Eventually, the two riverboats reach Virolando, a wide lake before the headwaters, home to the pacifist Church of the Second Chance, where Hermann Göring has become a priest. There, King John and Clemens begin an aerial dog-fight, and later a naval combat in which both riverboats are sunk and most of the crews die. King John is killed by Clemens and Clemens dies of a heart attack after being pulled from the water by his mortal enemy Erik Bloodaxe, who has become an adherent of the Church of the Second Chance, and seeks no revenge against Clemens. Among the survivors are Burton, Frigate, Alice, Kaz, Joe Miller, Li Po, Ah Qaaq, and Nur ed-Din ("Light of the Faith"), now joined by Tom Turpin, Aphra Behn, a man claiming to be Gilgamesh, and Baron de Marbot. They take the only craft to survive the fight upriver, then scale the waterfall at the end of the river and enter the polar sea. At the tower, they expose Ah Qaaq as the renegade Ethical and take him prisoner. He identifies himself as Loga, a grandson of King Priam of Troy, resurrected centuries ago and raised by the alien Ethicals on the Gardenworld. He reveals the current date is 2307 AD and other stories were false stories to throw off investigators. He reveals also that the Riverworld is a moral test, to allow humanity enlightenment. When the project is brought to a close the souls of those who have not achieved enlightenment will wander the universe aimlessly. Loga, being obsessed with sparing his earthly family this fate, awakened Burton prematurely, recruited Clemens and the others, and diverted a metal meteorite (disrupting social harmony) to Clemens. The protagonists discover a malfunction in the computer which runs the tower, threatening to release the stored wathans (souls), of the people who died on the Riverworld. Göring attempts to fix the computer, but is killed by security measures put in place by Monat, who was a member of the fifth-generation sentient race to receive wathans from the First Race to have wathans. Alice then devises a way to evade this programming, and deactivate the security. Loga is then able to repair the computer. Reception Greg Costikyan reviewed The Magic Labyrinth in Ares Magazine #5 and commented that "One cannot but suspect that this type of work – the pursuit by characters of an explanation for an unusual world