"Do you think it will be soon?"

"I pray it is, but I have no way of knowing. We do nothing to hasten the end. That decision is in Lord Valentine's hands—or in the hands of his successor, if Valentine no longer lives."

"If Lord Valentine is dead," said Hissune, "then the new Coronal might immediately ascend to Pontifex.

Unless he too chooses to sustain the life of Tyeveras."

"Indeed. And if Lord Valentine is dead, who then, do you think, will be that new Coronal?"

Hornkast's stare was overwhelming and merciless. Hissune felt himself sizzling in the fire of that stare, and all his hard-won shrewdness, all his sense of who he was and what he meant to achieve melted from him, leaving him vulnerable and muddled. He had a sudden wild dizzying image of himself catapulted upward through the Powers, becoming Coronal one morning, giving the orders to disconnect this tubing and machinery at noon, becoming Pontifex by nightfall. But of course that was absurd, he told himself in panic.

Pontifex? Me? Next month? It was a joke. It was altogether preposterous. He struggled for balance and succeeded after a moment in drawing himself back to the strategy that had seemed so obvious to him at the Castle: if Lord Valentine is dead, Divvis must become Coronal, and then Tyeveras at last must die, and Divvis goes to the Labyrinth. It must be that way. It must.

Hissune said, "The succession cannot, of course, be voted upon until we are certain of the Coronal's death, and daily we offer our prayers for his safety. But if in fact some tragic fate has befallen Lord Valentine, I think it will be the pleasure of the Castle princes to invite the son of Lord Voriax to ascend the throne."

"Ah."

"And if that should come to pass, there are those of us who think it would be desirable then to allow the Pontifex Tyeveras at last to return to the Source."

"Ah," said Hornkast. "Ah, yes. You make your meaning quite clear, do you not?" His eyes met Hissune's one final time: cold, penetrating, all-seeing. Then they grew milder, as though a veil had been drawn over them, and suddenly the high spokesman seemed to be nothing more than a weary old man at the end of a long and fatiguing day. Hornkast turned away and walked slowly toward the waiting floater. "Come," he said. "It grows late, Prince Hissune."

Late it was indeed, but Hissune found it all but impossible to sleep. I have seen the Pontifex, he thought again and again. I have seen the Pontifex. He lay awake and tossing half the night, with the image of the ancient Tyeveras blazing in his mind; nor did that image relent when sleep did come, but burned even brighter, Pontifex on throne within sphere of glass. And was the Pontifex weeping? Hissune wondered.

And if he wept, for whom did he weep?

At midday the next day Hissune, accompanied by an official escort, made the journey uplevel to the outer ring of the Labyrinth, to Guadeloom Court, to the drab little flat where he had lived so long.