"To me also, I'd say. Is Lord Stiamot in the camp?"

"The Coronal is holding a staff meeting. Does he expect you, captain?"

"No," said Eremoil. "But I need to speak with him." The adjutant was undisturbed by that. Staff meetings in the middle of the night, regional commanders turning up unannounced for conferences — well, why not? This was war, and protocols were improvised from day to day. Eremoil followed the man through the camp to an octagonal tent that bore the starburst insignia of the Coronal. A ring of guards surrounded the place, as grim and dedicated-looking as those who had held the mouth of Kattikawn's canyon. There had been four attempts on Lord Stiamot's life in the past eighteen months — all Metamorphs, all thwarted. No Coronal in Majipoor's history had ever died violently, but none had ever waged war, either, before this one.

The adjutant spoke with the commander of the guard; suddenly Eremoil found himself at the center of a knot of armed men, with lights shining maddeningly in his eyes and fingers digging painfully into his arms. For an instant the onslaught astonished him. But then he regained his poise and said, "What is this? I am Group Captain Eremoil."

"Unless you're a Shapeshifter," one of the men said.

"And you think you'd find that out by squeezing me and blinding me with your glare?"

"There are ways," said another.

Eremoil laughed. "None that ever proved reliable. But go on: test me. and do it fast. I must speak with Lord Stiamot."

They did indeed have tests. Someone gave him a strip of green paper and told him to touch his tongue to it. He did, and the paper turned orange. Someone else asked for a snip of his hair, and set fire to it. Eremoil looked on in amazement. It was a month since he had last been to the Coronal's camp, and none of these practices had been employed then; there must have been another assassination attempt, he decided, or else some quack scientist had come among them with these techniques. So far as Eremoil knew, there was no true way to distinguish a Metamorph from an authentic human when the Metamorph had taken on human form, except throush dissection, and he did not propose to submit to that.

"You pass," they said at last. "You can go in."

But they accompanied him. Eremoil's eyes, dazzled already, adjusted with difficulty to the dimness of the Coronal's tent, but after a moment he saw half a dozen figures at the far end, and Lord Stiamot among them. They seemed to be praying. He heard murmured invocations and responses, bits of the old scripture. Was this the sort of staff meetings the Coronal held now? Eremoil went forward and stood a few yards from the group. He knew only one of the Coronal's attendants. Damlang of Bibiroon, who was generally considered second or third in line for the throne; the others did not seem even to be soldiers, for they were older men, in civilian dress, with a soft citified look about them, poets, dream-speakers perhaps, certainly not warriors. But the war was almost over.

The Coronal looked in Eremoil's direction without seeming to notice him.

Eremoil was startled by Lord Stiamot's harried, ragged look. The Coronal had been growing visibly older all through the past three years of the war, but the process seemed to have accelerated now: he appeared shrunken, colorless, frail, his skin parched, his eyes dull. He might have been a hundred years old, and yet he was no older than Eremoil himself, a man in middle life. Eremoil could remember the day Stiamot had come to the throne, and how Stiamot had vowed that day to end the madness of this constant undeclared warfare with the Metamorphs, to collect the planet's ancient natives and remove them from the territories settled by mankind. Only thirty years, and the Coronal looked the better part of a century older; but he had spent his reign in the field, as no Coronal before him had done and probably none after him ever would do, campaigning in the Glayge Valley, in the hotlands of the south, in the dense forests of the northeast, in the rich plains along the Gulf of Stoien, year after year encircling the Shapeshifters with his twenty armies and penning them in camps. And now he was nearly finished with the job, just the guerrillas of the northwest remaining at liberty — a constant struggle, a long fierce life of war, with scarcely time to return to the tender springtime of Castle Mount for the pleasures of the throne. Eremoil had occasionally wondered, as the war went on and on, how Lord Stiamot would respond if the Pontifex should die, and he be called upward to the other kingship and be forced to take up residence in the Labyrinth: would he decline, and retain the Coronal's crown so that he might remain in the field? But the Pontifex was in fine health, so it was said, and here was Lord Stiamot now a tired little old man, looking to be at the edge of the grave himself. Eremoil understood abruptly what Aibil Kattikawn had failed to comprehend, why it was that Lord Stiamot was so eager to bring the final phase of the war to its conclusion regardless of cost.

The Coronal said, "Who do we have there? Is that Finiwain?"

"Eremoil, my lord. In command of the forces carrying out the burning."

"Eremoil. Yes. Eremoil. I recall. Come, sit with us. We are giving thanks to the Divine for the end of the war, Eremoil. These people have come to me from my mother the Lady of the Isle, who guards us in dreams, and we will spend the night in songs of praise and gratitude, for in the morning the circle of fire will be complete. Eh, Eremoil? Come, sit, sing with us. You know the songs to the Lady, don't you?"

Eremoil heard the Coronal's cracked and frayed voice with shock. That faded thread of dry sound was all that remained of his once majestic tone. This hero, this demigod, was withered and ruined by his long campaign; there was nothing left of him; he was a spectre, a shadow. Seeing him like this, Eremoil wondered if Lord Stiamot had ever been the mighty figure of memory, or if perhaps that was only mythmaking and propaganda, and the Coronal had all along been less than met the eye.

Lord Stiamot beckoned. Eremoil reluctantly moved closer.

He thought of what he had come here to say. My lord, there is a man in the path of the fire who will not move and will not allow himself to be moved, and who cannot be moved without the loss of life, and, my lord, he is too fine a man to be destroyed in this way. So I ask you, my lord, to halt the burning, perhaps to devise some alternative strategy, so that we may seize the Metamorphs as they flee the fire zone but do not need to extend the destruction beyond the point it already reaches, because—

No.

He saw the utter impossibility of asking the Coronal to delay the end of the war a single hour. Not for Kattikawn's sake, not for Eremoil's sake, not for the sake of the holy Lady his mother could the burning be halted now, for these were the last days of the war and the Coronal's need to proceed to the end was the overriding force that swept all else before it. Eremoil might try to halt the burning on his own authority, but he could not ask the Coronal for approval.

Lord Stiamot thrust his head toward Eremoil.

"What is it, captain? What bothers you? Here. Sit by me. Sing with us, captain. Raise your voice in thanksgiving."

They began a hymn, some tune Eremoil did not know. He hummed along, improvising a harmony. After that they sang another, and another, and that one Eremoil did know; he sang, but in a hollow and tuneless way. Dawn could not be far off now. Quietly he moved into the shadows and out of the tent. Yes, there was the sun, beginning to cast the first greenish light along the eastern face of Mount Haimon, though it would be an hour or more before its rays climbed the mountain wall and illuminated the doomed valleys to the southwest. Eremoil yearned for a week of sleep. He looked for the adjutant and said, "Will you send a message for me to my subaltern on Zygnor Peak?"