For once Hornkast's invincible serenity seemed shaken: his eyes flashed, his nostrils flared, his lips quirked quickly in surprise.

"Disappearance?"

"While Lord Valentine was traveling in Piurifayne we lost contact with him, and we have not been able to reestablish it."

"May I ask what the Coronal was doing in Piurifayne?"

Hissune offered a light shrug. "A mission of great delicacy, I am given to understand. He was separated from his party in the same storm that took Elidath's life. We have heard nothing since."

"And is the Coronal dead, do you think?"

"I have no idea, and guesses are without value. You can be sure we are making every effort to resume contact with him. But I think we must at least allow for the possibility that Lord Valentine is dead, yes. We have had discussions to that effect at the Castle. A plan of succession is emerging."

"Ah."

"And of course the health of the Pontifex is something that must figure prominently in our planning," said Hissune.

"Ah. Yes. I quite understand."

"The Pontifex, I take it, remains as he has been?"

Hornkast made no immediate reply, but stared at Hissune with mysterious and discomforting intensity a long while, as if engaged in the most intricate of political calculations.

Then at length he said, "Would you like to pay a call on his majesty?"

If not the last thing Hissune would have expected the high spokesman to say, it was close to it. A visit to the Pontifex? He had never dreamed of such a thing! It took him a moment to master his astonishment and regain his poise. Then he said, as coolly as he could manage it, "It would be a great privilege."

"Let us go, then."

"Now?"

"Now," said Hornkast.

The high spokesman signaled; servitors appeared and began clearing away the remnants of the meal; moments later Hissune found himself aboard a small snub-nosed floater, with Hornkast beside him, traveling down a narrow tunnel until they came to a place where they could go only on foot, and where one bronze door after another sealed the passageway at fifty-pace intervals. Hornkast opened each of these by sliding his hand into a hidden panel, and eventually one final door, inscribed with a gold-chased Labyrinth symbol and the imperial monogram over it, yielded to the high spokesman's touch and admitted them to the imperial throne-chamber.

Hissune's heart pounded with terrifying force. The Pontifex! Old mad Tyeveras! Throughout all his life he had scarcely believed that any such person truly existed. Child of the Labyrinth that he was, he had regarded the Pontifex always as some sort of supernatural being, hidden away here in the depths, the reclusive master of the world; and even now, for all Hissune's recent familiarity with princes and dukes and the household of the Coronal and the Coronal himself, he regarded the Pontifex as a being apart, dwelling in a realm of his own, invisible, unknowable, unreal, inconceivably remote from the world of ordinary beings.