Folly, Madness. You must always remember who you are, he told himself, and where you started from.

But it was hard not to keep dwelling on the transformation that had come over their lives, he thought, while he was making his way down the endless spiraling staircase to the street. So much had changed.

Once he and his mother both had worked the streets of the Labyrinth, she begging crowns from passing gentry for her hungry children, he rushing up to tourists and insistently offering to guide them, for half a royal or so, through the scenic wonders of the underground city. And now he was the Coronal's young protege, and she, through his new connections, was steward of wines at the cafe of the Court of Globes.

All achieved by luck, by extraordinary and improbable luck.

Or was it only luck? he wondered. That time so many years back, when he was ten and had thrust his services as a guide upon that tall fair-haired man, it had been convenient indeed for him that the stranger was none other than the Coronal Lord Valentine, overthrown and exiled and in the Labyrinth to win the support of the Pontifex in his reconquest of the throne.

But that in itself might not have led anywhere. Hissune often asked himself what it was about him that had caught Lord Valentine's fancy, that caused the Coronal to remember him and have him located after the restoration, and be taken from the streets to work in the House of Records, and now to be summoned into the innermost sphere of his administration. His irreverence, perhaps. His quips, his cool, casual manner, his lack of awe for coronals and pontifexes, his ability, even at ten, to look out for himself. That must have impressed Lord Valentine. Those Castle Mount knights, Hissune thought, are all so polite, so dainty-mannered: I must have seemed more alien than a Ghayrog to him. And yet the Labyrinth is full of tough little boys. Any of them might have been the one who tugged at the Coronal's sleeve. But I was the one. Luck. Luck.

He emerged into the dusty little plaza in front of his house. Before him lay the narrow curving streets of the Guadeloom Court district where he had spent all the days of his life; above him rose the decrepit buildings, thousands of years old and lopsided with age, that formed the boundary palisade of his world.

Under the harsh white lights, much too bright, almost crackling in their electric intensity—all this ring of the Labyrinth was bathed in that same fierce light, so little like that of the gentle golden-green sun whose rays never reached this city—the flaking gray masonry of the old buildings emanated a terrible weariness, a mineral fatigue. Hissune wondered if he had ever noticed before just how bleak and shabby this place was.

The plaza was crowded. Not many of the people of Guadeloom Court cared to spend their evenings penned up in their dim little flats, and so they flocked down here to mill aimlessly about in a kind of random patternless promenade. And as Hissune in his shimmering new clothes made his way through that promenade, it seemed that everyone that he had ever known was out there glaring at him, glowering, snickering, scowling. He saw Vanimoon, who was his own age to the hour and had once seemed almost like a brother to him, and Vanimoon's slender almond-eyed little sister, not so little anymore, and Heulan, and Heulan's three great hulking brothers, and Nikkilone, and tiny squinch-faced Ghisnet, and the beady-eyed Vroon who sold candied ghumba root, and Confalume the pickpocket, and the old Ghayrog sisters that everyone thought were really Metamorphs, which Hissune had never believed, and this one and that one and more. All staring, all silently asking him, Why are you putting on such airs, Hissune, why this pomp, why this splendor?