For once Hornkast’s invincible serenity seemed shaken: his eyes flashed, his nostrils flared, his lips quirked quickly in surprise.
“Disappearance?”
“While Lord Valentine was traveling in Piurifayne we lost contact with him, and we have not been able to reestablish it.”
“May I ask what the Coronal was doing in Piurifayne?”
Hissune offered a light shrug. “A mission of great delicacy, I am given to understand. He was separated from his party in the same storm that took Elidath’s life. We have heard nothing since.”
“And is the Coronal dead, do you think?”
“I have no idea, and guesses are without value. You can be sure we are making every effort to resume contact with him. But I think we must at least allow for the possibility that Lord Valentine is dead, yes. We have had discussions to that effect at the Castle. A plan of succession is emerging.”
“Ah.”
“And of course the health of the Pontifex is something that must figure prominently in our planning,” said Hissune.
“Ah. Yes. I quite understand.”
“The Pontifex, I take it, remains as he has been?”
Hornkast made no immediate reply, but stared at Hissune with mysterious and discomforting intensity a long while, as if engaged in the most intricate of political calculations.
Then at length he said, “Would you like to pay a call on his majesty?”
If not the last thing Hissune would have expected the high spokesman to say, it was close to it. A visit to the Pontifex? He had never dreamed of such a thing! It took him a moment to master his astonishment and regain his poise. Then he said, as coolly as he could manage it, “It would be a great privilege.”
“Let us go, then.”
“Now?”
“Now,” said Hornkast.
The high spokesman signaled; servitors appeared and began clearing away the remnants of the meal; moments later Hissune found himself aboard a small snub-nosed floater, with Hornkast beside him, traveling down a narrow tunnel until they came to a place where they could go only on foot, and where one bronze door after another sealed the passageway at fifty-pace intervals. Hornkast opened each of these by sliding his hand into a hidden panel, and eventually one final door, inscribed with a gold-chased Labyrinth symbol and the imperial monogram over it, yielded to the high spokesman’s touch and admitted them to the imperial throne-chamber.
Hissune’s heart pounded with terrifying force. The Pontifex! Old mad Tyeveras! Throughout all his life he had scarcely believed that any such person truly existed. Child of the Labyrinth that he was, he had regarded the Pontifex always as some sort of supernatural being, hidden away here in the depths, the reclusive master of the world; and even now, for all Hissune’s recent familiarity with princes and dukes and the household of the Coronal and the Coronal himself, he regarded the Pontifex as a being apart, dwelling in a realm of his own, invisible, unknowable, unreal, inconceivably remote from the world of ordinary beings.
But there he was.
It was exactly as the legend had it. The sphere of blue glass, the pipes and tubes and wires and clamps, the colored fluids bubbling in and out of their life-support chamber, and the old, old man within, sitting weirdly upright on the high-backed throne atop its three shallow steps. The eyes of the Pontifex were open. But did they see? Was he alive at all?
“He no longer speaks,” Hornkast said. “It is the latest of the changes. But the physician Sepulthrove says that his mind is still active, that his body retains its vitality. Go forward another step or two. You may look closely at him. See? See? He breathes. He blinks. He is alive. He is most definitely alive.”
Hissune felt as though he had stumbled into the presence of something of a former epoch, some prehistoric creature miraculously preserved. Tyeveras! Coronal to the Pontifex Ossier, how many generations ago? Survivor out of history. This man had seen Lord Kinniken with his own eyes. He had been old already when Lord Malibor came to the Castle. And here he still was: alive, yes, if this was in fact life.
Hornkast said, “You may greet him.”
Hissune knew the convention: one pretended not to speak directly to the Pontifex, but addressed one’s words to the high spokesman, pretending that the high spokesman would relay them to the monarch; but that was not actually done.
He said, “I pray you offer his majesty the greeting of his subject Prince Hissune son of Elsinome, who most humbly expresses his reverence and obedience.”
The Pontifex made no reply. The Pontifex showed no sign of having heard anything.
“Once.” said Hornkast, “he would make sounds that I learned to interpret, in response to what was said to him. No longer. He has not spoken in months. But we speak to him still, even so.”
Hissune said, “Tell the Pontifex, then, that he is beloved by all the world, and his name is constantly in our prayers.”
Silence. The Pontifex was motionless.
“Tell the Pontifex also,” Hissune said, “that the world turns on its course, that troubles come and go, that the greatness of Majipoor will be preserved.”
Silence. No response whatever.
“Are you done?” Hornkast asked.
Hissune stared across the room at the enigmatic figure within the glass cage. He longed to see Tyeveras stretch forth his hand in blessing, longed to hear him speak words of prophesy. But that would not happen, Hissune knew.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m done.”
“Come, then.”
The high spokesman led Hissune from the throne chamber. Outside, Hissune realized that his fine robes were soaked with sweat, that his knees were quivering. Tyeveras! If I live to be as old as he is, Hissune thought, I will never forget that face, those eyes, that blue sphere of glass.
Hornkast said, “It is a new phase, this silence. Sepulthrove maintains that he is still strong, and perhaps so. But possibly this is the beginning of the end. There must be some limit, even with all this machinery.”
“Do you think it will be soon?”
“I pray it is, but I have no way of knowing. We do nothing to hasten the end. That decision is in Lord Valentine’s hands—or in the hands of his successor, if Valentine no longer lives.”
“If Lord Valentine is dead,” said Hissune, “then the new Coronal might immediately ascend to Pontifex. Unless he too chooses to sustain the life of Tyeveras.”
“Indeed. And if Lord Valentine is dead, who then, do you think, will be that new Coronal?”
Hornkast’s stare was overwhelming and merciless. Hissune felt himself sizzling in the fire of that stare, and all his hard-won shrewdness, all his sense of who he was and what he meant to achieve melted from him, leaving him vulnerable and muddled. He had a sudden wild dizzying image of himself catapulted upward through the Powers, becoming Coronal one morning, giving the orders to disconnect this tubing and machinery at noon, becoming Pontifex by nightfall. But of course that was absurd, he told himself in panic. Pontifex? Me? Next month? It was a joke. It was altogether preposterous. He struggled for balance and succeeded after a moment in drawing himself back to the strategy that had seemed so obvious to him at the Castle: if Lord Valentine is dead, Divvis must become Coronal, and then Tyeveras at last must die, and Divvis goes to the Labyrinth. It must be that way. It must.
Hissune said, “The succession cannot, of course, be voted upon until we are certain of the Coronal’s death, and daily we offer our prayers for his safety. But if in fact some tragic fate has befallen Lord Valentine, I think it will be the pleasure of the Castle princes to invite the son of Lord Voriax to ascend the throne.”