Lord Valentine's Castle

—1—

FROM NUMINOR PORT the ships of the Lady departed, seven of them, with broad sails and high splendid prows, under the command of the Hjort Asenhart, chief of the Lady’s admirals, and bearing as passengers Lord Valentine the Coronal, his chief minister Autifon Deliamber the Vroon, his aides-de-camp Carabella of Til-omon and Sleet of Narabal, his military adjutant Lisamon Hultin, his ministers-at-large Zalzan Kavol the Skandar and Shanamir of Falkynkip, and various others. The fleet’s destination was Stoien at the tip of Alhanroel’s Stoienzar Peninsula, at the far side of the Inner Sea. Already the ships had been at sea for weeks, scudding ahead of the brisk westerlies that blew in late spring in these waters, but there was no sign yet of land, nor would there be for many days.

Valentine found the long journey comforting. He was not at all fearful of the tasks ahead, but neither was he impatient to begin them; rather, he needed a time to sort through his newly regained mind, and discover who he had been and what he had hoped to become. Where better than on the great bosom of the ocean, where nothing altered from day to day except the patterns of the clouds, and time seemed to stand still? And so he stood for hours at a time at the rail of his flagship, the Lady Thiin, apart from his friends, visiting with himself.

The person who he had been pleased him: stronger and more forceful of character than Valentine the juggler, but with no uglinesses of soul as sometimes are found among persons of power. To Valentine his former self seemed reasonable, judicious, calm, and moderate, a man of serious demeanor but not without playfulness, one who understood the nature of responsibility and obligation. He was well educated, as might be supposed of one whose entire life had been spent in training for high office, with a thorough grounding in history, the law, government, and economics, somewhat less thorough in literature and philosophy, and, so far as Valentine could tell, only the merest smattering of mathematics and the physical sciences, which were much in eclipse on Majipoor.

The gift of his former self was like the finding of a treasure trove. Valentine was still not fully united to that other self, and tended to think of "him" and "me," or of "us," instead of viewing himself as a single integrated personality; but the split grew less apparent every day. There had been enough damage to the Coronal’s mind in the overthrow at Til-omon that a cleavage now marked the discontinuity between Lord Valentine the Coronal and Valentine the juggler, and perhaps there would always be scar tissue along that cleft, the Lady’s ministrations notwithstanding. But Valentine could cross the place of discontinuity at will, could travel to any point along his previous time-line, into his childhood or young manhood or his brief period of rule, and wherever he looked was such a wealth of knowledge, of experience, of maturity, as in his simple wandering days he had never hoped to master. If at the moment he must enter those memories as one might enter an encyclopedia, or a library, so be it; he was sure that a fuller joining of self and self would occur in time.

In the ninth week of the voyage a thin green line of land appeared at the horizon.

"Stoienzar," said Admiral Asenhart. "See, there, to the side, that darker place? Stoien harbor."

Through his double vision Valentine studied the shore of the approaching continent. As Valentine he knew next to nothing of Alhanroel, only that it was the largest of Majipoor’s continents and the first to be settled by humans, a place of enormous population and tremendous natural wonders, and the seat of the planetary government, home to Coronal and Pontifex both. But out of Lord Valentine’s memory came much more. To him Alhanroel meant Castle Mount, almost a world in itself, on whose vast slopes one could spend one’s entire life among the Fifty Cities and not exhaust their marvels. Alhanroel was Lord Malibor’s Castle crowning the Mount — for so he had called it through all his boyhood, and the habit had persisted even into his own reign. He saw the Castle now in the eye of his mind, enfolding the summit of the Mount like some many-armed creature spreading over crags and peaks and alpine meadows, and down into the great terminal valleys and folds, a single structure of so many thousands of rooms that it was impossible to count them, a building that seemingly had a life of its own, and added annexes and outbuildings at the far perimeters of itself by authority of itself alone. And Alhanroel was, also, the great hump mounded up over the Labyrinth of the Pontifex, and the subterranean Labyrinth itself, reverse counterpart of the Lady’s Isle, for where the Lady dwelled at Inner Temple on a sun-splashed wind-washed height surrounded by ring upon ring of open terraces, the Pontifex laired like a mole deep underground, at the lowest place of his realm, surrounded by the coils of his Labyrinth. Valentine had been to the Labyrinth only once, on a mission from Lord Voriax, years ago, but the memory of those winding caverns still glowed darkly in him.

Alhanroel, too, meant the Six Rivers that spilled down from the slopes of Castle Mount, and the creature-plants of the Stoienzar that he soon would see again, and the tree-houses of Treymone, and the stone ruins of Velalisier Plain, said to be older than the advent of humankind on Majipoor. Looking eastward at that faint line, growing larger but still barely perceptible, Valentine sensed all the vastness of Alhanroel unrolling like a titanic scroll before him, and the tranquillity that had governed his frame of mind during the voyage melted at once. He was eager to be ashore, to commence his march to the Labyrinth.

To Asenhart he said, "When will we reach land?"

"Tomorrow evening, my lord."

"We’ll have feasting and games tonight, then. The best wines broken out, all hands to share. And afterward a performance deckside, a small jubilee."

Asenhart regarded him gravely. The admiral was an aristocrat among Hjorts, more slender than most of his kind, though with the coarse and pebbled skin that was their mark, and he had an odd sobriety of manner that Valentine found a bit offputting. The Lady held him in the highest regard.

"A performance, my lord?"

"A little jugglery," said Valentine. "My friends feel a nostalgic need to practice their art again, and what better moment than to celebrate the safe conclusion of our long voyage?"

"Of course," said Asenhart with a formal nod. But obviously the admiral disapproved of such goings-on aboard his flagship.

Zalzan Kavol had suggested it. The Skandar was plainly restless aboard ship; he could often be seen moving his four arms rhythmically in the gestures of juggling, though no objects were in his hands. More than anyone he had had to adapt to circumstances in this trek across the face of Majipoor. A year ago Zalzan Kavol had been a prince of his profession, master among masters of the juggling art, traveling in splendor from city to city in his wondrous wagon. Now all that was gone from him. The wagon was ashes somewhere in the forests of Piurifayne; two of his five brothers lay dead there too, and a third at the bottom of the sea; no longer did he growl orders to his employees and have them leap to obey; and instead of performing nightly before wonder-struck audiences that filled his pouch with crowns, he wandered now from place to place in Valentine’s wake, a mere subsidiary. Unused strengths and drives were accumulating in Zalzan Kavol. His face and demeanor showed it, for in the old days his temper had been churlish and he vented it freely, but now he seemed repressed, almost meek, and Valentine knew that must be a sign of severe inner distress. The agents of the Lady had found Zalzan Kavol still at the Terrace of Assessment at the outer rim of the Isle, at work at his menial pilgrim-tasks in a shambling, sleepwalking way, as if he had resigned himself to spending the rest of his life pulling weeds and pointing masonry.

"Can you do the routine with torches and knives?" Valentine asked him.

Zalzan Kavol brightened instantly. "Of course. And do you see those pins there?" He pointed to some huge wooden clubs, nearly four feet long, stowed in a rack near the mast. "Last night Erfon and I practiced with those, when everyone slept. If your admiral has no objections, we’ll use them tonight."

"Those? How can you juggle anything so long?"

"Get me the admiral’s permission, my lord, and tonight I’ll show you!"

All afternoon the troupe rehearsed in a large vacant chamber down in the hold. It was the first time they had done such a thing since Ilirivoyne, what seemed like half a lifetime ago. But, using the improvised array of objects that the Skandars had quietly gathered, they fell swiftly into the rhythm of it.

Valentine, watching, felt a warm glow at the sight of them — Sleet and Carabella furiously passing clubs back and forth, Zalzan Kavol and Rovorn and Erfon devising intricate new patterns of interchange to replace those that had been destroyed with the death of their three brothers. For a moment it was like the innocent old times in Falkynkip or Dulorn, when nothing mattered except getting hired on at the festival or the circus, and the only challenge life offered was the one of keeping hand and eye coordinated. There was no going back to those days. Now that they had been swept up into high intrigue, the making and unmaking of Powers, none of them would ever be as they had been before. These five had dined with the Lady, had shared lodgings with the Coronal, were sailing onward toward a rendezvous with the Pontifex; they were already a part of history, even if Valentine’s campaign came to nothing. Yet here they were juggling again as though juggling were all there was in life.

It had taken many days to bring his people together at Inner Temple. Valentine had imagined that the Lady or her hierarchs had merely to close their eyes and they could reach any mind on Majipoor, but it was not that simple; communication was imprecise and limited. They had located the Skandars first, in the outermost terrace. Shanamir had reached Second Cliff and in his youthful guileless way was advancing swiftly inward; Sleet, neither youthful nor guileless, had likewise wangled advancement to Second Cliff, and so had Vinorkis; Carabella was just behind them, at the Terrace of Mirrors, but through an error she was sought elsewhere at first; finding Khun and Lisamon Hultin had been no great task, since they were so much unlike all other pilgrims in appearance, but Gorzval’s three former crewmen, Pandelon, Cordeine, and Thesme, had vanished into the population of the island as though they were invisible, so that Valentine would have had to abandon them had they not turned up at the last moment. Hardest of all to track down was Autifon Deliamber. The Isle had many Vroons, some of them as diminutive as the little wizard, and all efforts at tracing him led to mistakes of identity. With the fleet ready to sail, Deliamber had still been unfound, but on the eve of departure, Valentine desperately torn between the need to move onward and the unwillingness to part from his most useful counselor, the Vroon appeared at Numinor, offering no explanations of where he had been or how he had crossed the Isle undetected. So all were united, those who had survived the long trek from Pidruid.

On Castle Mount, Valentine knew, Lord Valentine had had his own ring of intimates, whose faces and names now had been restored to his knowledge, princes and courtiers and officials close to him since childhood, Elidath, Stasilaine, Tunigorn, the dearest comrades he had; and yet, though he still felt loyalty to those people, they had become terribly distant from his soul, and his random assortment of companions acquired during his time of wanderings now stood nearest to him. He wondered how it would be when he returned to Castle Mount and had to reconcile one group with the other.

On one score, at least, he had reassured himself out of his newly regained memories. No wife awaited him at the Castle, nor intended bride, nor even an important lover to contest Carabella’s place at his side. As prince and as young Coronal he had lived a carefree and unattached life, the Divine be thanked. It would be difficult enough, imposing on the court the notion that the Coronal’s beloved was a commoner, a woman of the lowland cities, a wandering juggler; but it would be altogether impossible if his heart had already been given, and now he were to claim to have given it again.

"Valentine!" Carabella called.

Her voice broke him free of reverie. He looked toward her and she giggled and tossed him a club. He caught it as they had taught him so long ago, between thumb and fingers with the club’s head pointing at an angle. An instant later came a second one from Sleet, and then a third from Carabella. He laughed and sent the clubs whirling above his head in the old familiar pattern, throw and throw and catch, and Carabella clapped her hands and sent another one his way. It was good to be juggling again. Lord Valentine — a superb athlete, quick of eye and skilled at many games, though hampered somewhat by a slight limp from an old riding injury — had not known juggling. Juggling was the art of the simpler Valentine. Aboard this ship, wearing now the aura of authority that had come upon him by his mother’s healing of his mind, Valentine had felt his companions holding him at arm’s length, try as they might to regard him as the old Valentine of the Zimroel days. So it gave him special pleasure to have Carabella so irreverently fling a club his way.

And it gave him pleasure, too, to be handling the clubs — even when he dropped one, and, stooping for it, was hit on the head by another, provoking a snort of contempt out of Zalzan Kavol.

"Do that tonight," the Skandar called, "and you’ll forfeit your wine for a week!"

"Have no fear," Valentine retorted. "I drop the clubs now only for practice in recovering them. You’ll see no such blunders this evening."

Nor were there any. The ship’s entire company gathered at sundown on the deck for the entertainment. To one side, Asenhart and his officers occupied a platform where they would have the best view; but when the admiral beckoned to Valentine, offering him the chair of honor, he declined with a smile. Asenhart looked puzzled at that, but his expression was not nearly so strained as it became a few moments later, when Shanamir and Vinorkis and Lisamon Hultin began to pound on drums and tootle on coilpipes, and the jugglers emerged from a hatch in a gleeful sprint, and as they began to perform their wonders the figure of Lord Valentine the Coronal appeared among them, blithely hurling clubs and dishes and pieces of fruit like any vulgar entertainer.

—2—

IF ADMIRAL ASENHART had had his way, there would have been a grand celebration in Stoien to mark Valentine’s arrival, something at least as splendid as the festival held in Pidruid at the time of the visit of the false Coronal. But Valentine, as soon as he got word of Asenhart’s plan, put a stop to it. He was not yet ready to claim the throne, to make public accusations against the individual who called himself Lord Valentine, or to ask for any sort of homage from the citizenry at large. "Until I have the support of the Pontifex," Valentine told Asenhart sternly, "I mean to move quietly and gather strength without attracting attention. There will be no festivals for me in Stoien."

So it was that the Lady Thiin made a relatively inconspicuous landfall at that great port at the southwestern tip of Alhanroel. Even though there were seven ships in the fleet — and ships of the Lady, though common enough in the harbor at Stoien, did not generally arrive in such numbers — they came in quietly, flying no fancy banners. The port officials asked few questions: obviously they traveled on the business of the Lady of the Isle, and her doings were beyond the purview of customs-clerks.

To reinforce this, Asenhart sent purchasing agents through the wharfside district the first day, buying quantities of glue and sailcloth and spices and tools and the like. Meanwhile Valentine and his company covertly took lodgings in an unassuming commercial hotel.

