Immune to awe? Why, he had once walked up to Lord Valentine himself and shamelessly extorted half a royal from him for a tour of the Labyrinth, and three crowns more to find him lodgings in the outer ring.

He had felt no awe then. Coronals and Pontifexes were simply men with more power and money than ordinary people, and they attained their thrones through the good luck of being born into the Castle Mount aristocracy and making their way through the ranks with just the right happy accidents to take them to the top. You didn't even have to be particularly smart to be a Coronal, Hissune had noticed years ago. After all, just in the last twenty years or so, Lord Malibor had gone off to harpoon sea dragons and had stupidly gotten himself eaten by one, and Lord Voriax had died just as foolishly from a stray bolt that struck him down while he was out hunting in the forest, and his brother Lord Valentine, who was reputed to be fairly intelligent, had been witless enough to go drinking and carousing with the son of the King of Dreams, thereby letting himself be drugged and wiped clean of his memory and dumped from his throne. Feel awe for such as those? Why, in the Labyrinth any seven-year-old who conducted himself with such casual regard for his own welfare would be regarded as a hopeless idiot.

But Hissune had observed that some of his early irreverence seemed to have worn away over the years. When one is ten and has lived by one's wits in the streets since the age of five or six, it is easy enough to thumb one's nose at power. But he no longer was ten, and he no longer roved the streets. His perspective was a little deeper these days: and he knew it was no small thing to be Coronal of Majipoor, and no easy task. So when Hissune looked toward that broad-shouldered, golden-haired man, seeming both regal and gentle at once, who wore the green doublet and ermine robe of the world's second highest office, and when he considered that that man, only ten feet from him, was the Coronal Lord Valentine, who had chosen him out of all Majipoor to join this group tonight, he felt something very like a shiver traveling down his back, and he admitted finally to himself that what that shiver was was awe: for the office of the kingship, and for the person of Lord Valentine, and for the mysterious chain of happenstance that had brought a mere boy of the Labyrinth into this august company.

He sipped his wine and felt a warm glow spread through his soul. What did the evening's earlier troubles matter? He was here now, and welcome. Let Vanimoon and Heulan and Ghisnet eat their hearts out with envy! He was here, among the great ones, beginning his ascent toward the summit of the world, and soon he would be attaining heights from which the Vanimoons of his childhood would be altogether invisible.