Tales of Majipoor Read online

  Copyright © Agberg, Ltd 2013

  All rights reserved

  The right of Robert Silverberg to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  First published in Great Britain in 2013 by Gollancz An imprint of the Orion Publishing Group Orion House, 5 Upper St Martin’s Lane, London WC2H 9EA An Hachette UK Company

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  ISBN (Cased) 987 o 575 13005 o

  ISBN (Trade Paperback) 978 0 575 13006 7

  13579 10 8642

  Typeset by Deltatype Ltd, Birkenhead, Merseyside

  Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CRO 4YY

  The Orion Publishing Group’s policy is to use papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products and made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

  www.orionbooks.co.uk

  www.gollancz.co.uk

  FOR WOJTEK

  Who thought of this book before I did

  Acknowledgments

  “The End of the Line,” copyright © 2011 by Agberg, Ltd. First published in Asimov’s Science Fiction.

  “The Book of Changes,” copyright © 2003 by Agberg, Ltd.

  First published in Legends Two.

  “The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn,” copyright © 2011 by Agberg, Ltd. First published in Subterranean.

  “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,” copyright © 2004 by Agberg, Ltd.

  First published in Flights.

  “Dark Times at the Midnight Market,” copyright © 2010 by Agberg, Ltd. First published in Swords and Dark Magic.

  “The Way They Wove the Spells in Sippulgar,” copyright © 2009 by Agberg, Ltd. First published in Fantasy & Science Fiction.

  “The Seventh Shrine,” copyright © 1998 by Agberg, Ltd. First published in Legends.

  Tales of Majipoor, copyright © 2013 by Agberg, Ltd.

  Contents

  1 The End of the Line

  2 The Book of Changes

  3 The Tomb of the Pontifex Dvorn

  4 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

  5 Dark Times at the Midnight Market

  6 The Way They Wove the Spells in Sippulgar

  7 The Seventh Shrine

  Prologue

  They came from Old Earth. They found an enormous planet, a gigantic world which, huge as it was, was suitable for human settlement because of its low gravitational pull. Life abounded there, life of all sorts, including a sparse population of aboriginal humanoids, mysterious shapeshifting forest-dwellers. To the settlers from Old Earth, those natives – the Piurivars, they called themselves, but the Earthmen called them Shapeshifters or Metamorphs – did not seem important. Surely there was room among them on this vast planet for colonists from another world.

  And so the colony was planted. Settlements sprouted and grew, first on the continent called Alhanroel, then on the wild secondary continent of Zimroel, and even some on the desert continent of Suvrael in the sun-blasted south. Life was easy on fertile Majipoor. In the kindly tropical and subtropical climates, the human population grew and grew and grew, and over the course of time other settlers from different worlds came, the reptilian Ghayrogs and the burly four-armed Skandars and the small many-tentacled Vroons, and others besides. What had become a population of thousands expanded to millions – to billions—

  As their little towns grew into large cities and the cities into vast metropolises, the settlers felt the need of a worldwide governmental system. They devised one: a double monarchy, the Pontifex and the Coronal, an emperor and a king, with each Pontifex choosing his successor when his turn came to ascend to the senior title. The Pontifex reigned from a subterranean Labyrinth and rarely was seen by ordinary mortals. His younger colleague, the Coronal, was the public face of the monarchy, eventually coming to establish his court at a sprawling castle atop the colossal peak known as Castle Mount. Somehow the system worked, mostly.

  The years passed. Thousands of years. A civilization of unique complexity evolved on Majipoor.

  There were problems, of course—

  1

  The End of the Line

  “If you really want to learn something about the Shapeshifters,” the District Resident said, “you ought to talk to Mundiveen. He lived among them for about a dozen years, you know.”

  “And where do I find this Mundiveen?” Stiamot asked.

  “Oh, you’ll see him around. Crazy old doctor with a limp. Eccentric, annoying, a mean little man – he stands right out.”

  It was Stiamot’s second day in Domgrave, the largest city – an overgrown town, really – in this obscure corner of northwestern Alhanroel. He had never been in this part of the continent before. No one he knew ever had, either. This was agricultural country, a fertile land of odd greenish soil where a widely spaced series of little settlements, mere scattered specks amidst zones of densely forested wilderness, lay strung out along the saddle that separated massive Mount Haimon from its almost identical twin, the equally imposing Zygnor Peak. The planters here ruled their isolated estates as petty potentates, pretty much doing as they pleased. The region was in its dry time of the year here, when everything that was not irrigated was parched, and the wind out of the west carried the faint salt tang of the distant sea. The only official representative of the government was the District Resident, a fussy, soft-faced man named Kalban Vond, who had been stationed out here for many years, filing all the proper reports on time and stamping all the necessary bureaucratic forms but performing no other significant function.

