“Have you ever known sudden changes in the weather to occur this high on Castle Mount?”
Valentine frowned. “Not commonly, no.”
“Not ever,” said Deliamber. “My lord, why is the climate of this region so benign?”
“Why, because it’s controlled from the Castle, artificially generated and governed by the great machines that—”
He broke off, staring in horror.
“Exactly,” Deliamber said.
“No! It’s unthinkable!”
“Think it, my lord.” said the Vroon. “The Mount pierces high into the cold night of space. Above us in the Castle hides a terrified man who holds his throne by treachery, and who has just seen his most trusted generals desert to the side of his enemy. Now an invincible army climbs the summit of the Mount unhindered. How can he keep them from reaching him? Why, shut down the weather-machines and let this sweet air freeze in our lungs, let night fall in an afternoon and the darkness of the void come sweeping over us, turn this Mount back into the lifeless tooth of rock it was ten thousand years ago. Look at the sky, Valentine! Look at the banners in the wind!”
“But a billion people live on the Mount!” Valentine cried. “If he shuts down the weather-machines he destroys them along with us! Himself as well—unless he’s found some way to seal the Castle against the cold.”
“Do you think he cares about his own survival now? He’s doomed in any event. But this way he can bring you down with him—you and everyone else on Castle Mount. Look at the sky, Valentine! Look at it darkening!”
Valentine found himself trembling, not out of fear but in anger that Dominin Barjazid should be willing to destroy all the cities of the Mount in this monstrous final cataclysm, to murder children and babes and mothers with child, and farmers in the fields and merchants in their shops, millions upon millions of the innocent who had no part in this struggle for the Castle. And why this slaughter? Why, merely to vent his rage at having lost what was never rightfully his! Valentine looked toward the sky, hoping to find some sign that this was only some natural phenomenon after all. But that was foolishness. Deliamber was right: on Castle Mount the weather was never a natural phenomenon.
In anguish Valentine said, “We are still far from the Castle. How long will it be before the freezing begins?”
Deliamber shrugged. “When the weather-machines first were constructed, my lord, it took many months before there was air dense enough to support life at these altitudes. Night and day the machines labored, yet it took months. Undoing that work will probably be faster than the doing of it was; but it will need more than an instant, I think.”
“Can we reach the Castle in time to halt it?”
“It will be a close business, my lord,” said the Vroon.
Grim-faced, scowling, Valentine ordered the car to halt and summoned his officers. Elidath’s vehicle, he saw, was already making its way laterally across the plain toward him in advance of the summons: plainly Elidath too had noticed that something was awry. As Valentine stepped from his car he shivered at the first touch of the air—though it was a shiver more of apprehension than of chill, for there was only the lightest hint of cooling thus far. Yet that was sufficiently ominous.
Elidath came running to his side. His expression was bleak. He pointed toward the darkening sky and said, “My lord, the madman is doing the worst!”
“I know. We also see the change beginning.”
“Tunigorn is close below us now, and Stasilaine coming across by the Banglecode side. We must go on toward the Castle as fast as possible.”
“Do you think we’ll have time?” Valentine asked.
Elidath managed a frosty grin. “Little enough to spare. But it’ll be the quickest homeward journey I’ll ever have made.”
Sleet, Carabella, Lisamon Hultin, Asenhart, Ermanar, all were gathered close now, looking wholly mystified. These strangers to Castle Mount perhaps had noted the change in the weather, but had not drawn from it Elidath’s conclusions. They glanced from Valentine to Elidath and back again, troubled, dismayed, knowing that something was amiss but unable to comprehend the nature of it.
Crisply Valentine explained. Their looks of confusion gave way to disbelief, shock, rage, consternation.
“There will be no halt in Bombifale,” Valentine said. “We go straight on to the Castle, via the High Morpin road, and no stopping of any kind between here and there.” He looked toward Ermanar. “There is, I suppose, the possibility of panic among our forces. This must not happen. Assure your troops that we will be safe if only we reach the Castle in time, that panic is fatal and swift action the only hope. Understood? A billion lives depend on how fast we travel now—a billion lives and our own.”
