"By the Lady indeed, Sleet," said the Coronal in a voice of infinite weariness, "there'll be no war if I can help it, and you know that."

"And if you can't help it, my lord?" Sleet shot back.

The little man's chalk-white face was flushed now with excitement; his eyes gleamed, he made tight rapid obsessive gestures with his hands, as though he were juggling invisible clubs. It had not occurred to Hissune that anyone, even a High Counsellor, spoke so bluntly to Coronals. And perhaps it did not happen often, for Hissune saw something much like anger cross the face of Lord Valentine: Lord Valentine who was reputed never to have known rage, who had gently and lovingly sought even to win the soul of his enemy the usurper Dominin Barjazid, in the last moments of the war of restoration. Then that anger gave way to the dreadful weariness again, which made the Coronal seem to be a man of seventy or eighty years, and not the young and vigorous forty or so that Hissune knew him to be.

There was an endless moment of tense silence. At length Lord Valentine said, speaking slowly and deliberately and addressing his words to Hissune as though no one else were in the room. "Let me hear no more talk of war while hope of peace remains. But the omens were dark, true enough: if there is not to be war, there is certain to be some calamity of another kind. I will not ignore such warnings. We have changed some of our plans this night, Hissune."

"Will you call off the grand processional, my lord?"

"That I must not do. Again and again I've postponed it, saying that there was too much work for me at Castle Mount, that I had no time to go jaunting about the world. Perhaps I've postponed it too long. The processional should be made every seven or eight years."

"And has it been longer than that, sir?"

"Almost ten. Nor did I complete the tour, that other time, for at Til-omon, you know, there was that small interruption, when someone else relieved me for a while of my tasks, without my knowledge." The Coronal stared past Hissune into an infinitely remote distance. He seemed for a moment to be peering into the misty gulfs of time: thinking, perhaps, of the bizarre usurpation that had been worked upon him by the Barjazid, and of the months or years that he had roamed Majipoor bereft of his mind and of his might. Lord Valentine shook his head. "No, the grand processional must be made. Must be extended, in fact. I had thought to travel only through Alhanroel, but I think we will need to visit both continents. The people of Zimroel also must see that there is a Coronal. And if Sleet is right that the Metamorphs are the ones we must fear, why, then Zimroel is the place we must go, for that is where the Metamorphs dwell."