explained to him—running cables for illumination and ventilating pipes for the excavators; carefully checking with sonic probes to make sure that opening the shrine wall would not cause the ceiling of the vault to collapse; sonic testing of the interior of the shrine itself to see if there was anything important immediately behind the wall that might be imperilled by the drilling operation.

  All that took hours. Finally they were ready to start cutting into the wall.

  “Would you like to watch, majesty?” Magadone Sambisa asked.

  Despite the ventilation equipment, Valentine found it hard work to breathe inside the tunnel. The air had been hot and stale enough on his earlier visit; but now, with all these people crowded into it, it was thin, feeble stuff, and he had to strain his lungs to keep from growing dizzy.

  The close-packed archaeologists parted ranks to let him come forward. Bright lights cast a brilliant glare on the white stone facade of the shrine. Five people were gathered there, three Piurivars, two humans. The actual drilling seemed to be the responsibility of the burly foreman Vathiimeraak. Kaastisiik, the Piurivar archaeologist who was the site boss, was assisting. Just behind them was Driismiil, the Piurivar architectural expert, and a human woman named Shimrayne Gelvoin, who also was an architect, evidently. Magadone Sambisa stood to the rear, quietly issuing orders.

  They were peeling the wall back stone by stone. Already an area of the facade perhaps three feet square had been cleared just above the row of offering-alcoves. Behind it lay rough brickwork, no more than one course thick. Vathiimeraak, muttering to himself in Piurivar as he worked, now was chiselling away at one of the bricks. It came loose in a crumbling mass, revealing an inner wall made of the same fine black stone slabs as the tunnel wall itself.

  A long pause, now, while the several layers of the wall were measured and photographed. Then Vathiimeraak resumed the inward probing. Valentine was at the edge of queasiness in this foul, acrid atmosphere, but he forced it back.

  Vathiimeraak cut deeper, halting to allow Kaastisiik to remove some broken pieces of the black stone. The two architects came forward and inspected the opening, conferring first with each other, then with Magadone Sambisa; and then Vathiimeraak stepped towards the breach once again with his drilling tool.

  “We need a torch,” Magadone Sambisa said suddenly. “Give me a torch, someone!”

  A hand-torch was passed up the line from the crowd in the rear of the tunnel. Magadone Sambisa thrust it into the opening, peered, gasped.

  “Majesty? Majesty, would you come and look?”

  By that single shaft of light Valentine made out a large rectangular room, which appeared to be completely empty except for a large square block of dark stone. It was very much like the glossy block of black opal, streaked with veins of scarlet ruby, from which the glorious Confalume Throne at the castle of the Coronal had been carved.

  There were things lying on that block. But what they were was impossible to tell at this distance.

  “How long will it take to make an opening big enough for someone to enter the room?” Valentine asked.

  “Three hours, maybe.”

  “Do it in two. I’ll wait aboveground. You call me when the opening is made. Be certain that no one enters it before me.”

  “You have my word, majesty.”

  Even the dry desert air was a delight after an hour or so of breathing the dank stuff below. Valentine could see by the lengthening shadows creeping across the deep sockets of the distant dunes that the afternoon was well along. Tunigorn, Mirigant, and Nascimonte were pacing about amidst the rubble of the fallen pyramid. The Vroon Deliamber stood a little distance apart.

  “Well?” Tunigorn asked.

  “They’ve got a little bit of the wall open. There’s something inside, but we don’t know what, yet.”

  “Treasure?” Tunigorn asked, with a lascivious grin. “Mounds of emeralds and diamonds and jade?”

  “Yes,” said Valentine. “All that and more. Treasure. An enormous treasure, Tunigorn.” He chuckled and turned away. “Do you have any wine with you, Nascimonte?”

  “As ever, my friend. A fine Muldemar vintage.”

  He handed his flask to the Pontifex, who drank deep, not pausing to savour the bouquet at all, guzzling as though the wine were water.

  The shadows deepened. One of the lesser moons crept into the margin of the sky.

  “Majesty? Would you come below?”

  It was the archaeologist Vo-Siimifon. Valentine followed him into the tunnel.

  The opening in the wall was large enough now to admit one person. Magadone Sambisa, her hand trembling, handed Valentine the torch.

  “I must ask you, your majesty, to touch nothing, to make no disturbance whatever. We will not deny you the privilege of first entry, but you must bear in mind that this is a scientific enterprise. We have to record everything just as we find it before anything, however trivial, can be moved.”

  “I understand,” said Valentine.

  He stepped carefully over the section of the wall below the opening and clambered in.

  The shrine’s floor was of some smooth glistening stone, perhaps rosy quartz. A fine layer of dust covered it. No one has walked across this floor for twenty thousand years. Valentine thought. No human foot has ever come in contact with it at all.

