The archaeologist, lighting a hand torch, entered the opening in the ground. The descent was steep, via a series of precisely chiseled earthen steps that took them downward nine or ten feet. Then, abruptly, the subterranean passageway leveled off. Here there was a flagstone floor made of broad slabs hewn from some glossy green rock. Magadone Sambisa flashed her light at one and Valentine saw that it bore carved glyphs, runes of some kind, reminiscent of those he had seen in the paving of the grand ceremonial boulevard that ran past the royal palace.
“This is our great discovery,” she said. “There are shrines, previously unknown and unsuspected, under each of the seven pyramids. We were working near the Third Pyramid about six months ago, trying to stabilize its foundation, when we stumbled on the first one. It had been plundered, very probably in antiquity. But it was an exciting find all the same, and immediately we went looking for similar shrines beneath the other five intact pyramids. And found them: also plundered. For the time being we didn’t bother to go digging for the shrine of the Seventh Pyramid. We assumed that there was no hope of finding anything interesting there, that it must have been looted at the time the pyramid was destroyed. But then Huukaminaan and I decided that we might as well check it out too, and we put down this trench that we’ve been walking through. Within a day or so we reached this flagstone paving. Come.”
They went deeper in, entering a carefully constructed tunnel just about wide enough for four people to stand in it abreast. Its walls were fashioned of thin slabs of black stone laid sideways like so many stacked books, leading upward to a vaulted roof of the same stone that tapered into a series of pointed arches. The craftsmanship was very fine, and distinctly archaic in appearance. The air in the tunnel was hot and musty and dry, ancient air, lifeless air. It had a stale, dead taste in Valentine’s nostrils.
“We call this kind of underground vault a processional hypogeum,” Magadone Sambisa explained. “Probably it was used by priests carrying offerings to the shrine of the pyramid.”
Her torch cast a spreading circlet of pallid light that allowed Valentine to perceive a wall of finely dressed white stone blocking the path just ahead of them. “Is that the foundation of the pyramid we’re looking at?” he asked.
“No. What we see here is the wall of the shrine, nestling against the pyramid’s base. The pyramid itself is on the far side of it. The other shrines were located right up against their pyramids in the same way. The difference is that all the others had been smashed open. This one has apparently never been breached.”
Valentine whistled softly. “And what do you think is inside it?”
“We don’t have any idea. We were putting off opening it, waiting for Lord Hissune to return from his processional in Zimroel, so that you and he could be on hand when we broke through the wall. But then—the murder—”
“Yes,” Valentine said soberly. And, after a moment: “How strange that the destroyers of the city demolished the Seventh Pyramid so thoroughly, but left the shrine beneath it intact! You’d think they would have made a clean sweep of the place.”
“Perhaps there was something walled up in the shrine that they didn’t want to go near, eh? It’s a thought, anyway. We may never know the truth, even after we open it. If we open it.”
“If?”
“There may be problems about that, majesty. Political problems, I mean. We need to discuss them. But this isn’t the moment for that.”
Valentine nodded. He indicated a row of small indented apertures, perhaps nine inches deep and about a foot high, that had been chiseled in the wall some eighteen inches above ground level. “Were those for putting offerings in?”
“Exactly.” Magadone Sambisa flashed the torch across the row from right to left. “We found microscopic traces of dried flowers in several of them, and potsherds and colored pebbles in others—you can still see them there, actually. And some animal remains.” She hesitated. “And then, in the alcove on the far left—”
The torch came to rest on a star of yellow tape attached to the shallow alcove’s back wall.
Valentine gasped in shock. “There?”
“Huukaminaan’s head, yes. Placed very neatly in the center of the alcove, facing outward. An offering of some sort, I suppose.”
“To whom? To what?”
The archaeologist shrugged and shook her head.
Then, abruptly, she said, “We should go back up now, your majesty. The air down here isn’t good to spend a lot of time in. I simply wanted you to see where the shrine was situated. And where we found the missing part of Dr. Huukaminaan’s body.”
Later in the day, with Nascimonte and Tunigorn and the rest now joining him, Magadone Sambisa showed Valentine the site of the expedition’s other significant discovery: the bizarre cemetery, previously unsuspected, where the ancient inhabitants of Velalisier had buried their dead.
Or, more precisely, had buried certain fragments of their dead. “There doesn’t appear to be a complete body anywhere in the whole graveyard. In every interment we’ve opened, what we’ve found is mere tiny bits—a finger here, an ear there, a lip, a toe. Or some internal organ, even. Each item carefully embalmed, and placed in a beautiful stone casket and buried beneath one of these gravestones. The part for the whole: a kind of metaphorical burial.”
