As with Nissimorn Prospect, so too with all of Ni-moya. Hissune, disconsolately wandering the Hall of Windows with its sweeping views of every part of the city, looked out upon a scene of horrifying ruination.

This had been the wealthiest and most resplendent city of Zimroel, equal to any of the cities of Castle Mount. The white towers that had housed thirty million people now were blackened with the smoke of scores of great fires. The Ducal Palace was a shattered stump atop its magnificent pedestal. The Gossamer Galleria, a mile-long span of suspended fabric where the finest shops of the city had been, had been cut loose from its moorings at one side and sprawled like a discarded cloak across the avenue below it. The glass domes of the Museum of Worlds were broken, and Hissune did not want to think of what must have become of its treasures. The revolving reflectors of the Crystal Boulevard were dark. He looked toward the harbor and saw what must have been the floating restaurants, where once it had been possible to dine elegantly on the rarest delicacies of Narabal and Stee and Pidruid and other distant cities, capsized and turned bottomside up in the water.

He felt cheated. To have dreamed so long of seeing Ni-moya, and now at last to be here and find it like this, perhaps beyond repair....

How had this happened? he wondered. Why had the people of Ni-moya, in their hunger and panic and madness, turned against their own city? And was it like this all across the heartland of Zimroel, all the beauty that it had taken thousands of years to create tossed away in a single paroxysm of mindless destruction? We have paid a heavy price, Hissune told himself, for all those centuries of smug self-satisfaction.

Stimion came to him to report the news of the Lady Inyanna that he had learned from one of the squatters: she had fled Ni-moya more than a year ago, he said, when one of the false Coronals had demanded her mansion from her to serve as his palace. Where she had gone, whether she was still alive at all—no one knew that. The Duke of Ni-moya and all his family had fled, too, even earlier, and most of the other nobility.

"And the false Coronal?" Hissune asked.

"Gone also, my lord. All of them, for there was more than one, and toward the end there were ten or twelve, squabbling among themselves. But they ran like frightened bilantoons when the Pontifex Valentine reached the city last month. There is only one Coronal in Ni-moya today, my lord, and his name is Hissune."

Hissune smiled faintly. "And is this my grand processional, then? Where are the musicians, where are the parades? Why all this filth and destruction? This is not what I thought my first visit to Ni-moya would be like, Stimion."