Valentine Pontifex Read online

  “My lord,” he said, “these are stark times in which you come calling on us. But we greet you in all joy, no matter how somber the moment seems. We are mightily in your debt, my lord. All that is ours is yours. And all that we command is at your service.” It was obviously a speech he had prepared with care, and the resonance and smoothness of his delivery showed careful rehearsal. But then the King of Dreams leaned forward until his hard and glittering eyes were only inches from the Coronal’s own, and in a different voice, deeper, more private, he said, “You may have refuge here as long as you wish.”

  Quietly Valentine replied, “You misunderstand, your highness. I have not come here to take refuge, but to seek your aid in the struggle that lies ahead.”

  The King of Dreams seemed startled by that. “Such aid as I can give is yours, of course. But do you truly see any hope that we can fight our way free of the turmoil that assails us? For I must tell you, my lord, that I have looked at the world very closely through this”—he touched his diadem of power—“and I see no hope myself, my lord, none, none at all.”

  AN HOUR BEFORE TWILIGHT the chanting started again down in Ni-moya: thousands or perhaps hundreds of thousands of voices crying out with tremendous force, “Thallimon! Thallimon! Lord Thallimon! Thallimon! Thallimon!” The sound of that fierce jubilant outcry came rolling up the slopes of the outlying Gimbeluc district and swept over the quiet precincts of the Park of Fabulous Beasts like a great unstoppable wave.

  It was the third day since the demonstrations in honor of the newest of the new Coronals had begun, and tonight’s uproar was the most frenzied so far. Very likely it was accompanied by rioting, looting, widespread destruction. But Yarmuz Khitain scarcely cared. This had already been one of the most terrifying days he had experienced in all his long tenure as curator of the park, an assault on everything that he considered proper and rational and sane: why should he now be perturbed over a little noise that some fools were making in the city?

  At dawn that day Yarmuz Khitain had been awakened by a very young assistant curator who told him timidly, “Vingole Nayila has come back, sir. He is waiting at the east gate.”

  “Has he brought much back with him?”

  “Oh, yes, sir! Three transport floaters full, sir!”

  “I’ll be right down,” said Yarmuz Khitain.

  Vingole Nayila, the park’s chief field zoologist, had been exploring for the past five months in the disturbed areas of north central Zimroel. He was not a man of whom Yarmuz Khitain was greatly fond, for he tended to be cocky and overly self-satisfied, and whenever he exposed himself to deadly peril in the pursuit of some elusive beast he made sure that everyone knew just how deadly the peril had been. But professionally he was superb, an extraordinary collector of wild animals, indefatigable, fearless. When news had first begun to arrive that unfamiliar and grotesque creatures were causing havoc in the region between Khyntor and Dulorn, Nayila had lost no time mounting an expedition.

  And a successful one, evidently. When Yarmuz Khitain reached the east gate he saw Nayila strutting busily about on the far side of the energy field that kept intruders out and the rare animals in. Beyond that zone of pink haze Nayila was supervising the unloading of a vast number of wooden containers, from which came all manner of hisses and growls and buzzes and drones and yelps. At the sight of Khitain, Nayila looked across and yelled:

  “Khitain! You won’t believe what I’ve brought back!”

  “Will I want to?” asked Yarmuz Khitain.

  The accessioning process, it seemed, had already begun: the entire staff, such as still remained, had turned out to transport Nayila’s animals in their boxes through the gate and off toward the receiving building, where they could be installed in holding cages until enough was understood about them to allow their release into one of the open habitat ranges. “Careful!” Nayila bellowed, as two men struggling with a massive container nearly let it fall on its side. “If that animal gets loose, we’re all going to be sorry—but you first of all!” Turning to Yarmuz Khitain, he said, “It’s a real horror show. Predators—all predators—teeth like knives, claws like razors—I’m damned if I know how I got back here alive. Half a dozen times I thought I was done for, and me not having even recorded any of this for the Register of Souls. What a waste that would have been, what a waste! But here I am. Come—you’ve got to see these things—!”