Stoien was predominantly a maritime city — export-import, warehousing, shipbuilding, all the occupations and enterprises that go with a prime coastal location and a superb harbor. The city, of some fourteen million souls, spread for hundreds of miles along the rim of the great promontory that divided the Gulf of Stoien from the main body of the Inner Sea. It was not the mainland port closest to the Isle — that was Alaisor, far up Alhanroel’s coast, thousands of miles to the north — but at this season, prevailing winds and currents being what they were, it was quicker to make the long journey down to Stoien than to brave the shorter but rougher crossing due east to Alaisor.

After pausing here to restock the ships, they would sail the placid Gulf, going along the north shore of the huge Stoienzar Peninsula in tropic ease to Kircidane and then up to Treymone, the coastal city nearest the Labyrinth. It would be a relatively short overland trek from there to the abode of the Pontifex.

Valentine found Stoien strikingly beautiful. The entire peninsula was altogether flat, hardly twenty feet above sea level at its highest point, but the city-dwellers had devised a wondrous arrangement of platforms of brick faced with white stone to provide the illusion of hills. No two of these platforms were of identical height, some providing an elevation of no more than a dozen feet, others looming hundreds of feet in the air. Whole neighborhoods rose atop giant pedestals several dozen feet high and more than a square mile in area; certain significant buildings had platforms of their own, standing as if on stilts above their surroundings; alternations of high platforms and low ones created eye-jiggling vistas of startling contour.

What might have been an effect of sheerly mechanical whimsy, rapidly coming to seem brutal or arbitrary or fatiguing to behold, was softened and mellowed by tropical plantings unrivaled in Valentine’s experience. At the base of every platform grew dense beds of broad-crowned trees, interlaced branch by branch to form impenetrable cloaks. Leafy vines cascaded over the platform walls. The wide ramps that led from street level to the higher platforms were bordered by generous concrete tubs housing clusters of bushes whose narrow tapered leaves were marked with astonishing splashes of color, claret and cobalt and vermilion and scarlet and indigo and topaz and sapphire and amber and jade hues all mixed together in irregular patterns. And in the great public places of the city were the most startling displays of all, gardens of the famous animate plants that grew wild a few hundred miles to the south, on the torrid coast that looked toward the distant desert continent of Suvrael. These plants — and plants they were, for they manufactured their food by photosynthesis and lived their lives rooted to a single place — had a fleshy look to them, with arms that moved and coiled and grasped, eyes that stared, tubular bodies that undulated and swayed, and though they derived nourishment enough from sunlight and water they were quite willing and able to devour and digest any small creature rash enough to come within their reach. Elegantly arranged groups of them, bordered by low stone walls that served as warnings as well as decorations, were planted everywhere in Stoien. Some were as tall as small trees, others short and globular, still others bushy and angular. All were in constant motion, reacting to breezes, odors, sudden shouts, the voices of their keepers, and other stimuli. Valentine found them sinister but fascinating. He wondered if a collection of them might not be brought to Castle Mount.

"Why not?" Carabella said. "They can be kept alive as side-show displays in Pidruid. There ought to be a way to keep them in good health at Lord Valentine’s Castle."

Valentine nodded. "We’ll hire a staff of keepers out of Stoien. We’ll find out what they eat and have it shipped up to the Mount regularly."

Sleet shuddered. "These creatures give me a creepy feeling, my lord. Do you find them so lovely?"

"Not exactly lovely," said Valentine. "Interesting."

"As I suppose you found the mouthplants, eh?"

"The mouthplants, yes!" Valentine cried. "We’ll bring some of them to the Castle too!"

Sleet groaned.

Valentine paid little notice. His face glowed with sudden enthusiasm. Taking Sleet and Carabella by the hands, he said, "Each Coronal has added something to the Castle: an observatory, a library, a parapet, a battlement of prisms and shields, an armory, a feasting-hall, a trophy-room, reign by reign the Castle growing, changing, becoming richer and more complex. In my short time I had no chance even to think about what I would contribute. But listen: what Coronal has seen Majipoor the way I have? Who has traveled so far, in so turbulent a fashion? To commemorate my adventures I’ll collect the weirdities I’ve seen, the mouthplants and these animate plants and the bladder-trees and a good-sized dwikka or two and a grove of fireshower palms and sensitives and those singing ferns, all the wonders of our journey. There’s nothing like that at the Castle now, only the little glassed-in plant-houses that Lord Confalume built. I’ll do it grandly! Lord Valentine’s garden! How do you like the sound of that?"

"It will be a marvel, my lord," said Carabella.

Sleet said sourly, "I would not care to stroll among the mouthplants of Lord Valentine’s garden, not for three dukedoms and the revenues of Ni-moya and Piliplok."

"We excuse you from garden tours," said Valentine, laughing.

But there would be no garden tours, nor any garden, until Valentine dwelled again in Lord Valentine’s Castle. For an interminable week he idled in Stoien, waiting for Asenhart to complete his provisioning. Three of the ships were going to return to the Isle, bearing the goods bought here for island use; the other four would continue on as Valentine’s surreptitious escort. The Lady had provided him with more than a hundred of her sturdiest bodyguards, under the command of the formidable hierarch Lorivade: not warriors, exactly, for there had not been violence on the Isle of Sleep since the Metamorphs last invaded it thousands of years ago, but these were competent and fearless men and women, loyal to the Lady and ready to give their lives if need be to restore the harmony of the realm. They were the nucleus of a private army — the first such military force, so far as Valentine knew, organized on Majipoor since ancient times.

At last the fleet was ready to depart. The Isle-bound ships left first, early on a warm Twoday morning, heading north-northwest. The others waited until Seaday afternoon, when they sailed on the same course, but swung about after dark to head due east into the Gulf of Stoien.

The Stoienzar Peninsula, long and narrow, jutted like a colossal thumb out of the central mass of Alhanroel. On its southern, or ocean, side it was intolerably hot. There were few settlements on that jungled insect-ridden coast. Most of the peninsula’s considerable population was clustered along the Gulf coast, which had a major city every hundred miles or so and a virtually unbroken line of fishing villages and farming districts and resort towns between. It was early summer now, and a heavy haze of heat lay over the tepid, virtually motionless waters of the Gulf. The fleet paused a day for further provisioning at Kircidane, where the coast began its sweeping northward curve, and then began the crossing to Treymone.

Valentine spent many of the quiet seaward hours alone in his cabin, practicing the use of the circlet the Lady had given him. In a week he mastered the art of entering a light dozing trance — he could slide his mind instantly below the threshold of sleep now, and just as readily emerge from it, all the while staying aware of ongoing events. In the trance-state he was able, although spottily and without much force, to make contact with other minds, to wander out aboard ship and locate the aura of a sleeping soul, sleepers being far more vulnerable to such intrusions than those who were awake. He could lightly touch Carabella’s mind, or Sleet’s, or Shanamir’s, and transmit his own image, or some genial message of good will. Reaching a less familiar mind — that of Pandelon the carpenter, say, or the hierarch Lorivade — was still too hard for him except in the briefest, most fragmentary bursts, and he had no success at all entering minds of nonhuman origin, even ones so well known to him as those of Zalzan Kavol or Khun or Deliamber. But he was still learning. He felt his skills growing day by day, as they had when he first had taken up juggling; and this was juggling of a sort, for to use the circlet he had to occupy a position at the very center of his soul, undistracted by irrelevant thought, and coordinate all aspects of his being toward the single thrust of making contact. By the time the Lady Thlin was in view of Treymone, Valentine had advanced to the level where he could plant the beginnings of dreams, with events and incidents and images, in the minds of his subjects. To Shanamir he sent a dream of Falkynkip, and mounts grazing in a field, and a great gihorna-bird circling overhead, descending in a foolish flapping of mighty wings. At table the next morning the boy described the dream in all details, except only that the bird was a milufta, a carrion-feeder, with bright orange beak and ugly blue claws. "What does it mean, that I would dream of miluftas swooping down?" Shanamir asked, and Valentine said, "Could it be that you misremember the dream, and it was another bird you saw, a gihorna, perhaps, a bird of good omen?" But Shanamir, in that straightforward and innocent way of his, merely shook his head and said, "If I can’t tell a gihorna from a milufta, my lord, even in my sleep, I ought to be back in Falkynkip cleaning out the stables." Valentine looked away, hiding a smile, and resolved to work more diligently on his image-sending technique.

To Carabella he sent a dream of juggling crystal goblets filled with golden wine, and she reported it accurately, down to the tapered shape of the goblets. To Sleet he sent a dream of Lord Valentine’s garden, a wonderland of glistening feathery-leaved white bushes and solemn spherical prickly things on long stems and little three-forked plants with winking playful eyes at their tips, all of them imaginary and not a mouthplant among them, and Sleet described that imaginary garden in delight, saying that if only the Coronal would plant a garden like that on Castle Mount he would be well pleased to stroll in it.

Dreams came to him as well. Almost nightly the Lady his mother touched his soul from afar. Her serene presence passed through his sleeping spirit like a cool shaft of moonlight, calming and reassuring him. He dreamed, too, of old times on Castle Mount, memories of his early days upwelling, tournaments and races and games, his friends Tunigorn and Elidath and Stasilaine by his side, and his brother Voriax teaching him to use sword and bow, and Lord Malibor the Coronal traveling from city to city on the Mount like some grand and shining demigod, and much more of the same, a flood of images released from the depths of his mind.

Not all the dreams were agreeable. The night before the Lady Thiin reached the mainland he saw himself going ashore, landing on some forlorn, windswept beach of low and twisted scrub that had a dull, weary look in the late afternoon light. And he began to walk inland toward Castle Mount, rising in the distance, a jagged and sharp-tipped spire. But there was a wall in his way, a wall higher than the white cliffs of the Isle of Sleep, and that wall was a band of iron, more metal than existed on all of Majipoor, a dark and terrible iron girdle that seemed to span the world from pole to pole, and he was on one side of it and Castle Mount on the other. As he drew near he perceived that the wall crackled as if with electricity, and a low humming sound came from it, and when he looked closely at it he saw his reflection in the shining metal, and the face that peered back at him out of that frightful iron band was the face of the son of the King of Dreams.

—3—

TREYMONE WAS THE CITY of the celebrated tree-houses, famed throughout Majipoor. His second day ashore, Valentine went to visit them, in the coastal district just south of the mouth of the River Trey.

Nowhere else but in the Trey’s alluvial plain did the tree-houses live. They had short stout trunks a little like those of dwikkas, though not nearly so thick, and their bark was a handsome pale green, with a high gloss to it. From these barrel-like boles rose sturdy flattened branches that curved upward and outward like the fingers of two hands pressed together at the heels, and viny twigs wandered from branch to branch, adhering in many places, creating a snug cup-shaped enclosure.

The tree-folk of Treymone shaped their dwellings to suit their whims by pulling the pliant branches into the forms of rooms and corridors and fastening them into place until the natural adhesion of bark to bark made the join permanent. From the trees came leaves tender and sweet for salads, fragrant cream-colored flowers whose pollen was a mild euphoric, tart bluish fruits that had many uses, and a sweet pale sap, easily tapped, that served in place of wine. Each tree lived a thousand years or more; families maintained jealous control over them; ten thousand trees filled the plain, all mature and inhabited. Valentine saw a few skinny saplings at the edge of the district. "These," he was told, "are newly planted, to replace some that died in recent years."

"Where does a family go when its tree dies?"

"Into town," said the guide, "to what we call houses of mourning, until the new tree is grown. That may be twenty years. We dread such a thing, but it happens only one generation out of ten."

"And there’s no way to grow the trees elsewhere?"

"Not an inch beyond where you see them. Only in our climate will they thrive, and only in the soil on which you stand can they grow to fullness. Elsewhere they live a year or two, small stunted things."

Quietly to Carabella Valentine said, "We can make the experiment anyway. I wonder if they can spare some of their precious soil for Lord Valentine’s garden."

She smiled. "Even a small tree-house — a place where you can go when the cares of government grow too heavy, and sit hidden in the leaves, and breathe the perfume of the flowers, and pluck the fruits — oh, if you could have such a thing!"

"Someday I will," said Valentine. "And you’ll sit beside me in it."

Carabella gave him a startled look. "I, my lord?"

"If not you, then who? Dominin Barjazid?" Lightly he touched her hand. "Do you think our travels together end when we reach Castle Mount?"

"We should not talk of such things now," she told him severely. To the guide she said in a louder tone, "And these young trees — how do you care for them? Are they watered often?"

From Treymone it was several weeks’ journey by fast floater-car to the Labyrinth, which lay in south-central Al-hanroel. The countryside here was mainly a lowland, with rich red soil in the river valley and thin, gray sandy stuff beyond it, and settlements grew more sparse as Valentine and his party moved inland. There was occasional rain, but it seemed to sink immediately into the porous soil. The weather was warm and sometimes there was an oppressive weight to the heat. Day after day slipped by in bland, monotonous driving. To Valentine this sort of travel wholly lacked the magic and mystery — now enhanced by nostalgia — of the months he had spent crossing Zimroel in Zalzan Kavol’s elegant wagon. Then, every day had seemed a venture into the unknown, with fresh challenges at each turn, and always the excitement of performing, of stopping in strange towns to put on shows. Now? Everything was done for him by adjutants and aides-de-camp. He was becoming a prince again — though a prince of very modest puissance indeed, with hardly more than a hundred followers — and he was not at all certain he cared for it.

Late in the second week the landscape abruptly changed, turning rough and broken, with black flat-topped hills rising now from a dry, deeply ridged tableland. The only plants that grew here were small scraggly bushes, dark twisted things with tiny waxen leaves, and, on the higher slopes, thorny candelabra-like growths of moon-cactus, ghostly white, twice as tall as a man. Little long-legged animals with red fur and puffy yellow tails skittered about nervously, vanishing into holes whenever a floater came too close.

Deliamber said, "This is the beginning of the Desert of the Labyrinth. Soon we will see the stone cities of the ancients."

