Majipoor Chronicles

Toward the close of the seventh year of the restoration of Lord Valentine, word reaches the Labyrinth that the Coronal soon will be arriving on a visit — news that sends Hissune's pulse rate climbing and his heart to pounding. Will he see the Coronal? Will Lord Valentine remember him? The Coronal once took the trouble to summon him all the way to Castle Mount for his re-crowning; surely the Coronal still thinks of him, surely Lord Valentine has some recollection of the boy who — Probably not, Hissune decides. His excitement subsides; his cool rational self regains control. If he catches sight of Lord Valentine at all during his visit, that will be extraordinary, and if Lord Valentine knows who he is, that will be miraculous. Most likely the Coronal will dip in and out of the Labyrinth without seeing anyone but the high ministers of the Pontifex. They say he is off on a grand processional toward Alaisor, and thence to the Isle to visit his mother, and a stop at the Labyrinth is obligatory on such an itinerary. But Hissune knows that Coronals tend not to enjoy visits to the Labyrinth, which remind them uncomfortably of the lodgings that await them when it is their time to be elevated to the senior kingship. And he knows, too, that the Pontifex Tyeveras is a ghost-creature, more dead than alive, lost in impenetrable dreams within the cocoon of his life-support systems, incapable of rational human speech, a symbol rather than a man, who ought to have been buried years ago but who is kept in maintenance so that Lord Valentine's time as Coronal can be prolonged. That is fine for Lord Valentine and doubtless for Majipoor, Hissune thinks; not so good for old Tyeveras. But such matters are not his concern. He returns to the Register of Souls, still speculating idly about the coming visit of the Coronal, and idly he taps for a new capsule, and what comes forth is the recording of a citizen of Ni-moya, which begins so unpromisingly that Hissune would have rejected it, but that he desires a glimpse of that great city of the other continent. For Ni-moya's sake he allows himself to live the life of a little shopkeeper — and soon he has no regrets.

1

Inyanna's mother had been a shopkeeper in Velathys all her life, and so had Inyanna's mother's mother, and it was beginning to look as though that would be Inyanna's destiny too. Neither her mother nor her mother's mother had seemed particularly resentful of such a life, but Inyanna, now that she was nineteen and sole proprietor, felt the shop as a crushing burden on her back, a hump, an intolerable pressure. She thought often of selling out and seeking her real fate in some other city far away, Piliplok or Pidruid or even the mighty metropolis of Ni-moya, far to the north, that was said to be wondrous beyond the imagination of anyone who had not beheld it.

But times were dull and business was slow and Inyanna saw no purchasers for the shop on the horizon. Besides, the place had been the center of her family's life for generations, and simply to abandon it was not an easy thing to do, no matter how hateful it had become. So every morning she rose at dawn and stepped out on the little cobbled terrace to plunge herself into the stone vat of rainwater that she kept there for bathing, and then she dressed and breakfasted on dried fish and wine and went downstairs to open the shop. It was a place of general merchandise — bolts of cloth and clay pots from the south coast and barrels of spices and preserved fruits and jugs of wine and the keen cutlery of Narabal and slabs of costly sea-dragon meat and the glittering filigreed lanterns that they made in Til-omon, and many other such things. There were scores of shops just like hers in Velathys; none of them did particularly well. Since her mother's death, Inyanna had kept the books and managed the inventory and swept the floor and polished the counters and filled out the governmental forms and permits, and she was weary of all that. But what other prospects did life hold? She was an unimportant girl living in an unimportant rainswept mountain-girt city, and she had no real expectation that any of that would change over the next sixty or seventy years.

Few of her customers were humans. Over the decades, this district of Velathys had come to be occupied mainly by Hjorts and Liimen — and a good many Metamorphs, too, for the Metamorph province of Piurifayne lay just beyond the mountain range north of the city and a considerable number of the shapeshifting folk had filtered down into Velathys. She took them all for granted, even the Metamorphs, who made most humans uneasy. The only thing Inyanna regretted about her clientele was that she did not get to see many of her own kind, and so, although she was slender and attractive, tall, sleek, almost boyish-looking, with curling red hair and striking green eyes, she rarely found lovers and had never met anyone she might care to live with. Sharing the shop would ease much of the labor. On the other hand, it would cost her much of her freedom, too, including the freedom to dream of a time when she did not keep a shop in Velathys.

One day after the noon rains two strangers entered the shop, the first customers in hours. One was short and thick-bodied, a little round stub of a man, and the other, pale and gaunt and elongated, with a bony face all knobs and angles, looked like some predatory creature of the mountains. They wore heavy white tunics with bright orange sashes, a style of dress that was said to be common in the grand cities of the north, and they looked about the store with the quick scornful glances of those accustomed to a far finer level of merchandise.

The short one said, "Are you Inyanna Forlana?"

"I am."

He consulted a document. "Daughter of Forlana Hayorn, who was the daughter of Hayorn Inyanne?"

"You have the right person. May I ask—"

"At last!" cried the tall one. "What a long dreary trail this has been! If you knew how long we've searched for you! Up the river to Knyntor, and then around to Dulorn, and across these damnable mountains — does it ever stop raining down here? — and then from house to house, from shop to shop, all across Velathys, asking this one, asking that one—"

"And I am who you seek?"

"If you can prove your ancestry, yes."

Inyanna shrugged. "I have records. But what business do you have with me?"

"We should introduce ourselves," said the short one. "I am Vezan Ormus and my colleague is called Steyg, and we are officials of the staff of his majesty the Pontifex Tyeveras, Bureau of Probate, Ni-moya." From a richly tooled leather purse Vezan Ormus withdrew a sheaf of documents; he shuffled them purposefully and said, "You mother's mother's elder sister was a certain Saleen Inyanna, who in the twenty-third year of the Pontificate of Kinniken, Lord Ossier being then Coronal, settled in the city of Ni-moya and married one Helmyot Gavoon, third cousin to the duke."

Inyanna stared blankly. "I know nothing of these people."

"We are not surprised," said Steyg. "It was some generations ago. And doubtless there was little contact between the two branches of the family, considering the great gulf in distance and in wealth."

"My grandmother never mentioned rich relatives in Ni-moya," said Inyanna.

Vezan Ormus coughed and searched in the papers. "Be that as it may. Three children were born to Helmyot Gavoon and Saleen Inyanna, of whom the eldest, a daughter, inherited the family estates. She died young in a hunting mishap and the lands passed to her only son, Gavoon Dilamayne, who remained childless and died in the tenth year of the Pontificate of Tyeveras, that is to say, nine years ago. Since then the property has remained vacant while the search for legitimate heirs has been conducted. Three years ago it was determined—"

"That I am heir?"

"Indeed," said Steyg blandly, with a broad bony smile.

Inyanna, who had seen the trend of the conversation for quite some time, was nevertheless astounded. Her legs quivered, her lips and mouth went dry, and in her confusion she jerked her arm suddenly, knocking down and shattering an expensive vase of Alhanroel ware. Embarrassed by all that, she got herself under control and said, "What is it I'm supposed to have inherited, then?"

"The grand house known as Nissimorn Prospect, on the northern shore of the Zimr at Ni-moya, and estates at three places in the Steiche Valley, all leased and producing income," said Steyg.

"We congratulate you," said Vezan Ormus.

"And I congratulate you," replied Inyanna, "on the cleverness of your wit. Thank you for these moments of amusement; and now, unless you want to buy something, I beg you let me get on with my bookkeeping, for the taxes are due and—"

"You are skeptical," said Vezan Ormus. "Quite properly. We come with a fantastic story and you are unable to absorb the impact of our words. But look: we are men of Ni-moya. Would we have dragged ourselves thousands of miles down to Velathys for the sake of playing jokes on shopkeepers? See — here—" He fanned out his sheaf of papers and pushed them toward Inyanna. Hands trembling, she examined them. A view of the mansion — dazzling — and an array of documents of title, and a genealogy, and a paper bearing the Pontifical sea! with her name inscribed on it—

She looked up, stunned, dazed.

In a faint furry voice she said, "What must I do now?"

"The procedures are purely routine," Steyg replied. "You must file affidavits that you are in fact Inyanna Forlana, you must sign papers agreeing that you will make good the accrued taxes on the properties out of accumulated revenues once you have taken possession, you will have to pay the filing fees for transfer of title, and so on. We can handle all of that for you."

"Filing fees?"

"A matter of a few royals."

Her eyes widened. "Which I can pay out of the estate's accumulated revenues?"

"Unfortunately, no," said Vezan Ormus. "The money must be paid before you have taken title, and, of course, you have no access to the revenues of the estate until you have taken title, so—"

"An annoying formality," Steyg said. "But a trifling one, if you take the long view."

