Yerewain Noor knew what was happening too. "Call out your field hands!" he cried. "You've got to torch this stuff!"

"Too late," said Aximaan Threysz in a sepulchral voice. "No hope now. Too late, too late, too late. What can hold the spores back now?" Her land was infected beyond repair. And in an hour the spores would be spread all through the Vale. "It's all over with us, can't you see?"

"But lusavender smut was wiped out long ago!" Noor said in a foolish voice.

Aximaan Threysz nodded. She remembered it well: the fires, the sprayings, the breeding of smut-resistant clones, the roguing out of any plant that held the genetic predisposition to harbor the lethal fungus. Seventy, eighty, ninety years ago: how they had worked to rid the world of that blight! And here it was again, in these hybrid plants. These plants alone in all Majipoor, she thought, were capable of providing a home for lusavender smut. Her plants, so lovingly grown, so skillfully tended. By her own hand had she brought the smut back into the world, and set it free to blight her neighbors' crops.

"Hayn!" she roared. "Hayn, where are you? What have you done to me?"

She wished she could die, now, here, before what was about to happen could unfold. But she knew she would not be that lucky; for long life had been her blessing, and now it was her curse. The popping of the pods resounded in her ears like the guns of an advancing army, rampaging across the Vale. She had lived one year too long, she thought: long enough to see the end of the world.

5

Downward Hissune traveled, feeling rumpled and sweaty and apprehensive, through passageways and liftshafts he had known all his life, and soon the shabby world of the outermost ring was far behind him. He descended through level after level of wonders and marvels to which he had not given a second glance in years: Court of Columns, Hall of Winds, Place of Masks, Court of Pyramids, Court of Globes, the Arena, House of Records. People came here from Castle Mount or Alaisor or Stoien, or even from impossibly distant and supposedly fabulous Ni-moya on the other continent, and wandered around dazed and stupefied, lost in admiration of the ingenuity that had devised and constructed such bizarre architectural splendors so far underground. But to Hissune it was only the drab and dreary old Labyrinth. For him it had neither charm or mystery: it was simply his home.