12
This was not the joyous ascent of the Mount that Valentine had imagined. With the victory of Bombifale Plain he had felt a great burden lift from him, for he saw no further barriers standing between him and what he sought. He had envisioned a serene journey to the Inner Cities, a triumphant banquet in Bombifale while the Barjazid cowered in fearful anticipation above, then the climactic entry into the Castle, the seizure of the usurper, the proclamation of restoration, everything unfolding with grand inevitability. But that pleasant fantasy was blasted now. Upward they sped in desperate haste, and the sky grew darker moment by moment, and the wind down from the summit gained in force, and the air became raw and biting. What did they make of these changes, in Bombifale and Peritole and Banglecode, and higher yet in Halanx and the Morpins, and in the Castle itself? Certainly they must realize something hideous was in the making, as all the fair land of Castle Mount suffered under unfamiliar frigid blasts and the balmy afternoon turned into mysterious night. Did they understand the doom that was rushing upon them? What of the Castle folk—were they frantically trying to reach the weather-machines that their mad Coronal had shut down, or did the usurper have them barricaded and guarded, so that death might strike everyone impartially?
Bombifale now was close at hand. Valentine regretted passing it by, for his people had fought hard and were weary; but if they rested now in Bombifale they would rest there forever.
So it was upward and upward through the gathering night. However fast they moved, it was too slow for Valentine, who imagined the terrified crowds gathering in the grand plazas of the cities—vast chaotic hordes of the frightened, weeping, turning to one another, staring at the sky, crying out, “Lord Valentine, save us!” and not even knowing that the dark man to whom they sent their prayers was the instrument of their destruction. In his mind’s eye he saw the people of Castle Mount streaming out by the millions into the roads, beginning a dreadful panicky migration to the lower levels, hopeless, doomed, a frantic useless effort to outrace death. Valentine imagined, too, tongues of piercing wintry air sliding down the slopes, licking at the flawless plants of Tolingar Barrier, chilling the stone birds of Furible, blackening the elegant gardens of Stee and Minimool, turning the canals of Hoikmar to sheets of ice. Eight thousand years in the making, this miracle that was Castle Mount, and it might be destroyed in the twinkling of an eye by the folly of one cold and treacherous soul.
Valentine could reach out and touch Bombifale, so it seemed. Its walls and towers, perfect and heartachingly beautiful even in this strange failing light, beckoned to him. But he went on, and on and on, hastening now on the steep mountain road paved with ancient blocks of red stone. That was Elidath’s car close beside his on the left, and Carabella’s on the right, and not far away rode Sleet, Zalzan Kavol, Ermanar, Lisamon Hultin, and all the hordes of troops he had accumulated on his long journey. All hurried after their lord, not understanding the doom that was coming upon the world but aware that this was a moment of apocalypse when monumental evil stood near to triumph, and only courage, courage and haste, could block its victory.
Onward. Valentine clenched his fists and through sheer power of will tried to force the car higher. Deliamber, beside him, urged him to be calm, to be patient. But how? How, when the very a
ir of Castle Mount was being stripped away molecule by molecule, and the darkest of nights was taking hold?
“Look,” Valentine said. “Those trees that flank the road—the ones that bear the crimson-and-gold flowers? Those are halatingas, planted four hundred years ago. A festival is held at High Morpin when they come into bloom, and thousands of people dance down the road beneath them. And see, see? The leaves are shriveling already, turning black at the edges. They have never known temperatures so low, and the cold has only begun. What will happen to them in eight more hours? And what will happen to the people who loved to dance beneath them? If a mere chill withers the leaves, Deliamber, what will true frost do, and snow? Snow, on Castle Mount! Snow, and worse than snow, when the air is gone, when everything stands naked to the stars, Deliamber—”
“We are not yet lost, my lord. What city is that, now, above us?”
Valentine peered through the deepening shadows. “High Morpin—the pleasure-city, where the games are held.”
“Think of the games that will be held there next month, my lord, to celebrate your restoration.”
Valentine nodded. “Yes,” he said, without irony. “Yes. I will think of the games next month, the laughter, the wine, the flowers on the trees, the songs of the birds. Is there no way to make this thing go faster, Deliamber?”
