The trail to the sacred hunting grounds began right behind the royal palace and rose in five sharp switchbacks to a deep lateral crevice in the mountain wall that was invisible from below; and from there it wound gradually back and forth, up and up, until the canyon rim came into view. The path was much like the one to the cave where the hostages were being kept, rough and rocky and narrow, but not quite as steep. Harpirias found it far less of a challenge, although the snow of a few days before, still mostly unmelted, made the going trickier than it might otherwise have been.

The hunting party had twelve members. Toikella led the way, with the high priest Mankhelm beside him, followed by six husky villagers carrying hunting gear and some sort of holy regalia in a painted wooden box. Harpirias had Korinaam with him to serve as interpreter, and had been permitted also to bring two of the Skandars, presumably as porters, though there was nothing for them to carry.

This part of the canyon rim was higher and more irregular than the one Harpirias had visited earlier. Instead of terminating in a flat broad summit, it appeared to lead to a series of even higher ridges beyond, stretching on and on to the north — a jagged sloping plateau of sorts, no doubt the grazing grounds for the beasts that the king had come here to hunt.

They halted a long while at the transitional point of the canyon wall proper, where it ceased to rise in a straight vertical line but leveled off before beginning its next uneven swoop northward. The village could still be seen from here — just barely, far below — but it would be hidden from view beyond this point.

Here the king stripped off his robes and stood naked, evidently untroubled by the cold, silently looking on while Mankhelm performed a long series of rituals. The priest solemnly arranged twigs and bits of dried grass and scraps of colored leather in patterns on the ground and set fire to them; he built three little cairns of pebbles and muttered words into them; he opened a jug of beer or perhaps some stronger liquor and offered splashes of it to the four quarters of the horizon.

The climax of the rite came when one of the bearers undid a fur blanket that was tied with a thick leather cord, and drew from it a spear of astonishing length and heft that was tipped with a great triangular point of some glassy-looking white stone chipped to razor sharpness. He handed the huge weapon to Mankhelm, who formally raised it aloft with both hands and passed it over to Toikella. As Harpirias looked on in amazement the naked king brandished the mighty spear high over his head, shook it fiercely three times as if he meant to intimidate the gods with it, and delivered himself of a long rumbling war-whoop which reverberated through the mountains with such force that Harpirias expected boulders and whole crags to come crashing down around them.

And this is Majipoor, Harpirias thought, in the thirteenth year of the Pontificate of Taghin Gawad!

The echo of Toikella’s cry died away. The king resumed his robe; the bearers picked up the ceremonial spear and returned it to its fur wrap; the high priest Mankhelm kicked his pebble cairns apart and ground his foot into the charred bits of twigs and grass. Whatever rite had been observed here was done. They were ready, it seemed, to proceed now with the royal hunt itself.

"Look there," Eskenazo Marabaud said. The Skandar was pointing toward a distant high ridge. Harpirias shaded his eyes against the glare of the sky, but his eyes were not as keen as Eskenazo Marabaud’s and he could make out nothing unusual up there.

King Toikella, though, who also had followed the Skandar’s pointing arm, evidently could. He had taken up a peculiar fixed stance, legs far apart, head thrown back, and was studying the ridge in rigid concentration. After a moment a long thick strangled sound of rage came from his throat.

"What do you see?" Harpirias asked Eskenazo Marabaud.

"Figures. Moving about, right at the top."

"I don’t see them."

"Look harder, then, prince. There. There, coming down that ridge."

Harpirias stared. All he saw was tumbled masses of rock. He glanced sideways at Korinaam. The Shapeshifter was looking toward the high ridge in the same intent way as the king, and he was trembling. His hands were knotted together tensely behind his back and his arms from shoulder to wrist were writhing and rippling like a couple of agitated serpents.

Then at last Harpirias made out what the others were seeing: a dark line of diminutive figures, perhaps eight or ten of them, emerging like evil gnomes from sheltered crannies in the fissured rock of the ridge and clambering up toward a kind of natural amphitheater just below the highest point. It "was easier to see them there. They were long-limbed, slender, almost spidery of build — very different in appearance from the thick-set Othinor.

Toikella shook both his clenched fists at them and grunted something.

"What is he saying?" Harpirias asked Korinaam.

"He says, ‘Enemies— enemies—’ "

"The ones who threw the dead hajbaraks into the village, do you think?"

"It could be," the Shapeshifter said. "How should I know?" His voice was faint and remote, and he spoke without taking his eyes from the figures on the heights. His hands still were locked together behind his back and he had not stopped trembling.

Now the enraged king broke from his stasis. Gesturing to the other Othinor to follow him, he launched into a wild upward scramble. There was no longer any kind of path here, only a wide sloping apron covered with rocks and pebbles and the occasional boulder. Toikella, lurching and clawing and scrabbling, slithering up through shallow openings in the rock and often tumbling back down again, moved like a man possessed by dark spirits. It was as though he meant to seize the trespassers with his bare hands and hurl them from the mountain. Mankhelm and the Othinor bearers struggled upward after him, not far behind.

Harpirias had no choice but to climb with them. It would be distinctly unwise to let himself become separated from the royal parry in these mountains.

When he had ascended a hundred paces or so, he looked back and saw that Korinaam had not accompanied him. The Metamorph still stood motionless below, like one who was lost in dreams, peering up at the figures on the far-off ridge.

Angrily Harpirias called to him. "Korinaam? Korinaam! Stay close to me!"

"Yes — I’m coming— coming—"

Harpirias waited for him to catch up. The Skandars had already gone ahead.

He had a better view of the creatures on the upper ridge from here. They were arrayed in a straight line right along the top now, and had gone into a madcap dance, tipping their heads from side to side, waggling their long slender arms, kicking their knees high: a frantic devil-dance of obvious derision and scorn. They were defying Toikella to come and get them.

But Toikella had no hope of getting to them. When he had climbed a little farther Harpirias saw that a steep hidden declivity separated this ridge from the higher one. Toikella and his men had reached it and gone down into it, but from the looks of that sudden slope they would need all day to descend one side of it and come up the other. Their quarry was unlikely to wait for them.

And in fact the Othinor were coming back already. Somber-faced, weary-looking, they moved slowly into view, their heads and then their shoulders and their bodies becoming visible as they rose up out of the chasm.

Harpirias looked up again toward the dancers on the heights. They were gone, or so it seemed to him at first; but then he caught a glimpse of them off toward the left, clearly outlined against the bright sky as they went scampering away over the sharp spine of the ridge.