Elidath stared. "How can that be? Gihorna's an empty wasteland. The Steiche is an impassable river. He knows that, and if he doesn't, his little Vroon certainly does."

"Deliamber did his best to discourage the idea. Valentine wouldn't listen. He pointed out that if he went by way of Ni-moya and Verf, he'd be obliged to halt at every city along the way for the usual ceremonies of the grand processional, and he doesn't want to delay his pilgrimage to the Metamorphs that long."

Elidath felt himself engulfed by dismay and alarm. "And so he means to wander through the sandstorms and miseries of Gihorna—and then find a way across a river that has already once nearly drowned him—"

"Yes, and all so he can pay a call on the people who successfully managed to push him off his throne ten years ago—"

"Madness!"

"Madness indeed," Tunigorn said.

"You agree? We set out tonight?"

"Tonight, yes."

Tunigorn put forth his hand, and Elidath took it and clasped it tight, and they stood in silence a moment.

Then Elidath said, "Answer me one question, will you, Tunigorn?"

"Ask it."

"You used the word 'madness' more than once, in speaking of this venture of Valentine's, and so did I.

And so it is. But I have not seen him in a year or more, and you have been with him ever since he left the Mount. Tell me this: do you think he has truly gone mad?"

"Mad? No, I think not."

"Appointing young Hissune to the principate? Making pilgrimages to the Metamorphs?"

Tunigorn said, after a time, "Those are not things you or I would have done, Elidath. But I think they are signs not of Valentine's madness, but of something else in him, a goodness, a sweetness, a kind of holiness, that such as you and I are not fully able to understand. We have always known this about Valentine, that he is different from us in certain ways."

Frowning, Elidath said, "Better holy than mad, I suppose. But this goodness, this holiness: do you think those are the qualities that Majipoor most needs in its Coronal, as this time of strife and bewilderment unfolds?"

"I have no answer to that, old friend."

"Nor I. But I have certain fears."

"As do I," said Tunigorn. "As do I."

3

In the darkness Y-Uulisaan lay awake and tense, listening to the wind as it roared across the wastelands of Gihorna: a thin, cutting wind from the east that scoured up a swirl of damp sand and hurled it insistently against the sides of the tent.

The royal caravan with which he had been traveling so long was camped now many hundreds of miles southwest of Piliplok. The River Steiche lay no more than another few days' journey ahead, and beyond it was Piurifayne. Y-Uulisaan longed desperately to cross the river at last and breathe the air of his native province once more, and the closer the caravan came to it the more acute that longing grew. To be home again among his own, free of the strain of this unending masquerade—