  A horror show, yes. All morning long, and on deep into the afternoon. Yarmuz Khitain found himself witness to a procession of the impossible and the hideous and the wholly unacceptable: freaks, monsters, ghastly anomalies.

  “These were running around on the outskirts of Mazadone,” said Nayila, indicating a pair of small furious snarling animals with fiery red eyes and three savagely sharp horns ten inches long rising from their foreheads. Yarmuz Khitain recognized them by their thick reddish fur as haiguses—but never had he seen a haigus with horns, nor any so determinedly vicious. “Nasty little killers,” Nayila said. “I watched them run down a poor blave that had gone wild, and kill it in five minutes by leaping up and goring it in the belly. I bagged them while they were feeding, and then this thing came down to finish off the carcass.” He pointed to a dark-winged canavong with a sinister black beak and a single glowering eye in the center of its distended forehead: an innocent scavenger mysteriously transformed into a thing out of a nightmare. “Have you ever seen anything so ugly?”

  “I would never want to see anything uglier,” said Yarmuz Khitain.

  “But you will. You will. Uglier, meaner, nastier—just watch what comes out of these crates.” Yarmuz Khitain was not sure he wanted to. He had spent all his life with animals—studying them, learning their ways, caring for them. Loving them, in a real sense of the word. But these—these—

  “And then look at this,” Nayila went on. “A miniature dhumkar, maybe a tenth the size of the standard model, and fifty times as quick. It isn’t content to sit there in the sand and poke around with its snout in search of its dinner. No, it’s an evil little fast-moving thing that comes right after you, and would sooner chew your foot off at the ankle than breathe. Or this: a manculain, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Of course. But there are no manculains in Zimroel.”

  “That’s what I thought, too, until I saw this fellow back of Velathys, along the mountain roads. Very similar to the manculains of Stoienzar, is it not? But with at least one difference.” He knelt beside the cage that held the rotund many-legged creature and made a deep rumbling sound at it. The manculain at once rumbled back and began menacingly to stir the long stiletto-like needles that sprouted all over its body, as though it intended to hurl them through the wire mesh at him. Nayila said, “It isn’t content with being covered with spines. The spines are poisonous. One scratch with them and your arm puffs up for a week. I know. I don’t know what would have happened if the spine got in any deeper, and I don’t want to find out. Do you?”

  Yarmuz Khitain shivered. It sickened him to think of these horrendous creatures taking up residence in the Park of Fabulous Beasts, which had been founded long ago as a refuge for those animals, most of them gentle and inoffensive, that had been driven close to extinction by the spread of civilization on Majipoor. Of course the park had a good many predators in its collection, and Yarmuz Khitain had never felt like offering apologies for them: they were the work of the Divine, after all, and if they found it necessary to kill for their meals it was not out of any innate malevolence that they did so. But these—these—

  These animals are evil, he thought. They ought to be destroyed.

  The thought astounded him. Nothing like it had ever crossed his mind before. Animals evil? How could animals be evil? He could say, I think this animal is very ugly, or, I think this animal is very dangerous, but evil? No. No. Animals are not capable of being evil, not even these. The evil has to reside elsewhere: in their creators. No, not even in them. They too have their reasons for setting these beasts loose upon the world, and the reason is not sheer male
volence for its own sake, unless I am greatly mistaken. Where then is the evil? The evil, Khitain told himself, is everywhere, a pervasive thing that slips and slides between the atoms of the air we breathe. It is a universal corruption in which we all participate. Except the animals.

  Except the animals.

  “How is it possible,” Yarmuz Khitain asked, “that the Metamorphs have the skill to breed such things?”

  “The Metamorphs have many skills we’ve never bothered to learn a thing about, it would appear. They’ve been sitting out there in Piurifayne concocting these animals quietly for years, building up their stock of them. Can you imagine what the place where they kept them all must have been like—a horror zoo, monsters only? And now they’ve been kind enough to share them with us.”

  “But can we be certain the animals come from Piurifayne?”