Valentine had approached the Labyrinth from the other side, the northwest, the time he had been to it in his former life. There was desert there too, and the great haunted ruined city of Velalisier; but he had come down from Castle Mount by riverboat, bypassing all the unlucky dead lands that surrounded the Labyrinth, and the texture of this bleak and forbidding zone was new to him. He found it absorbingly strange at first, especially at sunset, when the vast cloudless sky was streaked with grotesque bands of violent color and the parched soil took on an eerie metallic look. But after a few days the starkness and austerity ceased to give him pleasure, and became disturbing, unsettling, menacing. Something about this sharp desert air, perhaps, was working unfavorably on his sensibilities. He had never experienced desert before, for there was none in Zimroel and none except this interior pocket of dryness in well-watered Alhanroel. Desert conditions were something he associated with Suvrael, which he had visited often enough in dreams, all of them troublesome ones; and he could not escape the notion, irrational and bizarre, that he was riding toward a rendezvous with the King of Dreams.

After a time Deliamber said, "There are the ruins."

It was difficult at first to distinguish them from the rocks of the desert. All Valentine saw were tumbled dark monoliths, scattered as though by a giant’s contemptuous hand, in little patches every mile or two. But gradually he discerned form: this was a bit of wall, this the foundation of some cyclopean palace, this perhaps an altar. Everything was built to titanic scale, although the individual groups of ruins, half covered by drifting sand, were unimpressive isolated outposts.

Valentine called the caravan to a halt at one particularly broad strew of ruins and led an inspection party to the site. He touched the rocks cautiously, fearing he might be committing some sort of sacrilege. The stone was cool, smooth to the touch, faintly encrusted by leathery growths of yellow lichen.

"And are these the work of the Metamorphs?" he asked.

Deliamber shrugged. "So we think, but no one knows."

"I have heard it said," remarked Admiral Asenhart, "that the first human settlers built these cities soon after the Landing-time, and that they were overthrown in the civil wars before the Pontifex Dvorn established government."

"Of course, few records survive of those days," said Deliamber.

Asenhart squinted at the Vroon. "Are you of a contrary opinion, then?"

"I? I? I hold no opinion at all of events of fourteen thousand years ago. I am not as old as you suspect, admiral."

The hierarch Lorivade said in a dry deep tone, "It seems unlikely to me that the early settlers would build so far from the sea. Or that they would trouble themselves to haul such huge blocks of stone about."

"Then you too think these were Metamorph cities?" said Valentine.

"The Metamorphs are wild savages who live in the jungles and dance to bring rain," Asenhart said.

Lorivade, looking bothered at the admiral’s interruption, said with testy precision, "I think it altogether likely." To Asenhart she added, "Not savages, admiral, but refugees. They may well have fallen from a higher estate."

"Pushed, rather," said Carabella.

Valentine said, "The government should organize studies of these ruins, if it hasn’t already been done. We need to know more about pre-human civilizations on Majipoor, and if these are Metamorph places, we might consider giving them a kind of custodianship of them. We—"

"The ruins need no custodians other than the ones they already have," said a new voice suddenly.

Valentine turned, startled. A bizarre figure had emerged from behind a monolith — a gaunt, almost fleshless man of sixty or seventy, with fierce blazing eyes set in jutting bony rims and a thin, wide, virtually toothless mouth now curved in a mocking grin. He was armed with a long narrow sword and was clad in a strange garment made entirely from the red fur of the desert-animals. Atop his head was a cap of thick yellow tail-fur, which he swept off in a grand gesture as he made a deep, sweeping bow. When he straightened, his hand rested on the pommel of his sword.

Valentine said courteously, "And are we in the presence of one of those custodians?"

"More than one," the other replied. And from the rocks there quietly came eight or ten similar fantasticos, as angular and bony as the first, and like the first all clad in scruffy fur leggings and jackets and wearing absurd furry caps. All carried swords, and all seemed ready to use them. A second group appeared behind them, materializing as though out of the air, and then a third, a good-sized troop, thirty or forty in all.

There were eleven in Valentine’s party, mostly unarmed. The others were back in the floater-cars, two hundred yards away on the main highway. While they had stood here debating nice points of ancient history, they had allowed themselves to be surrounded.

The leader said, "By what right do you trespass here?"

Valentine heard a faint clearing of the throat from Lisamon Hultin. He saw a stiffening also of Asenhart’s posture. But Valentine signaled them to be calm.

He said, "May I know who it is that addresses me?"

"I am Duke Nascimonte of Vornek Crag, Overlord of the Western Marches. About me you see the chief nobles of my realm, who serve me loyally in all things."

Valentine had no recollection of a province known as the Western Marches, nor of any such duke. Possibly he had forgotten some of his geography when his mind was meddled with; but not, he suspected, quite so much. Yet he did not choose to trifle with Duke Nascimonte.

Solemnly he said, "We meant no trespass, your grace, in passing through your domain. We are travelers bound for the Labyrinth on business with the Pontifex, and this seemed the most direct route between Treymone and there."

"So it is. You would have done better to approach the Pontifex by a less direct route."

Lisamon Hultin roared suddenly, "Give us no trouble! Have you any idea who this man is?"

Annoyed, Valentine snapped his fingers at the giantess to silence her.

Nascimonte said blandly, "Not in the least. But he could be Lord Valentine himself and he would not pass here lightly. Lord Valentine less than any other, in fact."

"Have you some special quarrel with Lord Valentine, then?" Valentine asked.

The bandit laughed harshly. "The Coronal is my most hated enemy."

"Why, then, your hand must be set against all of civilization, for everyone owes allegiance to the Coronal and must for order’s sake oppose his enemies. Can you truly be a duke, and not accept the Coronal’s authority?"

"Not this Coronal’s," Nascimonte replied. He sauntered coolly across the open space that separated him from Valentine, hand still resting on his sword, and peered closely at him. "You wear fine clothes. You smell of city comforts. You must be rich, and live in a great house somewhere high up on the Mount, and have servants to meet your every need. What would you say, if one day all that were stripped from you, eh? If by the whim of another you were cast down into poverty?"

"I have had that experience," said Valentine evenly.

"Have you, now? You, traveling in that cavalcade of floater-cars, with your retinue about you? Who are you, anyway?"

"Lord Valentine the Coronal," Valentine answered without hesitation.

Nascimonte’s fiery eyes flared with rage. For an instant it appeared as if he would draw his sword; then, as if seeing a jest much to his own ferocious humor, he relaxed and said, "Yes, you are Coronal the way I am a duke. Well, Lord Valentine, your kindness will repay me for my earlier losses. The fee for crossing the zone of ruins today is one thousand royals."

"We have no such sum," Valentine said mildly.

"Then you’ll make camp with us until your lackeys fetch it." He gestured to his men. "Seize them and bind them. Turn one loose — this one, the Vroon — to be the messenger." To Deliamber he said, "Vroon, carry word to those in the floaters that we hold these folk here for payment of a thousand royals, to be delivered within a month. And if you return with militia instead of money, why, bear in mind that we know these hills, and the officers of the law do not. You’ll never see any of your people alive again."

"Wait," Valentine said, as Nascimonte’s men stepped forward. "Tell me your quarrel with the Coronal."

Nascimonte scowled. "He came through this part of Alhanroel last year, returning from Zimroel where he made the grand processional. I lived then in the foothills of Mount Ebersinul, looking out on Lake Ivory, and I raised ricca and thuyol and milaile, and my plantation was the finest in the province, for my family has spent sixteen generations cultivating it. The Coronal and his party were billeted on me, as best able to meet the needs of hospitality for him, and at the height of thuyol-harvest he came to me with all his hundreds of hangers-on and lackeys, his myriad courtiers, enough mounts to graze half a continent bare, and between one Starday and the next they drank my cellars dry, they made festival in the fields and spoiled the crops, they torched the manor-house in drunken play, they shattered the dam and drowned my fields, they ruined me entirely for their own sport, and then they marched away, not even knowing what they had done to me, or caring. The moneylenders have it all now, and I live in the rocks of Vornek Crag courtesy of Lord Valentine and his friends, and where is justice? It will cost you a thousand royals to leave these ancient ruins, stranger, and though I hold you no malice I will slit your throat as coolly as Lord Valentine’s men opened my dam, and with as little concern, if the money fails to come." He turned away and said again, "Bind them."

Valentine drew breath deep into his lungs and closed his eyes, and, as the Lady had taught him, let himself slip into waking sleep, into the trance that brought his circlet to life. And sent his mind out toward the dark and bitter soul of the Overlord of the Western Marches, and flooded it with love.

The effort called forth all the strength that was in him. He swayed and braced his legs, and leaned against Carabella, one hand on her shoulder, drawing further energy and vitality from her and pumping it toward Nascimonte. He understood now what price Sleet paid for his blind juggling, for this was draining him of all the stuff of life. Yet he sustained the outpouring of spirit for moment after long moment.

Nascimonte stood frozen, facing half away from him with his body twisted around, his eyes locked on Valentine’s. Valentine held his grip unrelentingly on the other’s soul, and bathed it with compassion until Nascimonte’s iron resentments softened and loosened and dropped from him like a shell, and then into the suddenly vulnerable man Valentine poured a vision of all that had befallen him since his overthrow in Til-omon so long ago, everything compressed into a single dazzling point of illumination.

He broke the contact and, staggering, lurched hard against Carabella, who supported him unflinchingly.

Nascimonte stared at Valentine like one who has been touched by the Divine.

Then he dropped to his knees and made the starburst sign. "My lord— " he said thickly, deep in his throat, a barely audible sound. "My lord— forgive me— forgive—"

—4—

THAT THERE SHOULD BE bandits at large in this desert surprised and dismayed Valentine, for there was little history of such anarchy on well-mannered Majipoor. That the bandits should be well-to-do farming folk made paupers by the callousness of the present Coronal dismayed him also. It was not the custom on Majipoor for the ruling class so carelessly to exploit its position. Dominin Barjazid, if he thought he could conduct himself that way and hold his throne for long, was not merely a villain but a fool.

"Will you put down the usurper?" Nascimonte asked.

"In time," replied Valentine. "But there is much to do before that day arrives."

"I am yours to command, if I can be of service."

"Are there other bandits between here and the mouth of the Labyrinth?"

Nascimonte nodded. "Many. It becomes the fashion in this province to run wild in the hills."

"And have you influence over them, or is your title of duke only irony?"

"They obey me."

"Good," said Valentine. "I ask you then to conduct us through these lands to the Labyrinth, and to keep your marauding friends from delaying us in our journey."

"I will, my lord."

"But not a word to anyone of what I’ve shown you. Regard me simply as an official of the Lady, on embassy to the Pontifex."

The faintest glint of suspicion flickered momentarily in Nascimonte’s eyes. Uneasily he said, "I may not proclaim you as true Coronal? Why is that?"

Valentine smiled. "This is my entire army you see here in these few floater-cars. I would not announce war against the usurper until my forces are larger. Hence this secrecy; and hence my visit to the Labyrinth. The sooner I win the support of the Pontifex the sooner the true campaign begins. How quickly can you be ready to depart?"

"Within the hour, my lord."

Nascimonte and a few of his men rode with Valentine in the lead floater. The landscape grew steadily more barren: now it was a brown and almost lifeless wasteland, where swirls of dust rose under the harsh hot wind. Occasionally men in rough clothes could be seen riding in bands of three or four, far from the main highway, pausing to peer at the travelers, but there were no incidents. On the third day Nascimonte proposed a shortcut that would save several days in reaching the Labyrinth. Unhesitatingly Valentine agreed, and the caravan plunged off to the northeast over an enormous dry lakebed and then down a tortured land of steep gullies and flat-topped eroded hills, past a range of blunt mountains of a red sandy rock, and finally out into a vast windy tableland that seemed altogether featureless, a mere expanse of grit and pebbles filling the entire horizon. Valentine saw Sleet and Zalzan Kavol exchanging troubled glances as the floaters entered this bleak useless place, and he supposed they were muttering privately about treachery and betrayal, but his own faith in Nascimonte was unshaken. He had touched the bandit chieftain’s mind with his own, through the circlet of the Lady, and what he had sensed in it was not the soul of a traitor.

Another day, and another, and another, on this track through the midst of nowhere, and now Carabella was frowning, and the hierarch Lorivade looked more grim than usual, and Lisamon Hultin at last drew Valentine aside and said, as quietly as she could say anything, "What if this man Nascimonte is a hireling of the false Coronal, who has been paid to lose you in a place where no one will ever find you?"

"Then we are lost and our bones will lie here forever," said Valentine. "But I give no weight to such fears."

All the same, a certain edginess grew in him. He remained confident of Nascimonte’s good faith — it seemed unlikely that any agent of Dominin Barjazid would choose so dreary and drawn-out a method of getting rid of him, when a single sword-stroke back at the Metamorph ruins would have accomplished it — but he had no real assurance that Nascimonte knew where he was going. There was no water out here, and even the mounts, able to transform any sort of organic matter into fuel, were — so said Shanamir — growing thin and slack-muscled on the scattered scrawny weeds that now were their entire fare. If anything went wrong in this place there would be no hope of rescue. But Valentine’s touchstone was Autifon Deliamber: the wizard had a hearty and expert skill at self-preservation, and Deliamber looked unworried, altogether tranquil, as the drab days passed.

And at length Nascimonte halted the caravan at a place where two lines of steep bare hills converged to confine them in a high-walled narrow canyon. He said to Valentine, "Do you think we have lost our way, my lord? Come, let me show you something."

Valentine and some of the others followed him to the head of the canyon, a distance of some fifty paces. Nascimonte stretched his arms toward the immense valley that began where the canyon opened.

"Look," he said.

The valley was more desert, a giant fan-shaped expanse of pale tawny sand, spreading outward and extending northward and southward for at least a hundred miles. And precisely in the middle of that valley Valentine saw a darker circle, itself of colossal size, that rose a short way above the flat valley floor. He recognized it from an earlier time, when he had seen it from the far side: it was the giant mound of brown earth that covered the Labyrinth of the Pontifex.

