“Not yet an initiate,” Hissune tried to tell him, but the Hjort had already swung grandly about and was on his way down the center aisle, not looking back. With numb-legged strides Hissune followed him.
He felt impossibly conspicuous. There must have been five thousand people in the room, seated at round tables that held a dozen or so each, and he imagined that every eye was fastened on him. To his horror, he was no more than twenty paces into the room when he heard laughter beginning to rise, softly at first, then more heartily, and then waves of mirth that rolled from one side of the room to the other, crashing against him with stunning impact. He had never before heard such a vast roaring noise: it was the way he imagined the sea to sound as it flailed some wild northern coast.
The Hjort marched on and on, for what seemed like a mile and a half, and Hissune grimly marched on behind him through that ocean of merriment, wishing he were half an inch high. But after a while he realized that these people were laughing not at him but at a pack of dwarfish acrobats who were attempting with deliberate clownishness to form a human pyramid, and he grew less uneasy. Then the high dais came into view, and there was Lord Valentine himself beckoning to him, smiling, indicating the empty seat close by his side. Hissune thought he would weep from sheer relief. Everything was going to be all right after all.
“Your lordship!” Vinorkis boomed. “The Initiate Hissune!”
Hissune sank wearily and gratefully into his seat, just as an enormous round of applause for the acrobats, who were done with their act, resounded in the hall. A steward handed him a brimming bowl of some glistening golden wine, and as he put it to his lips, others around the table lifted their own bowls in a salute of welcome. Yesterday morning, during the brief and astonishing conversation with Lord Valentine in which the Coronal had invited him to join his staff on Castle Mount, Hissune had seen a few of these people at a distance, but there had been no time for introductions. Now they were actually giving him greeting—him!—and introducing themselves. But they needed no introduction, for these were the heroes of Lord Valentine’s glorious war of restoration, and everyone knew who they were.
That huge warrior-woman sitting beside him was surely Lisamon Hultin, the Coronal’s personal bodyguard, who, so the story went, once had cut Lord Valentine free of the belly of a sea dragon after he had been swallowed. And the amazingly pale-skinned little man with the white hair and the scarred face was, Hissune knew, the famous Sleet, juggling tutor to Lord Valentine in the days of exile; and the keen-eyed, heavy-browed man was the master archer Tunigorn of Castle Mount; and the small many-tentacled Vroon had to be the wizard Deliamber; and that man hardly older than Hissune himself, with the freckled face, was very likely the onetime herdboy Shanamir; and that slender, dignified Hjort must be Grand Admiral Asenhart—yes, these were the famous ones, and Hissune, who once had thought himself immune to any sort of awe, found himself very much awed indeed to be of their company now.
Immune to awe? Why, he had once walked up to Lord Valentine himself and shamelessly extorted half a royal from him for a tour of the Labyrinth, and three crowns more to find him lodgings in the outer ring. He had felt no awe then. Coronals and Pontifexes were simply men with more power and money than ordinary people, and they attained their thrones through the good luck of being born into the Castle Mount aristocracy and making their way through the ranks with just the right happy accidents to take them to the top. You didn’t even have to be particularly smart to be a Coronal, Hissune had noticed years ago. After all, just in the last twenty years or so, Lord Malibor had gone off to harpoon sea dragons and had stupidly gotten himself eaten by one, and Lord Voriax had died just as foolishly from a stray bolt that struck him down while he was out hunting in the forest, and his brother Lord Valentine, who was reputed to be fairly intelligent, had been witless enough to go drinking and carousing with the son of the King of Dreams, thereby letting himself be drugged and wiped clean of his memory and dumped from his throne. Feel awe for such as those? Why, in the Labyrinth any seven-year-old who conducted himself with such casual regard for his own welfare would be regarded as a hopeless idiot.
But Hissune had observed that some of his early irreverence seemed to have worn away over the years. When one is ten and has lived by one’s wits in the streets since the age of five or six, it is easy enough to thumb one’s nose at power. But he no longer was ten, and he no longer roved the streets. His perspective was a little deeper these days: and he knew it was no small thing to be Coronal of Majipoor, and no easy task. So when Hissune looked toward that broad-shouldered, golden-haired man, seeming both regal and gentle at once, who wore the green doublet and ermine robe of the world’s second highest office, and when he considered that that man, only ten feet from him, was the Coronal Lord Valentine, who had chosen him out of all Majipoor to join this group tonight, he felt something very like a shiver traveling down his back, and he admitted finally to himself that what that shiver was was awe: for the office of the kingship, and for the person of Lord Valentine, and for the mysterious chain of happenstance that had brought a mere boy of the Labyrinth into this august company.
He sipped his wine and felt a warm glow spread through his soul. What did the evening’s earlier troubles matter? He was here now, and welcome. Let Vanimoon and Heulan and Ghisnet eat their hearts out with envy! He was here, among the great ones, beginning his ascent toward the summit of the world, and soon he would be attaining heights from which the Vanimoons of his childhood would be altogether invisible.
In moments, though, that sense of well-being was completely gone from him, and he found himself tumbling back into confusion and dismay.
The first thing that went wrong was nothing more than a minor blunder, absurd but forgivable, scarcely his fault at all. Sleet had remarked on the obvious anxiety the Pontifical officials displayed every time they looked toward the Coronal’s table: plainly they were madly fearful that Lord Valentine was not sufficiently enjoying himself. And Hissune, newly radiant with wine and gloriously happy to be at the banquet at last, had brashly blurted out, “They ought to be worried! They know they’d better make a good impression, or they’ll be out in the cold when Lord Valentine becomes Pontifex!”
There were gasps all around the table. Everyone stared at him as though he had uttered some monstrous blasphemy—all but the Coronal, who clamped his lips together in the manner of one who has unexpectedly found a toad in his soup, and turned away.
“Did I say something wrong?” Hissune asked.
“Hush!” Lisamon Hultin whispered fiercely, and the mountainous Amazon woman nudged him urgently in the ribs.
“But is it not so that one day Lord Valentine will be Pontifex? And when that happens, won’t he want to install a staff of his own?”
Lisamon nudged him again, so emphatically that she all but knocked him from his seat. Sleet glared belligerently at him, and Shanamir said in a sharp whisper, “Enough! You’re only making it worse for yourself.”
Hissune shook his head. With a trace of anger showing beneath his confusion he said, “I don’t understand.”
“I’ll explain it to you later,” said Shanamir.
Stubbornly Hissune said, “But what have I done? To say that Lord Valentine is going to be Pontifex some day, and—”
With deep frost in his voice Shanamir said, “Lord Valentine does not wish to contemplate the necessity of becoming Pontifex at this time. He particularly does not wish to contemplate it during his dinner. It is something not spoken of in his presence. Do you understand now? Do you?”