All stability had gone from the world. It was as though he were riding the mirror slides in High Morpin, where you had to dance and hop lively to stay upright as the whirling slides tilted and jerked, but that was a game and this was true chaos, the roots of the world uprooted. The heaving tossed him down and rolled him over and over, and he dug his fingers fiercely into the soft yielding earth to keep from sliding into the crevasses that opened beside him. Out of those yawning cracks came terrifying sounds of laughter, and a purple glow that seemed to rise from a sun that the earth had swallowed. Angry faces floated in the air above him, faces he almost recognized, but they shifted about disconcertingly as he studied them, eyes becoming noses, noses becoming ears. Then behind those nightmare faces he saw another that he knew, shining dark hair, gentle warm eyes. The Lady of the Isle, the sweet mother.

"It is enough," she said. "Awaken now, Valentine!"

"And am I dreaming, then?"

"Of course. Of course."

"Then I should stay, and learn what I can from this dream!"

"You have learned enough, I think. Awaken now."

Yes. It was enough: any more such knowledge might make an end of him. As he had been taught long ago, he brought himself upward from this unexpected sleep and sat up, blinking, struggling to shed his grogginess and confusion. Images of titanic cataclysm still reverberated in his soul; but gradually he perceived that all was peaceful here. He lay on a richly brocaded couch in a high-vaulted room all green and gold. What had halted the earthquake? Where was his mount? Who had brought him here? Ah, they had! Beside him crouched a pale, lean, white-haired man with a ragged scar running the length of one cheek. Sleet. And Tunigorn standing just to the rear, frowning, heavy eyebrows contracting into a single furry ridge. "Calm, calm, calm," Sleet was saying. "It's all right, now. You're awake."

Awake? A dream, then, only a dream?

So it would seem. He was not on Castle Mount at all. There had been no snowstorm, no earthquake, no clouds of dust blotting out the sun. A dream, yes! But such a terrible dream, frighteningly vivid and compelling, so powerful that he found it difficult now to return to reality.

"Where is this place?" Valentine asked.

"Labyrinth, lordship."

Where? The Labyrinth? What, then, had he been spirited away from Castle Mount while he slept?

Valentine felt sweat bursting from his brow. The Labyrinth? Ah, yes, yes. The truth of it closed on him like a hand on his throat. The Labyrinth, yes. He remembered, now. The state visit, of which this was, the Divine be thanked, the final night. That ghastly banquet still to endure. He could not hide from it any longer.

The Labyrinth, the Labyrinth, the confounded Labyrinth: he was in it, down in the bottommost level of all.

The walls of the suite glowed with handsome murals of the Castle, the Mount, the Fifty Cities: scenes so lovely that they were a mockery to him now. So distant from Castle Mount, so far from the sun's sweet warmth—