"Va—Va— "

"What's that?" Sepulthrove asked.

"Something new!" whispered Dilifon.

Hornkast gestured to them to be quiet.

"Va— Valentine—"

"This is new indeed!" said Narrameer.

"Valentine Pontifex— Valentine Pontifex of Majipoor —"

Followed by silence. Those words, plainly enunciated, free of all ambiguities, hovered in the air like exploding suns.

"I thought he had forgotten Valentine's name," Hornkast said. "He thinks Lord Malibor is Coronal."

"Evidently he does not," said Dilifon.

"Sometimes toward the end," Sepulthrove said quietly, "the mind repairs itself. I think his sanity is returning."

"He is as mad as ever!" cried Dilifon. "The Divine forbid that he should regain his understanding, and know what we have done to him!"

"I think," said Hornkast, "that he has always known what we have done to him, and that he is regaining not his understanding but his ability to communicate with us in words. You heard him: Valentine Pontifex.

He is hailing his successor, and he knows who his successor ought to be. Sepulthrove, is he dying?"

"The instruments indicate no physical change in him. I think he could continue this way for some long while."

"We must not allow it," said Dilifon.

"What are you suggesting?" Hornkast asked.

"That this has gone on long enough. I know what it is to be old, Hornkast—and perhaps you do also, though you show little outer sign of it. This man is half again as old as any of us. He suffers things we can scarcely imagine. I say make an end. Now. This very day."

"We have no right," said Hornkast. "I tell you, I feel for his sufferings even as you. But it is not our decision."

"Make an end, nevertheless."

"Lord Valentine must take responsibility for that."

"Lord Valentine never will," Dilifon muttered. "He'll keep this farce running for fifty more years!"

"It is his choice," said Hornkast firmly.

"Are we his servants, or the servants of the Pontifex?" asked Dilifon.

"It is one government, with two monarchs, and only one of them now is competent. We serve the Pontifex by serving the Coronal. And—"

From the life-support cage came a bellow of rage, and then an eerie indrawn whistling sound, and then three harsh growls. And then the words, even more clearly than before:

"Valentine— Pontifex of Majipoor — hail!"

"He hears what we say, and it angers him. He begs for death," said Dilifon.

"Or perhaps he thinks he has already reached it," Narrameer suggested.

"No. No. Dilifon is right," said Hornkast. "He's overheard us. He knows we won't give him what he wants."

"Come. Rise. Walk" Howlings. Babblings. "Death! Death! Death!"

In a despair deeper than anything he had felt in decades, the high spokesman rushed toward the life-support globe, half intending to rip the cables and tubes from their mountings and bring an end to this now. But of course that would be insanity. Hornkast halted; he peered in; his eyes met those of Tyeveras, and he compelled himself not to flinch as that great sadness poured out upon him. The Pontifex was sane again. That was unarguable. The Pontifex understood that death was being withheld from him for reasons of state.