"We will be at the Mouth of Blades the day after tomorrow," said Nascimonte.

There were seven mouths all told, Valentine remembered, arranged equidistantly around the enormous structure. When he had come as emissary from Voriax he had entered by way of the Mouth of Waters, on the opposite side, where the River Glayge descended through the fertile northeastern provinces from Castle Mount. That was the genteel way to reach the Labyrinth, used by high officials when they had dealings with the ministers of the Pontifex; on all other sides the Labyrinth was surrounded by far less agreeable country, the least agreeable of all being the desert through which Valentine now advanced. But there was comfort in knowing that even if he must approach through this land of deadness he would leave the Labyrinth by its happier side.

The area covered by the Labyrinth was huge, and since it was constructed on many levels, spiraling down and down and piling tier upon tier in the bowels of the planet, its actual population was incalculable. The Pontifex himself occupied only the innermost sector, to which scarcely anyone ever gained admission. In the zone surrounding that was the domain of the governmental ministers, a multitude of mysterious dedicated souls who spent all their lives toiling underground at tasks that defied Valentine’s understanding, record-keeping and tax-decreeing and census-taking and such. And around the governmental zone there had developed, over thousands of years, the protective outer skin of the Labyrinth, a maze of circular passageways inhabited by millions of shadowy figures, bureaucrats and merchants and beggars and clerks and cutpurses and who knew what else, a world unto itself, where the kindly warmth of the sun was never felt, where the cool clean shafts of the moon could not penetrate, where all the beauty and wonder and joy of giant Majipoor had been exchanged for the pallid pleasures of a life underground.

The floater-cars followed the line of the outer mound for an hour or so, and came at last to the Mouth of Blades.

This was no more than a timber-roofed opening giving access to a tunnel disappearing into the earth. A line of ancient rusty swords was set in concrete across its front, forming a barrier more symbolic than actual, since they were spaced far apart. How long, Valentine wondered, does it take to turn swords rusty in this dry desert climate?

The guardians of the Labyrinth waited just within the entrance.

There were seven of them — two Hjorts, a Ghayrog, a Skandar, a Liiman, and two humans — and all were masked after the universal manner of the officials of the Pontifex. The mask too was mainly symbolic, a mere strip of some glossy yellow stuff angled across the eyes and bridge of the nose of the humans and in equivalent places on the others; but it created an effect of great strangeness about these people, as it was meant to do.

The guardians stolidly confronted Valentine and his party in silence. Deliamber said quietly to him, "They will ask a price for admission. All this is traditional. Go up to them and state your business."

To the guardians Valentine said, "I am Valentine, brother to the late Voriax, son of the Lady of the Isle, and I have come to seek audience with the Pontifex."

Not even so bizarre and provocative an announcement as that stirred much reaction from the masked ones. The Ghayrog said only, "The Pontifex admits no one to his presence."

"Then I would have audience with his high ministers, who can bear my message to the Pontifex."

"They will not see you either," replied one of the Hjorts.

Valentine said, "In that case I will make application to the ministers of the ministers. Or to the ministers of the ministers of the ministers, if I must. All I ask of you is that you grant admission to the Labyrinth for my companions and me."

The guardians conferred solemnly among themselves, in low droning tones, evidently going through some ritual of a purely mechanical sort, since they barely seemed to be listening to one another. When their mutterings died away the Ghayrog spokesman swung about to face Valentine and said, "What is your offering?"

"Offering?"

"The entry-price."

"Name it and I’ll pay it." Valentine signaled to Shanamir, who carried a purse of coins. But the guardians looked displeased, shaking their heads, several of them actually turning away as Shanamir produced some half-royal pieces.

"Not money," the Ghayrog said disdainfully. "An offering. "

Valentine was baffled. In confusion he looked toward Deliamber, who moved his tentacles, waving several of them up and down in a rhythmic tossing gesture. Valentine frowned. Then he understood. Juggling!

"Sleet — Zalzan Kavol—"

From one of the cars they brought clubs and balls. Sleet, Carabella, and Zalzan Kavol stationed themselves before the guardians and, at a signal from the Skandar, began to juggle. Motionless as statues, the seven masked ones watched. The entire proceeding seemed so preposterous to Valentine that he was hard put to keep a straight face, and several times had to choke back giggles; but the three jugglers performed their routines austerely and with the utmost dignity, as though this were some crucial religious rite. They went through three complete patterns of interchange and stopped with one accord, bowing stiffly to the guardians. The Ghayrog nodded almost imperceptibly — the only acknowledgment of the performance.

"You may enter," he said.

—5—

THEY DROVE THE FLOATERS between the blades and into a sort of vestibule, dark and musty, that opened into a wide sloping roadway. A short distance down that and they intersected a curving tunnel, the first of the rings of the Labyrinth.

It was high-roofed and brightly lit, and could well have been a market street in any busy city, with stalls and shops and pedestrian traffic and vehicles of all shapes and sizes floating along. But a moment’s careful inspection made it clear that this was no Pidruid, no Piliplok, no Ni-moya. The people in the streets were eerily pale, with a ghostly look that told of lifetimes spent away from the rays of the sun. Their clothing was curiously archaic in style, and of dull, dark colors. There were many masked individuals, servants of the pontifical bureaucracy, unremarkable in the context of the Labyrinth and moving in the crowds without attracting the slightest attention for their maskedness. And, thought Valentine, everyone, masked and maskless alike, had a tense and drawn expression, a strange haunted look about the eyes and mouth. Out in the world of fresh air, under the warm and cheerful sun, people on Majipoor smiled freely and easily, not only with their mouths but with their eyes, their cheeks, their entire faces, their whole souls. Down in this catacomb souls were of a different sort.

Valentine turned to Deliamber. "Do you know your way around in this place?"

"Not at all. But guides should be easily come by."

"How?"

"Halt the cars, get out, stand around, look befuddled," the Vroon said. "You’ll have guides aplenty in a minute."

It took less than that. Valentine, Sleet, and Carabella left their car, and instantly a boy no more than ten, who had been running along the street with some younger children, whirled about and called, "Show you the Labyrinth? One crown, all day!"

"Do you have an older brother?" Sleet asked.

The boy glared at him. "You think I’m too young? Go on, then! Find your own way around! You’ll be lost in five minutes!"

Valentine laughed. "What’s your name?"

"Hissune."

"How many levels must we go, Hissune, before we reach the government sector?"

"You want to go there?"

"Why not?"

"They’re all crazy there," the boy said, grinning. "Work, work, shuffle papers all day long, mumble and mutter, work hard and hope you’ll get promoted even deeper down. Talk to them and they don’t even answer you. Minds all mumbly from too much work. It’s seven levels under. Court of Columns first, Hall of Winds, Place of Masks, Court of Pyramids, Court of Globes, the Arena, and then you get to the House of Records. I’ll take you there. Not for one crown, though."

"How much?"

"Half a royal."

Valentine whistled. "What would you do with so much money?"

"Buy my mother a cloak, and light five candles to the Lady, and get my sister the medicine she needs." The boy winked. "And maybe a treat or two for myself."

During this exchange a goodly crowd had gathered — at least fifteen or twenty children no older than Hissune, some younger ones, and some adults, all clustered together in a tight semicircle and watching tensely to see if Hissune got the job. None of them called out, but out of the corner of his eye Valentine saw them straining for his attention, standing on tiptoes, trying to look knowledgeable and responsible. If he refused the boy’s offer, he would have fifty more the next moment, a wild clamor of voices and a forest of waving hands. But Hissune seemed to know his business, and his blunt, coolly cynical approach had charm.

"All right," Valentine said. "Take us to the House of Records."

"All these cars yours?"

"That one, that, that — yes, all."

Hissune whistled. "Are you important? Where are you from?"

"Castle Mount."

"I guess you’re important," the boy conceded. "But if you come from Castle Mount, what are you doing on the Blades side of the Labyrinth?"

The boy was clever. Valentine said, "We’ve been traveling. We’ve just come from the Isle."

"Ah." Hissune’s eyes widened just for an instant, the first breach in his jaunty street-wise coolness. Doubtless the Isle was a virtually mythical place to him, as far off as the farthest stars, and despite himself he showed awe at finding himself in the presence of someone who had actually been there. He moistened his lips. "And how shall I call you?" he asked after a moment.

"Valentine."

"Valentine," the boy repeated. "Valentine from Castle Mount. Very nice name." He clambered into the first floater-car. As Valentine got in beside him Hissune said, "Really? Valentine?"

"Really."

"Very nice name," he said again. "Pay me half a royal, Valentine, and I’ll show you the Labyrinth."

Half a royal, Valentine knew, was outrageous, several days’ pay for a skilled artisan, and yet he made no objection: it seemed improper for someone of his station to be haggling with a child over money. Hissune, perhaps, had calculated the same thing. In any event the fee turned out to be a worthwhile investment, for the boy proved expert in the twists and turns of the Labyrinth, guiding them with surprising swiftness toward the lower and inner coils of the place. Down they went, down and around, making unexpected turns and shortcuts through narrow, barely manageable alleyways, descending on hidden ramps that seemed to make transit across implausible gulfs of space.

The Labyrinth grew darker and more intricate as they went downward. Only the outermost level was well lit. The circles within it were shadowy and sinister, with dim corridors radiating in unlikely directions from the main ones, and hints of strange statuary and architectural ornamentation vaguely visible in the musty, dismal corners. Valentine found the place disturbing. It reeked of mildew and history; it had the chill clamminess of unimaginable antiquity; it was sunless and airless and joyless, a giant cavern of forlorn dreary gloom, through which scowling harsh-eyed figures moved on errands as mysterious as their own somber selves. Down — down — down—

The boy maintained a constant flow of chatter. He was marvelously articulate, lively and funny, somehow not at all a proper product of this morbid place. He told of tourists from Ni-moya who had been lost between the Hall of Winds and Place of Masks for a month, living on scraps provided by lower-level dwellers, but too proud to admit they were unable to find their way out. He told of the architect of the Court of Globes who had aligned every spheroid in that elaborate chamber with regard to some monumentally complex numerological system, only to find that the workmen, having lost the key to his charts, had installed everything according to an improvised system of their own: he had bankrupted himself to rebuild the whole thing in the right deployment at his own expense, discovering in the end that his computations were wrong and the pattern was impossible. "They buried him right where he fell," said Hissune. And the boy told the tale of the Pontifex Arioc, he who had, when a vacancy developed in the Ladyship, proclaimed himself female, appointed himself to the Isle, and abdicated his throne: barefoot and clad in loose flowing robes, the boy said, Arioc marched publicly out of the depths of the Labyrinth, followed by a cluster of his highest ministers, who frantically tried to dissuade him from his course. "On this spot," said Hissune, "he called the people together and told them he was now their Lady, and ordered up a chariot to take him to Stoien. And the ministers could do nothing. Nothing! I wish I had seen their faces."

Down—

All day the caravan descended. They passed through the Court of Columns, where thousands of huge gray pillars sprouted like titanic toadstools, and sluggish pools of oily black water covered the stone floor to a depth of three or four feet. They crossed the Hall of Winds, a terrifying place where cold gusts of air streamed inexplicably from finely carved stone grids in the walls. They saw the Place of Masks, a twisting corridor in which giant bodiless faces, with blind empty slits for eyes, stood mounted on marble plinths. They viewed the Court of Pyramids, a forest of stark white polyhedral figures set so close together that it was impossible to move between them, a spiky-tipped maze of monoliths, some perfectly tetrahedral but most weirdly elongated, spindly, ominous. A level below it they wandered in the celebrated Court of Globes, an even more complex structure a mile and a half long, where spherical objects, some no larger than a fist and others as big as great sea-dragons, hung eerily and invisibly suspended, illuminated from below. Hissune took care to point out the architect’s grave — unmarked, a slab of black stone beneath the greatest of the globes. Down — down—

Valentine had seen nothing of this on his earlier visit. From the Mouth of Waters one descended swiftly, through passageways used only by the Coronal and Pontifex, to the imperial lair at the heart of the Labyrinth.

Someday, thought Valentine, if I am Coronal again, it will happen that I must succeed Tyeveras as Pontifex. And when that day comes I will let the people know that I do not choose to live in the Labyrinth, but will build a palace for myself in some more cheering place.

He smiled. He wondered how many Coronals before him, seeing the hideous enormity of the Labyrinth, had vowed the same vow. And yet somehow they all, sooner or later, withdrew from the world and took up residence down here. It was easy enough now, when he was young and full of vitality, to make such resolutions — easy enough to think of taking the Pontificate out of Alhanroel altogether, off to some congenial spot on the younger continent, Ni-moya, perhaps, or Dulorn, and live among beauty and delight. He found it hard to imagine himself voluntarily walling himself up in this fantastic and repellent Labyrinth. But yet, but yet, they had all done it before him, Dekkeret and Confalume and Prestimion and Stiamot and Kinniken and the others of times gone by, they had moved from Castle Mount to this dark hole when their moment came. Perhaps it was not as bad as it seemed. Perhaps when one is Coronal long enough one is glad to retire from the heights of Castle Mount. I will think more of these matters, Valentine told himself, when the appropriate time is at hand.

The caravan of floater-cars executed a hairpin turn and entered yet a lower level.

"The Arena," Hissune announced grandly.

Valentine stared into a huge hollow chamber, so great in length and width that he was unable to see its walls, only the twinkling of distant lights in the shadowed corners. There were no visible supports to its ceiling. It was astonishing to think of the massive weight of the upper levels, those millions of people, those endless winding streets and alleyways, those buildings and statues and vehicles and all, pressing down on the roof of the Arena, and this vast nothingness resisting the colossal pressure.

"Listen," said Hissune. He scrambled out of the car, put his hands to his mouth, and unleashed a piercing cry. And echoes returned, sharp stabbing sounds bouncing from this wall and that, the first few magnified in sound, the rest diminished until they were no more than the twittering chirping sounds of droles. He sent forth another cry, and another on its heels, so that sounds crashed and reverberated all about them for more than a minute. Then, with a self-satisfied smirk, the boy returned to the car.