2

All told the fees came to twenty royals. That was an enormous sum for Inyanna, nearly her whole savings; but a study of the documents told her that the revenues of the agricultural lands alone were nine hundred royals a year, and then there were the other assets of the estate, the mansion and its contents, the rents and royalties on certain riverfront properties—

Vezan Ormus and Steyg were extremely helpful in the filling out of the forms. She put the closed for business sign out, not that it mattered much in this slow season, and all afternoon they sat beside her at her little desk upstairs, passing things to her for her to sign, and stamping them with impressive-looking Pontifical seals. Afterward she celebrated by taking them down to the tavern at the foot of the hill for a few rounds of wine. Steyg insisted on buying the first, pushing her hand away and plunking down half a crown for a flask of choice palm-wine from Pidruid. Tnyanna gasped at the extravagance — she ordinarily drank humbler stuff — but then she remembered that she had come into wealth, and when the flask was gone she ordered another herself. The tavern was crowded, mainly with Hjorts and a few Ghayrogs, and the bureaucrats from the northland looked uncomfortable amid all these non-humans, sometimes holding their fingers thoughtfully over their noses as if to filter out the scent of alien flesh. Inyanna, to put them at their ease, told them again and again how grateful she was that they had taken the trouble to seek her out in the obscurity of Velathys.

"But it is our job!" Vezan Ormus protested. "On this world we each must give service to the Divine by playing our parts in the intricacies of daily life. Land was sitting idle: a great house was unoccupied; a deserving heir lived drably in ignorance. Justice demands that such inequities be righted. To us falls the privilege of doing so."

"All the same," said Inyanna, flushed with wine and leaning almost coquettishly close now to one man, now to the other, "You have undergone great inconvenience for my sake, and I will always be in your debt. May I buy you another flask?"

It was well past dark when they finally left the tavern. Several moons were out, and the mountains that ringed the city, outlying fangs of the great Gonghar range, looked like jagged pillars of black ice in the chilly glimmer. Inyanna saw her visitors to their hostelry, at the edge of Dekkeret Plaza, and in her winy wooziness came close to inviting herself in for the night. But seemingly they had no yearning for that, were perhaps made even a little wary at the possibility, and she found herself smoothly and expertly turned away at the door. Wobbling a little, she made the long steep climb to her house and stepped out on the terrace to take the night air. Her head was throbbing. Too much wine, too much talk, too much startling news! She looked about her at her city, row upon row of small stucco-walled tile-roofed buildings descending the sloping bowl of Velathys Basin, a few ragged strands of parkland, some plazas and mansions, the duke's ramshackle castle slung along the eastern ridge, the highway like a girdle encircling the town, then the lofty and oppressive mountains beginning just beyond, the marble quarries like raw wounds on their flanks — she could see it all from her hilltop nest. Farewell! Neither an ugly city nor a lovely one, she thought: just a place, quiet, damp, dull, chilly, ordinary, known for its fine marble and its skilled stonemasons and not much else, a provincial town on a provincial continent. She had been resigned to living out her days here. But now, now that miracles had invaded her life, it seemed intolerable to have to spend as much as another hour here, when shining Ni-moya was waiting, Ni-moya, Ni-moya, Ni-moya!

She slept only fitfully. In the morning she met with Vezan Ormus and Steyg in the notary's office behind the bank and turned over to them her little sack of well-worn royal pieces, most of them old, some very old, with the faces of Kinniken and Thimin and Ossier on them, and even one coin of the reign of great Confalume, a coin hundreds of years old. In return they gave her a single sheet of paper: a receipt, acknowledging payment of twenty royals that they were to expend on her behalf for filing fees. The other documents, they explained, must go back with them to be countersigned and validated. But they would ship everything to her once the transfer was complete, and then she could come to Ni-moya to take possession of her property.

"You will be my guests," she told them grandly, "for a month of hunting and feasting, when I am in my estates."

"Oh, no," said Vezan Ormus softly. "It would hardly be appropriate for such as we to mingle socially with the mistress of Nissimorn Prospect. But we understand the sentiment, and we thank you for the gesture."

Inyanna asked them to lunch. But they had to move on, Steyg replied. They had other heirs to contact, probate work to carry out in Narabal and Til-omon and Pidruid; many months would pass before they saw their homes and wives in Ni-moya again. And did that mean, she asked, suddenly dismayed, that no action would be taken on the filing of her claim until they had finished their tour? "Not at all," said Steyg. "We will ship your documents to Ni-moya by direct courier tonight. The processing of the claim will begin as soon as possible. You should hear from our office in — oh, shall we say seven to nine weeks?"

She accompanied them to their hotel, and waited outside while they packed, and saw them into their floater, and stood waving in the street as they drove off toward the highway that led to the southwest coast. Then she reopened the shop. In the afternoon there were two customers, one buying eight weights' worth of nails and the other asking for false satin, three yards at sixty weights the yard, so the entire day's sales were less than two crowns, but no matter. Soon she would be rich.

A month went by and no news came from Ni-moya. A second month, and still there was silence.

The patience that had kept Inyanna in Velathys for nineteen years was the patience of hopelessness, of resignation. But now that great changes were before her, she had no patience left. She fidgeted, she paced, she made notations on the calendar. The summer, with its virtually daily rains, came to an end, and the dry crisp autumn began, when the leaves turned fiery in the foothills. No word. The heavy torrents of winter began, with masses of moist air drifting south out of the Zimr Valley across the Metamorph lands and colliding with the harsh mountain winds. There was snow in the highest rims of the Gonghars, and streams of mud ran through the streets of Velathys. No word out of Ni-moya, and Inyanna thought of her twenty royals, and terror began to mingle with annoyance in her soul. She celebrated her twentieth birthday alone, bitterly drinking soured wine and imagining what it would be like to command the revenues of Nissimorn Prospect. Why was it taking so long? No doubt Vezan Ormus and Steyg had properly forwarded the documents to the offices of the Pontifex; but just as surely her papers were sitting on some dusty desk, awaiting action, while weeds grew in the gardens of her estate.

One Winterday Eve Inyanna resolved to go to Ni-moya and take charge of the case in person.

The journey would be expensive and she had parted with her savings. To raise the money she mortgaged the shop to a family of Hjorts. They gave her ten royals; they were to pay themselves interest by selling off her inventory at their own profit; if the entire debt should be repaid before she returned, they would continue to manage the place on her behalf, paying her a royalty. The contract greatly favored the Hjorts, but Inyanna did not care: she knew, but told no one, that she would never again see the shop, nor these Hjorts, nor Velathys itself, and the only thing that mattered was having the money to go to Ni-moya.

It was no small trip. The most direct route between Velathys and Ni-moya lay across the Shapeshifter province of Piurifayne, and to enter that was dangerous and rash. Instead she had to make an enormous detour, westward through Stiamot Pass, then up the long broad valley that was the Dulorn Rift, with the stupendous mile-high wall of Velathys Scarp rising on the right for hundreds of miles; and once she reached the city of Dulorn itself she would still have half the vast continent of Zimroel to cross, by land and by riverboat, before coming to Ni-moya. But Inyanna saw all that as a glorious gaudy adventure, however long it might take. She had never been anywhere, except once when she was ten, and her mother, enjoying unusual prosperity one winter, had sent her to spend a month in the hotlands south of the Gonghars. Other cities, although she had seen pictures of them, were as remote and implausible to her as other worlds. Her mother once had been to Til-omon on the coast, which she said was a place of brilliant sunlight like golden wine, and soft never-ending summer weather. Her mother's mother had been as far as Narabal, where the tropical air was damp and heavy and hung about you like a mantle. But the rest — Pidruid, Piliplok, Dulorn, Ni-moya, and all the others — were only names to her, and the idea of the ocean was almost beyond her imagining, and it was utterly impossible for her really to believe that there was another continent entirely beyond the ocean, with ten great cities for every city of Zimroel, and thousands of millions of people, and a baffling lair beneath the desert called the Labyrinth, where the Pontifex lived, and a mountain thirty miles high, at the summit of which dwelled the Coronal and all his princely court. Thinking about such things gave her a pain in the throat and a ringing in the ears. Awesome and incomprehensible Majipoor was too gigantic a sweetmeat to swallow at a single gulp; but nibbling away at it, a mile at a time, was wholly wondrous to someone who had only once been beyond the boundaries of Velathys.

