And perhaps there was some sea route out of the southern continent to the Isle, or to Alhanroel, that would take him beyond the zone infested by the unruly sea dragons. Yes. Yes.

So, then: Suvrael. The voyage was a swift one. And now the fleet of Bellatule merchantmen, gliding steadily southward against the scorching wind, began its entry into Tolaghai harbor.

The city baked in the late afternoon heat. It was a dismal place, a featureless clutter of mud-colored buildings a story or two high, stretching on and on along the shore and interminably back toward the ridge of low hills that marked the boundary between the coastal plain and the brutal interior desert. As the royal party was escorted ashore, Carabella glanced at Valentine in consternation. He offered her an encouraging smile, but without much conviction. Castle Mount seemed just then to be not ten thousand miles away, but ten million.

But five magnificent floaters ornamented with bold stripes of purple and yellow, the colors of the King of Dreams, waited in the courtyard of the customs house. Guards in livery of the same colors stood before them; and, as Valentine and Carabella approached, a tall, powerful-looking man with a thick black beard lightly flecked with gray emerged from one of the floaters and began to walk slowly toward them, limping slightly.

Valentine remembered that limp well, for it once had been his. As had the body that the black-bearded man once wore: for this was Dominin Barjazid, the former usurper, by whose orders Lord Valentine had been cast into the body of some unknown golden-haired man so that the Barjazid, taking Valentine's own body for his own, might rule in Valentine's guise on Castle Mount. And the limp was the doing of the young Valentine of long ago, when he had smashed his leg in a foolish accident while riding with Elidath in the pygmy forest by Amblemorn on the Mount.

"My lord, welcome," said Dominin Barjazid with great warmth. "You do us a high honor by this visit, for which we have hoped so many years."

Most submissively he offered Valentine the starburst gesture—with trembling hands, the Coronal observed. Valentine was far from unmoved himself. For it was a strange and disturbing experience once again to see his first body, now in the possession of another. He had not cared to undergo the risk of having that body back, after the defeat of Dominin, but all the same it stirred a mighty confusion in him to see another's soul looking outward through his eyes. And also it stirred him to see the onetime usurper now so wholly redeemed and cleansed of his treasons and so genuine in his hospitality.

There had been some who had wanted Dominin put to death for his crime. But Valentine had never been willing to countenance such talk. Perhaps some barbarian king on some remote prehistoric world might have had his enemies executed, but no crime—not even an attempt on a Coronal's life—had ever drawn so severe a penalty on Majipoor. Besides, the fallen Dominin had collapsed into madness, his mind wholly shattered by the revelation that his father, the supposed King of Dreams, was in truth a Metamorph impostor.