That would be his last responsibility, to instruct the new high spokesman. And then I will go away, he thought, and I suspect I will not long survive the loss of my office. Elidath, I suppose, will become Coronal.

They say he is a good man, very dear to Lord Valentine, almost like a brother. How strange it will be, after all these years, to have a real Pontifex again, actively working with his Coronal! But I will not see it, Hornkast told himself. I will not be here.

In that mood of foreboding and resignation he arrived at the ornately embellished door to the imperial throne room. He slipped his hand into the recognition glove and squeezed the cool yielding sphere within; and at his touch the door slid back to reveal the great globe of the imperial chamber, the lofty throne upon the three broad steps, the elaborate mechanisms of the Pontifex's life-support systems, and, within the bubble of pale blue glass that had held him for so many years, the long-limbed figure of the Pontifex himself, fleshless and parched like his own mummy, upright in his seat, jaws clenched, eyes bright, bright, bright still with inextinguishable life.

A familiar crew of grotesques stood beside the throne: ancient Dilifon, the withered and trembling private secretary; the Pontifical dream-speaker; the witch Narrameer; and Sepulthrove the physician, hawk-nosed, skin the color of dried mud. From then, even from Narrameer, who kept herself young and implausibly beautiful by her sorceries, came a pulsing aura of age, decay, death. Hornkast, who had seen these people every day for forty years, had never before perceived with such intensity how frightful they were: and, he knew, he must be just as frightful himself. Perhaps the time has come, he thought, to clear us all away.

"I came as soon as the messengers could reach me," he said. He glanced toward the Pontifex. "Well?

He's dying, is he? He looks just the same to me."

"He is very far from dying," said Sepulthrove.

"Then what's going on?"

"Listen," the physician said. "He's starting again."

The creature in the life-support globe stirred and swayed from side to side in minute oscillations. A low whining sound came from the Pontifex, and then a kind of half-whistled snore, and a thick bubbling gurgle that went on and on.

Hornkast had heard all these sounds many times before. They were the private language the Pontifex in his terrible senility had invented, and which the high spokesman alone had mastered. Some were almost words, or the ghosts of words, and within their blurred outlines the original meanings were still apparent.

Others had evolved from words over the years into mere noise, but Hornkast, because he had observed those evolutions in their various stages, knew what meanings were intended. Some were nothing but moans and sighs and weepings without a verbal content. And some seemed to have a certain complexity of form that might represent concepts that had been perceived by Tyeveras in his long mad sleepless isolation, and were known to him alone.