“Look, there,” Carabella said. “Is that a trail, Valentine?”
“Perhaps it is,” he said.
“And perhaps not?”
“Perhaps not, yes.”
They had seen hundreds of trails much like it: faint scars on the jungle floor, the unreadable imprints of some former presence, imprints made last month, possibly, or possibly in the time of Lord Dekkeret a thousand years before. An occasional stick planted in the ground, with a bit of feather fastened to it, maybe, or a scrap of ribbon; a row of grooves, as of something having been dragged this way once; or sometimes nothing in any way visible, just a psychic spoor, the mystifying vestigial trace of the passage of intelligent beings. But none of these things ever led them anywhere. Sooner or later the clues dwindled and became imperceptible and only virgin jungle lay ahead.
“Shall we make camp, my lord?” Sleet said.
Neither he nor Carabella had spoken a word yet against this expedition, foolhardy though it must seem to them. Did they understand, Valentine wondered, how urgently he felt the need to consummate his meeting with the Shapeshifter queen? Or was it out of fear of the wrath of king and husband that they kept this obliging silence through these weeks of aimless roaming, when surely they must think his time was better spent in the civilized provinces, coping with whatever awful crisis must be unfolding there? Or were they—worst of all—merely humoring him as he spun his mad way through these dense rain-swept glades? He dared not ask. He wondered only how long he would pursue the quest, despite his gathering conviction that he was never to find Ilirivoyne.
When they were settled for the night he donned the Lady’s silver circlet and thrust himself once again into the trance state, the mind-casting state, and sent his spirit outward across the jungle, seeking Deliamber, seeking Tisana.
He thought it likely that he could reach their minds more easily than any of the others, sensitive as those two were to the witcheries of dreams. But he had tried, night after night, without ever once feeling a flicker of contact. Was distance the problem? Valentine had never attempted long-range mindcasting except with the aid of dream-wine, and he had none of that there. Or perhaps the Metamorphs had some way of intercepting or disrupting his transmissions. Or perhaps his messages were not getting through because those he was sending them to were dead. Or—
—Tisana—Tisana —
—Deliamber—
—This is Valentine calling you —Valentine —Valentine—Valentine—
—Tisana —
—Deliamber —
Nothing.
He tried reaching Tunigorn. Surely Tunigorn still lived, no matter what calamity had overtaken the others; and though his mind was stolid and well defended, nevertheless there was always the hope it might open to one of Valentine’s probes. Or Lisamon’s. Or Zalzan Kavol’s. To touch any of them, to feel the familiar response of a familiar mind—
He went on for a time; and then, sadly, he removed the circlet and restored it to its case. Carabella gave him an inquiring glance. Valentine shook his head and shrugged. “It’s very quiet out there,” he said.
“Except for the rain.”
“Yes. Except for the rain.”
The rain was drumming delicately against the lofty forest canopy once more. Valentine peered gloomily into the jungle, but he saw nothing: the floater’s beam was on, and would stay on all night, but beyond the golden sphere of light that that created lay only a wall of blackness. A thousand Metamorphs might be gathered in a ring around the camp, for all he knew. He wished it were so. Anything—even a surprise attack—would be preferable to these foolish weeks of wandering in an unknown and unknowable wilderness.
How long, he asked himself, am I going to keep this up?
And how are we ever going to find our way out of here, once I decide that this quest is absurd?
He listened somberly to the changing rhythms of the rain until he drifted finally into sleep.
Almost at once, he felt the onset of a dream.
By its intensity and by a certain vividness and warmth he knew it to be no ordinary dream but rather a sending of the Lady, the first he had had since leaving the coast of Gihorna; and yet as he waited for some tangible sign of the presence of his mother in his mind he grew perplexed, for she had not announced herself, and indeed the impulses penetrating his soul seemed to come from another source entirely. The King of Dreams? He too had the power to enter minds from afar, of course; but not even in such strange times as these would the King of Dreams presume to aim his instrument at the Coronal. Who, then? Valentine, watchful even in sleep, scanned the boundaries of his dream, seeking and not finding an answer.
The dream was almost entirely without narrative structure: it was a thing of shapeless forms and silent sounds, creating a sense of event by purely abstract means. But gradually the dream presented him with a cluster of moving images and slippery shifts of mood that became a metaphor for something quite concrete: the writhing, interlacing tentacles of a Vroon.
—Deliamber?
—I am here, my lord.
—Where?
—Here. Close by you. Moving toward you.
That much was communicated not in any kind of speech, mental or otherwise, but entirely through a grammar of shifting patterns of light and mind-state that carried unambiguous meaning. After a while the dream left him, and he lay still, neither awake nor asleep, reflecting on what had come to him; and for the first time in weeks he felt some sense of hope.
In the morning as Sleet was preparing to strike camp Valentine said, “No. I plan to remain here another few days. Or possibly even longer.”
A look of doubt and confusion, instantly suppressed but briefly evident, passed across Sleet’s face. But he merely nodded and went off to tell the Skandars to leave the tents as they were.
Carabella said, “This night has brought you news, my lord. I see that in your face.”
“Deliamber lives. He and the others have been following us, trying to rejoin us. But we’ve been drifting about so much, traveling so quickly—they can’t catch up with us. As soon as they have a fix on us, we head off in some new direction. If we remain in one place they’ll be able to find us.”
“You spoke with the Vroon, then?”
“With his image, with his shadow. But it was the true shadow, the authentic image. He’ll be with us soon.”
And indeed Valentine had no doubt of that. But a day passed, and another, and another. Each night he donned his circlet and sent forth a signal, and had no response. The Skandar guards took to prowling the jungle like restless beasts; Sleet grew tense and fidgety, and went off alone for hours at a time, despite the fear of Metamorphs he claimed to feel. Carabella, seeing matters growing so edgy, suggested that he and she and Valentine do a little juggling, for the sake of old times and to give themselves an amusement so demanding it would draw their minds away from other concerns; but Sleet said he had no heart for it and Valentine, when he agreed at her urging to try it, was so fumble-fingered from lack of practice that he would have abandoned the attempt in the first five minutes, but for Carabella’s insistence. “Of course you’re rusty!” she said. “Do you think the skill stays sharp without some honing? But it comes back, if you work at it. Here, Valentine: catch! Catch! Catch!”