Valentine stared in wonder and astonishment.
The twenty-thousand-year-old Metamorph cemetery was one of the strangest sights he had seen in all his years of exploring the myriad wondrous strangenesses that Majipoor had to offer.
It covered an area hardly more than a hundred feet long and sixty feet wide, off in a lonely zone of dunes and weeds a short way beyond the end of one of the north-south flagstone boulevards. In that small plot of land there might have been ten thousand graves, all jammed together. A small stela of brown sandstone, a hand’s-width broad and about fifteen inches high, jutted upward from each of the grave plots. And each of them crowded in upon the ones adjacent to it in a higgledy-piggledy fashion so that the cemetery was a dense agglomeration of slender close-set gravestones, tilting this way and that in a manner that utterly befuddled the eye.
At one time every stone must have lovingly been set in a vertical position above the casket containing the bit of the departed that had been chosen for interment here. But the Metamorphs of Velalisier had evidently gone on jamming more and more burials into this little funereal zone over the course of centuries, until each grave overlapped the next in the most chaotic manner. Dozens of them were packed into every square yard of terrain.
As the headstones continued to be crammed one against another without heed for the damage that each new burial was doing to the tombs already in place, the older ones were pushed out of perpendicular by their new neighbors. The slender stones all leaned precariously one way and another, looking the way a forest might after some monstrous storm had passed through, or after the ground beneath it had been bent and buckled by the force of some terrible earthquake. They all stood at crazy angles now, no two slanting in the same direction.
On each of these narrow headstones a single elegant glyph was carved precisely one-third of the way from the top, an intricately patterned whorl of the sort found in other zones of the city. No symbol seemed like any other one. Did they represent the names of the deceased? Prayers to some long-forgotten god?
“We hadn’t any idea that this was here,” Magadone Sambisa said. “This is the first burial site that’s ever been discovered in Velalisier.”
“I’ll testify to that,” Nascimonte said, with a great jovial wink. “I did a little digging here myself, you know, long ago. Tomb-hunting, looking for buried treasure that I might be able to sell somewhere, during the time I was forced from my land in the reign of the false Lord Valentine and living like a bandit in this desert. But not a single grave did any of us come upon then. Not one.”
“Nor did we detect any, though we tried,” said Magadone Sambisa. “When we found this place it was only by sheer luck. It was hidden deep under th
e dunes, ten, twelve, twenty feet below the surface of the sand. No one suspected it was here. But one day last winter a terrific whirlwind swept across the valley and hovered right up over this part of the city for half an hour, and by the time it was done whirling the whole dune had been picked up and tossed elsewhere and this amazing collection of gravestones lay exposed. Here. Look.”
She knelt and brushed a thin coating of sand away from the base of a gravestone just in front of her. In moments the upper lid of a small box made of polished gray stone came into view. She pried it free and set it to one side.
Tunigorn made a sound of disgust. Valentine, peering down, saw a thing like a curling scrap of dark leather lying within the box.
“They’re all like this,” said Magadone Sambisa. “Symbolic burial, taking up a minimum of space. An efficient system, considering what a huge population Velalisier must have had in its prime. One tiny bit of the dead person’s body buried here, preserved so artfully that it’s still in pretty good condition even after all these thousands of years. The rest of it exposed on the hills outside town, for all we know, to be consumed by natural processes of decay. A Piurivar corpse would decay very swiftly. We’d find no traces, after all this time.”
“How does that compare with present-day Shapeshifter burial practices?” Mirigant asked.
Magadone Sambisa looked at him oddly. “We know next to nothing about present-day Piurivar burial practices. They’re a pretty secretive race, you know. They’ve never chosen to tell us anything about such things and evidently we’ve been too polite to ask, because there’s hardly a thing on record about it. Hardly a thing.”
“You have Shapeshifter scientists on your own staff,” Tunigorn said. “Surely it wouldn’t be impolite to consult your own associates about something like that. What’s the point of training Shapeshifters to be archaeologists if you’re going to be too sensitive of their feelings to make any use of their knowledge of their own people’s ways?”
“As a matter of fact,” said Magadone Sambisa, “I did discuss this find with Dr. Huukaminaan not long after it was uncovered. The layout of the place, the density of the burials, seemed pretty startling to him. But he didn’t seem at all surprised by the concept of burial of body parts instead of entire bodies. He gave me to understand what had been done here wasn’t all that different in some aspects from things the Piurivars still do today. There wasn’t time just then for him to go into further details, though, and we both let the subject slip. And now—now—”
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 artifact 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 artifacts 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 forever. 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.
Tha
t 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.