So Inyanna noted in fascination the change in the air as the big transport floater drifted through the pass and down into the flatlands west of the mountains. It was still winter down there — the days were short, the sunlight pale and greenish — but the breeze was mild and thick, lacking a wintry edge, and there was a sweet pungent fragrance on it. She saw in surprise that the soil here was dense and crumbly and spongy, much unlike the shallow rocky sparkling stuff around her home, and that in places it was an amazing bright red hue for miles and miles. The plants were different — fat-leaved, glistening — and the birds had unfamiliar plumage, and the towns that lined the highway were airy and open, farming villages nothing at all like dark ponderous gray Velathys, with audacious little wooden houses fancifully ornamented with scrollwork and painted in bright splashes of yellow and blue and scarlet. It was terribly unfamiliar, too, not to have the mountains on all sides, for Velathys nestled in the bosom of the Gonghars, but now she was in the wide depressed plateau that lay between the mountains and the far-off coastal strip, and when she looked to the west she could see so far that it was almost frightening, an unbounded vista dropping off into infinity. On her other side she had Velathys Scarp, the outer wall of the mountain chain, but even that was a strangeness, a single solid grim vertical barrier only occasionally divided into individual peaks, that ran endlessly north. But eventually the Scarp gave out, and the land changed profoundly once again as she continued northward into the upper end of the Dulorn Rift. Here the colossal sunken valley was rich in gypsum, and the low rolling hills were white as if with frost. The stone had an eerie texture, spiderweb stuff with a mysterious chilly sheen. In school she had learned that all of the city of Dulorn was built of this mineral, and they had shown pictures of it, spires and arches and crystalline facades blazing like cold fire in the light of day. That had seemed mere fable to her, like the tales of Old Earth from which her people were said to have sprung. But one day in late winter Inyanna found herself staring at the outskirts of the actual city of Dulorn and she saw that the fable had been no work of fancy. Dulorn was far more beautiful and strange than she had been able to imagine. It seemed to shine with an inner light of its own, while the sunlight, refracted and shattered and deflected by the myriad angles and facets of the lofty baroque buildings, fell in gleaming showers to the streets.

So this was a city! Beside it, Inyanna thought, Velathys was a bog. She would have stayed here a month, a year, forever, going up one street and down the next, staring at the towers and bridges, peering into the mysterious shops so radiant with costly merchandise, so much unlike her own pitiful little place. These hordes of snaky-faced people — this was a Ghayrog city, millions of the quasi-reptilian aliens and just a scattering of the other races — moving with such purposefulness, pursuing professions unknown to simple mountain-folk — the luminous posters advertising Dulorn's famous Perpetual Circus — the elegant restaurants and hotels and parks — all of it left Inyanna numb with awe. Surely there was nothing on Majipoor to compare with this place! Yet they said Ni-moya was far greater, and Stee on Castle Mount superior to them both, and then also the famous Piliplok, and the port of Alaisor, and — so much, so much!

But half a day was all she had in Dulorn, while the floater was discharging its passengers and being readied for the next leg of its route. That was like no time at all. A day later, as she journeyed eastward through the forests between Dulorn and Mazadone, she found herself not sure whether she had truly seen Dulorn or only dreamed that she had been there.

New wonders presented themselves daily — places where the air was purple, trees the size of hills, thickets of ferns that sang. Then came long stretches of dull indistinguishable cities, Cynthion, Mazadone, Thagobar, and many more. Aboard the floater passengers came and went, drivers were changed every nine hundred miles of so, and only Inyanna went on and on and on, country girl off seeing the world, getting glassy-eyed now and foggy-brained from the endlessly unrolling vista. There were geysers to be seen shortly, and hot lakes, and other thermal wonders: Khyntor, this was, the big city of the midlands, where she was to board the riverboat for Ni-moya. Here the River Zimr came down out of the northwest, a river as big as a sea, so that it strained the eyes to look from bank to bank. In Velathys, Inyanna had known only mountain streams, quick and narrow. They gave her no preparation for the huge curving monster of dark water that was the Zimr.

On the breast of that monster Inyanna now sailed for weeks, past Verf and Stroyn and Lagomandino and fifty other cities whose names were mere noises to her. The river-boat became the whole of her world. In the valley of the Zimr seasons were gentle and it was easy to lose track of the passing of time. It seemed to be springtime, though she knew it must be summer, and later summer at that, for she had been embarked on this journey more than half a year. Perhaps it would never end; perhaps it was her fate merely to drift from place to place, experiencing nothing, coming to ground nowhere. That was all right. She had begun to forget herself. Somewhere there was a shop that had been hers, somewhere there was a great estate that would be hers, somewhere there was a young woman named Inyanna Forlana who came from Velathys, but all that had dissolved into mere motion as she floated onward across unending Majipoor.

Then one day for the hundredth time some new city began to come in view along the Zimr's shores, and there was sudden stirring aboard the boat, a rushing to the rails to stare into the misty distance. Inyanna heard them muttering, "Ni-moya! Ni-moya!" and knew that her voyage had reached its end, that her wandering was over, that she was coming into her true home and birthright.

3

She was wise enough to know that to try to fathom Ni-moya on the first day made no more sense than trying to count the stars. It was a metropolis twenty times the size of Velathys, sprawling for hundreds of miles along both banks of the immense Zimr, and she sensed that one could spend a lifetime here and still need a map to find one's way around. Very well. She refused to let herself be awed or overwhelmed by the grotesque excessiveness of everything she saw about her here. She would conquer this city step by single step. In that calm decision was the beginning of her transformation into a true Ni-moyan.

Nevertheless there was still the first step to be taken. The riverboat had docked at what seemed to be the southern bank of the Zimr. Clutching her one small satchel, Inyanna stared out over a vast body of water — the Zimr here was swollen by its meeting with several major tributaries — and saw cities on every shore. Which one was Ni-moya? Where would the Pontifical offices be? How would she find her lands and mansion? Glowing signs directed her to ferries, but their destinations were places called Gimbeluc and Istmoy and Strelain and Strand Vista: suburbs, she guessed. There was no sign for a ferry to Ni-moya because all these places were Ni-moya.

"Are you lost?" a thin sharp voice said.

Inyanna turned and saw a girl who had been on the river-boat, two or three years younger than herself, with a smudged face and stringy hair bizarrely dyed lavender. Too proud or perhaps too shy to accept help from her — she was not sure which — Inyanna shook her head brusquely and glanced away, feeling her cheeks go hot and red.

The girl said, "There's a public directory back of the ticket windows," and vanished into the ferry-bound hordes.

Inyanna joined the line outside the directory, came at last to the communion booth, and poked her head into the yielding contact hood. "Directory," a voice said.

Inyanna replied smoothly, "Office of the Pontifex. Bureau of Probate."

"There is no listing for such a bureau."

Inyanna frowned. "Office of the Pontifex, then."

"853 Rodamaunt Promenade, Strelain."

Vaguely troubled, she bought a ferry ticket to Strelain: one crown twenty weights. That left her with exactly two royals, perhaps enough for a few weeks' expenses in this costly place. After that? I am the inheritor of Nissimorn Prospect, she told herself airily, and boarded the ferry. But she wondered why the Bureau of Probate's address was unlisted.

It was mid-afternoon. The ferry, with a blast of its horn, glided serenely out from its slip. Inyanna clung to the rail, peering in wonder at the city on the far shore, every building a radiant white tower, flat-roofed, rising in level upon level toward the ridge of gentle green hills to the north. A map was mounted on a post near the stairway to the lower decks. Strelain, she saw, was the central district of the city, just opposite the ferry depot, which was named Nissimorn. The men from the Pontifex had told her that her estate was on the northern shore; therefore, since it was called Nissimorn Prospect and must face Nissimorn, it should be in Strelain itself, perhaps somewhere in that forested stretch of the shore to the northeast. Gimbeluc was a western suburb, separated from Strelain by a many-bridged subsidiary river; Istmoy was to the east; up from the south came the River Steiche, nearly as great as the Zimr itself, and the towns along its bank were named—

"Your first time?" It was the lavender-haired girl again.

Inyanna smiled nervously. "Yes. I'm from Velathys. Country girl, I guess."

"You seem afraid of me."

"Am I? Do I?"

"I won't bite you. I won't even swindle you. My name's Liloyve. I'm a thief in the Grand Bazaar."

"Did you say thief?"

"It's a recognized profession in Ni-moya. They don't license us yet, but they don't interfere much with us, either, and we have our own official registry, like a regular guild. I've been down in Lagomandino, selling stolen goods for my uncle. Are you too good for me, or just very timid?"

"Neither," said Inyanna. "But I've come a long way alone, and I'm out of the habit of talking to people, I think." She forced another smile. "You're really a thief?"

"Yes. But not a pickpocket. You look so worried! What's your name, anyway?"

"Inyanna Forlana."

"I like the sound of that. I've never met an Inyanna before. You've traveled all the way from Velathys to Ni-moya? What for?"

"To claim my inheritance," Inyanna answered. "The property of my grandmother's sister's grandson. An estate known as Nissimorn Prospect, on the north shore of—"

Liloyve giggled. She tried to smother it, and her cheeks belled out, and she coughed and clapped a hand over her mouth in what was almost a convulsion of mirth. But it passed swiftly and her expression changed to a softer one of pity. Gently she said, "Then you must be of the family of the duke, and I should beg your pardon for approaching you so rudely here."

