"Perhaps."

"With your assistance it could be done."

"I feared that was coming," said Deliamber dryly.

"You have some skill at making sendings. We could reach, if not the Lady herself, then those close to her. Step by step, drawing ourselves closer to her, cutting short the interminable process on the terraces—"

"It could be done, possibly," Deliamber said. "Do you believe I’m minded to make the pilgrimage with you, though?"

Valentine regarded the Vroon in silence for a long time.

"I’m certain of it," he said finally. "You play at reluctance, but you’ve engineered my every motive to impel me toward the Isle. With you at my side. Am I right? Eh, Deliamber? You’re more eager to have me get there than I am myself."

"Ah," the sorcerer said. "It comes out now!"

"Am I right?"

"If you resolve to go to the Isle, Valentine, I will be at your side. But are you resolved?"

"Sometimes."

"Intermittent resolutions lack potency," said Deliamber.

"Thousands of miles. Years of waiting. Toil and intrigue. Why do I want to do this, Deliamber?"

"Because you are Coronal, and must be again."

"The first may be true, though I have mighty doubts of it. The second is open to question."

Deliamber’s look was crafty. "You prefer to live under the rule of a usurper?"

"What’s the Cordial and his rule to me? He’s half a world away on Castle Mount and I’m a wandering juggler." Valentine extended his fingers and stared at them as though he had never seen his hands before. "I could spare myself much effort if I remained with Zalzan Kavol and let the other, whoever he may be, keep the throne. Suppose he’s a wise and just usurper? Where’s the benefit for Majipoor, if I do all this work merely to put myself back in his place? Oh, Deliamber, Deliamber, do I sound like a king at all, when I say these things? Where’s my lust for. power? How can I ever have been a ruler, when I so obviously don’t care about what’s happened?"

"We’ve spoken of this before. You have been tampered with, my lord. Your spirit as well as your face has been changed."

"Even so. My royal nature, if ever I had one, is altogether gone from me. That lust for power—"

"Twice you’ve used the phrase," Deliamber said. "Lust has nothing to do with it. A true king doesn’t lust for power: responsibility lusts for him. And takes him, and possesses him. This Coronal is new, he has done little yet but make the grand processional, and already the people grumble at his early decrees. And you ask if he will be wise and just? How can any usurper be just? He is a criminal, Valentine, and he rules already with a criminal’s guilty fears eating at his dreams, and as time goes on those fears will poison him and he will be a tyrant. Can you doubt that? He will remove anyone who threatens him — will kill, even, if need be. The poison that courses in his veins will enter the life of the planet itself, will affect every citizen. And you, sitting here looking at your fingers, do you see no responsibility? How can you talk of sparing yourself much effort? As if it hardly matters who is the king. It matters very much who is the king, my lord, and you were chosen and trained for it, and not by lottery. Or do you believe anyone can become Coronal?"

"I do. By random stroke of fate."

Deliamber laughed harshly. "Possibly that was true nine thousand years ago. There is a dynasty, my lord."

"An adoptive dynasty?"

"Precisely. Since the time of Lord Arioc, and maybe even earlier, Coronals have been chosen from among a small group of families, no more than a hundred clans, all of them dwellers on Castle Mount and close participants in the government. The next Coronal is already in training, though only he and a few advisers know who he is, and two or three replacements for him must also have been chosen. But now the line is broken, now an intruder has pushed his way in. Nothing but evil can come of that."

"What if the usurper is simply the heir-in-waiting, who grew tired of waiting?"

"No," said Deliamber. "Inconceivable. No one deemed qualified to be Coronal would overthrow a lawfully consecrated prince. Besides, why the mummery of pretending to be Lord Valentine, if he is another?"

"I grant you that."

"Grant me also this: that the person atop Castle Mount now has neither right nor qualification for being there, and must be cast down, and you are the only one who can do it."

Valentine sighed. "You ask a great deal."

"History asks a great deal," said Deliamber. "History has demanded, on a thousand worlds across many thousands of years, that intelligent beings choose between order and anarchy, between creation and destruction, between reason and unreason. And the forces of order and creation and reason have been focused always in a single leader, a king, if you will, or a president, a chairman, a grand minister, a generalissimo, use whatever word you wish, a monarch by some name or other. Here it is the Coronal, or more accurately the Coronal ruling as the voice of the Pontifex who was once Coronal, and it matters, my lord, it matters very much, who is to be Coronal and who is not to be Coronal."

"Yes," Valentine said. "Perhaps."

"You’ll go on wavering from yes to perhaps a long while," said Deliamber. "But yes will govern, in the end. And you will make the pilgrimage to the Isle, and with the Lady’s blessing you will march on Castle Mount and take your rightful place."

"The things you say fill me with terror. If ever I had the ability to rule, if ever I was given the training for it, these things have been burned from my mind."

"The terror will fade. Your mind will be made whole in the passing of time."

"And time passes, and here we sit in Dulorn, to amuse the Ghayrogs."

Deliamber said, "Not much longer. We’ll find our way eastward, my lord. Have faith in that."

There was something contagious about Deliamber’s assurance. Valentine’s hesitations and uncertainties were gone — for the moment. But when Deliamber had departed, Valentine gave way to uncomfortable contemplation of certain hard realities. Could he simply hire a couple of mounts and set off for Piliplok with Deliamber tomorrow? What about Carabella, who had suddenly become very important to him? Abandon her here in Dulorn? And Shanamir? The boy was attached to Valentine, not to the Skandars: he neither could nor would be left. There was the cost, then, of a journey for four across nearly all of vast Zimroel, food, lodging, transportation, then the pilgrim ship to the Isle, and what then of expenses on the Isle while he schemed to gain access to the Lady? Autifon Deliamber had guessed it might cost twenty royals for him to travel alone to Piliplok. The cost, for the four of them, or for the five if Sleet were added, though Valentine had no idea if Sleet would care to come, might run a hundred royals or more, a hundred fifty perhaps to the lowest terrace of the Isle. He sorted through his purse. Of the money he had had upon him when he found himself outside Pidruid, he had more than sixty royals left, plus a royal or two that he had earned with the troupe. Not enough, not nearly enough. Carabella, he knew, was almost without money; Shanamir had dutifully returned to his family the hundred sixty royals from the sale of his mounts; and Deliamber, if he had any wealth, would not in old age be hauling himself through the countryside under contract to a crowd of ruffian Skandars.

So, then? Nothing to do but wait, and plan, and hope that Zalzan Kavol intended a generally eastward route. And save his crowns and bide his time, until the moment was ripe for going to the Lady.