"Of course. So long a separation — it must have been a dreadful burden—"

"As you know, I've been preoccupied with urgent matters of state these last weeks, too delicate to discuss in detail with you, and so—"

The words sounded impossibly idiotic in his own ears. It was a relief when she cut him off, saying smoothly, "There's time for all that, love. Shall we have some wine?"

"Please. Yes."

She signaled. A liveried waiter, a haughty-looking Hjort, came to take the order, and stalked away.

Silimoor said, "And won't you even remove your mask?"

"Ah. Sorry. It's been such a scrambled few days—"

He set aside the bright yellow strip that covered his nose and eyes and marked him as the Pontifex's man. Silimoor's expression changed as she saw him clearly for the first time; the look of serenely self-satisfied fury faded and something close to concern appeared on her face. "Your eyes are so bloodshot — your cheeks are so pale and drawn—"

"I've had no sleep. It's been a crazy time."

"Poor Calintane."

"Do you think I kept away from you because I wanted to? I've been caught up in this insanity, Silimoor."

"I know. I can see how much of a strain it's been." He realized suddenly that she was not mocking him, that she was genuinely sympathetic, that in fact this was possibly going to be easier than he had been imagining.

He said, "The trouble with being ambitious is that you get engulfed in affairs far beyond your control, and you have no choice but to let yourself be swept along. You've heard what the Pontifex Arioc did yesterday?"

She stifled a laugh. "Yes, of course. I mean, I've heard the rumors. Everyone has. Are they true? Did it really happen?"

"Unfortunately, it did."

"How marvelous, how perfectly marvelous! But such a thing turns the world upside down, doesn't it? It affects you in some dreadful way?"

"It affects you, and me, and everyone in the world," said Calintane, with a gesture that reached beyond the Court of Globes, beyond the Labyrinth itself, encompassing the entire planet beyond these claustrophobic depths, from the awesome summit of Castle Mount to the far-off cities of the western continent. "Affects us all to a degree that I hardly understand yet myself. But let me tell you the story from the beginning—"

Perhaps you were not aware that the Pontifex Arioc has been behaving strangely for months. I suppose there's something about the pressures of high office that eventually drives people crazy, or perhaps you have to be at least partly mad in the first place to aspire to high office. But you know that Arioc was Coronal for thirteen years under Dizimaule, and now he's been Pontifex a dozen years more, and that's a long time to hold that sort of power. Especially living here in the Labyrinth. The Pontifex must yearn for the outside world now and then, I'd imagine — to feel the breezes on Castle Mount or hunt gihornas in Zimroel or just to swim in a real river anywhere — and here he is miles and miles underground in this maze, presiding over his rituals and his bureaucrats until the end of his life.

One day about a year ago Arioc suddenly began talking about making a grand processional of Majipoor. I was in attendance at court that day, along with Duke Guadeloom. The Pontifex called for maps and started laying out a journey down the river to Alaisor, over to the Isle of Sleep for a pilgrimage and a visit to the Lady at Inner Temple, then across to Zimroel, with stops at Piliplok, Ni-moya, Pidruid, Narabal, you know, everywhere, a tour that would last at least five years. Guadeloom gave me a funny look and gently pointed out to Arioc that it's the Coronal who makes grand processionals, not the Pontifex, and that Lord Struin had only just come back from one a couple of years ago.

"Then I am forbidden to do so?" the Pontifex asked.

"Not precisely forbidden, your majesty, but custom dictates"

"That I remain a prisoner in the Labyrinth?"

"Not at all a prisoner, your majesty, but—"

"But I am rarely if ever to venture into the upper world?"

And so on. I must say my sympathies were with Arioc; but remember that I am not, like you, a native of the Labyrinth, only one whose government duties have brought him here, and I do find life underground a little unnatural at times. At any rate Guadeloom did convince his majesty that a grand processional was out of the question. But I could see the restlessness in the Pontifex's eyes.