"The family of the duke? No, of course not. Why do you—"

"Nissimorn Prospect is the estate of Calain, who is the duke's younger brother."

Inyanna shook her head. "No. My grandmother's sister's—"

"Poor thing, no need to pick your pocket. Someone's done it already!"

Inyanna clutched at her satchel.

"No," Liloyve said. "I mean, you've been taken, if you think you've inherited Nissimorn Prospect."

"There were papers with the Pontifical seal. Two men of Nimoya brought them in person to Velathys. I may be a country girl, but I'm not so great a fool as to make this journey without proof. I had my suspicions, yes, but I saw the documents. I've filed for title! Twenty royals, it cost, but the papers were in order!"

Liloyve said, "Where will you stay, when we reach Strelain?"

"I've given that no thought. An inn, I suppose."

"Save your crowns. You'll need them. We'll put you up with us in the Bazaar. And in the morning you can take things up with the imperial proctors. Maybe they can help you recover some of what you've lost, eh?"

4

That she had been the victim of swindlers had been in Inyanna's mind from the start, like a low nagging buzz droning beneath lovely music, but she had chosen not to hear that buzz, and even now, with the buzz grown to a monstrous roar, she compelled herself to remain confident. This scruffy little bazaar-girl, this self-admitted professional thief, doubtless had the keenly honed mistrustfulness of one who lived by her wits in a hostile universe, and saw fraud and malevolence on all sides, possibly even where none existed. Inyanna was aware that she might have led herself through gullibility into a terrible error, but it was pointless to lament so soon. Perhaps she was somehow of the duke's family after all, or perhaps Liloyve was confused about the ownership of Nissimorn Prospect; or, if in fact she had come to Ni-moya on a fool's chase, consuming her last few crowns in the fruitless journey, at least now she was in Ni-moya rather than Velathys, and that in itself was cause for cheer.

As the ferry pulled into the Strelain slip Inyanna had her first view of central Ni-moya at close range. Towers of dazzling white came down almost to the water's edge, rising so steeply and suddenly that they seemed unstable, and it was hard to understand why they did not topple into the river. Night was beginning to fall. Lights glittered everywhere. Inyanna maintained the calmness of a sleepwalker in the face of the city's splendors. I have come home, she told herself over and over. I am home, this city is my home, I feel quite at home here. All the same she took care to stay close beside Liloyve as they made their way through swarming mobs of commuters, up the passageway to the street.

At the gate of the terminal stood three huge metallic birds with jeweled eyes — a gihorna with vast wings outspread, a great silly long-legged hazenmarl, and some third one that Inyanna did not know, with an enormous pouched beak curved like a sickle. The mechanical figures moved slowly, craning their heads, fluffing their wings. "Emblems of the city," Liloyve said. "You'll see them everywhere, the big silly boobies! A fortune in precious jewels in their eyes, too."

"And no one steals them?"

"I wish I had the nerve. I'd climb right up there and snatch them. But it's a thousand years' bad luck, so they say. The Metamorphs will rise again and cast us out, and the towers will fall, and a lot of other nonsense."

"But if you don't believe the legends, why don't you steal the gems?"

Liloyve laughed her snorting little laugh. "Who'd buy them? Any dealer would know what they were, and with a curse on them there'd be no takers, and a world of trouble for the thief, and the King of Dreams whining in your head until you wanted to scream. I'd rather have a pocketful of colored glass than the eyes of the birds of Ni-moya. Here, get in!" She opened the door of a small street-floater parked outside the terminal and shoved Inyanna to a seat. Settling in beside her, Liloyve briskly tapped out a code on the floater's pay-plate and the little vehicle took off. "We can thank your noble kinsman for this ride."

"What? Who?"

"Calain, the duke's brother. I used his pay-code. It was stolen last month and a lot of us are riding free, courtesy of Calain. Of course, when the bills come in his chancellor will get the number changed, but until then — you see?"

"I am very naive," said Inyanna. "I still believe that the Lady and King see our sins while we sleep, and send dreams to discourage such things."

"So you are meant to believe," Liloyve replied. "Kill someone and you'll hear from the King of Dreams, no question of it. But there are how many people on Majipoor? Eighteen billion? Thirty? Fifty? And the King has time to foul the dreams of everyone who steals a ride in a street-floater? Do you think so?"

"Well—"

"Or even those who falsely sell title to other people's palaces?"

Inyanna's cheeks flamed and she turned away.

"Where are we going now?" she asked in a muffled voice.

"We're already there. The Grand Bazaar. Out!"

Inyanna followed Liloyve into a broad plaza bordered on three sides by lofty towers and on the fourth by a low, squat-looking building fronted by a multitude of shallow-rising stone steps. Hundreds of people in elegant white Ni-moyan tunics, perhaps thousands, were rushing in and out of the building's wide mouth, over the arch of which the three emblematic birds were carved in high relief, with jewels again in their eyes.

Liloyve said, "This is Pidruid Gate, one of thirteen entrances. The Bazaar itself covers fifteen square miles, you know — a little like the Labyrinth, though it isn't as far underground, just at street level mainly, snaking all over the city, through the other buildings, under some of the streets, between buildings — a city within a city, you might say. My people have lived in it for hundreds of years. Hereditary thieves, we are. Without us the shopkeepers would be in bad trouble."

"I was a shopkeeper in Velathys. We have no thieves there, and I think we never felt the need for any," said Inyanna dryly as they allowed themselves to be swept along up the shallow steps and into the gate of the Grand Bazaar.

"It's different here," said Liloyve.

The Bazaar spread in every direction — a maze of narrow arcades and passages and tunnels and galleries, brightly lit, divided and subdivided into an infinity of tiny stalls. Overhead, a single continuous skein of yellow sparklecloth stretched into the distance, casting a brilliant glow from its own internal luminescence. That one sight astounded Inyanna more than anything else she had seen so far in Ni-moya, for she had sometimes carried sparklecloth in her shop, at three royals the roll, and such a roll was good for decorating no more than a small room; her soul quailed at the thought of fifteen square miles of sparklecloth, and her mind, canny as it was in such matters, could not at all calculate the cost. Ni-moya! Such excess could be met only with the defense of laughter.

They proceeded inward. One little streetlet seemed just like the next, every one bustling with shops for porcelains and fabrics and tableware and clothes, for fruits and meats and vegetables and delicacies, each with a wine-shop and a spice-shop and a gallery of precious stones, and a vendor selling grilled sausages and one selling fried fish, and the like. Yet Liloyve seemed to know precisely which fork and channel to take, which of the innumerable identical alleys led toward her destination, for she moved purposefully and swiftly, pausing only occasionally to acquire their dinner by deftly snatching a stick of fish from one counter or a goblet of wine from another. Several times the vendor saw her make the theft, and only smiled.

Mystified, Inyanna said, "They don't mind?"

"They know me. But I tell you, we thieves are highly regarded here. We are a necessity."

"I wish I understood that."

"We maintain order in the Bazaar, do you see? No one steals here but us, and we take only what we need, and we patrol the place against amateurs. How would it be, in these mobs, if one customer out of ten filled his purse with merchandise? But we move among them, filling our own purses, and also halting them. We are a known quantity. Do you see? Our own takings are a kind of tax on the merchants, a salary of sorts that they pay us, to regulate the others who throng the passages. Here, now!" Those last words were directed not to Inyanna but to a boy of about twelve, dark-haired and eel-slim, who had been rummaging through hunting knives in an open bin. With a swift swoop Liloyve caught the boy's hand and in the same motion seized hold of the writhing tentacles of a Vroon no taller than the boy, standing a few feet away in the shadows. Inyanna heard Liloyve speaking in low, fierce tones, but could not make out a single word; the encounter was over in moments, and the Vroon and the boy slunk miserably away.

"What happened then?" Inyanna asked.

"They were stealing knives, the boy passing them to the Vroon. I told them to get out of the Bazaar right away, or my brothers would cut the Vroon's wrigglers off and feed them to the boy roasted in stinnim-oil."

"Would such a thing be done?"

"Of course not. It would be worth a life of sour dreams to anyone who did it. But they got the point. Only authorized thieves steal in this place. You see? We are the proctors here, in a way of speaking. We are indispensable. And here — this is where I live. You are my guest."

5

Liloyve lived underground, in a room of whitewashed stone that was one of a chain of seven or eight such rooms beneath a section of the Grand Bazaar devoted to merchants of cheeses and oils. A trapdoor and a suspended ladder of rope led to the subterranean chambers; and the moment Inyanna began the downward climb, all the noise and frenzy of the Bazaar became impossible to perceive, and the only reminder of what lay above was the faint but unarguable odor of red Stoienzar cheese that penetrated even the stone walls.

