"We'll have to report this to the agricultural agent," Etowan Elacca said. "And send messengers too, Simoost, to Hagidawn's farm, and Nismayne's, and what's-his-name by the lake—find out if they've had trouble with their niyks too. Is it a plague, I wonder? But niyks have no diseases—a new plague, Simoost?

Coming upon us like a sending of the King of Dreams?"

"The purple rain, sir—"

"A little colored sand? How could that harm anything? They have purple rain a dozen times a year on the other side of the Rift, and it doesn't bother their crops. Oh, Simoost, my niyks, my niyks—!"

"It was the purple rain," said Simoost firmly. "That was not the rain of the eastern lands. It was something new, sir: it was poison rain, and it killed the niyks!"

"And killed the sensitivos too, three days before it actually fell?"

"They are very delicate, sir. Perhaps they felt the poison in the air, as the rain was coming toward us."

Etowan Elacca shrugged. Perhaps. Perhaps. And perhaps the Shapeshifters have been flying up from Piurifayne on broomsticks or magical flying machines in the night, and scattering some baleful enchantment on the land. Perhaps. In the world of perhaps anything at all was possible.

"What good is speculating?" he asked bitterly. "We know nothing. Except that the sensitivos have died, and the niyk trees have died. What will be next, Simoost? What will be next?"

12

Carabella, who had been staring all day out of the window of the floater car as though she hoped somehow to speed the journey through this bleak wasteland by the force of her eyes, called out in sudden glee, "Look, Valentine! I think we're actually coming out of the desert!"

"Surely not yet," he said. "Surely not for three or four more days. Or five, or six, or seven—"

"Will you look ?"

He put down the packet of dispatches through which he had been leafing, and sat up and peered past her. Yes! By the Divine, it was green out there! And not the grayish green of twisted scruffy stubborn pathetic desert plants, but the rich, vibrant green of real Majipoori vegetation, throbbing with the energies of growth and fertility. So at last he was beyond the malign spell of the Labyrinth, now that the royal caravan was emerging from the parched tableland in which the subterranean capital was situated. Duke Nascimonte's territory must be coming near—Lake Ivory, Mount Ebersinul, the fields of thuyol and milaile, the great manor-house of which Valentine had heard so much—

Lightly he rested his hand on Carabella's slender shoulder and drew his fingers along her back, digging gently into the firm bands of muscle in what was in part a massage, in part a caress. How good it was to have her with him again! She had joined him on the processional a week ago, at the Velalisier ruins, where together they had inspected the progress the archaeologists were making at uncovering the enormous stone city that the Metamorphs had abandoned fifteen or twenty thousand years ago. Her arrival had done much to lift him from his bleak and cheerless mood.