No one was. No one, Hissune suspected, ever had been. They said it had forty thousand rooms. Was that so? Had anyone made an accurate count? Every Coronal since Lord Stiamot had lived here and had tried to leave his own imprint on the Castle, and the legend was that five rooms were added every year, and it was eight thousand years since Lord Stiamot first had taken up residence on the Mount. So there might well be forty thousand rooms here—or fifty thousand, or ninety thousand. Who could tell? One could tally a hundred rooms a day, and a year would not be enough to count them all, and by year's end a few new rooms would have been added somewhere anyway, so it would become necessary to search them out and add them to the list. Impossible. Impossible.

To Hissune the Castle was the most wondrous place in the world. Early in his stay here he had concentrated on coming to know the innermost zone, where the main court and the royal offices were, and the most famous buildings, Stiamot Keep and Lord Prestimion's Archive and Lord Arioc's Watchtower and Lord Kinniken's Chapel and the grand ceremonial chambers that surrounded the magnificent room the centerpiece of which was the Confalume Throne of the Coronal. Like any greenhorn tourist from the back woods of Zimroel, Hissune had gone over and over those places, including a good many that no greenhorn tourist would ever be allowed to see, until he knew every corner of them as well as any of the tour guides who had spent decades leading visitors through them.

The central reaches of the Castle, at least, were complete for all time: no one could build anything significant there any longer without first removing some structure erected by a past Coronal, and to do such a thing was unthinkable. Lord Malibor's trophy room had been the last building to go up in the inner zone, so far as Hissune had been able to discover. Lord Voriax in his short reign had constructed only some game courts far out on the eastern flank of the Castle, and Lord Valentine had not yet managed to add any rooms of consequence at all, though he did speak from time to time of building a great botanical garden to house all the marvelous and bizarre plants he had seen during his wanderings through Majipoor—as soon as the pressure of his royal responsibilities, he said, eased enough to allow him to give some serious thought to the project. Judging by the reports of devastation now coming in from Zimroel, Lord Valentine had perhaps waited too long to undertake it, Hissune thought: the blights on that continent were wiping out, so it appeared, not only the agricultural crops but also many of the unusual plants of the wilderness areas.

When he had mastered the inner zone to his own satisfaction Hissune began to extend his explorations to the baffling and almost endless sprawl that lay beyond it. He visited the subterranean vaults that housed the weather machines—designed in ancient times when such scientific matters were better understood on Majipoor—by which the eternal springtime of Castle Mount was maintained, even though the summit of the Mount thrust itself thirty miles above sea level into the chilly dark of space. He wandered through the great library that coiled from one side of the Castle to the other in vast serpentine loops, and was said to contain every book ever published anywhere in the civilized universe. He roamed the stables where the royal mounts, splendid high-spirited synthetic animals very little like their plodding cousins, the beasts of burden of every Majipoori town and farm, pranced and snorted and pawed the air as they waited for their next outing.