  But now the Coronal Lord Strelkimar, who had grown increasingly strange and unpredictable in his middle years, had taken into his head to set forth on a grand processional, only the second one of his reign, that would take him on a great loop, starting from the capital city of Stee that sprawled halfway up the slope of the great central Mount and descending into the western lowlands beyond, and through these northwestern provinces, out to the sea via Sintalmond and Michimang, down the coast to the big port of Alaisor, and inland again via a zigzag route through Mesilor and Thilambaluc and Sisivondal back up the flank of the Mount to Stee. It was traditional for the Coronal to get himself out of the capital and display himself to the people of the provinces every few years, Majipoor being so huge that the only way to sustain the plausibility of the world government was to give the populace of each far-flung district the occasional chance to behold the actual person of their king.

  To Stiamot, though, this particular journey was an absurd one. Why, he wondered, bother with these small agricultural settlements, so far apart, ten thousand people here, twenty thousand there, where the government’s writ was so very lightly observed? This was mainly a wilderness territory, after all, with only this handful of plantations interrupting the thick texture of the forests. The Coronal, Stiamot thought, would do better directing his attention to the major cities, and the cities of the other continent, at that, where he had never been. Over there in distant, largely undeveloped Zimroel, in such remote, practically mythical places as Ni-moya and Pidruid and Til-omon, was the Coronal Lord Strelkimar anything more than a name? And what concern did their people have, really, with the decrees and regulations that came forth from Stee? He needed to make his presence felt there, where a huge population gave no more than lip service to the central government. Here, there was little to gain from a visit by the Coronal.

  The chosen route was not without its dangers. The valley towns, Domgrave and Bizfern and Kattikawn and the rest, were mere islands in a trackless realm of forests, and through those forests flitted mysterious band
s of aboriginal Metamorphs, still unpacified, who posed a frequent threat to the nearby human settlements. The Metamorphs constituted a great political problem for the rulers of Majipoor, for in all the thousands of years of human settlement here they had never fully reconciled themselves to the existence of the intruders among them, and now seemed to be growing increasingly restive. There were constant rumors that some great Metamorph insurrection was being planned; and, if that was so, this would be the place to launch it. Nowhere else on the continent of Alhanroel were humans and Metamorphs so closely interwoven. It was not impossible that the Coronal’s life would be at risk here.

  But it was not Stiamot’s place to set royal policy, or even to quarrel with it, only to see that it was carried out. He was one of the most trusted members of the Coronal’s inner circle, which was not saying much, for Strelkimar had never been an extraordinarily trusting man and had grown more and more secretive as time went along. Possibly the irregular way he had come to the throne had something to do with that, the setting aside of his kindly, foolish, ineffectual cousin Lord Thrykeld, a virtual coup d’etat. In any case, a counsellor who contradicted the Coronal was not likely to remain a counsellor very long; and so, when Strelkimar said, “I will go to Alaisor by way of Zygnor Peak and Mount Haimon, and you will precede me and prepare the way,” Stiamot did not presume to question the wisdom of the route. He was not a weak or a passive man, but he was a loyal one, and he was the Coronal’s right hand, who would never even consider rising up in opposition to his master.

  And the journey had a special appeal for Stiamot. He was among those at court who had begun to give careful thought to the need for a new policy toward the aboriginal folk. A good first step would be to learn more about them, and he hoped to do that by coming here.

  They had always fascinated him, anyway: their silent, stealthy ways, their aloof and unreadable natures, their customs and religious ideas, and, above all, their biologically baffling gift of shapeshifting. He had spent the past several years gathering whatever information he could about them, striving to know them, to get inside their minds. Without that, what sort of settling of accounts with them could be achieved? But he had never managed any real understanding of them. He knew some words of their language, he had collected a few of their paintings and carvings, he had read what he could find of what had been written about them, and still he stood entirely outside them. They remained as alien to him as they had been when, as a small boy, he had first heard that there existed on Majipoor a race of strange beings that once had had exclusive possession of the vast planet, long before the first humans had ever come to it.

  There were no Metamorphs in Stee or any of the other cities in the capital territory, of course, but Stiamot, traveling through the land on this or that mission for the Coronal, had had a few brief glimpses of them. And once, when the Coronal had journeyed down to the Labyrinth to confer with the senior monarch, the Pontifex Gherivale, Stiamot had taken the opportunity to visit the nearby ruins of the ancient Metamorph capital of Velalisier, and quite a wondrous time he had had among those stone temples and pyramids and sacrificial altars. Out here in the hinterlands he hoped for a chance to experience the Metamorph culture at close range. And perhaps the eccentric Dr. Mundiveen would consent to serve as his guide.

  Stiamot’s first few days in Domgrave were spent arranging for the Coronal’s arrival, checking out the route he would travel for places of possible risk and seeing to it that the Coronal’s lodgings would be not only secure but appropriately comfortable. It was too much to expect luxury in these parts, but a certain degree of magnificence was necessary to remind the local grandees that the ruler of the world was among them. Kalban Vond, the District Resident, offered his own house for the Coronal’s use – no palace, but the closest thing to a stately house that Domgrave could provide, a many-balconied building three stories high with ornate moldings and handsome inlays of decorative woods – and Stiamot set about having it bedecked with such tapestries and carpets and draperies as this very provincial province could supply. He himself commandeered a smaller but nevertheless pleasant house not far from the main highway as his own headquarters. He met with wine-merchants and providers of meat and game. He sent messengers to the prime landholders of the territory, inviting them to the great banquet that the Coronal would hold. In the evenings he dined with the Resident, who managed to produce reasonable fare, if nothing on a par with what Stiamot had become accustomed to at court, and plied him with questions about the region, the climate, the predominant crops, the personalities of the heads of the leading families, and – eventually – about the Metamorph tribes of the forests.