  He approached the broad block of black stone in the centre of the room and turned the torch full on it. Yes, a single dark mass of ruby-streaked opal, just like the Confalume Throne. Atop it, with only the faintest tracery of dust concealing its brilliance, lay a flat sheet of gold, engraved with intricate Piurivar glyphs and inlaid with cabochons of what looked like beryl and carnelian and lapis lazuli. Two long, slender objects that could have been daggers carved from some white stone lay precisely in the centre of the gold sheet, side by side.

  Valentine felt a tremor of the deepest awe. He knew what those two things were.

  “Majesty? Majesty?” Magadone Sambisa called. “Tell us what you see! Tell us, please!”

  But Valentine did not reply. It was as though Magadone Sambisa had not spoken. He was deep in memory, travelling back eight years to the climactic hour of the War of the Rebellion.

  He had, in that hour, held in his hand a dagger-like thing much like these two, and had felt the strange coolness of it, a coolness that gave a hint of a fiery core within, and had heard a complex far-off music emanating from it into his mind, a turbulent rush of dizzying sound.

  It had been the tooth of a sea-dragon that he had been grasping then. Some mystery within that tooth had placed his mind in communion with the mind of the mighty water-king Maazmoorn, a dragon of the distant Inner Sea. And with the aid of the mind of Maazmoorn had Valentine Pontifex reached across the world to strike down the unrepentant rebel Faraataa and bring that sorry uprising to an end.

  Whose teeth were these, now?

  He thought he knew. This was the Shrine of the Downfall, the Place of the Defilement. Not far from here, long ago, two water-kings had been brought from the sea to be sacrificed on platforms of blue stone. That was no myth. It had actually happened. Valentine had no doubt of that, for the sea-dragon Maazmoorn had shown it to him with the full communion of his mind, in a manner that admitted of no question. He knew their names, even: one was the water-king Niznorn and the other the water-king Domsitor. Was this tooth here Niznorn’s, and this one Domsitor’s?

  Twenty thousand years.

  * * *

  “Majesty? Majesty?”

  “One moment,” Valentine said, speaking as though from halfway around the world.

  He picked up the left-hand tooth. Grasped it tightly. Hissed as its fiery chill stung the palm of his hand. Closed his eyes, allowed his mind to be pervaded by its magic. Felt his spirit beginning to soar outward and outward and outward, towards some waiting dragon of the sea—Maazmoorn again, for all he could know, or perhaps some other one of the giants who swam in those waters out there—while all the time he heard the sounding bells, the tolling music of that sea-dragon’s mind.

  And was granted a vision of the ancient sacrifice of the two water-kings, the event known as the Defilement.

  He already knew, from Maazmoorn in that meeting of minds years ago, that the traditional name was a misnomer. There had been no defilement whatever. It had been a voluntary sacrifice; it had been the formal acceptance by the sea-dragons of the power of That Which Is, which is the highest of all the forces of the universe.

  The water-kings had given themselves gladly to those Piurivars of long-ago Velalisier to be slain. The slayers themselves had understood what they were doing, perhaps, but the simple Piurivars of the outlying provinces had not; and so those simpler Piurivars had called it a Defilement, and had put the Final King of Velalisier to death and smashed the Seventh Pyramid and then had wrecked all the rest of this great capital, and had laid a curse on the city for ever. But the shrine of these teeth they had not dared to touch.

  Valentine, holding the tooth, beheld the sacrifice once more. Not with the bound sea-dragons writhing in fury as they were brought to the knife, the way he had seen it in his nightmare of the previous night. No. He saw it now as a serene and holy ceremony, a benign yielding up of the living flesh. And as the knives flashed, as the great sea-creatures died, as their dark flesh was carried to the pyres for burning, a resounding wave of triumphant harmony went rolling out to the boundaries of the universe.

  He put the tooth down and picked up the other one. Grasped. Felt. Surrendered himself to its power.

  This time the music was more discordant. The vision that came to him was that of some unknown man of middle years, garbed in a rich costume of antique design, clothing befitting a Pontifex. He was moving cautiously by the smoky light of a flickering torch down the very passageway outside this room where Magadone Sambisa and her archaeologists now clustered. Valentine watched that Pontifex of long ago approaching the white unsullied wall of the shrine. Saw him press the fiat of his hand against it, pushing as though he hoped to penetrate it by his own strength alone. Turning from it, then, beckoning to workmen with picks and spades, indicating that they should start hacking their way through it.

  And a figure uncoiling out of the darkness, a Shapeshifter, long and lean and grim-faced, taking one great step forward and in a swift unstoppable lunge driving a knife upward and inward beneath the heart of the man in the brocaded Pontifical robes—

  * * *

  “Majesty, I beg you!”

  Magadone Sambisa’s voice, ripe with anguish.

  “Yes,” said Valentine, in the distant tone of one who has been lost in a dream. “I’m coming.”