"What purpose does this place serve?" Valentine asked.

"None."

"None? None at all?"

"It’s just an emptiness. The Pontifex Dizimaule wanted a large empty space here. Nothing ever happens in it. No one’s allowed to build in it, not that anyone would want to. It just sits. It makes good echoes, don’t you think? That’s the only use it has. Go on, Valentine, make an echo."

Valentine smiled and shook his head. "Another time," he said.

Crossing the Arena seemed to take all day. On and on they went, never once seeing a wall or a column; it was like traversing an open plain, except for the vaguely visible ceiling far above. Nor was Valentine able to discern the moment when they began to leave the Arena. He realized after a time that the floor of the place had turned somehow into a ramp, and that they had made an imperceptible transition to a lower level that returned to the familiar claustrophobic closeness of the Labyrinth’s coils. As they proceeded down this new semi-circular corridor it grew gradually more brightly lit, until soon it was nearly as well illuminated as that level close to the mouth where the shops and markets were. Ahead, rising to an extraordinary height directly before them, was a screen of some sort on which inscriptions in brilliant luminous colors could be seen.

Hissune said, "We are coming to the House of Records. I can go with you no farther."

Indeed the road terminated in a five-sided plaza in front of the great screen — which, Valentine now saw, was a kind of chronicle of Majipoor. Down its left-hand side were the names of the Coronals, a list so long that he could scarcely read its upper reaches. Down the right was the corresponding list of Pontifexes. Beside each name was the date of reign.

His eyes searched the lists. Hundreds, hundreds of names, some the familiar ones, the great resonant names of the planet’s history, Stiamot, Thimin, Confalume, Dekkeret, Prestimion, and some that were only meaningless arrangements of letters, names that Valentine had seen when as a boy he had whiled away rainy afternoons reading the lists of the Powers, but that had no significance other than that they were on the list — Prankipin and Hunzimar and Meyk and Struin and Scaul and Spurifon, men who had held power on Castle Mount and then in the Labyrinth a thousand years ago, three thousand, five, had been the center of all conversation, the object of all homage, had danced across the imperial stage and done their little show and vanished into history. Lord Spurifon, he thought. Lord Scaul. Who were they? What color was their hair, what games did they enjoy, what laws had they decreed, how calmly and bravely had they met their deaths? What impact had they had on the lives of the billions of Majipoor, or had they none? Some, Valentine saw, had ruled only a few years as Coronal, carried off quickly to the Labyrinth by the death of a Pontifex. And some had occupied the summit of Castle Mount for a generation. This Lord Meyk, Coronal for thirty years, and Pontifex for — Valentine scanned the dizzying lists — Pontifex for twenty more. Fifty years of supreme power, and who knew anything of Lord Meyk and Meyk the Pontifex today?

He looked toward the bottom of the lists, where they trailed off into blankness. Lord Tyeveras — Lord Malibor — Lord Voriax — Lord Valentine—

That was where the left-hand list ended, of course. Lord Valentine, reign three years old and unfinished—

Lord Valentine, at least, would be remembered. Not for him the oblivion of the Spurifons and Scauls; for they would tell the tale on Majipoor, for generations to come, of the dark-haired young Coronal who was cast by treachery into a fair-haired body, and lost his throne to the son of the King of Dreams. But what would they say of him? That he was a guileless fool, as comic a figure as Arioc who made himself Lady of the Isle? That he was a weakling who had failed to guard himself against evil? That he had suffered an astounding fall, and had valiantly regained his place? How would the history of Lord Valentine be told, a thousand years hence? One thing he prayed, as he stood before the great list of the House of Records: let it not be said of Lord Valentine that he regained his throne with magnificent heroism, and then ruled feebly and aimlessly for fifty years. Better to abandon the Castle to the Barjazid than to be known for that.

Hissune tugged at his hand.

"Valentine?"

He looked down, startled.

The boy said, "I leave you here. The people of the Pontifex will come for you soon."

"Thank you, Hissune, for all you’ve done. But how will you get back by yourself?"

Hissune winked. "It won’t be by walking, I promise you that." He peered solemnly up and said, after a pause, "Valentine?"

"Yes?"

"Aren’t you supposed to have dark hair and a beard?"

Valentine laughed. "You think I’m the Coronal?"

"Oh, I know you are! It’s written all over your face. Only — only your face is wrong."

"It’s not a bad face," said Valentine lightly. "A little more kindly than my old one, and maybe more handsome. I think I’m going to keep it. I suppose whoever had it first has no more need for it now."

The boy’s eyes were wide. "Are you in disguise, then?"

"You might say that."

"I thought so." He put his small hand in Valentine’s. "Well, good luck, Valentine. If you ever come back to the Labyrinth, ask for me and I’ll be your guide again, and the next time for free. Remember my name: Hissune."

"Goodbye, Hissune."

The boy winked again, and was gone.

Valentine looked toward the great screen of history.

Lord Tyeveras — Lord Malibor — Lord Voriax — Lord Valentine—

And perhaps someday Lord Hissune, he thought. Why not? The boy seemed at least as qualified as many who had ruled, and probably would have had sense enough not to drink Dominin Barjazid’s drugged wine. I must remember him, he told himself. I must remember him.

—5—

FROM A GATEWAY AT THE far side of the plaza of the House of Records now came three figures, a Hjort and two humans, in the masks of Labyrinthine officialdom. Unhurriedly they advanced toward the place where Valentine stood with Deliamber, Sleet, and a few others.

The Hjort gave Valentine careful scrutiny and did not seem awed.

"Your business here?" she asked.

"To apply for an audience with the Pontifex."

"An audience with the Pontifex," the Hjort repeated in wonder, as if Valentine had said, To apply for a pair of wings, To apply for permission to drink the ocean dry. "An audience with the Pontifex!" She laughed. "The Pontifex grants no audiences."

"Are you his chief ministers?"

The laughter was louder. "This is the House of Records, not the Court of Thrones. There are no ministers of state here."

The three officials turned and started back toward the gateway.

"Wait!" Valentine called.

He slipped into the dream-state and sent an urgent vision toward them. There was no specific content to it, only a broad and general sense that the stability of things was in peril, that the bureaucracy itself was sorely threatened, and that only they could stave off the forces of chaos. They walked on, and Valentine redoubled the intensity of his sending, until he began to sweat and tremble with the effort of it. They halted. The Hjort looked around.

"What do you want here?" she asked.

"Admit us to the ministers of the Pontifex."

There was a whispered conference.

"What do we do?" Valentine asked Deliamber. "Juggle for them?"

"Try to be patient," the Vroon murmured.

Valentine found that difficult; but he held his tongue, and after some moments the officials returned to say that he could enter, and five of his companions. The others must take lodgings on an upper level. Valentine scowled. But there seemed no arguing with these masked ones. He chose Deliamber, Carabella, Sleet, Asenhart, and Zalzan Kavol to continue on with him.

"How will the rest find lodgings?" he asked.

The Hjort shrugged. That was none of her affair.

From the shadows to Valentine’s left came a high clear voice. "Does someone need a guide to the upper levels?"

Valentine chuckled. "Hissune? Still here?"

"I thought I might be needed."

"You are. Find a decent place for my people to stay, in the outer ring near the Mouth of Waters, where they can wait for me until I’ve finished down here."

Hissune nodded. "I ask only three crowns."

"What? You need a ride up to the top anyway! And five minutes ago you said that the next time you were my guide, you wouldn’t charge anything!"

"That’s next time," replied Hissune gravely. "This is still this time. Would you deprive a poor boy of his livelihood?"

Sighing, Valentine said to Zalzan Kavol, "Give him three crowns."

The boy hopped into the first car. Shortly the entire caravan swung around and departed. Valentine and his five companions passed through the gateway of the House of Records.

Corridors went in all directions. In poorly lit cubicles clerks bent low over mounds of documents. The air was musty and dry here; the general feel of the place was even more repellent than that of the earlier levels. This, Valentine realized, was the administrative core of Majipoor, the place where the real business of governing twenty billion beings was carried on. The awareness that these scurrying gnomes, these burrowers in the earth, held the actual power of the world chilled him.

He had tended to think it was the Coronal who was the true king, and the Pontifex a mere figurehead, since it was the Coronal who was seen actively commanding the forces of order whenever chaos threatened, the vigorous and dynamic Coronal, whereas the Pontifex remained immured down below, emerging from the Labyrinth only on the highest occasions of state.

But now he was not so certain.

The Pontifex himself might be merely a crazy old man, but the minions of the Pontifex, these hundreds of thousands of drab bureaucrats in their odd little masks, might collectively wield more authority on Majipoor than the dashing Coronal and all his princely aides. Down here the tax rolls were determined, here the balances of trade between province and province were adjusted, here the maintenance of highways and parks and educational establishments and all the other functions under provincial control were coordinated. Valentine was not at all convinced that true central government was possible on a world as big as Majipoor, but at least the basic forms of it existed, the structural outlines, and he saw, as he moved through the inner maze of the Labyrinth, that government on Majipoor was not altogether a matter of grand processionals and dream-sendings. The mighty hidden bureaucracy down here did most of the work. And he was caught in its toils. There were lodgings several levels down from the House of Records for provincial officials who were visiting the Labyrinth on government business; there he was given a suite of modest rooms, and there he stayed, ignored, for the next few days. There seemed to be no way to move beyond this point. As Coronal he would have the right of immediate access to the Pontifex, of course; but he was not Coronal, not in any effective sense, and to claim that he was would probably make it impossible for him to proceed at all.

He recalled, after some rooting about in his memory, the names of the chief ministers of the Pontifex. Unless things had changed lately, Tyeveras kept five plenipotentiary officials close by him — Hornkast, his high spokesman; Dilifon, his private secretary; Shinaam, a Ghayrog, his minister of external affairs; Sepulthrove, his minister of scientific matters and personal physician; and Narrameer, his dream-speaker, who was rumored to be the most powerful of all, the adviser who had chosen Voriax and then Valentine to be Coronal.

But to reach any of these five seemed as hard as to reach the Pontifex himself. Like Tyeveras they were buried in the depths, remote, inaccessible. Valentine’s skill with the circlet his mother had given him did not extend to making contact with the mind of someone unknown to him, at an unknown distance.

He learned shortly that two lesser, but still significant, officials served as the guardians of the central levels of the Labyrinth. These were the imperial major-domos, Dondak-Sajamir of the Su-Suheris stock and Gitamorn Suul, a human. "But," said Sleet, who had been talking with the keepers of the hostelry, "these two have been feuding for a year or more. They cooperate with one another as little as possible. And you must have the approval of both in order to see the higher ministers."

Carabella snorted in annoyance. "We’ll spend the rest of our lives gathering dust down here! Valentine, why are we bothering with the Labyrinth at all? Why not clear out of here and march straight for Castle Mount?"

"My idea exactly," said Sleet.

Valentine shook his head. "The support of the Pontifex is essential. So the Lady told me, and I agree."

"Essential for what?" Sleet demanded. "The Pontifex sleeps far below the ground. He knows nothing of anything. Does the Pontifex have any army to lend you? Does the Pontifex even exist?"

"The Pontifex has an army of petty clerks and officials," Deliamber pointed out mildly. "We will find them extremely useful. They, not warriors, control the balance of power in our world."

Sleet was unconvinced. "I say hoist the starburst banner and sound the trumpets and bang the drums and set out across Alhanroel, proclaiming you as Coronal and letting the whole world know of Dominin Barjazid’s little trick. In each city along the way, you meet with the key people and win their support with your warmth and sincerity, and maybe a little help from the Lady’s circlet. By the time you’re at Castle Mount, ten million people are marching behind you, and the Barjazid will surrender without a fight!"

"A pretty vision," said Valentine. "But I think we still must have the instrumentalities of the Pontifex working for us before we try to make any open challenge. I will pay calls on these two major-domos."

In the afternoon he was conducted to the headquarters of Dondak-Sajamir — a surprisingly bleak little office deep in a tangle of tiny clerkish cubicles. For more than an hour Valentine was kept waiting in a cramped and cluttered vestibule, before at last being admitted to the major-domo’s presence.

Valentine was not entirely sure how to manage things with a Su-Suheris. Was one head Dondak and the other Sajamir? Did you address both at once, or speak only to the head that spoke to you? Was it proper to keep your attention moving from one head to the other while talking?

Dondak-Sajamir regarded Valentine as though from a great height. There was tense silence in the office as the four cool green eyes of the alien dispassionately surveyed the visitor. The Su-Suheris was a slender, elongated creature, hairless and smooth-skinned, tubular and shoulderless in form, with a rod-shaped neck that rose like a pedestal to a height of ten or twelve inches and forked to provide support for the two narrow spindle-shaped heads. He bore himself with such an air of superiority that one could easily think that the office of major-domo to the Pontifex was far more important than that of the Pontifex himself. But some of that frosty hauteur, Valentine knew, was simply a function of the major-domo’s race: a Su-Suheris could not help looking naturally imperious and disdainful.

Eventually Dondak-Sajamir’s left-hand head said, "Why have you come here?"

"To apply for an audience with the chief ministers of the Pontifex."

"So it says in your letter. But what business do you have with them?"

"A matter of the greatest urgency, an affair of state."

"Yes?"

"You hardly expect me to discuss it with anyone below the highest levels of authority, surely."

Dondak-Sajamir considered that point interminably. When he spoke again, it was from the right-hand head. The second voice was much deeper than the first. "If I waste the time of the chief ministers, it will go hard for me."

"If you place obstacles between me and my seeing them, it will also go hard for you, ultimately."

"A threat?"

"Not at all. I can tell you only that the consequences of their not receiving the information I bear will be very serious for all of us — and no doubt they will be distressed to learn that it was you who kept that information from reaching them."

