To reinforce this, Asenhart sent purchasing agents through the wharfside district the first day, buying quantities of glue and sailcloth and spices and tools and the like. Meanwhile Valentine and his company covertly took lodgings in an unassuming commercial hotel.

Stoien was predominantly a maritime city — export-import, warehousing, shipbuilding, all the occupations and enterprises that go with a prime coastal location and a superb harbor. The city, of some fourteen million souls, spread for hundreds of miles along the rim of the great promontory that divided the Gulf of Stoien from the main body of the Inner Sea. It was not the mainland port closest to the Isle — that was Alaisor, far up Alhanroel’s coast, thousands of miles to the north — but at this season, prevailing winds and currents being what they were, it was quicker to make the long journey down to Stoien than to brave the shorter but rougher crossing due east to Alaisor.

After pausing here to restock the ships, they would sail the placid Gulf, going along the north shore of the huge Stoienzar Peninsula in tropic ease to Kircidane and then up to Treymone, the coastal city nearest the Labyrinth. It would be a relatively short overland trek from there to the abode of the Pontifex.

Valentine found Stoien strikingly beautiful. The entire peninsula was altogether flat, hardly twenty feet above sea level at its highest point, but the city-dwellers had devised a wondrous arrangement of platforms of brick faced with white stone to provide the illusion of hills. No two of these platforms were of identical height, some providing an elevation of no more than a dozen feet, others looming hundreds of feet in the air. Whole neighborhoods rose atop giant pedestals several dozen feet high and more than a square mile in area; certain significant buildings had platforms of their own, standing as if on stilts above their surroundings; alternations of high platforms and low ones created eye-jiggling vistas of startling contour.

What might have been an effect of sheerly mechanical whimsy, rapidly coming to seem brutal or arbitrary or fatiguing to behold, was softened and mellowed by tropical plantings unrivaled in Valentine’s experience. At the base of every platform grew dense beds of broad-crowned trees, interlaced branch by branch to form impenetrable cloaks. Leafy vines cascaded over the platform walls. The wide ramps that led from street level to the higher platforms were bordered by generous concrete tubs housing clusters of bushes whose narrow tapered leaves were marked with astonishing splashes of color, claret and cobalt and vermilion and scarlet and indigo and topaz and sapphire and amber and jade hues all mixed together in irregular patterns. And in the great public places of the city were the most startling displays of all, gardens of the famous animate plants that grew wild a few hundred miles to the south, on the torrid coast that looked toward the distant desert continent of Suvrael. These plants — and plants they were, for they manufactured their food by photosynthesis and lived their lives rooted to a single place — had a fleshy look to them, with arms that moved and coiled and grasped, eyes that stared, tubular bodies that undulated and swayed, and though they derived nourishment enough from sunlight and water they were quite willing and able to devour and digest any small creature rash enough to come within their reach. Elegantly arranged groups of them, bordered by low stone walls that served as warnings as well as decorations, were planted everywhere in Stoien. Some were as tall as small trees, others short and globular, still others bushy and angular. All were in constant motion, reacting to breezes, odors, sudden shouts, the voices of their keepers, and other stimuli. Valentine found them sinister but fascinating. He wondered if a collection of them might not be brought to Castle Mount.

"Why not?" Carabella said. "They can be kept alive as side-show displays in Pidruid. There ought to be a way to keep them in good health at Lord Valentine’s Castle."

Valentine nodded. "We’ll hire a staff of keepers out of Stoien. We’ll find out what they eat and have it shipped up to the Mount regularly."

Sleet shuddered. "These creatures give me a creepy feeling, my lord. Do you find them so lovely?"

"Not exactly lovely," said Valentine. "Interesting."

"As I suppose you found the mouthplants, eh?"

"The mouthplants, yes!" Valentine cried. "We’ll bring some of them to the Castle too!"

Sleet groaned.

Valentine paid little notice. His face glowed with sudden enthusiasm. Taking Sleet and Carabella by the hands, he said, "Each Coronal has added something to the Castle: an observatory, a library, a parapet, a battlement of prisms and shields, an armory, a feasting-hall, a trophy-room, reign by reign the Castle growing, changing, becoming richer and more complex. In my short time I had no chance even to think about what I would contribute. But listen: what Coronal has seen Majipoor the way I have? Who has traveled so far, in so turbulent a fashion? To commemorate my adventures I’ll collect the weirdities I’ve seen, the mouthplants and these animate plants and the bladder-trees and a good-sized dwikka or two and a grove of fireshower palms and sensitives and those singing ferns, all the wonders of our journey. There’s nothing like that at the Castle now, only the little glassed-in plant-houses that Lord Confalume built. I’ll do it grandly! Lord Valentine’s garden! How do you like the sound of that?"