  The Resident, plump and slow-moving and at least twenty years older than Stiamot, was a conventional, cautious man, and beneath his caution Stiamot thought he could detect a weariness, a bleakness of spirit, a thwarted sense that he had hoped for more out of life than a career as District Resident in an unimportant and backward rural district. But he did not seem unintelligent. He listened carefully to Stiamot’s questions and responded in abundant detail, and when Stiamot had returned once too often to the subject of the Metamorphs Kalban Vond said, “You keep coming back to them, don’t you? They must interest you very much.”

  “They do. It’s nothing of an official nature, you understand. Just my own curiosity. We could say that I’m something of a student of them.”

  The Resident’s sleepy blue eyes turned suddenly bright. “A student? What interests you, may I ask, about those sneaky, nasty savages?”

  Stiamot, startled, caught his breath. But he showed his displeasure only by the slightest quirk of his lips. “Is that how you see them?”

  “Most of us do, out here.”

  “Be that as it may, we have to consider that we share the planet with them. They were here first. We thrust ourselves down among them and shoved them aside.”

  “So to speak,” said Kalban Vond primly. “Majipoor’s a big place. There’s plenty of room for both races, wouldn’t you say?” Stiamot managed a faint smile. “I wonder if they see it that way. But in any case, problems are brewing, and it’s necessary to give some thought to them. Our population is growing very rapidly, and I don’t just mean the human population. Ghayrogs – Hjorts – the other non-human groups also—”

  “Room for all,” Kalban Vond said, sounding a little nettled. “A very big world. We’ve lived side by side with them fairly peacefully for thousands of years.”

  “Side by side, yes. And fairly peacefully, I suppose. But, as I say, there are more of us than ever before. The world is big, but it isn’t infinite. And those thousands of years have gone by, and have they become our friends? Are we heading toward any sort of real rapport with them? You know as well as I do that there have been some very unpleasant incidents, and it’s my impression that those incidents are becoming more frequent. They hate us, don’t they? And we fear them. They put up with our settling on their world because they have no choice, and here in this valley you live next door to them wondering how long they’ll continue to maintain the peace. That’s so, isn’t it?”

  “Perhaps you put it a bit extremely,” the Resident said. “Hate – fear—”

  “A moment ago you called them ‘sneaky, nasty savages.’ Which one of us is being extreme? Is that how you usually speak of your friends, Resident?”

  “I never claimed they were my friends, you know,” said Kalban Vond. “You’re the one who used the word.”

  Stiamot could make no response to that. In the chilly silence that followed the Resident turned aside to open a second bottle of wine and refill their bowls. Something of a confrontational tone was creeping into the conversation, and perhaps this was meant as a calming gesture. They were drinking a surprisingly fine wine, a blue one from Stoienzar in the south. Stiamot had never expected to be offered anything so good here, or to have the Resident be so generous with it.

  After a moment he said, a little more gently, “I think we both agree, at any rate, that we’re not m
aking much progress toward developing a more harmonious relationship with them. Not making any at all, in fact. But we need to. As our population grows, so does their resentment of our presence here. If we don’t come to some sort of understanding with them soon, we’ll find ourselves in a state of constant collision with them. Warfare, in fact. I’ve heard the rumors.”

  “Well, Prince Stiamot, at least here we agree.”

  “It can’t be allowed to happen. We need to head it off.”

  “And do you have a plan? Does Lord Strelkimar?”

  “It’s not something his lordship has spoken of with me. But I assure you the Council has been discussing it.”

  Kalman Vond sat up alertly, and his eyes were once again gleaming. All that weariness and self-pitying sadness had fallen from him in a moment. Stiamot saw the man’s unabashed eager excitement: it must seem to him that he was about to be made privy to intimate details of the deliberations of the Council. Sitting here sipping wine with one of the Coronal’s close advisors was surely the biggest thing that had happened to him in all the years since he had been posted to this dreary province, and the thought that he would very shortly be playing host to the Coronal himself in his very own home must be dizzying.

  But no revelations of court deliberations were going to be forthcoming tonight. Stiamot said, “We’ve been speaking about the Metamorphs only in the most general way, so far. Everyone agrees that we need to examine the whole problem much more thoroughly than ever before. And, as I said, my interest in them is a matter of mere personal curiosity. They fascinate me. Now that I find myself in a district where Metamorphs actually live, I hope to get a chance to learn something more about them – some details of their culture, their governmental structure, their religious beliefs, their art—”