He made the discovery of Lord Sangamor's tunnels, a series of linked chambers strung like a chain of sausages around an outjutting spire on the west face of the Mount, the walls and roof of which glowed with eerie radiance, one room a midnight blue, one a rich vermilion, one a subtle aquamarine, one a dazzling tawny yellow, one a somber throbbing russet, and on and on: no one knew why the tunnels had been built, or what was the source of the light that sprang of its own accord from the glistening paving-blocks.

Wherever he went he was admitted without question. He was, after all, one of the three regents of the realm: a surrogate Coronal, in a sense, or at least a significant fraction of one. But the aura of power had begun to settle about him long before Elidath had named him to the triumvirate. He felt eyes on him everywhere. He knew what those intent glances signified. That is Lord Valentine's favorite. He came out of nowhere; he is already a prince; there will be no limits to his rise. Respect him. Obey him. Flatter him. Fear him. At first he thought he could remain unchanged amidst all this attention, but that was impossible. I am still only Hissune, who gulled tourists in the Labyrinth, who pushed papers about in the House of Records, who was jeered at by his own friends for putting on airs. Yes, that would always be true; but it was also true that he was no longer ten years old, that he had been greatly deepened and transformed by what he had experienced peering into the lives of scores of other men and women in the Registry of Souls, and by the training he had had on Castle Mount, and by the honors and responsibilities—mainly the responsibilities—that had been conferred on him during Elidath's regency. He walked in a different way now: no longer the cocky but wary Labyrinth boy, always glancing in six directions for some bewildered stranger to exploit, nor the lowly, overworked clerk keeping to his proper place while nonetheless busily scrabbling for promotion to some senior desk, nor the apologetic neophyte bewilderingly thrust among the Powers of the realm and moving cautiously in their midst, but now the rising young lordling, striding with assurance and poise through the Castle, confident, secure, aware of his strengths, his purposes, his destiny. He hoped he had not become arrogant or overbearing or self-important; but he accepted himself calmly and without labored humility for what he had become and what he would be.

Today his route took him into a part of the Castle he had rarely visited, the north wing, which cascaded down a long rounded snout of the Mount's summit that pointed toward the distant cities of Huine and Gossif. The guards' residential quarters were here, and a series of beehive-shaped outbuildings that had been built in the reigns of Lord Dizimaule and Lord Arioc for purposes now forgotten, and a cluster of low weatherbeaten structures, roofless and crumbling, that no one understood at all. On his last visit to this zone, months ago, a team of archaeologists had been excavating there, two Ghayrogs and a Vroon overseeing a bunch of Skandar laborers sifting sand for potsherds, and the Vroon had told him then that she thought the buildings were the remnants of an old fort of the time of Lord Damlang, successor to Stiamot. Hissune had come by today to see if they were still at work and find out what they had learned; but the place was deserted, and the excavations had been filled. He stood for a time atop an ancient broken wall, looking toward the impossibly distant horizon, half concealed by the enormous shoulder of the Mount.