"It will be a marvel, my lord," said Carabella.

Sleet said sourly, "I would not care to stroll among the mouthplants of Lord Valentine’s garden, not for three dukedoms and the revenues of Ni-moya and Piliplok."

"We excuse you from garden tours," said Valentine, laughing.

But there would be no garden tours, nor any garden, until Valentine dwelled again in Lord Valentine’s Castle. For an interminable week he idled in Stoien, waiting for Asenhart to complete his provisioning. Three of the ships were going to return to the Isle, bearing the goods bought here for island use; the other four would continue on as Valentine’s surreptitious escort. The Lady had provided him with more than a hundred of her sturdiest bodyguards, under the command of the formidable hierarch Lorivade: not warriors, exactly, for there had not been violence on the Isle of Sleep since the Metamorphs last invaded it thousands of years ago, but these were competent and fearless men and women, loyal to the Lady and ready to give their lives if need be to restore the harmony of the realm. They were the nucleus of a private army — the first such military force, so far as Valentine knew, organized on Majipoor since ancient times.

At last the fleet was ready to depart. The Isle-bound ships left first, early on a warm Twoday morning, heading north-northwest. The others waited until Seaday afternoon, when they sailed on the same course, but swung about after dark to head due east into the Gulf of Stoien.

The Stoienzar Peninsula, long and narrow, jutted like a colossal thumb out of the central mass of Alhanroel. On its southern, or ocean, side it was intolerably hot. There were few settlements on that jungled insect-ridden coast. Most of the peninsula’s considerable population was clustered along the Gulf coast, which had a major city every hundred miles or so and a virtually unbroken line of fishing villages and farming districts and resort towns between. It was early summer now, and a heavy haze of heat lay over the tepid, virtually motionless waters of the Gulf. The fleet paused a day for further provisioning at Kircidane, where the coast began its sweeping northward curve, and then began the crossing to Treymone.

Valentine spent many of the quiet seaward hours alone in his cabin, practicing the use of the circlet the Lady had given him. In a week he mastered the art of entering a light dozing trance — he could slide his mind instantly below the threshold of sleep now, and just as readily emerge from it, all the while staying aware of ongoing events. In the trance-state he was able, although spottily and without much force, to make contact with other minds, to wander out aboard ship and locate the aura of a sleeping soul, sleepers being far more vulnerable to such intrusions than those who were awake. He could lightly touch Carabella’s mind, or Sleet’s, or Shanamir’s, and transmit his own image, or some genial message of good will. Reaching a less familiar mind — that of Pandelon the carpenter, say, or the hierarch Lorivade — was still too hard for him except in the briefest, most fragmentary bursts, and he had no success at all entering minds of nonhuman origin, even ones so well known to him as those of Zalzan Kavol or Khun or Deliamber. But he was still learning. He felt his skills growing day by day, as they had when he first had taken up juggling; and this was juggling of a sort, for to use the circlet he had to occupy a position at the very center of his soul, undistracted by irrelevant thought, and coordinate all aspects of his being toward the single thrust of making contact. By the time the Lady Thlin was in view of Treymone, Valentine had advanced to the level where he could plant the beginnings of dreams, with events and incidents and images, in the minds of his subjects. To Shanamir he sent a dream of Falkynkip, and mounts grazing in a field, and a great gihorna-bird circling overhead, descending in a foolish flapping of mighty wings. At table the next morning the boy described the dream in all details, except only that the bird was a milufta, a carrion-feeder, with bright orange beak and ugly blue claws. "What does it mean, that I would dream of miluftas swooping down?" Shanamir asked, and Valentine said, "Could it be that you misremember the dream, and it was another bird you saw, a gihorna, perhaps, a bird of good omen?" But Shanamir, in that straightforward and innocent way of his, merely shook his head and said, "If I can’t tell a gihorna from a milufta, my lord, even in my sleep, I ought to be back in Falkynkip cleaning out the stables." Valentine looked away, hiding a smile, and resolved to work more diligently on his image-sending technique.