  He had had enough visions, for the moment. He set the torch down on the floor, aiming it towards the opening in the wall to fight his way. Carefully he picked up the two dragon teeth—letting them rest easily on the palms of his hands, taking care not to touch them so tightly as to activate their powers, for he did not want now to open his mind to them—and made his way back out of the shrine.

  Magadone Sambisa stared at him in horror. “I asked you, your majesty, not to touch the objects in the vault, not to cause any disturbance to—”

  “Yes. I know that. You will pardon me for what I have done,”

  It was not a request.

  The archaeologists melted back out of his way as he strode through their midst, heading for the exit to the upper world. Every eye was turned to the things that rested on Valentine’s upturned hands.

  “Bring the khivanivod to me here,” he said quietly to Aarisiim. The light of day was nearly gone now, and the ruins were taking on the greater mysteriousness that came over them by night, when moonlight’s cool gleam danced across the shattered city’s ancient stones.

  The Shapeshifter went rushing away. Valentine had not wanted the khivanivod anywhere near the shrine while the opening of the wall was taking place; and so, over his violent objections, Torkkinuuminaad had been bundled off to the archaeologists’ headquarters in the custody of some of Valentine’s security people. The two immense woolly Skandars brought him forth now, holding him by the arms.

  Anger and hatred were bubbling up from the shaman like black gas rising from a churning marsh. And, staring into that jagged green wedge of a face, Valentine had a powerful sense of the ancient magic of this world, of mysteries reaching towards him out of the timeless misty Majipoor dawn, when Shapeshifters had moved alone and unhindered through this great planet of marvels and splendours.

  The Pontifex held the two sea-dragon teeth aloft.

  “Do you know what these are, Torkkinuuminaad?”

  The rubbery eye-folds drew back. The narrow eyes were yellow with rage. “You have committed the most terrible of all sacrileges, and you will die in the most terrible of agonies.”

  “So you do know what they are, eh?”

  They are the holiest of holies! You must return them to the shrine at once!”

  “Why did you have Dr Huukaminaan killed, Torkkinuuminaad?”

  The khivanivod’s only answer was an even more furiously defiant glare.

  He would kill me with his magic, if he could, thought Valentine. And why not? I know what I represent to Torkkinuuminaad. For I am Majipoor’s emperor and therefore I am Majipoor itself, and if one thrust would send us all to our doom he would strike that thrust.

  Yes. Valentine was in his own person the embodiment of the Enemy: of those who had come out of the sky and taken the world away from the Piurivars, who had built their own gigantic sprawling cities over virgin forests and glades, had intruded themselves by the billions into the fragile fabric of the Piurivars’ trembling web of life. And so Torkkinuuminaad would kill him, if he could, and by killing the Pontifex kill, by the symbolism of magic, all of human-dominated Majipoor.

  But magic can be fought with magic, Valentine thought.

  “Yes, look at me,” he told the shaman. “Look right into my eyes, Torkkinuuminaad.”

  And let his fingers close tightly about the two talismans he had taken from the shrine.

  The double force of the teeth struck into Valentine with a staggering impact as he closed the mental circuit. He felt the full range of the sensations all at once, not simply doubled, but multiplied many times over. He held himself upright nevertheless; he focused his concentration with the keenest intensity; he aimed his mind directly at that of the khivanivod.

  Looked. Entered. Penetrated the khivanivod’s memories and quickly found what he was seeking.

  Midnight darkness. A sliver of moonlight. The sky ablaze with stars. The billowing tent of the archaeologists. Someone coming out of it, a Piurivar, very thin, moving with the caution of age.

  Dr Huukaminaam, surely.

  A slender figure stands in the road, waiting: another Metamorph, also old, just as gaunt raggedly and strangely dressed.

  The khivanivod, that one is. Viewing himself in his own mind’s eye.

  Shadowy figures moving about behind him, five, six, seven of them. Shape-shifters all. Villagers, from the looks of them. The old archaeologist does not appear to see them. He speaks with the khivanivod; the shaman gestures, points. There is a discussion of some sort. Dr Huukaminaam shakes his head. More pointing. More discussion. Gestures of agreement. Everything seems to be resolved.

  As Valentine watches, the khivanivod and Huukaminaan start off together down the road that leads to the heart of the ruins.

  The villagers, now, emerging from the shadows that have concealed them. Surrounding the old man; seizing him; covering his mouth to keep him from crying out. The khivanivod approaches him.

  The khivanivod has a knife.

  Valentine did not need to see the rest of the scene. Did not want to see that monstrous ceremony of dismemberment at the stone platform, nor the weird ritual afterward in the excavation leading to the Shrine of the Downfall, the placing of the dead man’s head in that alcove.

  He released his grasp on the two sea-dragon teeth and set them down with great care beside him on the ground.

  “Now,” he said to the khivanivod, whose expression had changed from one of barely controllable wrath to one that might almost have been resignation. There’s no need for further pretending here, I think. Why did you kill Dr Huukaminaan?”