"Not I alone," said the Su-Suheris. "There is a second major-domo, and we must act jointly in approving applications of this sort. You have not spoken to my colleague yet."

"No."

"She is insane. She has deliberately and malevolently withheld her cooperation from me for many months." Now Dondak-Sajamir spoke from both heads simultaneously, in tones not quite an octave apart. The effect was weirdly disconcerting. "Even if I gave you approval, she would refuse. You will never get to see the chief ministers."

"But this is impossible! Can’t we go around her somehow?"

"It would be illegal."

"If she blocks all legitimate business, though—"

The Su-Suheris looked indifferent. "The responsibility is hers."

"No," Valentine said. "You both share it! You can’t simply say that because she won’t cooperate, I can’t go forward, when the survival of the government itself is at stake!"

"Do you think so?" asked Dondak-Sajamir.

The question left Valentine baffled. Was it the idea of a threat to the realm that he was challenging, or merely the notion that he bore equal responsibility for blocking Valentine?

Valentine said, after a moment, "What do you suggest I do?"

"Return to your home," said the major-domo, "and live a fruitful and happy life, and leave the problems of government to those of us whose fate it is to wrestle with them."

—7—

HE HAD NO BETTER satisfaction from Gitamorn Suul. The other major-domo was less supercilious than the Su-Suheris, but hardly more cooperative.

She was a woman ten or twelve years older than Valentine, tall and dark-haired, with a businesslike, competent air about her. She did not appear at all insane. On her desk, in an office notably more cheerful and attractive, though no larger, than Dondak-Sajamir’s, was a file containing Valentine’s application. She tapped it several times and said, "You can’t see them, you know."

"May I ask why not?"

"Because no one sees them."

"No one?"

"No one from outside. It is no longer done."

"Is that because of the friction between you and Dondak-Sajamir?"

Gitamorn Suul’s lips quirked testily. "That idiot! But no — even if he were performing his duties properly, it still wouldn’t be possible for you to reach the ministers. They don’t want to be bothered. They have heavy responsibilities. The Pontifex is old, you know. He gives little time to matters of government, and therefore the burdens on those about him have increased. Do you understand?"

"I must see them," said Valentine.

"I can’t help that. Not even for the most urgent reason can they be disturbed."

"Suppose," Valentine said slowly, "the Coronal had been overthrown, and a false ruler held possession of the Castle?"

She pushed up her mask and looked at him in astonishment. "Is that what you want to tell them? Here. Application dismissed." Rising, she made brisk shooing gestures at him. "We have madmen enough in the Labyrinth already, without new ones coming down out of—"

"Wait," said Valentine.

He let the trance-state possess him, and summoned the power of the circlet. Desperately he reached toward her soul with his, touched it, enfolded it. It had not been part of his plan to reveal much to these minor officials, but there seemed no alternative but to take her into his confidence. He sustained the contact until he felt himself growing dizzy and weak; then he broke it off and returned hurriedly to full wakefulness. She was staring at him, dazed; her cheeks were flushed, her eyes were wild, her breasts heaved in agitation. It was a moment before she could speak.

Finally she said, "What kind of trick is that?"

"No trick. I am the Lady’s son, and she herself taught me the art of sendings."

"Lord Valentine is a dark-haired man."

"So he was. Not any longer."

"You ask me to believe—"

"Please," he said. He threw all the intensity of his spirit into the word. "Please. Believe me. Everything depends on my telling the Pontifex what has happened."

But her suspicions ran deep. From Gitamorn Suul came no kneelings, no homages, no starburst gesticulations, only a kind of sullen bewilderment, as if she might be inclined to think his bizarre story was true, but wished he had inflicted it on some other functionary.

She said, "The Su-Suheris would veto anything I proposed."

"Even if I showed him what I’ve shown you?"

She shrugged. "His obstinacy is legendary. Not even to save the life of the Pontifex would he approve one of my recommendations.’’

"But this is madness!"

"Exactly so. You’ve talked to him?"

"Yes," Valentine said. "He seemed unfriendly and puffed up with pride. But not mad."

"Deal with him a little longer," Gitamorn Suul advised, "before you form your final judgment of him."

"What if we were to forge his approval, so that I could go in without his knowing?"

She looked shocked. "You want me to commit a crime?" Valentine struggled to maintain his even temper. "A crime has already been committed, and not a trifling one," he said in a low, steady voice. "I am Coronal of Majipoor, deposed through treachery. Your help is vital to my restoration. Doesn’t that override all these petty regulations? Can’t you see that I have the power to pardon you for breaking those regulations?" He leaned toward her. "Time is wasting. Castle Mount houses a usurper. I run back and forth between subordinates of the Pontifex, when I should be leading an army of liberation across Alhanroel. Give me your approval, and let me be on my way, and there’ll be rewards for you when everything’s again as it should be on Majipoor."

Her eyes were cold and suddenly bleak. "Your story makes great demands on my powers of belief. What if it is all false? What if you are in the pay of Dondak-Sajamir?"

Valentine groaned. "I beg you—"

"No. It’s entirely likely. This is a trap, perhaps. You, your fantastic story, some sort of hypnosis, all designed to destroy me, to leave the Su-Suheris unchallenged here, to give him the supreme power he has so long desired—"

"I swear by the Lady my mother I have not lied to you."

"A true criminal would swear by anybody’s mother, but what is that?"

Valentine hesitated, then boldly reached forth and took Gitamorn Suul’s hands in his. Intently he stared into her eyes. What he was about to do was disagreeable to him, but so was all that these petty bureaucrats had been doing to him. The time had come for a little shamelessness, or he would be forever entangled down here.

He said, peering close, "Even if I were in Dondak-Sajamir’s pay, I could never betray a woman as beautiful as you."

She looked scornful. But color flared again in her cheeks.

He went on, "Trust me. Believe in me. I am Lord Valentine, and you will be one of the heroes of my return. I know the thing you want most in the world, and it will be yours when I have regained the Castle."

"You know it?"

"Yes," he whispered, gently stroking the hands that now lay limply in his. "To have sole authority over the inner Labyrinth, is that not it? To be the only major-domo?"

She nodded as though in a dream.

"It will be done," he said. "Ally yourself with me, and Dondak-Sajamir will be stripped of his rank, for making himself an obstacle to me. Will you do that? Will you help me reach the chief ministers, Gitamorn Suul?"

"It will be — difficult—"

"But it can be done! Anything can be done! And when I am Coronal again, the Su-Suheris loses his post! I promise you that."

"Swear it!"

"I swear it," Valentine said passionately, feeling foul and depraved. "I swear it on my mother’s name. I swear it by all that’s holy. Is it agreed?"

"Agreed," she said in a small faltering voice. "But how is it to be done? You need both signatures on the pass, and if mine is on it, he’ll refuse to add his."

Valentine said, "Write me out a pass and sign it. I’ll go back to him and talk him into countersigning it."

"He will never do it."

"Let me work on him. I can be persuasive. Once I have his signature, I can enter the inner Labyrinth and achieve what I must achieve. When I emerge, it will be with the full authority of the Coronal — and I will have Dondak-Sajamir removed from office, that I promise you."

"But how will you get his signature? He’s refused all countersignatures for months!"

"Leave that to me," said Valentine.

She drew from her desk a dark green cube of some sleek glistening material and placed it briefly in a machine that cast an incandescent yellow glow over it. When she removed it, the surface of the cube was infused with a new brightness. "Here. This is your pass. But I warn you that without his countersignature it is worthless."

"I’ll get it," Valentine said.

He returned to Dondak-Sajamir. The Su-Suheris was reluctant to see him, but Valentine persevered.

"I understand now your loathing of Gitamorn Suul," he said.

Dondak-Sajamir smiled coolly. "Is she not hateful? I suppose she refused your application."

"Oh, no," said Valentine, taking the cube from his cloak and placing it before the major-domo. "She granted that willingly enough, knowing that you had refused me and her permission would be worthless. It was her other rejection that wounded me so deeply."

"And which was that?"

Serenely Valentine said, "This may sound foolish to you, or even repellent, but I was powerfully overcome by her beauty. To human eyes, I must tell you, that woman has extraordinary physical presence, a nobility of bearing, a luminous erotic force, that — well, no matter. I threw myself before her in an embarrassingly naive way. I made myself open and vulnerable. And she mocked me cruelly. She scorned me in a way that was like a blade twisting in my vitals. Can you understand that, that she would be so merciless, so contemptuous, toward a stranger who had only the warmest and most profoundly passionate feelings for her?"

"Her beauty escapes me," said Dondak-Sajamir. "But I know her coldness and arrogance quite well."

"Now I share your enmity for her," Valentine said. "If you will have me, I offer myself to your service, so that we can work together to destroy her."

Dondak-Sajamir said thoughtfully, "Yes, this would be a fine moment to bring about her downfall. But how?"

Valentine tapped the cube that rested on the major-domo’s desk. "Add your countersignature to this pass. I’ll then be free to enter the inner Labyrinth. While I’m there, you launch an official inquiry into the circumstances under which I was admitted, claiming that you gave no such permission. When I’ve returned from my business with the Pontifex, summon me to testify. I’ll say you rejected my application, and that I got the pass, already fully countersigned, from Gitamorn Suul, never suspecting it might be forged by someone meaning to spite you by admitting me. Your accusation of forgery, coupled with my testimony that you had declined to approve my application, will be her ruination. What do you say?"

"A magnificent plan," replied Dondak-Sajamir. "I could have devised nothing better!"

The Su-Suheris slipped the cube into a machine that gave it a brilliant pink glow superimposed over Gitamorn Suul’s yellow one. The pass now was valid. All this intrigue, Valentine thought, was nearly as much of a strain on the mind as the intricacies of the Labyrinth itself; but it was done, and done successfully. Now let these two plot and scheme against each other as they wished, while he made his way unimpeded toward the ministers of the Pontifex. They were apt to be disappointed with the way he fulfilled his promises to them, for he intended, if he could, to sweep both the bickering rivals from power. But he did not ask pure and total saintliness of himself in his dealings with those whose chief role in the government appeared to be to impede and obstruct.

He took the cube from Dondak-Sajamir and inclined his head in gratitude.

"May you come to have all the power and prestige you deserve," said Valentine unctuously, and departed.

—8—

THE GUARDIANS OF THE innermost Labyrinth seemed astounded that anyone from outside had contrived to gain entry to their realm. But though they subjected the pass-cube to a thorough scanning, they grudgingly conceded that it was legitimate and sent Valentine and his companions inward.

A narrow, snub-snouted car carried them silently and swiftly down the passages of this interior universe. The masked officials who accompanied them did not seem to be guiding it themselves, nor would that have been an easy task, for in these levels the Labyrinth branched and rebranched, curved and recurved. Any intruder would quickly become hopelessly bewildered amid these thousand twistings, twinings, sinuosities, and tangles. The car, though, appeared to be floating over a concealed guidance track that controlled its journey, along a swift if not particularly straightforward route, deeper and deeper into the coils of sequestered alleys. At checkpoint after checkpoint Valentine was interrogated by disbelieving functionaries almost unable to comprehend the notion that an outlander had come calling on the ministers of the Pontifex. Their endless thrusts were wearying but futile. He waved his pass-cube at them as though it were a magic wand. "I am on a mission of the highest urgency," he said again and again, "and will speak only with the supreme members of the Pontifical court." Arming himself with all the dignity and presence at his command, Valentine brushed aside every objection, every quibble. "It will not go well for you," he warned, "if you delay me further."

And finally — it felt as though a hundred years had passed since Valentine had juggled his way into the Labyrinth at the Mouth of Blades — he found himself standing before Shinaam, Dilifon, and Narrameer, three of the five great ministers of the Pontifex.

They received him in a somber and clammy chamber made of huge blocks of black stone, with a lofty ceiling and ornamentation of pointed arches. It was a heavy, oppressive place more suitable as a dungeon than a council-chamber. Entering it, Valentine felt all the weight of the Labyrinth bearing down on him, level upon level, Arena and House of Records and Court of Globes and Hall of Winds, and all the rest, the dark corridors, the cluttered cubicles, the multitudes of toiling clerks. Somewhere far above, the sun was shining, the air was fresh and crisp, a breeze blew out of the south, bearing the perfume of alabandinas and eldirons and tanigales. And he was here pinned beneath a giant mound of earth and miles of tortuous passageways, in a kingdom of eternal night. His journey downward and inward in the Labyrinth had left him feverish and drawn, as though he had not slept for weeks.

He touched his hand to Deliamber and the Vroon gave him a tingling jolt of energy, shoring up his ebbing strength. He looked to Carabella, who smiled and blew him a kiss. He looked to Sleet, who nodded and grinned grimly. He looked to Zalzan Kavol, and the fierce grizzled Skandar made a quick juggling motion with all his hands by way of encouragement. His companions, his friends, his bulwarks throughout all this long and strange travail.

He looked toward the ministers.

Maskless, they sat side by side on chairs majestic enough to be thrones. Shinaam was in the center, the minister of external affairs, of Ghayrog birth, reptilian-looking, with chilly lidless eyes and busily flicking forked red tongue and hair of a coarse snaky appearance that moved in slow wriggles. To his right was Dilifon, private secretary to Tyeveras, a frail and spectral figure, hair as white as Sleet’s, skin parched and withered, eyes blazing like jets of fire out of the ancient face. And on the other side of the Ghayrog was Narrameer, the imperial dream-speaker, a slender and elegant woman who must surely be of great age, for her association with Tyeveras went back as far as the long-ago era when he was Coronal. Yet she seemed to be barely of middle years. Her skin was smooth and unlined, her auburn hair was lustrous and full. Only by the remote and enigmatic expression of her eyes could Valentine detect any hint of the wisdom, the experience, the accumulated power of many decades, that was hers. Some sorcery at work, he decided.

"We have read your petition," said Shinaam. His voice was deep and crisp, with the merest trace of a hiss in it. "The story you bring strains our credulity."