"Our den," Liloyve said. She sang a quick lilting melody and people came trailing in from the far rooms — shabby, shifty people, mostly small and thin, with a look about them much the same as Liloyve's, as of having been manufactured from second-rate materials. "My brothers Sidoun and Hanoun," she said. "My sister Medill Faryun. My cousins Avayne, Amayne, and Athayne. And this is my uncle Agour-mole, who heads our clan. Uncle, this is Inyanna Forlana, from Velathys, who was sold Nissimorn Prospect for twenty royals by two traveling rogues. I met her on the riverboat. She'll live with us and become a thief."

Inyanna gasped. "I—"

Agourmole, courtly and elaborately formal, made a gesture of the Lady, by way of blessing. "You are one of us. Can you wear a man's clothing?"

Bewildered, Inyanna said, "Yes, I imagine so, but I don't under—"

"I have a younger brother who is registered with our guild. He lives in Avendroyne among the Shapeshifters, and has not been seen in Ni-moya for years. You will take his name and place. It is simpler that way than gaining a new registration. Give me your hand." She let him take it. His palms were moist and soft. He looked up into her eyes and said in a low intense tone, "Your true life is just commencing. All that has gone before has been only a dream. Now you are a thief in Ni-moya and your name is Kulibhai." Winking, he added, "Twenty royals is an excellent price for Nissimorn Prospect."

"Those were only the filing fees," said Inyanna. "They told me I had inherited it, through my mother's mother's sister."

"If it is true, you must hold a grand feast for us there, once you are in possession, to repay our hospitality. Agreed?" Agourmole laughed. "Avayne! Wine for your Uncle Kulibhai! Sidoun, Hanoun, find clothes for him! Music, someone! Who's for a dance? Show some life! Medill, prepare the guest bed!" The little man pranced about irrepressibly, barking orders. Inyanna, swept along by his vehement energies, accepted a cup of wine, allowed herself to be measured for a tunic by one of Liloyve's brothers, struggled to commit to memory the flood of names that had swept across her mind. Others now were coming into the room, more humans, three pudgy-cheeked gray-faced Hjorts, and, to Inyanna's amazement, a pair of slender silent Metamorphs. Accustomed though she was to dealing with Shapeshifters in her shopkeeping days, she had not expected to find Liloyve and her family actually sharing their quarters with these mysterious aborigines. But perhaps thieves, like Metamorphs, deemed themselves a race apart on Majipoor, and the two were drawn readily to one another.

An impromptu party buzzed about her for hours. The thieves seemed to be vying for her favor, each in turn cozying up to her, offering some little trinket, some intimate tale, some bit of confidential gossip. To the child of a long line of shopkeepers, thieves were natural enemies; and yet these people, seedy outcasts though they might be, seemed warm and friendly and open, and they were her only allies against a vast and indifferent city. Inyanna had no wish to take up their profession, but she knew that fortune might have done worse by her than to throw her in with Liloyve's folk.

She slept fitfully, dreaming vaporous fragmentary dreams and several times waking in total confusion, with no idea where she was. Eventually exhaustion seized her and she dropped into deep slumber. Usually it was dawn that woke her, but dawn was a stranger in this cave of a place, and when she awakened it might have been any time of day or night.

Liloyve smiled at her. "You must have been terribly tired."

"Did I sleep too long?"

"You slept until you were finished sleeping. That must have been the right amount, eh?"

Inyanna looked around. She saw traces of the party — flasks, empty globelets, stray items of clothing — but the others were gone. Off on their morning rounds, Liloyve explained. She snowed Inyanna where to wash and dress, and then they went up into the maelstrom of the Bazaar. By day it was as busy as it had been the night before, but somehow it looked less magical in ordinary light, its texture less dense, its atmosphere less charged with electricity: it was no more than a vast crowded emporium, where last night it had seemed to Inyanna an enigmatic self-contained universe. They paused only to steal their breakfasts at three or four counters, Liloyve brazenly helping herself and passing the take to an abashed and hesitant Inyanna, and then — making their way through the impossible intricacy of the maze, which Inynana was sure she would never master — they emerged abruptly into the clear fresh air of the surface world.

"We have come out at Piliplok Gate," said Liloyve. "From here it's only a short walk to the Pontificate."

A short walk but a stunning one, for around every corner lay new wonders. Up one splendid boulevard Inyanna caught sight of a brilliant stream of radiance, like a second sun sprouting from the pavement. This, said Liloyve, was the beginning of the Crystal Boulevard, that blazed by day and by night with the glint of revolving reflectors. Across another street and she had a view of what could only be the palace of the Duke of Ni-moya. far to the east down the great slope of the city, at the place where the Zimr made its sudden bend. It was a slender shaft of glassy stone atop a broad many-columned base, huge even at this enormous distance, and surrounded by a park that was like a carpet of green. One more turn and Inyanna beheld something that resembled the loosely woven chrysalis of some fabulous insect, but a mile in length, hanging suspended above an immensely wide avenue. "The Gossamer Galleria," said Liloyve, "where the rich ones buy their playthings. Perhaps some day you'll scatter your royals in its shops. But not today. Here we are: Rodamaunt Promenade. We'll see soon enough about your inheritance."

The street was a grand curving one lined on one side by flat-faced towers all the same height, and on the other by an alternation of great buildings and short ones. These, apparently, were government offices. Inyanna was daunted by the complexity of it all, and might have wandered outside in confusion for hours, not daring to enter; but Liloyve penetrated the mysteries of the place with a series of quick inquiries and led Inyanna within, through the corridors and windings of a maze hardly less intricate than the Grand Bazaar itself, until at length they found themselves sitting on a wooden bench in a large and brightly lit waiting room, watching names flick on and off on a bulletin board overhead. In half an hour Inyanna's appeared on the board.

"Is this the Bureau of Probate?" she asked, as they went in.

"Apparently there's no such thing," said Liloyve. 'These are the proctors. If anyone can help you, they can."

A dour-faced Hjort, bloated and goggle-eyed like most of his kind, asked for her problem, and Inyanna, hesitant at first, then voluble, poured out the story: the strangers from Ni-moya, the astounding tale of the grand inheritance, the documents, the Pontifical seal, the twenty royals in filing fees. The Hjort, as the story unfolded, slumped behind his desk, kneaded his jowls, disconcertingly swiveled his great globular eyes one at a time. When she was done he took her receipt from her, ran his thick fingers thoughtfully over the ridges of the imperial seal it bore, and said gloomily, "You are the nineteenth claimant to Nissimorn Prospect who has presented herself in Ni-moya this year. There will be more, I am afraid. There will be many more."

"Nineteenth?"

"To my knowledge. Others may not have bothered to report the fraud to the proctors."

"The fraud," Inyanna repeated. "Is that it? The documents they showed me, the genealogy, the papers with my name on it — they traveled all the way from Ni-moya to Velathys simply to swindle me of twenty royals?"

"Oh, not simply to swindle you," said the Hjort. "Probably there are three or four heirs to Nissimorn Prospect in Velathys, and five in Narabal, and seven in Til-omon, and a dozen in Pidruid — it's not hard to get genealogies, you know. And forge the documents, and fill in the blanks. Twenty royals from this one, thirty perhaps from that, a nice livelihood if you keep moving, you see?"

"But how is this possible? Such things are against the law!"

"Yes," the Hjort agreed wearily.

"And the King of Dreams—"

"Will punish them severely, you may be sure of it. Nor will we fail to apply civil penalties once we apprehend them. You will give us great assistance by describing them to us."

"And my twenty royals?"

The Hjort shrugged.

Inyanna said, "There's no hope that I can recover a thing?"

"None."

"But I've lost eyerything, then!"

"On behalf of his majesty I offer my most sincere regrets," said the Hjort, and that was that.

Outside, Inyanna said sharply to Liloyve, "Take me to Nissimorn Prospect!"

"But surely you don't believe—"

"That it is really mine? No, of course not. But I want to see it! I want to know what sort of place it was that was sold to me for my twenty royals!"

"Why torment yourself?"

"Please," Inyanna said.

"Come, then," said Liloyve.

She hailed a floater and gave it its instructions. Wide-eyed, Inyanna stared in wonder as the little vehicle bore them through the noble avenues of Ni-moya. In the warmth of the midday sun everything seemed bathed with light, and the city glowed, not with the frosty light of crystalline Dulorn but with a pulsing, throbbing, sensuous splendor that reverberated from every whitewashed wall and street. Liloyve described the most significant of the places they were passing. "This is the Museum of Worlds," she said, indicating a great structure crowned by a tiara of angular glass domes. "Treasures of a thousand planets, even some things of Old Earth. And this is the Chamber of Sorcery, also a museum of sorts, given over to magic and dreaming. I have never been in it. And there — see the three birds of the city out front? — is the City Palace, where the mayor lives." They turned downhill, toward the river. "The floating restaurants are in this part of the harbor," she said, with a grand wave of her hand. "Nine of them, like little islands. They say you can have dishes from every province of Majipoor there. Someday we'll eat at them, all nine, eh?"