“It floats,” said the Vroon, “but it will not fly. Be patient. The Castle is near.”
“Hours, yet,” Valentine said sullenly.
He struggled to regain his balance of soul. He reminded himself of Valentine the juggler, that innocent young man buried somewhere within him, standing in the stadium at Pidruid and reducing himself to nothing more than hand and eye, hand and eye, to perform the tricks he had only just learned. Steady, steady, steady, keep to the center of your soul, remember that life is merely a game, a voyage, a brief amusement, that Coronals can be gobbled by sea-dragons and tumbled about in rivers and mocked by pantomiming Metamorphs in a drizzly forest, and what of it? But those were poor consolations now. This was not a matter of one man’s misfortunes, which under the eye of the Divine were trivial enough, though that man had been a king. A billion innocent lives were threatened here, and a work of splendid art, this Mount, that might be unique in all the cosmos. Valentine stared at the deep reaches of the darkening sky, where, he feared, the stars would soon be shining through in afternoon. Stars out there, multitudes of worlds, and in all those worlds was there anything to compare with Castle Mount and the Fifty Cities? And would it all perish in an afternoon?
“High Morpin,” said Valentine. “I had hoped my return to it would be happier.”
“Peace,” Deliamber whispered. “Today we pass it by. Another day you’ll come to it in joy.”
Yes. The shining airy webwork that was High Morpin rose to view on the right, that fantasy-city, that city of play, all wonder and dream, a city spun from wires of gold, or so Valentine had often thought as a boy, looking at its marvelous buildings. He glanced at it now and quickly away. It was ten miles from High Morpin to the perimeter of the Castle—a moment, an eye-blink.
“Does this road have a name?” asked Deliamber.
“The Grand Calintane Highway,” Valentine replied. “A thousand times I traveled it, Deliamber, back and forth to the pleasure-city. The fields beside it are so arranged that something is in bloom on every day of the year, and always in pleasing patterns of color, the yellows beside the blues, the reds far from the oranges, the whites and pinks in the borders, and look now, look at the flowers turning away from us, drooping on their stems—”
“They can be planted again, if the cold destroys them,” said Deliamber. “But there’s time yet. These plants may not be as tender as you think.”
“I feel the cold on them as though it were on my own skin.”
Now they were in the highest reaches of Castle Mount, so far above the plains of Alhanroel that it was almost as though they had attained some other world, or some moon that hovered motionless in the sky of Majipoor.
Everything came to an end here in a fantastic upsweep of sharp-tipped peaks and crags. The summit aimed itself at the stars like a hundred spears, and in the midst of those strangely delicate stony spikes rose the odd rounded hump of the highest place of all, where Lord Stiamot had boldly planted his imperial residence eight thousand years ago in celebration of his conquest of the Metamorphs, and where, ever since, Coronal after Coronal had commemorated his own reign by adding rooms and outbuildings and spires and battlements and parapets. The Castle sprawled incomprehensibly over thousands of acres, a city in itself, a labyrinth more bewildering even than the lairs of the Pontifex. And the Castle lay just ahead.
It was dark now. The cold pitiless splendor of the stars blazed overhead.
“The air must be gone,” Valentine murmured. “The death will come soon, will it not?”
“This is true night, not the calamity,” Deliamber answered. “We have journeyed all day without rest, and you’ve had no sense of the passing of time. The hour is late, Valentine.”
“And the air?”
“Growing colder. Growing thinner. But not yet gone.”
“And there is time?”
“There is time.”
They came around the last stupefying turn in the Calintane Highway. Valentine remembered it well: the turn that whipped at a sharp curve around the neck of the mountain and presented stunned travelers with their first view of the Castle.
Valentine had never seen Deliamber amazed before.
In a hushed voice the wizard said, “What are those buildings, Valentine?”
“The Castle,” he replied.
The Castle, yes. Lord Malibor’s Castle, Lord Voriax’s Castle, Lord Valentine’s Castle. Nowhere could one see the whole structure, or even any significant part of it, but from here, at least, one beheld an awesome segment of it, a great pile of masonry and brick rising in level upon level, in maze upon maze, spiraling round and round upon itself, dancing up the peak in eye-dazzling fashion, sparkling with the glow of a million lights.