"Have you spoken with the Lady my mother?"

"We have spoken with the Lady, yes," the Ghayrog replied coolly. "She accepts you as her son."

"She urges us to cooperate with you," said Dilifon in a cracked and scratchy voice.

"In sendings she appeared to us," said Narrameer, softly, musically, "and commended you to us, asking that we give you such aid as you require."

"Well, then?" Valentine demanded.

Shinaam said, "The possibility exists that the Lady is capable of being deceived."

"You think I’m an impostor?"

"You ask us to believe," said the Ghayrog, "that the Coronal of Majipoor was taken unawares by a younger son of the King of Dreams and evicted from his own body, that he was stripped of his memory and placed — such fragment of him as remained — in quite another body that conveniently happened to be available, and that the usurper successfully entered the empty husk of the Coronal and imposed his own consciousness on it. We find it strenuous to believe such things."

"The skills exist to move bodies from mind to mind," said Valentine. "There is precedent."

"No precedent," Dilifon said, "for the displacement of a Coronal in that fashion."

"Nevertheless it happened," Valentine replied. "I am Lord Valentine, restored to my memory by the kindness of the Lady, and I ask the backing of the Pontifex in regaining the responsibilities to which he called me upon my brother’s death."

"Yes," said Shinaam. "If you are who you claim to be, it would be fitting for you to return to Castle Mount. But how are we to know that? These are serious matters. They portend civil war. Shall we advise the Pontifex to plunge the world into agony on the mere assertion of some young stranger who—"

"I’ve already convinced my mother of my authenticity," Valentine pointed out. "My mind lay open to her at the Isle, and she saw me to be who I am." He touched the silver circlet at his brow. "How do you think I came by this device? It was her gift, by her own hands, as we stood together in Inner Temple."

Quietly Shinaam said, "That the Lady accepts and supports you is not in doubt."

"But you question her judgment?"

"We require deeper proof of your claims," said Narrameer.

"Then allow me to cast forth a sending here and now, so that I can convince you that I speak the truth."

"As you wish," said Dilifon.

Valentine closed his eyes and let the trance-state come upon him.

From him, with passion and conviction, came the radiant stream of his being, flooding forth as it had when he had needed to gain the trust of Nascimonte in that bleak ruin-strewn wilderness beyond Treymone, and when he had swayed the minds of the three officials at the gateway to the House of Records, and when he had revealed himself to the major-domo Gitamorn Suul. With varying degrees of success he had accomplished what had to be accomplished with all of those.

But now he felt himself unable to surmount the impenetrable skepticism of the ministers of the Pontifex.

The mind of the Ghayrog was altogether opaque to him, a wall as blank and inaccessible as the towering white cliffs of the Isle of Sleep. Valentine sensed only the most cloudy flickerings of a consciousness behind Shinaam’s mental shield, and could not break through, though he poured against it everything at his command. The mind of shriveled old Dilifon was an equally remote thing, not because it was shielded but because it seemed porous, open, a honeycomb that offered no resistance: he went through it, air passing through air, encountering nothing tangible. Only with the mind of the dream-speaker Narrameer did Valentine sense contact, but that too was unsatisfactory. She seemed to be drinking in his soul, absorbing all that he was giving and letting it drain into some fathomless cavern of her being, so that he could send and send and send and never reach the center of her spirit.

Yet he refused to give up. With furious intensity he hurled forth the fullness of his soul, proclaiming himself to be Lord Valentine of Castle Mount and urging them to give proof that he was anything else. He reached deep for memories — of his mother, his royal brother, his princely education, his overthrow in Til-omon, his wanderings in Zimroel, everything that had gone into the shaping of the man who had battled his way to the bowels of the Labyrinth to gain their aid. He offered himself totally, recklessly, ferociously, until he could send no more, until he was reeling and numb with exhaustion, hanging between Sleet and Carabella like some limp and useless garment that its owner had discarded.

He brought himself up from the trance-state, fearing that he had failed.

He was trembling and weak. Sweat bathed his body. His vision was blurred and there was a savage pain in his temples.

He fought to recover his strength, closing his eyes, sucking air deep into his lungs. Then he looked up at the trio of ministers.

Their faces were harsh and somber. Their eyes were cold and unmoved. Their expressions were aloof, disdainful, even hostile. Valentine was suddenly terrified. Could these three be in league with Dominin Barjazid himself? Was he pleading before his own enemies?

But that was unthinkable and impossible, a phantom of his exhausted mind, he told himself desperately. He could not let himself believe that the plot against him had reached as far as the Labyrinth.

In a hoarse, ragged voice he said, "Well? What do you say now?"

"I experienced nothing," said Shinaam.

"I am unconvinced," said Dilifon. "Any wizard can make sendings of this sort. Your sincerity and passion can be feigned."

Narrameer said, "I agree. Through sendings can come lies as well as truth."

"No!" Valentine cried. "You had me wide open before you. You can’t possibly have failed to see—"

"Not wide open enough," said Narrameer.

"What do you mean?"

She said, "Let us do a dream-speaking, you and I. Here, now, in this chamber, before these people. Let our minds truly become one. And then I can evaluate the plausibility of your story. Are you willing? Will you drink the drug with me?"

In alarm Valentine looked to his companions — and saw alarm reflected on their faces, all but that of Deliamber, whose expression was as bland and neutral as though he were someplace entirely else. Risk a speaking? Did he dare? The drug would render him unconscious, utterly transparent, wholly vulnerable. If these three were allied with the Barjazid and sought to render him helpless, there would be no easier way. Nor was this any ordinary village speaker who proposed to enter his mind; this was the speaker of the Pontifex, a woman of at least a hundred years, wily and powerful, reputed to be the true master of the Labyrinth, controlling all others, including old Tyeveras himself. Deliamber studiously was giving him no clue. This was entirely his decision to make.

"Yes," he said, his eyes directly on hers. "If nothing else avails, let it be a speaking. Here. Now."

—9—

THEY SEEMED TO BE prepared for it. At a signal, aides brought in the paraphernalia of a speaking: a thick rug of rich glowing colors, dark gold edged with scarlet and green; a slim tall decanter of polished white stone; two delicate porcelain cups. Narrameer stepped down from her lofty chair and poured the dream-wine with her own hands, offering Valentine the first cup.

He held it a moment without drinking it. He had had wine from the hands of Dominin Barjazid in Til-omon, and all had changed for him in a single draught. Was he to drink this, now, without fear of consequences? Who knew what fresh enchantment was being prepared for him? Where would he awaken, in what altered guise?

Narrameer watched him in silence. The dream-speaker’s eyes were unreadable, mysterious, penetrating. She was smiling, an altogether ambiguous smile, whether one of encouragement or of triumph Valentine could not tell. He raised the cup in brief salute and put it to his lips.

The effect of the wine was instantaneous and unexpectedly powerful. Valentine swayed dizzily. Fogs and cobwebs assailed his mind. Was this stuff stronger than what the dream-speaker Tisana had given him in Falkynkip so long ago — some special demon-brew of Narrameer’s? Or was it simply that he was more susceptible at this moment, weakened and drained as he was by his using of the circlet? Through eyes that were becoming unwilling to focus he saw Narrameer down her own wine, toss the empty cup to an aide, and slide swiftly out of her robe. Her naked body was supple, smooth, youthful — flat belly, slender thighs, high round breasts. A sorcery, he thought. A sorcery, yes. Her skin was a deep shade of brown. Her nipples, almost black, stared at him like blind eyes.

He was already too deeply drugged to manage his own disrobing. The hands of his friends plucked at the catches and hasps of his clothing. He felt cold air about him and knew he was naked.

Narrameer beckoned him to the dream-rug. On wobbly legs Valentine went to her, and she drew him down. He closed his eyes, imagining he was with Carabella, but Narrameer was nothing at all like Carabella. Her embrace was dry and cold, her flesh hard, unresilient. She had no warmth, no vibrance. That youthfulness of hers was only a cunning projection. Lying in her arms was like lying on a bed of smooth chilly stone.

An all-engulfing pool of darkness was rising about him, a thick warm oily fluid growing deeper and deeper, and Valentine let himself slip easily into it, feeling it slide up comfortingly about his legs, his waist, his chest.

It was much like the time the great sea-dragon had smashed Gorzval’s ship, and he had found himself being sucked down by the whirlpool. Not resisting was so easy, so much easier than fighting. To yield all will, to relax, to accept whatever might befall, to allow himself to be swept under — so tempting, so very appealing. He was tired. He had struggled a long time. Now he could rest and allow the black tide to cover him. Let others battle valiantly for honor and power and acclaim. Let others—

No.

That was what they wanted: to ensnare him in his own weaknesses. He was too trusting, too guileless; he had supped with an enemy, unknowingly, and had been undone; he would be undone once more if he abandoned the effort now. This was not the moment for slipping into warm dark pools.

He began to swim. At first the going was difficult, for the pool was deep and the black fluid, viscous and heavy, tugged at his arms. But after a few strokes Valentine found a way to make his body more angular, a blade slicing deep. He moved rapidly and more rapidly yet, arms and legs pistoning in smooth coordination. The pool that had tempted him with oblivion now offered him support. Buoyant, firm, it bore him up as he swam swiftly toward the distant shore. The sun, bright, immense, a great purple-yellow globe, cast dazzling rays, a track of fire over the sea.

"Valentine."

The voice was deep, rolling, a sound like thunder. He did not recognize it.

"Valentine, why are you swimming so hard?"

"To reach the shore."

"But why do that?"

Valentine shrugged and kept swimming. He saw an island, a broad white beach, a jungle of tall slender trees growing one up against the next, with tangled vines binding their crowns into a dense canopy. But though he swam and swam and swam he came no closer to it.

"You see?" The great voice said. "There’s no sense in bothering!"

"Who are you?" Valentine asked.

"I am Lord Spurifon," came the majestic resonant reply.

"Who?"

"Lord Spurifon the Coronal, successor to Lord Scaul now Pontifex, and I tell you to give up this folly. Where can you hope to get?"

"Castle Mount," answered Valentine, swimming harder.

"But I am Coronal!"

"Never — heard of — you—"

Lord Spurifon made a shrill shrieking sound. The smooth oily surface of the sea rippled and then grew puckered, as though a million needles were piercing it from below. Valentine forced himself onward, no longer trying to be angular, but rather now transforming himself into something blunt and obstinate, a log with arms, battering through the turbulence.

Now the shore was within reach. He lowered his feet and felt sand below, hot, squirming, writhing sand that ran in trickles away from him wherever he touched it, making walking a chore, but not so grave a chore that he was unable to push himself to land. He scrambled up on the beach and knelt a moment. When he looked up, a pale, thin man with worried blue eyes was studying him.

"I am Lord Hunzimar," he said mildly. "Coronal of Coronals, never to be forgotten. And these are my immortal companions." He gestured, and the beach was filled with men much like himself, insignificant, diffident, trifling. "This is Lord Struin," declared Lord Hunzimar, "and this Lord Prankipin, and Lord Meyk, and Lord Scaul, and Lord Spurifon. Coronals of grandeur and puissance. Bow down before us!"

Valentine laughed. "You’re all completely forgotten!"

"No! No!"

"Such a squeaking!" He pointed at the last in the row.

"You — Spurifon! No one remembers you."

"Lord Spurifon, if you please."

"And you — Lord Scaul. Three thousand years have entirely evaporated your fame."

"You are mistaken in this. My name is inscribed on the roster of the Powers."

Valentine shrugged. "So it is. But what does that matter? Lord Prankipin, Lord Meyk, Lord Hunzimar, Lord Struin — nothing but names, now — nothing — but — names—"

"Nothing — but — names—" they echoed, in high thin wailing tones, and began to dwindle and shrink, until they were drole-high on the beach, small scurrying things that ran about pitifully, crying out their names in sharp little squeaks. Then they were gone, and in their place were small white spheres, no bigger than juggling-balls, which, Valentine realized, as he bent down to inspect them, were skulls. He scooped them up and tossed them blithely in the air, and caught them as they descended and threw them again, arraying them in a gleaming cascade. Their jaws clicked and chattered as they soared and fell. Valentine grinned. How many could he juggle at once? Spurifon, Struin, Hunzimar, Meyk, Prankipin, Scaul — that was only six. There had been hundreds of Coronals, one every ten or twenty or thirty years for the past eleven thousand years or thereabouts. He would juggle them all. From the air he plucked more of them, greater ones, Confalume, Prestimion, Stiamot, Dekkeret, Pinitor, a dozen, a hundred, filling the air with them, hurling and catching, hurling and catching. Never since the days of the first settlement had there been such a display of juggling skill on Majipoor! No longer was he throwing skulls; they had become glittering many-faceted diadems, orbs, indeed a thousand imperial orbs that cast sparkling light in every direction. He juggled them flawlessly, knowing each for the Power that it represented, now Lord Confalume, now Lord Spurifon, now Lord Dekkeret, now Lord Scaul, keeping them all aloft, spreading them out through the air so that they formed a great inverted pyramid of light, all the royal persons of Majipoor dancing above him, all converging toward the fair-haired smiling man who stood with legs planted firmly in the warm sand of that golden beach. He supported them all. The entire history of the world was in his hands, and he sustained it in its flight.

The dazzling diadems formed a great starburst of radiance overhead.