The next thing that happened was that his majesty started slipping out by night to wander around the Labyrinth by himself. No one knows how often he did it before we found out what was going on, but we began to hear odd rumors that a masked figure who looked much like the Pontifex had been seen in the small hours lurking about in the Court of Pyramids or the Hall of Winds. We regarded that as so much nonsense, until the night when some flunky of the bedchamber imagined he had heard the Pontifex ring for service and went in and found the room empty. I think you will remember that night, Silimoor, because I was spending it with you and one of Guadeloom's people hunted me down and made me leave, claiming that an urgent meeting of the high advisers had been convened and my services were needed. You were quite upset — furious, I'd say. Of course what the meeting was about was the disappearance of the Pontifex, though later we covered it up by claiming it was a discussion of the great wave that had devastated so much of Stoienzar.

We found Arioc about four hours past midnight. He was in the Arena — you know, that stupid empty thing that the Pontifex Dizimaule built in one of his crazier moments — sitting crosslegged at the far side, playing a zootibar and singing songs to an audience of five or six ragged little boys. We brought him home. A few weeks later he got out again and managed to get as far up as the Court of Columns. Guadeloom discussed it with him: Arioc insisted that it is important for a monarch to go among his people and hear their grievances, and he cited precedents as far back as the kings of Old Earth. Quietly Guadeloom began posting guards in the royal precincts, supposedly to keep assassins out — but who would assassinate a Pontifex? The guards were put there to keep Arioc in. But though the Pontifex is eccentric he's far from stupid, and despite the guards he slipped out twice more in the next couple of months. It was becoming a critical problem. What if he vanished for a week? What if he got out of the Labyrinth entirely, and went for a stroll in the desert?

"Since we can't seem to prevent him from roaming," I said to Guadeloom, "why don't we give him a companion, someone who'll go on his adventures with him and at the same time see to it that no harm comes to him?"

"An excellent idea," the duke replied. "And I appoint you to the post. The Pontifex is fond of you, Calintane. And you are young enough and agile enough to be able to extricate him from any trouble into which he may stumble."

That was six weeks ago, Silimoor. You will surely recall that I suddenly ceased spending my nights with you at that time, pleading an increase of responsibilities at court, and thus our estrangement began. I could not tell you what duty it was that now occupied my nights, and I could only hope you did not suspect me of having shifted my affections to another. But I can now reveal that I was compelled to take up lodgings close by the bedchamber of the Pontifex and give him attendance every night; that I began to do most of my sleeping at random hours of the day; and that by one stratagem and another I became companion to Arioc on his nocturnal jaunts.

It was taxing work. I was in truth the Pontifex's keeper, and we both knew it, but I had to take care not to underscore the fact by unduly imposing my will on him. And yet I had to guard him from rough playmates and risky excursions. There are rogues, there are brawlers, there are hotheads; no one would knowingly harm the Pontifex but he might easily come by accident between two who meant to harm each other. In my rare moments of sleep I sought the guidance of the Lady of the Isle — may she rest in the bosom of the Divine — and she came to me in a blessed sending, and told me that I must make myself the Pontifex's friend if I meant not to be his jailer. How fortunate we are to have the counsel of so kind a mother in our dreams! And so I dared to initiate more than a few of Arioc's adventures myself. "Come, let us go out tonight," I said to him, which would have frozen Guadeloom's blood, had he known. It was my idea to take the Pontifex up into the public levels of the Labyrinth for a night of taverns and marketplaces — masked, of course, beyond chance of recognition. I led him into mysterious alleyways where gamblers lived, but gamblers known to me, who posed no threats. And it was I who on the boldest night of all actually guided him beyond the walls of the Labyrinth itself. I knew it was what he most desired, and even he feared to attempt it, so I proposed it to him as my secret gift, and he and I took the private royal passageway upward that emerges at the Mouth of Waters. We stood together so close to the River Glayge that we could feel the cool air that blows down from Castle Mount, and we looked up at the blazing stars. "I have not been out here in six years," said the Pontifex. He was trembling and I think he was weeping behind his mask; and I, who had not seen the stars either for much too long, was nearly as deeply moved. He pointed to this one and that, saying it was the star of the world from which the Ghayrog folk came, and this the star of the Hjorts, and that one there, that trifling dot of light, was none other than the sun of Old Earth. Which I doubted, since I had been taught otherwise in school, but he was in such joy that I could not contradict him then. And he turned to me and gripped my arm and said in a low voice, "Calintane, I am the supreme ruler of this whole colossal world, and I am nothing at all, a slave, a prisoner. I would give everything to escape this Labyrinth and spend my last years in freedom under the stars."