He opened his eyes. He saw Guidrag dazed and swaying and sinking slowly to her knees on the deck, and the other Skandars beside her doing the same. Then she threw up her hands before her eyes as though to shield them from a terrible light, and murmured in a stunned, awestruck way, "My lord—your majesty—your majesty—"

"Valentine!" someone cried, farther back on the deck. "Valentine Pontifex!" And the cry was taken up by one sailor after another: "Valentine Pontifex! Valentine Pontifex!" until it went echoing from ship to ship, all across the waters and even to the ramparts of distant Piliplok:

"Valentine! Valentine Pontifex! Valentine Pontifex!"

FIVE

The Book of the Reunion

1

When the royal expeditionary force was some hours yet downriver from Ni-moya, Lord Hissune called Alsimir to him and said, "Find out whether the great house known as Nissimorn Prospect still exists. If it does, I mean to requisition it as my headquarters while I'm in Ni-moya."

Hissune remembered that house—remembered all of Ni-moya, its white towers and glittering arcades—as vividly as though he had dwelled there half his life. But he had never set foot on the continent of Zimroel at all before this voyage. It was through the eyes of another that he had seen Ni-moya. Now he cast his mind back to that time in his boyhood when he had covertly peered at the memory-readings on file in the Register of Souls in the depths of the Labyrinth. What was her name, the little shopkeeper from Velathys who had married the duke's brother, and came to inherit Nissimorn Prospect? Inyanna, he thought. Inyanna Forlana. Who had been a thief in the Grand Bazaar, until the course of her life so amazingly changed.

All that had happened at the end of Lord Malibor's reign—only some twenty or twenty-five years ago.

Very likely she was still alive, Hissune thought. Still living in her wondrous mansion overlooking the river.

And then I will go to her and I will say, "I know you, Inyanna Forlana. I understand you as well as I understand myself. We are of the same kind, you and I: fortune's favorites. And we know that the true favorites of fortune are those who know how to make the best use of their own good luck."

Nissimorn Prospect still stood, rising splendidly on its rocky headland above the harbor, its cantilevered balconies and porticos floating dreamlike in the shimmering air. But Inyanna Forlana no longer lived there.

The great house was occupied now by a brawling horde of squatters, packed five and six to a room, who had scrawled their names on the glass wall of the Hall of Windows and built smoky campfires on the verandas facing the garden and left smeary fingerprints on the shining white walls. Most of them fled like morning mists the moment the Coronal's forces came through the gates; but a few remained, sullenly staring at Hissune as if he were an invader from some other world.