Without missing a beat, Valentine began to walk inland, over the smoothly rising dunes toward the dense jungle wall. The trees parted as he approached, bowing to left and right, clearing a track for him, a scarlet-paved way leading to the unknown interior of the island. He looked ahead and saw foothills before him, low gray hills that rose in slow ascent to become steeply rising granite flanks, beyond which lay jagged peaks, a formidable sharp-tipped cordillera stretching on and on and on to the heart of a continent. And on the highest peak of all, on a summit so lofty that the air about it shimmered with a pale luminous glow seen only in dreams, sprawled the buttressed walls of the Castle. Valentine marched toward it, juggling as he went. Figures passed him along the path, coming the other way, waving, smiling, bowing. Lord Voriax was one, and his mother the Lady another, and the tall solemn figure of the Pontifex Tyeveras, all greeting him cordially, and Valentine waved back to them without dropping a diadem, without breaking the smooth serene flow of his juggling. He was on the foothill trail now, and effortlessly moving upward, with a crowd growing about him, Carabella and Sleet close at hand, Zalzan Kavol and the whole juggling band of Skandars, Lisamon Hultin the giantess and Khun of Kianimot, Shanamir, Vinorkis, Gorzval, Lorivade, Asenhart, hundreds of others, Hjorts and Ghayrogs and Liimen and Vroons, merchants, farmers, fishers, acrobats, musicians, Duke Nascimonte the bandit chieftain, Tisana the dream-speaker, Gitamorn Suul and Dondak-Sajamir arm in arm, a horde of dancing Metamorphs, a phalanx of dragon-captains merrily brandishing harpoons, a skittering cavorting troop of forest-brethren swinging hand over hand through the trees alongside the path, everyone singing, laughing, prancing, following him toward the Castle, Lord Malibor’s Castle, Lord Spurifon’s Castle, Lord Confalume’s Castle, Lord Stiamot’s Castle, Lord Valentine’s Castle — Lord Valentine’s Castle—

He was nearly there. Though the mountain road led virtually straight upward, though mists thick as wool hung low over the trail, he went onward, faster now, skipping and running, gloriously juggling his hundreds of gleaming baubles. Just ahead he saw three great pillars of fire, which as he drew closer resolved themselves into faces — Shinaam, Dilifon, Narrameer, side by side in his path.

They spoke in a single voice: "Where are you going?"

"To the Castle."

"Whose Castle?"

"Lord Valentine’s Castle."

"And who are you?"

"Ask them," said Valentine, gesturing to those who danced behind him. "Let them tell you my name!"

"Lord Valentine!" cried Shanamir, first to hail him.

"He is Lord Valentine!" cried Sleet and Carabella and Zalzan Kavol.

"Lord Valentine the Coronal!" cried the Metamorphs and the dragon-captains and the forest-brethren.

"Is this so?" asked the ministers of the Pontifex.

"I am Lord Valentine," said Valentine gently, and threw the thousand diadems high overhead, and they rose until they were lost to sight in the darkness that dwells between the worlds, and out of that darkness they came floating silently down, twinkling, sparkling like snowflakes falling on the slopes of the mountains of the north, and when they touched the figures of Shinaam and Dilifon and Narrameer the three ministers vanished instantly, leaving only a silver gleam behind, and the gates of the Castle lay open.

—10—

VALENTINE WOKE. He felt the wool of the rug against his bare skin, and saw the pointed arches of the gloomy stone ceiling far above. For a moment the world of the dream remained so vivid in his mind that he sought to return to it, not wanting at all to be in this place of musty air and dark corners. Then he sat up and looked about, shaking the fog from his mind.

He saw his companions Sleet and Carabella and Deliamber and Zalzan Kavol and Asenhart huddled together strangely against the far wall, tense, apprehensive.

He turned the other way, expecting to see the three ministers of the Pontifex once more enthroned. As indeed they were, but two more of the magnificent chairs had been brought to the room, and now five seated figures confronted him. Narrameer, robed again, sat at the left. Beside her was Dilifon. At the center of the group was a round-faced man with a blunt broad nose and dark solemn eyes, whom Valentine recognized, after a moment’s thought, as Hornkast, high spokesman of the Pontificate. Next to him sat Shinaam, and in the rightmost chair was a person Valentine did not know, a sharp-featured man, thin-lipped, gray-skinned, strange. The five were watching him sternly, in a distant, preoccupied way, as though they were judges of a secret court, gathered to pass a verdict that was long overdue in rendering.

Valentine stood. He made no attempt to retrieve his clothing. That he was naked before this tribunal seemed somehow appropriate.

Narrameer said, "Is your mind clear?"

"I believe it is."

"You have slept more than an hour past the end of your dream. We have waited for you." She indicated the gray-skinned man at the far side of the group and said, "This is Sepulthrove, physician to the Pontifex."

"So I suspected," Valentine said.

"And this man" — she indicated the one in the center — "I think you already know."

Valentine nodded. "Hornkast, yes. We have met." And then the import of Narrameer’s choice of words reached him. He smiled broadly and said, "We have met, but I was in another body then. You accept my claim?"

"We accept your claim, Lord Valentine," said Hornkast in a rich, melodious voice. "A great strangeness has been perpetrated upon this world, but it will be set to rights. Come: clothe yourself. It is hardly fit that you go before the Pontifex naked like this."

Hornkast led the procession to the imperial throne-room. Narrameer and Dilifon walked behind him, with Valentine between; Sepulthrove and Shinaam brought up the rear. Valentine’s companions were not permitted to come.

The passageway was a narrow high-vaulted tunnel of a glimmering greenish glassy stuff, in the depths of which strange reflections, elusive and distorted, sparkled and swam. It coiled round and round, spiraling inward on a slight downward grade. Every fifty paces there was a bronze door that entirely sealed the tunnel: at each, Hornkast touched his fingers to a hidden panel, and the door slid noiselessly aside to admit them to the next segment of the passage, until at last they came to a door more ornate than the others, richly embellished with the symbol of the Labyrinth in chasings of gold, and the imperial monogram of Tyeveras superimposed on it. This was the very heart of the Labyrinth, Valentine knew, its deepest and most central point. And when this final door slipped aside at Hornkast’s touch it revealed a huge bright chamber of spherical form, a great glassy-walled globe of a room, in which the Pontifex of Majipoor sat enthroned in splendor.

Valentine had beheld the Pontifex Tyeveras on five occasions. The first had been when Valentine was a child, and the Pontifex had come to Castle Mount to attend Lord Malibor’s wedding; then again years later, at the coronation of Lord Voriax, and again a year afterward at the marriage of Voriax, and a fourth time when Valentine had visited the Labyrinth as emissary from his brother, and one last meeting just three years ago — though it felt now more like thirty — when Tyeveras had attended Valentine’s own coronation. The Pontifex had already been old at the first of these events, an enormously tall, gaunt, forbidding-looking man with harsh angular features, a beard of midnight black, deep-set mournful eyes; and as he grew even older those characteristics became greatly accentuated, so that there came to be something cadaverous about him, a stiff, slow-moving, wintry old dry stalk of a man, but nevertheless alert, aware, still vigorous in his fashion, still projecting an aura of immense power and majesty. But now—

But now—

The throne on which Tyeveras sat was the one he had occupied on Valentine’s earlier visit to the Labyrinth, a splendid high-backed golden seat atop three wide low steps; but now it was wholly enclosed in a sphere of lightly tinted blue glass, into which ran a vast and intricate network of life-support conduits that formed a complex, almost unfathomable cocoon. Those clear pipes bubbling with colored fluids, those meters and dials, those measuring plaques mounted on the Pontifex’s cheeks and forehead, those wires and nodes and connectors and clamps, had a weird and frightening aspect, for plainly they said that the life of the Pontifex resided not in the Pontifex but in the machinery surrounding him.

"How long has he been like this?" Valentine murmured.

"The system has been developing for twenty years," said the physician Sepulthrove with obvious pride. "But only in the last two have we kept him constantly in it."

"Is he conscious?"

"Oh, yes, yes, definitely conscious!" Sepulthrove replied. "Go closer. Look at him."

Uneasily Valentine advanced until he stood at the foot of the throne, peering up at the eerie old man within the glass bubble. Yes, he saw the light still aglow in the eyes of Tyeveras, saw the fleshless lips still clamped in a look of resolve. Now the skin of the Pontifex was like parchment over his skull, and his long beard, though still strangely black, was sparse and wispy.

Valentine glanced at Hornkast. "Does he recognize people? Does he speak?"

"Of course. Give him a moment."

Valentine’s eyes met those of Tyeveras. There was a terrible silence. The old man frowned, stirred vaguely, let his tongue flicker briefly over his lips.

From the Pontifex came an unintelligible quavering sound, a kind of whining moan, soft and strange.

Hornkast said, "The Pontifex gives greeting to his beloved son Lord Valentine the Coronal."

Valentine repressed a shudder. "Tell his majesty— tell him— tell him that his son Lord Valentine the Coronal comes to him in love and respect, as always."

That was the convention: that one did not ever speak directly to the Pontifex, that one phrased one’s sentences as though the high spokesman would repeat everything, although in fact the spokesman did not do so.

The Pontifex spoke again, as indistinctly as before. Hornkast said, "The Pontifex expresses his concern for the disturbance that has occurred in the realm. He asks what plans Lord Valentine the Coronal has for restoring the proper system of things."

"Tell the Pontifex," said Valentine, "that I plan to march toward Castle Mount, calling upon all citizens to give me their allegiance. I ask from him a general directive branding Dominin Barjazid a usurper and denouncing all those who support him."

From the Pontifex now came more animated sounds, sharp and high of pitch, with weird compelling energy behind them.

Hornkast said, "The Pontifex wishes to be assured that you will avoid battle and the destruction of lives, if at all possible."

"Tell him that I would prefer to regain Castle Mount without the loss of a single life on either side. But I have no idea whether that can be achieved."

Odd gurgling sounds. Hornkast looked puzzled. He stood with his head cocked, listening intently.

"What does he say?" Valentine whispered.

The high spokesman shook his head. "Not everything his majesty says can be interpreted. Sometimes he moves in realms too remote from our experience."

Valentine nodded He looked with pity and even with love on the grotesque old man, caged within the globe that sustained his life, able to communicate only in this dreamlike moaning. More than a century old, for decade after decade supreme monarch of the world, now drooling and babbling like a child — and yet somewhere within that decaying softening brain still ticked the mind of the Tyeveras that had been, trapped in the breakdown of the flesh. To behold him now was to understand the ultimate meaninglessness of supreme rank: a Coronal lived in the world of deeds and moral responsibility, only to succeed to the Pontificate and finally to vanish into the Labyrinth and crazy senility. Valentine wondered how often a Pontifex had become the captive of his spokesman and his doctor and his dream-speaker, and finally had had to be eased from the world so that the grand rotation of the Powers could bring a more vital man to the throne. Valentine comprehended now why the system separated the doer and the ruler, why the Pontifex eventually hid himself away from the world in this Labyrinth. His own time would come, down here: but, the Divine willing, it would not be soon.

He said, "Tell the Pontifex that Lord Valentine the Coronal, his worshipful son, will do his utmost to repair the rift in the fabric of society. Tell the Pontifex that Lord Valentine counts on his majesty’s support, without which there can be no swift restoration."

There was silence from the throne, and then a long painful outwelling of incomprehensibility, a jumble of fluting gargling sounds that wandered up and down the scale like the eerie melodies of the Ghayrog mode. Hornkast appeared to be straining to catch even a syllable of sense here and there. The Pontifex ceased speaking, and Hornkast, troubled, tugged at his jowls, chewed at his lip.

"What was all that?" Valentine asked.

"He thinks you are Lord Malibor," said Hornkast dejectedly. "He cautions you against the risks of going to sea to hunt dragons."

"Wise counsel," said Valentine. "But it comes too late."

"He says the Coronal is too precious to gamble his life in such amusements."

"Tell him that I agree, that if I regain Castle Mount I’ll cling closely to my tasks, and avoid any such diversions."

The physician Sepulthrove came forward and said quietly, "We are tiring him. This audience must end, I fear."

"One moment more," Valentine said.

Sepulthrove frowned. But Valentine, with a smile, advanced again to the foot of the throne, and knelt there, and held his outspread hands up toward the ancient creature within the glass bubble, and, slipping into the trance-state, sent forth his spirit toward Tyeveras, bearing impulses of reverence and affection. Had anyone ever shown affection toward the formidable Tyeveras before? Very likely not. But for decades this man had been the center and soul of Majipoor, and now, sitting here lost in a timeless dream of governance, aware only intermittently of the responsibilities that once had been his, he deserved such love as his adoptive son and someday successor could bestow, and Valentine gave as fully as the powers of the circlet would permit.

And Tyeveras seemed to grow stronger, his eyes to brighten, his cheeks to take on a ruddy tint. Was that a smile on those shriveled lips? Did the left hand of the Pontifex lift, ever so slightly, in a gesture of blessing? Yes. Yes. Yes. Beyond doubt the Pontifex felt the flow of warmth from Valentine, and welcomed it, and was responding. Tyeveras spoke briefly and almost coherently. Hornkast said, "He says he grants you his full support, Lord Valentine."

Live long, old man, Valentine thought, getting to his feet and bowing. Probably you would rather sleep forever, but I must wish upon you a longer life even than you have already had, for there is work for me to do on Castle Mount.

He turned away.

"Let’s go," he told the five ministers. "I have what I need."

They marched soberly from the throne-room. As the door swung shut behind them Valentine glanced at Sepulthrove and said, "How long can he survive like that?"

The physician shrugged. "Almost indefinitely. The system sustains him perfectly. We could keep him going, with some repairs every now and then, another hundred years."

"That won’t be necessary. But he may have to stay with us another twelve or fifteen. Can you do that?"

"Count on it," said Sepulthrove.

"Good. Good." Valentine stared at the shining winding passageway that sloped upward before him. He had been in the Labyrinth long enough. The time had come to return to the world of sun and wind and living things, and to settle matters with Dominin Barjazid. To Hornkast he said, "Return me to my people and prepare transportation for us to the outer world. And before my departure I’ll want a detailed study of the military forces and supporting personnel you’ll be able to place at my disposal."

"Of course, my lord," the high spokesman said.

My lord. It was the first indication of submission that he had had from the ministers of the Pontifex. The main battle was yet to come; but Valentine felt, hearing those two small words, almost as though he had already regained Castle Mount.