The man rose. He looked terrified. Brusquely Ermanar and Nascimonte checked him for weapons and found none.

"Who are you?" Valentine asked. "What are you doing here?"

No reply.

"You can speak. We won’t harm you. You have the starburst on your arm. Are you part of the Coronal’s forces?"

A nod.

"Sent out here to trail us?"

Again a nod.

"Do you know who I am?"

The man stared silently at Valentine.

"Are you able to speak?" Valentine asked. "Do you have a voice? Say something. Anything."

"I— if I—"

"Good. You can talk. Again: do you know who I am?"

In a thin whisper the captive replied, "They say you would steal the throne from the Coronal."

"No," Valentine said. "You have it wrong, fellow. The thief is he who sits now on Castle Mount. I am Lord Valentine, and I demand your allegiance."

The man stared, bewildered, uncomprehending.

"How many of you were up there?" Valentine asked.

"Please, sir—"

"How many?" Sullen silence.

"Let me twist his arm a little," Lisamon Hultin begged.

"That won’t be necessary." Valentine moved closer to the cowering man and said gently, "You understand nothing of this, but all will be made clear in time. I am the true Coronal, and by the oath you swore to serve me, I ask you now to answer. How many of you were up there?"

Conflicts raged in the man’s face. Slowly, reluctantly, be-wilderedly, he replied, "Just two of us, sir."

"Can I believe that?"

"By the Lady, sir!"

"Two of you. All right. How long were you following us?"

"Since — since Lumanzar."

"Under what orders?"

Hesitation again. "To — to observe your movements and report to camp in the morning."

Ermanar scowled. "Which means that other one is probably halfway to the lake by now."

"You think so?"

It was the rough, harsh voice of Zalzan Kavol. The Skandar strode into their midst and dumped down before Valentine, as though it were a sack of vegetables, the body of a second figure wearing the starburst emblem. Zalzan Kavol’s energy-thrower had seared a hole through him from back to front. "I chased him about half a mile, my lord. A quick devil he was, too! He was moving more easily than I over the heaps of stones, and starting to pull away from me. I ordered him to stop, but he kept going, and so—"

"Bury him somewhere off the path," Valentine said curtly.

"My lord? Did I do wrong to kill him?"

"You had no choice," Valentine said in a softer tone. "I wish you had managed to catch him. But you couldn’t, so you had no choice. Very well, Zalzan Kavol."

Valentine turned away. The slaying had shaken him, and he could hardly pretend otherwise. This man had died only because he was loyal to the Coronal, or to the person he believed to be the Coronal.

The civil war had had its first casualty. The bloodshed had begun, here in this city of the dead.

—4—

THERE WAS NO THOUGHT of continuing the tour now. They returned with the prisoner to their camp. And in the morning Valentine gave orders to move on through Velalisier and begin the northeastward swing.

By day the ruined city seemed not as magical, although no less impressive. It was hard to understand how so frail and unmechanical a folk as the Metamorphs had ever moved these giant blocks of stone about; but perhaps twenty thousand years ago they had not been quite so unmechanical. The glowering Shapeshifters of the Piurifayne forests, those people of wicker huts and muddy streets, were only the broken remnant of the race that once had ruled Majipoor.

Valentine vowed to return here, once this business with Dominin Barjazid was settled, and explore the ancient capital in detail, clearing underbrush and excavating and reconstructing. If possible, he thought, he would invite Metamorph leaders to take part in that work — though he doubted they would care to cooperate. Something was needed to reopen lines of communication between the two populations of the planet.

"If I am Coronal again," he said to Carabella as the cavalcade rode past the pyramids and headed out of Velalisier, "I intend—"

"When you are Coronal again," she said.

Valentine smiled. "When I am Coronal again, yes. I intend to examine the entire problem of the Metamorphs. Bring them back into the mainstream of Majipooran life, if that can be done. Give them a place in the government, even."

"If they’ll have it."

"I mean to overcome that anger of theirs," said Valentine. "I’ll dedicate my reign to it. Our entire society, our wonderful and harmonious and loving realm, was founded on an act of theft and injustice, Carabella, and we’ve succeeded in teaching ourselves to overlook that."

Sleet glanced up. "The Shapeshifters weren’t making full use of this planet. There weren’t twenty million of them on the entire enormous place when our ancestors came here."

"But it was theirs!" Carabella cried. "By what right—"

"Easily, easily," Valentine said. "There’s no use fighting over the deeds of the first settlers. What’s done is done, and we must live with it. But it’s within our power to change the way we’ve been living with it, and if I’m Coronal again, I—"

"When," said Carabella.

"When," Valentine echoed.

Deliamber said mildly, in that far-off way of his that gained the immediate attention of all listeners, "It may be that the present troubles of the realm are the beginning of the retribution for the suppression of the Metamorphs."

Valentine stared at him. "What do you mean by that?"

"Only that we have gone a long way, here on Majipoor, without paying any sort of price for the original sin of the conquerors. The account accumulates interest, you know. And now this usurpation, the evils of the new Coronal, the prospect facing us of war, death and destruction, chaos — perhaps the past is starting to send us its reckoning at last."

"But Valentine had nothing to do with the oppression of the Metamorphs," Carabella protested. "Why should he be the one to suffer? Why was he chosen to be cast down from power, and not some high-handed Coronal of long ago?"

Deliamber shrugged. "Such things are never fairly distributed. What makes you think that only the guilty are punished?"

"The Divine—"

"Why do you think the Divine is fair? In the long run, all wrongs are righted, every minus is balanced with a plus, the columns are totaled and the totals are found correct. But that’s in the long run. We must live in the short run, and matters are often unjust there. The compensating forces of the universe make all the accounts come out even, but they grind down the good as well as the wicked in the process."

"More than that," said Valentine suddenly. "It may be that I was chosen to be an instrument of Deliamber’s compensating forces, and it was necessary for me to suffer in order to be effective."

"How so?"

"If nothing unusual had ever happened to me, I might have ruled like all the others before me on Castle Mount, self-satisfied, amiable, accepting things as they were because from where I sat I saw no wrong in them. But these adventures of mine have given me a view of the world I’d never have had if I had remained snug in the Castle. And perhaps now I’m ready to play the role that needs to be played, whereas otherwise—" Valentine let his voice trail away. After a moment he said, "All this talk is mere vapor. The first thing to do is regain the Castle. Then we can debate the nature of the compensating forces of the universe and the tactics of the Divine."

He looked back at fallen Velalisier, the accursed city of the ancients, chaotic but yet magnificent on the forlorn desert plain. And then he turned away to sit in silence and contemplate the changing countryside ahead.

The road now curved about sharply toward the northeast, passing up and over the range of hills they had crossed to the south, and descending into the fertile flood-plain of the Glayge near the northernmost limb of Lake Roghoiz. They were emerging hundreds of miles north of the field where the Coronal’s army had been camped.