No one was. No one, Hissune suspected, ever had been. They said it had forty thousand rooms. Was that so? Had anyone made an accurate count? Every Coronal since Lord Stiamot had lived here and had tried to leave his own imprint on the Castle, and the legend was that five rooms were added every year, and it was eight thousand years since Lord Stiamot first had taken up residence on the Mount. So there might well be forty thousand rooms here—or fifty thousand, or ninety thousand. Who could tell? One could tally a hundred rooms a day, and a year would not be enough to count them all, and by year’s end a few new rooms would have been added somewhere anyway, so it would become necessary to search them out and add them to the list. Impossible. Impossible.
To Hissune the Castle was the most wondrous place in the world. Early in his stay here he had concentrated on coming to know the innermost zone, where the main court and the royal offices were, and the most famous buildings, Stiamot Keep and Lord Prestimion’s Archive and Lord Arioc’s Watchtower and Lord Kinniken’s Chapel and the grand ceremonial chambers that surrounded the magnificent room the centerpiece of which was the Confalume Throne of the Coronal. Like any greenhorn tourist from the back woods of Zimroel, Hissune had gone over and over those places, including a good many that no greenhorn tourist would ever be allowed to see, until he knew every corner of them as well as any of the tour guides who had spent decades leading visitors through them.
The central reaches of the Castle, at least, were complete for all time: no one could build anything significant there any longer without first removing some structure erected by a past Coronal, and to do such a thing was unthinkable. Lord Malibor’s trophy room had been the last building to go up in the inner zone, so far as Hissune had been able to discover. Lord Voriax in his short reign had constructed only some game courts far out on the eastern flank of the Castle, and Lord Valentine had not yet managed to add any rooms of consequence at all, though he did speak from time to time of building a great botanical garden to house all the marvelous and bizarre plants he had seen during his wanderings through Majipoor—as soon as the pressure of his royal responsibilities, he said, eased enough to allow him to give some serious thought to the project. Judging by the reports of devastation now coming in from Zimroel, Lord Valentine had perhaps waited too long to undertake it, Hissune thought: the blights on that continent were wiping out, so it appeared, not only the agricultural crops but also many of the unusual plants of the wilderness areas.
When he had mastered the inner zone to his own satisfaction Hissune began to extend his explorations to the baffling and almost endless sprawl that lay beyond it. He visited the subterranean vaults that housed the weather machines—designed in ancient times when such scientific matters were better understood on Majipoor—by which the eternal springtime of Castle Mount was maintained, even though the summit of the Mount thrust itself thirty miles above sea level into the chilly dark of space. He wandered through the great library that coiled from one side of the Castle to the other in vast serpentine loops, and was said to contain every book ever published anywhere in the civilized universe. He roamed the stables where the royal mounts, splendid high-spirited synthetic animals very little like their plodding cousins, the beasts of burden of every Majipoori town and farm, pranced and snorted and pawed the air as they waited for their next outing. He made the discovery of Lord Sangamor’s tunnels, a series of linked chambers strung like a chain of sausages around an outjutting spire on the west face of the Mount, the walls and roof of which glowed with eerie radiance, one room a midnight blue, one a rich vermilion, one a subtle aquamarine, one a dazzling tawny yellow, one a somber throbbing russet, and on and on: no one knew why the tunnels had been built, or what was the source of the light that sprang of its own accord from the glistening paving-blocks.
Wherever he went he was admitted without question. He was, after all, one of the three regents of the realm: a surrogate Coronal, in a sense, or at least a significant fraction of one. But the aura of power had begun to settle about him long before Elidath had named him to the triumvirate. He felt eyes on him everywhere. He knew what those intent glances signified. That is Lord Valentine’s favorite. He came out of nowhere; he is already a prince; there will be no limits to his rise. Respect him. Obey him. Flatter him. Fear him. At first he thought he could remain unchanged amidst all this attention, but that was impossible. I am still only Hissune, who gulled tourists in the Labyrinth, who pushed papers about in the House of Records, who was jeered at by his own friends for putting on airs. Yes, that would always be true; but it was also true that he was no longer ten years old, that he had been greatly deepened and transformed by what he had experienced peering into the lives of scores of other men and women in the Registry of Souls, and by the training he had had on Castle Mount, and by the honors and responsibilities—mainly the responsibilities—that had been conferred on him during Elidath’s regency. He walked in a different way now: no longer the cocky but wary Labyrinth boy, always glancing in six directions for some bewildered stranger to exploit, nor the lowly, overworked clerk keeping to his proper place while nonetheless busily scrabbling for promotion to some senior desk, nor the apologetic neophyte bewilderingly thrust among the Powers of the realm and moving cautiously in their midst, but now the rising young lordling, striding with assurance and poise through the Castle, confident, secure, aware of his strengths, his purposes, his destiny. He hoped he had not become arrogant or overbearing or self-important; but he accepted himself calmly and without labored humility for what he had become and what he would be.
Today his route took him into a part of the Castle he had rarely visited, the north wing, which cascaded down a long rounded snout of the Mount’s summit that pointed toward the distant cities of Huine and Gossif. The guards’ residential quarters were here, and a series of beehive-shaped outbuildings that had been built in the reigns of Lord Dizimaule and Lord Arioc for purposes now forgotten, and a cluster of low weatherbeaten structures, roofless and crumbling, that no one understood at all. On his last visit to this zone, months ago, a team of archaeologists had been excavating there, two Ghayrogs and a Vroon overseeing a bunch of Skandar laborers sifting sand for potsherds, and the Vroon had told him then that she thought the buildings were the remnants of an old fort of the time of Lord Damlang, successor to Stiamot. Hissune had come by today to see if they were still at work and find out what they had learned; but the place was deserted, and the excavations had been filled. He stood for a time atop an ancient broken wall, looking toward the impossibly distant horizon, half concealed by the enormous shoulder of the Mount.
What cities lay down this way? Gossif, fifteen or twenty miles along, and below it Tentag, and then, he thought, either Minimool or Greel. And then, surely, Stee of the thirty million citizens, equalled only by Ni-moya in its grandeur.
He had never seen any of those cities, and perhaps he never would. Valentine himself often remarked that he had spent all his life on Castle Mount without finding the occasion to visit Stee. The world was too large for anyone to explore adequately in one lifetime: too large to comprehend, indeed.
And the thirty million folk of Stee, and the thirty million of Ni-moya, and Pidruid’s eleven million, and the millions more of Alaisor, Treymone, Piliplok, Mazadone, Velathys, Narabaclass="underline" how were they faring this very moment? Hissune wondered. Amid the famines, amid the panics, amid the cries of new prophets and self-appointed new kings and emperors? The situation now was critical, he knew. Zimroel had fallen into such confusion that it was all but impossible to find out what was going on there, though surely it was nothing good. And not long ago had come news of weevils and rusts and smuts and the Divine only knew what else beginning to make their sinister way through the farming belts of western Alhanroel, so in a little while the same madness would very likely be sweeping the senior continent. Already there were rumblings: tales of sea-dragon worship openly conducted in Treymone and Stoien, and mysterious new orders of chivalry, the Knights of Dekkeret and the Fellowship of the Mount and some others, springing up suddenly in cities like Amblemorn and Normork on Castle Mount itself. Ominous, troublesome signs of greater upheaval to come.