  “I traced the distribution vectors very carefully. The lines radiate outward from the region southwest of Ilirivoyne. This is Metamorph work, no doubt about that. It simply can’t happen that two or three dozen loathsome new kinds of animals would burst onto the scene in Zimroel all at the same time by spontaneous mutation. We know that we’re at war: these are weapons, Khitain.”

  The older man nodded. “I think you’re right.”

  “I’ve saved the worst for last. Come: look at these.”

  In a cage of closely woven metal mesh so fine that he was able to see through its walls, Khitain observed an agitated horde of small winged creatures fluttering angrily about, battering themselves against the sides of the cage, striking it furiously with their leathery black wings, falling back, rising again for another try. They were furry little things about eight inches long, with disproportionately large mouths and beady, glittering red eyes.

  “Dhiims,” said Nayila. “I captured them in a dwikka forest over by Borgax.”

  “Dhiims?” Khitain said hoarsely.

  “Dhiims, yes. Found them feeding on a couple of little forest-brethren that I suppose they’d killed—so busy eating they didn’t see me coming. I knocked them out with my collecting spray and gathered them up. A few of them woke up before I got them all in the box. I’m lucky still to have my fingers, Yarmuz.”

  “I know dhiims,” said Khitain. “They’re two inches long, half an inch wide. These are the size of rats.”

  “Yes. Rats that fly. Rats that eat flesh. Carnivorous giant dhiims, eh? Dhiims that don’t just nibble and nip, dhiims that can strip a forest-brother down to its bones in ten minutes. Aren’t they lovely? Imagine a swarm of them flying into Ni-moya. A million, two million—thick as mosquitos in the air. Sweeping down. Eating everything in their way. A new plague of locusts—flesh-eating locusts—” Khitain felt himself growing very calm. He had seen too much today. His mind was overloaded with horror.

  “They would make life very difficult,” he said mildly. “Yes. Very very difficult, eh? We’d need to dress in suits of armor.” Nayila laughed. “The dhiims are their masterpiece, Khitain. You don’t need bombs when you can launch deadly little flying rodents against your enemy. Eh? Eh?”

  Yarmuz Khitain made no reply. He stared at the cage of frenzied angry dhiims as though he were looking into a pit that reached down to the core of the world.

  From far away he heard the shouting begin “Thallimon! Thallimon! Lord Thallimon!”

  Nayila frowned, cocked an ear, strained to make out the words. “Thallimon? Is that what they’re yelling?”

  “Lord Thallimon,” said Khitain. “The new Coronal. The new new Coronal. He surfaced three days ago, and every night they have a big rally for him outside Nissimorn Prospect.”

  “There was a Thallimon who used to work here. Is this some relative of his?”

  “The same man,” Khitain said.

  Vingole Nayila looked stunned.

  “What? Six months ago he was sweeping dung out of zoo cages, and now he’s Coronal? Is it possible?”

  “Anybody can be Coronal now,” Yarmuz Khitain said placidly. “But only for a week or two, so it seems. Perhaps it will be your turn soon, Vingole.” He chuckled. “Or mine.”

  “How did this happen, Yarmuz?”

  Khitain shrugged. With a wide sweep of his hand he indicated Nayila’s newly collected animals, the snarling three-horned haigus, the dwarf dhumkar, the single-eyed canavong, the dhiims: everything bizarre and frightful, everything taut with dark hunger and rage. “How did any of this happen?” he asked. “If such strangenesses as these are loosed upon the world, why not make dung sweepers into Coronals? First jugglers, then dung sweepers, then zoologists, maybe. Well, why not? How does it sound to you? ‘Vangole! Lord Vingole! All hail Lord Vingole!’ ”

  “Stop it, Yarmuz.”

  “You’ve been off in the forest with your dhiims and your manculains. I’ve had to watch what’s been happening here. I feel very tired, Vangole. I’ve seen too much.”

  “Lord Thallimon! Imagine!”

