The lusavender blight, he learned, had spread somehow into the quarantined unaffected provinces. The stajja harvest was going to be half normal this year. A pest called the wireworm, long thought eradicated, had entered the regions where thuyol, an important forage crop, was grown: ultimately that would threaten the supply of meat. A fungus that attacked grapes had caused widespread dropping of unripe fruit in the wine country of Khyntor and Ni-moya. All of Zimroel now was affected by some sort of agricultural disturbance, except only the area of the remote southwest around the tropical city of Narabal.

Y-Uulisaan, when Valentine had showed him the reports, said gravely. "It will not be contained now.

These are ecologically interlocking events: Zimroel's food supply will be totally disrupted, my lord."

"There are eight billion people in Zimroel!"

"Indeed. And when these blights spread to Alhanroel—?"

Valentine felt a chill. "You think they will?"

"Ah, my lord, I know they will! How many ships go back and forth between the continents each week?

How many birds and even insects make the crossing? The Inner Sea is not that broad, and the Isle and the archipelagos make useful halfway houses." With a strangely serene smile the agricultural expert said, "I tell you, my lord, this cannot be resisted, this cannot be defeated. There will be starvation. There will be plague.

Majipoor will be devoured."

"No. Not so."

"If I could give you comforting words, I would. I have no comfort for you, Lord Valentine."

The Coronal stared intently into Y-Uulisaan's strange eyes. "The Divine has brought this catastrophe upon us," he said. "The Divine will take it from us."

"Perhaps. But not before there has been great damage. My lord, I ask permission to withdraw. May I study these papers an hour or so?"

When Y-Uulisaan had gone, Valentine sat quietly for a time, thinking through one last time the thing that he was intending to do, and which now seemed more urgent than ever, in the face of these calamitous new reports. Then he summoned Sleet and Tunigorn and Deliamber.

"I mean to change the route of the processional," he said without preamble.

They looked warily toward one another, as though they had been expecting for weeks some such sort of troublesome surprise.

"We will not go on to Ni-moya at this time. Cancel all arrangements for Ni-moya and beyond." He saw them staring at him in a tense and somber way, and knew he would not win their support without a struggle.

"On the Isle of Sleep," he continued, "it was made manifest to me that the blights that have come upon Zimroel, and which may before long come upon Alhanroel as well, are a direct demonstration of the displeasure of the Divine. You, Deliamber, raised that point with me long ago, when we were at the Velalisier ruins, and you suggested that the troubles of the realm that had grown from the usurpation of my throne might be the beginning of the retribution for the suppression of the Metamorphs. We have gone a long way here on Majipoor, you said, without paying the price for the original sin of the conquerors, and now chaos was upon us because the past was starting to send us its reckoning at last, with compound interest added."