"Valentine."

"Valentine," the boy repeated. "Valentine from Castle Mount. Very nice name." He clambered into the first floater-car. As Valentine got in beside him Hissune said, "Really? Valentine?"

"Really."

"Very nice name," he said again. "Pay me half a royal, Valentine, and I’ll show you the Labyrinth."

Half a royal, Valentine knew, was outrageous, several days’ pay for a skilled artisan, and yet he made no objection: it seemed improper for someone of his station to be haggling with a child over money. Hissune, perhaps, had calculated the same thing. In any event the fee turned out to be a worthwhile investment, for the boy proved expert in the twists and turns of the Labyrinth, guiding them with surprising swiftness toward the lower and inner coils of the place. Down they went, down and around, making unexpected turns and shortcuts through narrow, barely manageable alleyways, descending on hidden ramps that seemed to make transit across implausible gulfs of space.

The Labyrinth grew darker and more intricate as they went downward. Only the outermost level was well lit. The circles within it were shadowy and sinister, with dim corridors radiating in unlikely directions from the main ones, and hints of strange statuary and architectural ornamentation vaguely visible in the musty, dismal corners. Valentine found the place disturbing. It reeked of mildew and history; it had the chill clamminess of unimaginable antiquity; it was sunless and airless and joyless, a giant cavern of forlorn dreary gloom, through which scowling harsh-eyed figures moved on errands as mysterious as their own somber selves. Down — down — down—

The boy maintained a constant flow of chatter. He was marvelously articulate, lively and funny, somehow not at all a proper product of this morbid place. He told of tourists from Ni-moya who had been lost between the Hall of Winds and Place of Masks for a month, living on scraps provided by lower-level dwellers, but too proud to admit they were unable to find their way out. He told of the architect of the Court of Globes who had aligned every spheroid in that elaborate chamber with regard to some monumentally complex numerological system, only to find that the workmen, having lost the key to his charts, had installed everything according to an improvised system of their own: he had bankrupted himself to rebuild the whole thing in the right deployment at his own expense, discovering in the end that his computations were wrong and the pattern was impossible. "They buried him right where he fell," said Hissune. And the boy told the tale of the Pontifex Arioc, he who had, when a vacancy developed in the Ladyship, proclaimed himself female, appointed himself to the Isle, and abdicated his throne: barefoot and clad in loose flowing robes, the boy said, Arioc marched publicly out of the depths of the Labyrinth, followed by a cluster of his highest ministers, who frantically tried to dissuade him from his course. "On this spot," said Hissune, "he called the people together and told them he was now their Lady, and ordered up a chariot to take him to Stoien. And the ministers could do nothing. Nothing! I wish I had seen their faces."

Down—

All day the caravan descended. They passed through the Court of Columns, where thousands of huge gray pillars sprouted like titanic toadstools, and sluggish pools of oily black water covered the stone floor to a depth of three or four feet. They crossed the Hall of Winds, a terrifying place where cold gusts of air streamed inexplicably from finely carved stone grids in the walls. They saw the Place of Masks, a twisting corridor in which giant bodiless faces, with blind empty slits for eyes, stood mounted on marble plinths. They viewed the Court of Pyramids, a forest of stark white polyhedral figures set so close together that it was impossible to move between them, a spiky-tipped maze of monoliths, some perfectly tetrahedral but most weirdly elongated, spindly, ominous. A level below it they wandered in the celebrated Court of Globes, an even more complex structure a mile and a half long, where spherical objects, some no larger than a fist and others as big as great sea-dragons, hung eerily and invisibly suspended, illuminated from below. Hissune took care to point out the architect’s grave — unmarked, a slab of black stone beneath the greatest of the globes. Down — down—

Valentine had seen nothing of this on his earlier visit. From the Mouth of Waters one descended swiftly, through passageways used only by the Coronal and Pontifex, to the imperial lair at the heart of the Labyrinth.

Someday, thought Valentine, if I am Coronal again, it will happen that I must succeed Tyeveras as Pontifex. And when that day comes I will let the people know that I do not choose to live in the Labyrinth, but will build a palace for myself in some more cheering place.

He smiled. He wondered how many Coronals before him, seeing the hideous enormity of the Labyrinth, had vowed the same vow. And yet somehow they all, sooner or later, withdrew from the world and took up residence down here. It was easy enough now, when he was young and full of vitality, to make such resolutions — easy enough to think of taking the Pontificate out of Alhanroel altogether, off to some congenial spot on the younger continent, Ni-moya, perhaps, or Dulorn, and live among beauty and delight. He found it hard to imagine himself voluntarily walling himself up in this fantastic and repellent Labyrinth. But yet, but yet, they had all done it before him, Dekkeret and Confalume and Prestimion and Stiamot and Kinniken and the others of times gone by, they had moved from Castle Mount to this dark hole when their moment came. Perhaps it was not as bad as it seemed. Perhaps when one is Coronal long enough one is glad to retire from the heights of Castle Mount. I will think more of these matters, Valentine told himself, when the appropriate time is at hand.

The caravan of floater-cars executed a hairpin turn and entered yet a lower level.

"The Arena," Hissune announced grandly.

Valentine stared into a huge hollow chamber, so great in length and width that he was unable to see its walls, only the twinkling of distant lights in the shadowed corners. There were no visible supports to its ceiling. It was astonishing to think of the massive weight of the upper levels, those millions of people, those endless winding streets and alleyways, those buildings and statues and vehicles and all, pressing down on the roof of the Arena, and this vast nothingness resisting the colossal pressure.

"Listen," said Hissune. He scrambled out of the car, put his hands to his mouth, and unleashed a piercing cry. And echoes returned, sharp stabbing sounds bouncing from this wall and that, the first few magnified in sound, the rest diminished until they were no more than the twittering chirping sounds of droles. He sent forth another cry, and another on its heels, so that sounds crashed and reverberated all about them for more than a minute. Then, with a self-satisfied smirk, the boy returned to the car.

"What purpose does this place serve?" Valentine asked.

"None."

"None? None at all?"

"It’s just an emptiness. The Pontifex Dizimaule wanted a large empty space here. Nothing ever happens in it. No one’s allowed to build in it, not that anyone would want to. It just sits. It makes good echoes, don’t you think? That’s the only use it has. Go on, Valentine, make an echo."

Valentine smiled and shook his head. "Another time," he said.

Crossing the Arena seemed to take all day. On and on they went, never once seeing a wall or a column; it was like traversing an open plain, except for the vaguely visible ceiling far above. Nor was Valentine able to discern the moment when they began to leave the Arena. He realized after a time that the floor of the place had turned somehow into a ramp, and that they had made an imperceptible transition to a lower level that returned to the familiar claustrophobic closeness of the Labyrinth’s coils. As they proceeded down this new semi-circular corridor it grew gradually more brightly lit, until soon it was nearly as well illuminated as that level close to the mouth where the shops and markets were. Ahead, rising to an extraordinary height directly before them, was a screen of some sort on which inscriptions in brilliant luminous colors could be seen.