Valentine’s fears dissolved, his morbid gloom lifted. At Lord Valentine’s Castle, Lord Valentine could feel no sorrow. He was coming home, and whatever wound had been inflicted upon the world would soon be healed.
The Calintane Highway reached its end at the Dizimaule Plaza, which lay before the Castle’s southern wing, a huge open space paved with cobblestones of green porcelain, with a golden starburst at its center. Here Valentine halted and descended from his car to assemble his officers.
A cold bleak wind was blowing, biting and brisk.
Carabella said, “Are there gates? Will we have to lay siege?”
Valentine smiled and shook his head. “No gates. Who would ever invade the Castle of the Coronal? We simply ride in, through the Dizimaule Arch yonder. But once we’re inside, we may face enemy troops again.”
“The guards of the Castle are in my command,” said Elidath. “I’ll deal with them.”
“Good. Keep moving, keep in touch, trust in the Divine. By morning we’ll gather to celebrate our victory. I swear you that.”
“Long life to Lord Valentine!” Sleet called out.
“Long life! Long life!”
Valentine lifted his arms, both as an acknowledgment and to silence their uproar.
“We celebrate tomorrow,” he said. “Tonight we give battle, and may it be the last!”
13
How strange it felt, finally to be passing under the Dizimaule Arch, and to see the baffling myriad splendors of the Castle before him!
As a boy he had played in these boulevards and avenues, had lost himself in the wonders of the endlessly intertangling passageways and corridors, had stared in awe at the mighty walls and towers and enclosures and vaults. As a young man in the service of Lord Voriax his brother, he had dwelled within the Castle, over yonder in the Pinitor Court, where high officials had their residences, and many a time he had strolled on the parapet of Lord Ossier, with its stupendous view of the Morp
in Plunge and the High Cities. And as Coronal, that brief time he had occupied the innermost zones of the Castle, he had with delight touched the ancient weather-beaten stones of Stiamot Keep, and walked alone through the vast echoing chamber of the Confalume throne-room, and studied the patterns of the stars from Lord Kinniken’s Observatory, and pondered what additions he would make to the Castle himself in years to come. Now that he was back, he realized how much he loved this place, and not merely because it was a symbol of power and imperial grandeur that had been his, but mainly because it was such a fabric of the ages, such a living, breathing weave of history.
“The Castle is ours!” cried Elidath jubilantly as Valentine’s army burst through the unguarded gate.
But what good was that, Valentine thought, if death for all the Mount and its squabbling mortals lay just a few hours away? Already too much time had elapsed since the thinning of the atmosphere had begun. Valentine wanted to reach out, to claw the fleeing air and hold it back.
The deepening chill that now lay like a terrible weight on Castle Mount was nowhere more manifest than in the Castle itself, and those within it, already dazed and bewildered by the events of the civil war, stood like waxen figures, unblinking and numb, shivering and immobile, while the invading parties rushed inward. Some, shrewder or quicker of wit than the others, managed to croak, “Long live Lord Valentine!” as the unfamiliar golden-haired figure rode by; but most behaved as though their minds had already begun to freeze.
The hordes of attackers, flowing inward, moved swiftly and precisely toward the tasks Valentine had assigned. Duke Heitluig and his Bibiroon warriors had charge of seizing control of the Castle perimeter, flushing out and neutralizing any hostile forces. Asenhart and six detachments of valley people had the work of sealing all of the Castle’s many gates, so none of the usurper’s followers might escape. Sleet and Carabella and their troops went upward, toward the imperial halls of the inner sector, to take possession of the seat of government. Valentine himself, with Elidath and Ermanar and their combined forces, set out on the spiraling lower causeway to the vaults where the weather-machines were housed. The rest, under command of Nascimonte, Zalzan Kavol, Shanamir, Lisamon Hultin, and Gorzval, went forth in random streams, spreading out over the Castle in search of Dominin Barjazid, who might be hiding in any of the thousands of rooms, even the meanest.