"Take him to some city in the far north," said the false Lord Valentine, "and turn him loose, and let him make his own way upon the world."

The dream would have continued, but Valentine found himself smothering in his sleep, and came up into consciousness to discover Lisamon Hultin sprawled against him with one of her beefy arms over his face. With some effort he freed himself, but then there was no returning to sleep.

In the morning he said nothing to anyone of his dream: it was becoming time, he suspected, to keep the informations of the night to himself, for they were starting to border on affairs of state. This was the second time he had dreamed of having been supplanted as Coronal by Dominin Barjazid, and Carabella, weeks ago, had dreamed that enemies unknown had drugged him and stolen his identity. All these dreams might yet prove to be nothing but fantasy or parable, but Valentine inclined now to doubt that. There was too strong a consistency to them, too frequent a repetition of underlying structures.

And if a Barjazid now wore the starburst crown? What then, what then?

The Valentine of Pidruid would have shrugged and said, No matter, one overlord is the same as another; but the Valentine now sailing from Khyntor to Verf took a more thoughtful view of things. There was a balance of power in this world, a balance carefully designed over a span of thousands of years, a system that had been evolving since Lord Stiamot’s time, or perhaps earlier, out of whatever forgotten polities had ruled Majipoor in the first centuries of the settlement. And in that system an inaccessible Pontifex ruled through the vehicle of a vigorous and dynamic Coronal of his own choosing, with the official known as the King of Dreams functioning to execute the commands of the government and chastise lawbreakers by virtue of his entry into the minds of sleepers, and the Lady of the Isle, mother of the Coronal, contributing a tempering of love and wisdom. There was strength to the system, or else it could not have endured so many thousands of years; under it, Majipoor was a happy and prosperous world, subject, true, to the frailties of flesh and the vagaries of nature, but mainly free of conflict and suffering. What now, Valentine wondered, if a Barjazid of the King’s blood were to put aside a lawfully constituted Coronal and interpose himself in that divinely ordained balance? What harm to the commonwealth, what disruption of public tranquility?

And what might be said of a fallen Coronal who chooses to accept his altered destiny and leaves the usurper unchallenged? Was that not an abdication, and had there ever been an abdication of a Coronal in Majipoor’s history? Would he not thereby become a co-conspirator in Dominin Barjazid’s overthrow of order?

The last of his hesitations were going from him. It had seemed a comical thing, or a bizarre one, to Valentine the juggler when the first hints had come to him that he might be truly Lord Valentine the Coronal. That had been an absurdity, a lunacy, a farce. No longer. The texture of his dreams carried the weight of plausibility. A monstrous thing had happened, indeed. The full import of it was only now coming clear to him. And it was his task, that he must accept without further question, to set things right.

But how? Challenge an incumbent Coronal? Rise up in juggler’s costume to claim Castle Mount?

He spent the morning quietly, giving no hint of his thoughts. Mostly he remained at the rail, staring at the far-off shore. The river’s immensity was beyond his understanding: at some points here it was so wide that no land could be seen, and in other places what Valentine took to be the shore turned out to be islands, themselves of great size, with miles of water between their farther sides and the riverbank. The flow of the river was strong, and the huge riverboat was being swept rapidly along eastward.

The day was bright, and the river rippled and glinted in the sparkling sunlight. In the afternoon a light rain began to fall, out of clouds so compact that the sunlight remained bright around them. The rain increased in intensity and the jugglers were forced to cancel their second performance, to Zalzan Kavol’s great annoyance. They huddled under cover.

That night Valentine took care to sleep beside Carabella, and left the snores of Lisamon Hultin for the Skandars to cope with. He waited almost eagerly for revealing new dreams. But what came to him was useless, the ordinary formless hodgepodge of fantasy and chaos, of nameless streets and unfamiliar faces, of bright lights and garish colors, of absurd disputes, disjointed conversations, and unfocused images, and in the morning the riverboat arrived at the port of Verf on the river’s southern bank.

"THE PROVINCE OF THE METAMORPHS," said Autifon Deliamber, "is named Piurifayne, after the name by which the Metamorphs call themselves in their own language, which is Piurivar. It is bounded on the north by the outlying suburb of Verf, on the west by the Velathys Scarp, on the south by the substantial range of mountains known as the Gonghars, and on the east by the River Steiche, an important tributary of the Zimr. I have beheld each of those boundary zones with my own eyes, though I have never entered Piurifayne itself. To enter is difficult, for the Velathys Scarp is a sheer wall a mile high and three hundred miles long; the Gonghars are storm-swept and disagreeable; and the Steiche is a wild unruly river full of rapids and turbulence. The only rational way in is through Verf and down through Piurifayne Gate."