Inyanna smiled sadly. "It would be nice to think so."

"Don't worry. We have all our lives before us, and a thief's life is a comfortable one. I mean to roam every street of Ni-moya in my time, and you can come with me. There's a Park of Fabulous Beasts out in Gimbeluc, off in the hills, you know, with creatures that are extinct in the wilds everywhere, sigimoins and ghalvars and dimilions and everything, and there's the Opera House, where the municipal orchestra plays — you know about our orchestra? A thousand instruments, nothing like it in the universe — and then there's — oh. Here we are!"

They dismounted from the floater. Inyanna saw that they were nearly at the river's edge. Before her lay the Zimr, the great river so wide at this point that she could barely see across it, and only dimly could she make out the green line of Nissimorn on the horizon. Just to her left was a palisade of metal spikes twice the height of a man, set eight or ten feet apart and linked by a gauzy, almost invisible webbing that gave off a deep and sinister humming sound. Within that fence was a garden of striking beauty, low elegant shrubs abloom with gold and turquoise and scarlet blossoms, and a lawn so closely cropped it might well have been sprayed against the ground. Farther beyond, the land began to rise, and the house itself sat upon a rocky prominence overlooking the harbor: a mansion of wonderful size, white-walled in the Ni-moya manner, which made much use of the techniques of suspension and lightness typical of Ni-moyan architecture, with porticoes that seemed to float and balconies cantilevered out for wondrous distances. Short of the Ducal Palace itself — visible not far down the shore, rising magnificently on its pedestal — Nissimorn Prospect seemed to Inyanna to be the most beautiful single building she had seen in all of Ni-moya thus far. And it was this that she thought she had inherited! She began to laugh. She sprinted along the palisade, pausing now and again to contemplate the great house from various angles, and laughter poured from her as though someone had told her the deepest truth of the universe, the truth that holds the secrets of all other truths and so must necessarily evoke a torrent of laughter. Liloyve followed her, calling out for her to wait, but Inyanna ran as one possessed. Finally she came to the front gate, where two mammoth Skandars in immaculate white livery stood guard, all their arms folded in an emphatic possessive way. Inyanna continued to laugh; the Skandars scowled; Liloyve, coming up behind, plucked at Inyanna's sleeve and urged her to leave before there was trouble.

"Wait," she said, gasping. She went up to the Skandars. "Are you servants of Calain of Ni-rnoya?"

They looked at her without seeing her, and said nothing.

"Tell your master," she went on, undisturbed, "that Inyanna of Velathys was here, to see the house, and sends her regrets that she could not come to dine. Thank you."

"Come!" Liloyve whispered urgently.

Anger was beginning to replace indifference on the hairy faces of the huge guards. Inyanna saluted them graciously, and broke into laughter again, and gestured to Liloyve; and together they ran back to the floater, Liloyve too finally joining in the uncontrollable mirth.

6

It was a long time before Inyanna saw the sunlight of Ni-moya again, for now she took up her new life as a thief in the depths of the Grand Bazaar. At first she had no intent of adopting the profession of Liloyve and her family. But practical considerations soon overruled her niceties of morality. She had no way of returning to Velathys, nor, after these first few glimpses of Ni-moya, had she any real wish to do so. Nothing waited for her there except a life of peddling glue and nails and false satin and lanterns from Til-omon. To stay in Ni-moya, though, required a livelihood. She knew no trade except shopkeeping, and without capital she could hardly open a shop here. Quite soon all her money would be exhausted; she would not live off the charity of her new friends; she had no other prospects; they were offering her a niche in their society; and somehow it seemed acceptable to take up a life of thieving, alien though that was to her former nature, now that she had been robbed of all her savings by the fast-talking swindlers. So she let herself be garbed in a man's tunic — she was tall enough, and a little awkward of bearing, enough to carry the deception off plausibly — and under the name of Kulibhai, brother to the master thief Agourmole, entered the guild of thieves.

Liloyve was her mentor. For three days Inyanna followed her through the Bazaar, watching closely as the lavender-haired girl skimmed merchandise here and there. Some of it was done as crudely as donning a cloak in a shop and vanishing suddenly into the crowds; some involved quick sleight-of-hand in the bins and counters; and some required elaborate deceptions, bamboozling some delivery boy with a promise of kisses or better, while an accomplice made off with his barrow of goods. At the same time there was the obligation to prevent freelance theft. Twice in the three days, Inyanna saw Liloyve do that — the hand on the wrist, the cold angry glare, the sharp whispered words, resulting both times in the look of fear, the apologies, the hasty withdrawal. Inyanna wondered if she would ever have the courage to do that. It seemed harder than thieving itself; and she was not at all sure she could bring herself to steal, either.

On the fourth day Liloyve said, "Bring me a flask of dragon-milk and two of the golden wine of Piliplok."

Inyanna said, appalled, "But they must sell for a royal apiece!"

"Indeed."

"Let me begin by stealing sausages."

"It's no harder to steal rare wines," said Liloyve. "And considerably more profitable."

"I am not ready."

"You only think you aren't. You've seen how it's done. You can do it yourself. Your fears are needless. You have the soul of a thief, Inyanna."

Furiously Inyanna said. "How can you say such a—"

"Softly, softly, I meant it as a compliment!"

Inyanna nodded. "Even so. I think you are wrong."

"I think you underestimate yourself," said Lilowe. "There are aspects of your character more apparent to others than to yourself. I saw them displayed the day we visited Nissimorn Prospect. Go, now: steal me a flask of Piliplok golden, and one of dragon-milk, and no more chatter. If you are ever to be a thief of our guild, today is your beginning."

There was no avoiding it. But there was no reason to risk doing it alone. Inyanna asked Liloyve's cousin Athayne to accompany her, and together they went swaggering down to a wine-shop in Ossier Lane — two youngs bucks of Ni-moya off to buy themselves some jollity. A strange calmness came over Inyanna. She allowed herself to think of no irrelevancies, such as morality, property rights, or the fear of punishment; there was only the task at hand to consider, a routine job of thievery. Once her profession had been shopkeeping, and now it was shoplooting, and it was useless to complicate the situation with philosophical hesitations.

A Ghayrog was behind the wine-shop counter: icy eyes that never blinked, glossy scaly skin, writhing fleshy hair. Inyanna, making her voice as deep as she could, inquired after the price of dragon-milk in globelet, flask, and duple. Meanwhile Athayne busied himself among the cheap red mid-country wines. The Ghayrog quoted prices. Inyanna expressed shock. The Ghayrog shrugged. Inyanna held a flask aloft, studied the pale blue fluid, scowled, and said, "It is murkier than the usual quality."

"It varies from year to year. And from dragon to dragon."

"One would think these things would be made standard."

"The effect is standard," said the Ghayrog, with the chilly reptilian Ghayrog equivalent of a leer and a smirk. "A few sips of that, my fellow, and you'll be good for the whole night!"

"Let me think about it a moment," said Inyanna. "A royal's no little sum, no matter how wonderful the effects."

It was the signal to Athayne, who turned and said, "This Mazadone stuff, is it really three crown the duple? I'm certain that last week it sold for two."

"If you can find it at two, buy it at two," the Ghayrog answered.

Athayne scowled, moved as if to put the bottle back on the shelf, lurched and stumbled, and knocked half a row of globelets over. The Ghayrog hissed in anger. Athayne, bellowing his regrets, clumsily tried to set things to rights, knocking still more bottles down. The Ghayrog scurried to the display, yelling. He and Athayne bumbled into one another in their attempts to restore order, and in that moment Inyanna popped the flask of dragon-milk into her tunic, tucked one of Piliplok golden beside it, and, saying loudly, "I'll check the prices elsewhere, I think," walked out of the shop. That was all there was to it. She forced herself not to break into a run, although her cheeks were blazing and she was certain that the passersby all knew her for a thief, and that the other shopkeepers in the row would come storming out to seize her, and that the Ghayrog himself would be after her in a moment. But without difficulty she made her way to the corner, turned to her left, saw the street of facepaints and perfumes, went the length of it, and entered the place of oils and cheeses where Liloyve was waiting.

"Take these," Inyanna said. "They burn holes in my breast."

"Well done," Liloyve told her. "We'll drink the golden tonight, in your honor!"

"And the dragon-milk?"

"Keep it," said Liloyve. "Share it with Calain, the night you are invited to dine at Nissimorn Prospect."

