"I was there once, my lord, when I was much younger."

"Looking for ghosts?"

"Looking for treasures of the ancients, to decorate my mansion-house. I found very little. The place must have been well plundered when it fell."

"You had no fears, then, of looting a haunted city?"

Nascimonte shrugged. "I knew the legends. I was younger, and not very timid."

"Speak with Ermanar," Valentine said, "and introduce yourself as one who has been to Velalisier and lived to tell the tale. Can you guide us through it?"

"My memories of the place are forty years old, my lord. But I’ll do my best."

Studying the patchy, incomplete maps Ermanar provided, Valentine concluded that the only road that would not take them perilously near the army waiting by the lake would in fact bring them almost to the edge of the ruined city, if not actually into it. He would not regret that. The Velalisier ruins, however much they terrified the credulous, were by all reports a noble sight; and besides, Dominin Barjazid was unlikely to have troops waiting for him out there. The detour could be turned to advantage, if the false Coronal expected Valentine to take the predictable route up the Glayge: perhaps, if desert travel did not prove too taxing, they might be able to keep away from the river much of the way north, and gain the benefit of some surprise as they turned at last toward Castle Mount.

Let Velalisier produce what ghosts it may, Valentine thought. Better to dine with phantoms than to march down Lumanzar Ridge into the jaws of Barjazid’s mollitors.

THE ROAD AWAY FROM the lake led through increasingly more arid terrain. The thick dark alluvial soil of the flood-plain gave way to light, gritty, brick-red stuff that supported a skimpy population of gnarled and thorny plants. The road grew rougher here, no longer paved, just an irregular gravel-strewn track winding gradually upward into the low hills that divided the Roghoiz district from the desert of Velalisier Plain.

Ermanar sent out scouts, hoping to find a passable road on the lakeward side of the hills and thus avoid having to approach the ruined city. There was none, nothing but a few hunters’ trails crossing country too rugged for their vehicles. Over the hills it was, then, and down into the haunted regions beyond.

In late afternoon they began the descent of the far side. Heavy clouds were gathering — the trailing edge, perhaps, of some storm system now buffeting the upper Glayge Valley — and sunset, when it came, spread over the western sky like a great bloody stain. Just before darkness a rift appeared in the overcast and a triple beam of dark red light burst through, illuminating the plain, bathing in strange dreamlike radiance the sprawling immensity of the Velalisier ruins.

Great blocks of blue stone littered the landscape. A mighty wall of shaped monoliths, two and in some places three courses high, ran for more than a mile at the western edge of the city, ending abruptly in a heap of tumbled stone cubes. Closer at hand the outlines of vast shattered buildings still were visible, a whole forum of palaces and courtyards and basilicas and temples, half buried in the drifting sands of the plain. To the east rose a row of six colossal narrow-based sharp-topped pyramids set close together in a straight line, and the stump of a seventh, which had been dismantled apparently with furious energy, for its fragments lay strewn across a wide arc around it. Just ahead, where the mountain road made its entry into the city, were two broad stone platforms, eight or ten feet above the surface of the plain and wide enough for the maneuvers of a substantial army. In the distance Valentine saw the huge oval form of what might have been an arena, high-walled, many-windowed, breached at one end by a rough ragged gap. The scale of everything was astonishing, that and the enormous area. This place made the nameless ruins on the other side of the Labyrinth, where Duke Nascimonte had first found them, seem trivial indeed.

The rift in the clouds suddenly closed. The last daylight disappeared; the destroyed city became a place of mere formless confusion, chaotic humps against the desert skyline, as night descended.

Nascimonte said, "The road, my lord, runs between those platforms, through the group of buildings just behind them, and around the six pyramids, going out by the northeast side. It will be difficult to follow in the dark, even by moonlight."

"We won’t try to follow it in the dark. We’ll camp here and go through in the morning. I plan to explore the ruins tonight, as long as we’re here." That brought a grunt and a muffled cough from Ermanar. Valentine glanced at the little officer, whose face was drawn and bleak. "Courage," he murmured. "I think the ghosts will let us be, this evening."

"My lord, this is not a joking matter for me."

"I mean no mockery, Ermanar."

"You will go into the ruins alone?"

"Alone? No, I don’t think so. Deliamber, will you accompany me? Sleet? Carabella? Zalzan Kavol? And you, Nascimonte — you’ve survived them once; you have less to fear in there than any of us. What do you say?"

The bandit chieftain smiled. "I am yours to command, Lord Valentine."

"Good. And you, Lisamon?"

"Of course, my lord."

"Then we have a party of seven explorers. We’ll set out after dinner."

"Eight explorers, my lord," said Ermanar quietly.

Valentine frowned. "There’s scarcely any need for—"

"My lord, I swore to remain at your side until the Castle is yours again. If you go into the dead city, I go into the dead city with you. If the dangers are unreal, there is nothing to fear, and if they are real, my place is with you. Please, my lord."

Ermanar seemed entirely sincere. His face was tense, his expression strained, but more, Valentine thought, out of concern that he might be excluded from the expedition than out of fear of what might lurk in the ruins.

"Very well," said Valentine. "A party of eight." The moon was nearly full that evening, and its cold brilliant light illuminated the city in fine detail, mercilessly revealing the effects of thousands of years of abandonment in a way that the softer, more fantastical red glow of twilight had not. At the entrance, a worn and nearly illegible marker proclaimed Velalisier to be a royal historic preserve, by order of Lord Siminave the Coronal and the Pontifex Calintane. But they had ruled some five thousand years ago, and it did not seem as though much maintenance had been practiced here since their day. The stones of the two great platforms that flanked the road were cracked and uneven. In the furrows between them grew small ropy-stemmed weeds that with irresistible patience were prying the huge blocks apart: already in some places canyons were opening between block and block, wide enough for sizable shrubs to have taken root. Conceivably in another century or two a forest of twisted woody vegetation would hold possession of these platforms and the mighty square blocks would be wholly lost to view.

Valentine said, "All this must be cleared away. I’ll have the ruins restored to the way they were before this overgrowth began to sprout. How could such neglect have been permitted?"

"No one cares about this place," said Ermanar. "No one will lift a finger for this place."

"Because of the ghosts?" Valentine asked.

"Because it’s Metamorph," Nascimonte said. "That makes it doubly accursed."

"Doubly?"

"You don’t know the story, my lord?"

"Tell me."

Nascimonte said, "This is the legend I was raised on, at any rate. When the Metamorphs ruled Majipoor, Velalisier was their capital, oh, twenty, twenty-five thousand years ago. It was the greatest city on the planet. Two or three million of them lived here, and from all over Alhanroel came people of the outlying tribes, bringing tribute. They held Shapeshifter festivals on top of these platforms, and every thousand years they held a special festival, a superfestival, and to mark each of those they built a pyramid, so the city was at least seven thousand years old. But evil took hold here. I don’t know what sort of things a Metamorph would regard as evil, but whatever they were, they were practiced here. This was the capital city of all abominations. And the Metamorphs of the provinces grew disgusted, and then they grew outraged, and one day they marched in here and smashed the temples and pulled down most of the city walls and destroyed the places where the evils were practiced and drove the citizens into exile and slavery. We know they weren’t massacred, because there’s been plenty of treasure-digging here — I’ve done a little of it myself, as you know — and if there were a few million skeletons buried here, they’d have been found. So the place was torn apart and abandoned, long before the first humans came here, and a curse was put on it. The rivers that fed the city were dammed and diverted. The entire plain became a desert. And for fifteen thousand years no one has lived here except the ghosts of those who died when the city was destroyed."