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.