"But I tell you this, and then let us talk no further of it: if you find some honorable way of escaping the Labyrinth forever, I will rejoice, but if you must go down into it I will go with you and never give it a second thought. When as Coronal you took me as consort, do you imagine I failed to see that Lord Valentine must one day become Valentine Pontifex? When I accepted you, I accepted the Labyrinth: just as you, my lord, accepted the Labyrinth when you accepted the crown your brother had worn. So let us say no more on these matters, my lord."

"'Your majesty,'" said Valentine. He slipped his arm again about her shoulders, and touched his lips lightly to hers. "I will promise to do no more brooding about the Labyrinth," he said. "And you must promise to call me by my proper title."

"Yes, your majesty. Yes, your majesty. Yes, your majesty!"

And she made a wondrous sweeping salutation, swinging her arms round and round in a flamboyantly exaggerated mockery of the Labyrinth symbol.

After a time Carabella went below. Valentine remained on deck, studying the horizon through a seeing-tube.

What kind of reception, he wondered, would he have in the free republic of Piliplok?

There was hardly anyone who had not opposed his decision to go there. Sleet, Tunigorn, Carabella, Hissune—they all spoke of the risk, the uncertainty. Piliplok, in its madness, might do anything—seize him, even, and hold him hostage to guarantee its independence. "Whoever enters Piliplok," Carabella said, as she had said months before in Piurifayne, "must do so at the head of an army, and you have no army, my lord!"

From Hissune had come the same argument. "It was agreed on Castle Mount," he said, "that when the new armies are organized, it is the Coronal who should lead troops against Piliplok—while the Pontifex directs the strategy at a safer remove."

"It will not be necessary to lead troops against Piliplok," said Valentine.

"Your majesty?"

Valentine said, "I had much experience during the war of restoration in pacifying rebellious subjects without bloodshed. If you were to go to Piliplok—a new Coronal, untried, unknown, with soldiers at his back—it would be sure to stir armed resistance in them. But if the Pontifex himself appears—who can remember a time when a Pontifex was seen in Piliplok?—they will be awed, they will be cowed, they will not dare to raise a hand against him even if he enter the city alone."

Though Hissune had continued to voice strong doubts, in the end Valentine overruled him. There could have been no other outcome, Valentine knew: this early in his Pontificate, having only just handed over the temporal power of the Coronal to the younger man, he could not yet relegate himself wholly to the kind of figurehead position that a Pontifex might be expected to assume. Power, Valentine was discovering, was not easily relinquished, not even by those who once thought they had little love for it.