That night Inyanna lay awake for hours, afraid to sleep, for sleep brought dreams and in dreams came punishments. The wine was gone, but the dragon-milk flask lay beneath her pillow, and she felt the urge to slip off in the night and return it to the Ghayrog. Centuries of shopkeeper ancestors weighed against her soul. A thief, she thought, a thief, a thief, I have become a thief in Ni-moya. By what right did I take those things? By what right, she answered herself, did those two steal my twenty royals? But what had that to do with the Ghayrog? If they steal from me, and I use that as license to steal from him, and he goes to another's goods, where does it end, how does society survive? The Lady forgive me, she thought. The King of Dreams will whip my spirit. But at last she slept; she could not keep from sleeping forever; and the dreams that came to her were dreams of wonder and majesty, and she glided disembodied through the grand avenues of the city, past the Crystal Boulevard, the Museum of Worlds, the Gossamer Galleria, to Nissimorn Prospect, where the duke's brother took her hand. The dream bewildered her, for she could not in any way see it as a dream of punishment. Where was morality? Where was proper conduct? This went counter to all she believed. Yet it was as though destiny had intended her to be a thief. Everything that had happened to her in the past year had aimed her toward that. So perhaps it was the will of the Divine that she become what she had become. Inyanna smiled at that. What cynicism! But so be it. She would not fight destiny.

7

She stole often and she stole well. That first tentative terrifying venture into thievery was followed by many more over the days that followed. She roved freely through the Grand Bazaar, sometimes with accomplices, sometimes alone, helping herself to this and that and this and that. It was so easy that it came to seem almost not like crime. The Bazaar was always crowded: Ni-moya's population, they said, was close to thirty million, and it seemed that all of them were in the Bazaar all the time. There was a constant crushing flow of people. The merchants were harried and careless, bedeviled always by questions, disputes, bargainers, inspectors. There was little challenge in moving through the river of beings, taking as she pleased.

Most of the booty was sold. A professional thief might keep the occasional item for her own use, and meals were always taken on the job, but nearly everything was stolen with an eye toward immediate resale. That was mainly the responsibility of the Hjorts who lived with Agourmole's family. There were three of them, Beyork, Hankh, and Mozinhunt, and they were part of a wide-ranging network of disposers of stolen goods, a chain of Hjorts that passed merchandise briskly out of the Bazaar and into wholesale channels that often eventually resold it to the merchants from whom it had been taken. Inyanna learned quickly what things were in demand by these people and what were not to be bothered with.

Because Inyanna was new to Ni-moya she had a particularly easy time of it. Not all the merchants of the Grand Bazaar were complacent about the guild of thieves, and some knew Liloyve and Athayne and Sidoun and the others of the family by sight, ordering them out of their shops the moment they appeared. But the young man who called himself Kulibhai was unknown in the Bazaar, and so long as Inyanna picked over a different section of the all but infinite place every day, it would be many years before her victims became familiar with her.

The dangers in her work came not so much from the shopkeepers, though, as from thieves of other families. They did not know her either, and their eyes were quicker than the merchants' — so that three times in her first ten days Inyanna was apprehended by some other thief. It was terrifying at first to feel a hand closing on her wrist; but she remained cool, and, confronting the other without panic, she said simply, "You are infringing. I am Kulibhai, brother to Agourmole." Word spread swiftly. After the third such event, she was not troubled again.

To make such arrests herself was troublesome. At first she had no way of telling the legitimate thieves from the improper ones, and she hesitated to seize the wrist of some who, for all she knew, had been pilfering in the Bazaar since Lord Kinniken's time. It became surprisingly easy for her to detect thievery in progress, but if she had no other thief of Agourmole's clan with her to consult, she took no action. Gradually she came to recognize many of the licensed thieves of other families, but yet nearly every day she saw some unfamiliar figure rummaging through a merchant's goods, and finally, after some weeks in the Bazaar, she felt moved to act. If she found herself apprehending a true thief, she could always beg pardon; but the essence of the system was that she not only stole but also policed, and she knew she was failing in that duty. Her first arrest was that a grimy girl taking vegetables; there was hardly time to say a word, for the girl dropped her take and fled in terror. The next one turned out to be a veteran thief distantly related to Agourmole, who amiably explained Inyanna's mistake; and the third, unauthorized but also frightened, responded to Inyanna's words with spitting curses and muttered threats, to which Inyanna replied calmly and untruthfully that seven other thieves of the guild were observing them and would take immediate action in the event of trouble. After that she felt no qualms, and acted freely and confidently whenever she believed it was appropriate.

Nor did the thieving itself trouble her conscience, after the beginning. She had been reared to expect the vengeance of the King of Dreams if she wandered into sin — nightmares, torments, a fever of the soul whenever she closed her eyes — but either the King did not regard this sort of pilferage and purloinment as sin, or else he and his minions were so busy with even greater criminals that they had no time to get around to her. Whatever the reason, the King sent her no sendings. Occasionally she dreamed of him, fierce old ogre beaming bad news out of the burning wastelands of Suvrael, but that was nothing unusual; the King entered everybody's dreams from time to time, and it meant very little. Sometimes, too, Inyanna dreamed of the blessed Lady of the Isle, the gentle mother of the Coronal Lord Malibor, and it seemed to her that that sweet woman was shaking her head sadly, as though to say she was woefully disappointed in her child Inyanna. But it was within the powers of the Lady to speak more strongly to those who had strayed from her path, and that she did not seem to be doing. In the absence of moral correction Inyanna quickly came to have a casual view of her profession. It was not crime; it was merely redistribution of goods. No one seemed to be greatly injured by it, after all.

In time she took as her lover Sidoun, the older brother of Liloyve. He was shorter than Inyanna, and so bony that it was a sharp business to embrace him; but he was a gentle and thoughtful man, who played prettily on the pocket-harp and sang old ballads in a clear light tenor, and the more often she went out thieving with him the more agreeable she found his company. Some rearrangements of the sleeping-quarters in Agourmole's den were made, and they were able to spend their nights together. Lilovye and the other thieves seemed to find this development charming.

In Sidoun's company she roved farther and farther through the great city. So efficient were they as a team that often they had their day's quota of larceny done in an hour or two, and that left them free for the rest of the day, for it would not do to exceed one's quota: the social contract of the Grand Bazaar allowed the thieves to take only so much, and no more, with impunity. So it was that Inyanna began to make excursions to the delightful outer reaches of Ni-moya. One of her favorite places was the Park of Fabulous Beasts in the hilly suburb of Gimbeluc, where she could roam among animals of other eras, that had been crowded out of their domains by the spread of civilization on Majipoor. Here she saw such rarities as the wobbly-legged dimilions, fragile long-necked leaf-chompers twice as high as a Skandar, and the dainty tiptoeing sigimoins with a thickly furred tail at either end, and the awkward big-beaked zampidoon birds that once had darkened the sky over Ni-moya with their great flocks, and now existed only in the park and as one of the city's official emblems. Through some magic that must have been devised in ancient times, voices came from the ground whenever one of these creatures sauntered by, telling onlookers its name and original habitat. Then too the park had lovely secluded glades, where Inyanna and Sidoun could walk hand in hand, saying little, for Sidoun was not a man of many words.

Some days they went on boat-rides out into the Zimr and over to the Nissimorn side, and occasionally down the gullet of the nearby River Steiche, which, if followed long enough, would bring them to the forbidden Shapeshifter territory. But that was many weeks' journey upriver, and they traveled only as far as the little Liiman fishing villages a short way south of Nissimorn, where they bought fresh-caught fish and held picnic on the beach and swam and lay in the sun. Or on moonless evenings they went to the Crystal Boulevard, where the revolving reflectors cast dazzling patterns of ever-changing light, and peered in awe at the exhibit cases maintained by the great companies of Majipoor, a streetside museum of costly goods, so magnificent and so opulently displayed that not even the boldest of thieves would dare to attempt an entry. And often they dined at one of the floating restaurants, frequently taking Liloyve with them, for she loved those places above all else in the city. Each island was a miniature of some far territory of the planet, its characteristic plants and animals thriving there, and its special foods and wines a feature: one of windy Piliplok, where those who had the price dined on sea-dragon meat, and one of humid Narabal with its rich berries and succulent ferns, and one of great Stee on Castle Mount, and a restaurant of Stoien and one of Pidruid and one of Til-omon — but none of Velathys, Inyanna learned without surprise, nor was the Shapeshifter capital of Ilirivoyne favored with an island, nor harsh sun-blasted Tolaghai on Suvrael, for Tolaghai and Ilirivoyne were places that most folk of Majipoor did not care to think about, and Velathys was simply beneath notice.

