What cities lay down this way? Gossif, fifteen or twenty miles along, and below it Tentag, and then, he thought, either Minimool or Greel. And then, surely, Stee of the thirty million citizens, equalled only by Ni-moya in its grandeur.

He had never seen any of those cities, and perhaps he never would. Valentine himself often remarked that he had spent all his life on Castle Mount without finding the occasion to visit Stee. The world was too large for anyone to explore adequately in one lifetime: too large to comprehend, indeed.

And the thirty million folk of Stee, and the thirty million of Ni-moya, and Pidruid's eleven million, and the millions more of Alaisor, Treymone, Piliplok, Mazadone, Velathys, Narabal: how were they faring this very moment? Hissune wondered. Amid the famines, amid the panics, amid the cries of new prophets and self-appointed new kings and emperors? The situation now was critical, he knew. Zimroel had fallen into such confusion that it was all but impossible to find out what was going on there, though surely it was nothing good. And not long ago had come news of weevils and rusts and smuts and the Divine only knew what else beginning to make their sinister way through the farming belts of western Alhanroel, so in a little while the same madness would very likely be sweeping the senior continent. Already there were rumblings: tales of sea-dragon worship openly conducted in Treymone and Stoien, and mysterious new orders of chivalry, the Knights of Dekkeret and the Fellowship of the Mount and some others, springing up suddenly in cities like Amblemorn and Normork on Castle Mount itself. Ominous, troublesome signs of greater upheaval to come.

There were those who imagined that Majipoor had some inherent immunity to the universal inevitabilities of change, merely because its social system had undergone virtually no important evolution since it had taken its present form thousands of years ago. But Hissune had studied enough of history, both Majipoor's and that of the mother world Earth, to know that even so placid a population as Majipoor's, stable and content for millennia, lulled by the kindnesses of its climate and an agricultural fertility capable of supporting an almost unlimited number of people, would tumble with startling swiftness into anarchy and utter disintegration if those comforting props suddenly were knocked away. That had already begun, and it would grow worse.

Why had these plagues come? Hissune had no idea. What was being done to deal with them? Plainly, not enough. Could anything be done? What were rulers for, if not to maintain the welfare of their people?

And here he was, a ruler of sorts, at least for the moment, in the grand isolation of Castle Mount, far above a crumbling civilization: badly informed, remote, helpless. But of course the ultimate responsibility for dealing with this crisis did not lie with him. What of Majipoor's true anointed rulers, then? Hissune had always thought of the Pontifex, buried down there at the bottom of the Labyrinth, as a blind mole who could not conceivably know what was happening in the world—even a Pontifex who, like Tyeveras, might be reasonably vigorous and sane. In fact the Pontifex did not need to keep close touch with events: he had a Coronal to do that, so the theory ran. But Hissune saw now that the Coronal too was cut off from reality, up here in the misty reaches of Castle Mount, just as thoroughly sequestered as the Pontifex was in his pit.