  “Lord this, Lord that, Lord whoever—a plague of Coronals all month, and a couple of Pontifexes too. They don’t last long. But let’s hope Thallimon does. At least he’s likely to protect the park,” said Khitain.

  “Against what?”

  “Mob attack. There are hungry people down there, and up here we continue to feed the animals. They tell me that agitators in the city are stirring people up to break into the park and butcher everything for meat.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Apparently they are.”

  “But these animals are priceless—irreplaceable—!”

  “Tell that to a starving man, Vingole,” said Khitain quietly.

  Nayila stared at him. “And do you really think this Lord Thallimon is going to hold back the mob, if they decide to attack the park?”

  “He worked here once. He knows the importance of what we have here. He must have had some love for the animals, don’t you think?”

  “He swept out the cages, Yarmuz.”

  “Even so—”

  “He may be hungry himself, Yarmuz.”

  “The situation is bad, but not that desperate. Not yet. And in any case what can be gained by eating a few scrawny sigimoins and dimilions and zampi-doons? One meal, for a few hundred people, at such a cost to science?”

  “Mobs aren’t rational,” Nayila said. “And you overestimate your dung-sweeper Coronal, I suspect. He may have hated this place—hated his job, hated you, hated the animals. Also he may decide that there are political points to be made by leading his supporters up the hill for dinner. He knows how to get through the gates, doesn’t he?”

  “Why—I suppose—”

  “The whole staff does. Where the key-boxes are, how to neutralize the field so that you can pass through—”

  “He wouldn’t!”

  “He may, Yarmuz. Take measures. Arm your people.”

  “Arm them? With what? Do you think I keep weapons here?”

  “This place is unique. Once the animals perish, they’ll never be restored. You have a responsibility, Yarmuz.”

  From the distance—but not, Khitain thought, so distant as before—came the cry: “Thallimon! Lord Thallimon!” Nayila said, “Are they coming, do you think?”

  “He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t.”

  “Thallimon! Lord Thallimon!”

  “It sounds closer,” Nayila said.

  There was a commotion down at the far end of the room. One of the groundkeepers had come running in, breathless, wild-eyed, calling Khitain’s name. “Hundreds of people!” he cried. “Thousands! Heading toward Gimbeluc!”

  Khitain felt panic rising. He looked about at the members of his staff. “Check the gates. Make absolutely sure everything’s shut tight. Then start closing the inner gates—whatever animals are out in the field should be pushed as far to the northern end of the park as possible. They’ll have a better chance to hide in the woods back there. And—”

  “This is not the way,” Vingole Nayila said.

  “What else can we do? I have no weapons, Vingole. I have no
weapons!”

  “I do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I risked my life a thousand times to collect the animals in this park. Especially the ones I brought in today. I intend to defend them.” He turned away from Yarmuz Khitain. “Here! Here, give me a hand with this cage!”

  “What are you doing, Vingole?”

  “Never mind. Go see after your gates.” Without waiting for help, Nayila began to shove the cage of dhi-ims onto the little floater-dolly on which it had been rolled into the building. Khitain suddenly comprehended what weapon it was that Nayila meant to use. He rushed forward, tugging at the younger man’s arm. Nayila easily pushed him aside, and, ignoring Khitain’s hoarse protests, guided the dolly out of the building.

  The invaders from the city, still roaring their leader’s name, sounded closer and closer. The park will be destroyed, Khitain thought, aghast. And yet—if Nayila truly intends—

  No. No. He rushed from the building, peered through the dusk, caught sight of Vingole Nayila far away, down by the east gate. The chanting was much louder now. “Thallimon! Thallimon!”

  Khitain saw the mob, spilling into the broad plaza on the far side of the gate, where each morning the public waited until the hour of opening arrived. That fantastic figure in weird red robes with white trim—that was Thallimon, was it not? Standing atop some sort of palanquin, waving his arms madly, urging the crowd on. The energy field surrounding the park would hold back a few people, or an animal or two, but it was not designed to withstand the thrust of a vast frenzied mob. One did not ordinarily have to worry about vast frenzied mobs here. But now—