"May the Divine spare you from that fate," said Valentine, with a faint smile.

"And you, my lord, from the need to meet violence with violence, for I know it is not in your nature,"

responded Sleet, smiling even more faintly. He offered a formal salute. "We will be arriving shortly in Tolaghai," he said, "and I must make a great many arrangements for our accommodations. May I have leave to withdraw, my lord?"

As Sleet moved off down the deck, Valentine stared after him a moment; then, shading his eyes against the harsh blaze of the sun, he stared into the wind at the southern continent, now a dark massive shape sprawling on the horizon.

Suvrael! The name alone evoked a shiver!

He had never expected to come here: the stepchild among Majipoor's continents, forgotten, neglected, a sparsely populated place of barren and forbidding wastelands, almost entirely bleak and arid, so little like the rest of Majipoor as to seem almost like a slice of some other planet. Though millions of people dwelled here, clustered in half a dozen cities scattered through the least uninhabitable regions of the place, Suvrael for centuries had maintained only the most perfunctory of ties with the two main continents. When officials of the central government were sent off for a tour of duty there, they regarded it virtually as a penal sentence.

Few Coronals had ever visited it. Valentine had heard that Lord Tyeveras had been there, on one of his several grand processionals, and he thought that Lord Kinniken once had done the same. And of course there was the famous exploit of Dekkeret, roaming the Desert of Stolen Dreams in the company of the founder of the Barjazid dynasty, but that had happened long before he had become Coronal.

Out of Suvrael came only three things that impinged on the life of Majipoor in any important way. One was wind: out of Suvrael at all months of the year poured a torrent of searing air that fell brutally upon the southern shores of Alhanroel and Zimroel and rendered them nearly as disagreeable as Suvrael itself.

Another was meat: on the western side of the desert continent, mists rising from the sea drifted inland to sustain a vast grassland where cattle were raised for shipment to the other continents. And the third great export of Suvrael was dreams. For a thousand years now the Barjazids had held sway as Powers of the realm from their great domain inland of Tolaghai: with the aid of thought-amplifying devices, whose secret they jealously guarded, they filled the world with their sendings, stern and troublesome infiltrations of the soul that sought and found anyone who had done injury to a fellow citizen, or even was merely contemplating it. In their harsh and austere way the Barjazids were the consciences of the world, and they long had been the rod and the scourge by which the Coronal and the Pontifex and the Lady of the Isle were able to sustain their more benign and gentle mode of government.