The jugglers now were only a few miles north of that entrance, having left the drab mercantile city of Verf as quickly as possible. The rain, light but insistent, had continued all morning. The countryside here was unexciting, a place of light sandy soil and dense stands of dwarf trees with pale green bark and narrow, twittering leaves. There was little conversation in the wagon. Sleet seemed lost in meditation, Carabella juggled three red balls obsessively in the mid-cabin space, the Skandars who were not driving engaged in some intricate game played with slivers of ivory and packets of black drole-whiskers, Shanamir dozed, Vinorkis made entries in a journal he carried, Deliamber entertained himself with minor incantations, the lighting of tiny necromantic candles, and other wizardly amusements, and Lisamon Hultin, who had hitched her mount to the team drawing the wagon so that she could come in from the rain, snored like a beached sea-dragon, awakening now and then to gulp a globelet of the cheap gray wine she had bought in Verf.

Valentine sat in a corner, up against a window, thinking of Castle Mount. What could it be like, a mountain thirty miles high? A single stone shaft rising like a colossal tower into the dark night of space? If Velathys Scarp, a mile high, was as Deliamber said an impassable wall, what sort of barrier was a thing thirty times as tall? What shadow did Castle Mount cast when the sun was in the east? A dark stripe running the length of Alhanroel? And how were the cities on its lofty slope provided with warmth, and air to breathe? Some machines of the ancients, Valentine had heard, that manufactured heat and light, and dispensed sweet air, miraculous machines of that forgotten technological era of thousands of years ago, when the old arts brought from Earth still were widely practiced here; but he could no more comprehend how such machines might work than he understood what forces operated the engines of memory in his own mind to tell him that this dark-haired woman was Carabella, this white-haired man Sleet. He thought too of Castle Mount’s highest reaches, and that building of forty thousand rooms at its summit, Lord Valentine’s Castle now, Lord Voriax’ not so long ago. Lord Malibor’s when he was a boy in that childhood he no longer remembered. Lord Valentine’s Castle! Was there really such a place, or was the Castle and its Mount only a fable, a vision, a fantasy such as comes in dreams? Lord Valentine’s Castle! He imagined it clinging to the mountaintop like a coat of paint, a bright splash of color just a few molecules thick, or so it would seem against the titanic scale of that impossible mountain, a splash that coursed irregularly down the flank of the summit in a tentacular way, hundreds of rooms extending on this face, hundreds more on that, a cluster of great chambers extending themselves pseudopod-fashion here, a nest of courtyards and galleries over there. And in its innermost place the Coronal in all grandeur, dark-bearded Lord Valentine, except that the Coronal would not be there now, he would still be making his grand processional through the realm, in Ni-moya by now or some other eastern city. And I, thought Valentine, I once lived on that Mount? Dwelled in that Castle? What did I do, when I was Coronal — what decrees, what appointments, what duties? The whole thing was inconceivable, and yet, and yet, he felt the conviction growing in him, there was fullness and density and substance to the phantom bits of memory that drifted through his mind. He knew now that he had been born not in Ni-moya by the river’s bend, as the false recollections planted in his mind had it, but rather in one of the Fifty Cities high up on the Mount, almost at the verge of the Castle itself, and that he had been reared among the royal caste, among that cadre from which princes were chosen, that his childhood and boyhood had been one of privilege and comfort. He still had no memory of his father, who must have been some high prince of the realm, nor could he recall anything of his mother except that her hair was dark and her skin was swarthy, as his once had been, and — a memory rushed into his awareness out of nowhere — and that she had embraced him a long while one day, weeping a little, before she told him that Voriax had been chosen as Coronal in the place of the drowned Lord Malibor, and she would go thenceforth to live as Lady on the Isle of Sleep. Was there truth to that, or had he imagined it just now? He would have been — Valentine paused, calculating — twenty-two years old, very likely, when Voriax came to power. Would his mother have embraced him at all? Would she have wept, on becoming Lady? Or rather rejoice, that she and her eldest son were chosen Powers of Majipoor? To weep and to rejoice at once, maybe. Valentine shook his head. These mighty scenes, these moments of potent history: would he ever regain access to them, or was he always to labor under the handicap placed upon him by those who had stolen his past?