Of all the places that Inyanna visited with Sidoun on these leisurely afternoons and evenings, though, her favorite was the Gossamer Galleria. That mile-long arcade, hanging high above street level, contained the finest shops of Ni-moya, which is to say the finest in all the continent of Zimroel, the finest outside the rich cities of Castle Mount. When they went there, Inyanna and Sidoun put on their most elegant clothes, that they had stolen from the best stalls in the Grand Bazaar — nothing at all to compare with what the aristocrats wore, but superior by far to their daily garb. Inyanna enjoyed getting out of the male costumes that she wore in her role as Kulibhai the thief, and dressing in slinky and clinging robes of purples and greens, and letting her long red hair tumble free. With her fingertips lightly touching Sidoun's, she made the grand promenade of the Galleria, indulging in pleasant fantasies as they inspected the eye-jewels and feather-masks and polished amulets and metal trinkets that were available, for a double handful of shining royal-pieces, to the truly wealthy. None of these things would ever be hers, she knew, for a thief who thieved well enough to afford such luxuries would be a danger to the stability of the Grand Bazaar; but it was joyous enough merely to see the treasures of the Gossamer Galleria, and to pretend.

It was on one of these outings to the Gossamer Galleria that Inyanna strayed into the orbit of Calain, brother to the duke.

8

She had no notion that that was what she was doing, of course. All she thought she was doing was conducting a little innocent flirtation, as part of the adventure into fantasy that a visit to the Galleria ought to be. It was a mild night in late summer and she was wearing one of her lightest gowns, a sheer fabric less substantial even than the webbing of which the Galleria was woven; and she and Sidoun were in the shop of dragon-bone carvings, examining the extraordinary thumbnail-sized masterpieces of a Skandar boat-captain who produced intricacies of interwoven slivers of ivory of the highest implausibility, when four men in the robes of nobility came in. Sidoun at once faded into a dark corner, for he knew that his clothing and his bearing and the cut of his hair marked him as no equal to these; but Inyanna, conscious that the lines of her body and the cool gaze of her green eyes could compensate for all sorts of deficiencies of manner, boldly held her place at the counter. One of the men glanced at the carving in her hand and said, "If you buy that, you'll be doing well for yourself."

"I have not made up my mind," Inyanna replied.

"May I see it?"

She dropped it lightly into his palm, and at the same time let her eyes make contact brazenly with his. He smiled, but gave his attention mainly to the ivory piece, a map-globe of Majipoor fashioned from many sliding panels of bone. After a moment he said to the proprietor, "The price?"

"It is a gift," answered the other, a slender and austere Ghayrog.

"Indeed. And also from me to you," said the nobleman, spilling the bauble back into the hand of the amazed Inyanna. Now his smile was more intimate. "You are of this city?" he asked quietly.

"I live in Strelain," she said.

"Do you dine often at the Narabal Island?"

"When the mood takes me."

"Good. Will you be there at sunset tomorrow? There will be someone there eager to make your acquaintance."

Hiding her bewilderment, Inyanna bowed. The nobleman bowed and turned away; he purchased three of the little carvings, dropping a purse of coins on the counter; then they departed. Inyanna stared in astonishment at the precious thing in her hand. Sidoun, emerging from the shadows, whispered, "It's worth a dozen royals! Sell it back to the keeper!"

"No," she said. To the proprietor she said, "Who was that man?"

"You are unfamiliar with him?"

"I would not have asked you his name if I knew it."

"Yes. Yes." The Ghayrog made little hissing sounds. "He is Durand Livolk, the duke's chamberlain."

"And the other three?"

"Two are in the duke's service, and the third is a companion to the duke's brother Calain."

"Ah," said Inyanna. She held forth the ivory globe. "Can you mount this on a chain?"

"It will take only a moment."

"And the price for a chain worthy of the object?"

The Ghayrog gave her a long calculating look. "The chain is only accessory to the carving; and since the carving was a gift, so too with the chain." He fitted delicate golden links to the ivory ball, and packed the trinket in a box of shining stickskin.

"At least twenty royals, with the chain!" Sidoun muttered, amazed, when they were outside. "Take it across to that shop and sell it, Inyanna!"

"It was a gift," she said coolly. "I will wear it tomorrow night, when I dine at the Narabal Island."

She could not go to dinner in the gown she had worn that evening, though; and finding another just as sheer and costly in the shops of the Grand Bazaar required two hours of diligent work the next day. But in the end she came upon one that was the next thing to nakedness, yet cloaked everything in mystery: and that was what she wore to the Narabal Island, with the ivory carving dangling between her breasts.

At the restaurant there was no need to give her name. As she stepped off the ferry she was met by a somber and dignified Vroon in ducal livery, who conducted her through the lush groves of vines and ferns to a shadowy bower, secluded and fragrant, in a part of the island cut off by dense plantings from the main restaurant area. Here three people awaited her at a gleaming table of polished nightflower wood beneath a vine whose thick hairy stems were weighed down by enormous globular blue flowers. One was Durand Livolk, who had given her the ivory carving. One was a woman, slender and dark-haired, as sleek and glossy as the tabletop itself. And the third was a man of about twice Inyanna's age, delicately built, with thin close-pursed lips and soft features. All three were dressed with such magnificence that Inyanna cringed at her own fancied shabbiness. Durand Livolk rose smoothly, went to Inyanna's side, and murmured, "You look even more lovely this evening. Come: meet some friends. This is my companion, the lady Tisiorne. And this—"

The frail-looking man got to his feet. "I am Calain of Ni-moya," he said simply, in a gentle and feathery voice.

Inyanna felt confused, but only for a moment. She had thought the duke's chamberlain had wanted her himself; now she understood that Durand Livolk had merely been procuring her for the duke's brother. That knowledge sparked an instant's indignation in her, but it died quickly away. Why take offense? How many young women of Ni-moya had the chance to dine on the Narabal Island with the brother of the duke? If to another it might seem that she was being used, so be it; she meant to do a little using herself, in this interchange.

A place was ready for her beside Calain. She took it and the Vroon instantly brought a tray of liqueurs, all unfamiliar ones, of colors that blended and swirled and phosphoresced. She chose one at random: it had the flavor of mountain mists, and caused an immediate tingling in her cheeks and ears. From overhead came the patter of light rainfall, landing on the broad glossy leaves of the trees and vines, but not on the diners. The rich tropical plantings of this island, Inyanna knew, were maintained by frequent artificial rainfall that duplicated the climate of Narabal.

Calain said, "Do you have favorite dishes here?"

"I would prefer that you order for me."

"If you wish. Your accent is not of Ni-moya."

"Velathys," she replied. "I came here only last year."

"A wise move," said Durand Livolk. "What prompted it?"

Inyanna laughed. "I think I will tell that story another time, if I may."

"Your accent is charming," said Calain. "We rarely meet Velathyntu folk here. Is it a beautiful city?"

"Hardly, my lord."

"Nestling in the Gonghars, though — surely it must be beautiful to see those great mountains all around you."

"That may be. One comes to take such things for granted when one spends all one's life among them. Perhaps even Ni-moya would begin to seem ordinary to one who had grown up here."

"Where do you live?" asked the woman Tisiorne.

"In Strelain," said Inyanna. And then, mischievously, for she had had another of the liqueurs and was feeling it, she added, "In the Grand Bazaar."

"In the Grand Bazaar?" said Durand Livolk.

"Yes. Beneath the street of the cheesemongers."

Tisiorne said, "And for what reason do you make your home there?"

"Oh," Inyanna answered lightly, "to be close to the place of my employment."

"In the street of the cheesemongers?" said Tisiorne, horror creeping into her tone.

"You misunderstand. I am employed in the Bazaar, but not by the merchants. I am a thief."

The word fell from her lips like a lightning-bolt crashing on the mountaintops. Inyanna saw the sudden startled look pass from Calain to Durand Livolk, and the color rising in Durand Livolk's face. But these people were aristocrats, and they had aristocratic poise. Calain was the first to recover from his amazement. Smiling coolly, he said, "A profession that calls for grace and deftness and quick-wittedness, I have always believed." He touched his glass to Inyanna's. "I salute you, thief who says she's a thief. There's an honesty in that which many others lack."

The Vroon returned, bearing a vast porcelain bowl filled with pale blue berries, waxen-looking, with white highlights. They were thokkas, Inyanna knew — the favorite fruit of Narabal, said to make the blood run hot and the passions to rise. She scooped a few from the bowl; Tisiorne carefully chose a single one; Durand Livolk took a handful, and Calain more than that. Inyanna noticed that the duke's brother ate the berries seeds and all, said to be the most effective way. Tisiorne discarded the seeds of hers, which brought a wry grin from Durand Livolk. Inyanna did not follow Tisiorne's fashion.

Then there were wines, and morsels of spiced fish, and oysters floating in their own fluids, and a plate of intricate little fungi of soft pastel hues, and eventually a haunch of aromatic meat — the leg of the giant bilantoon of the forests just east of Narabal, said Calain. Inyanna ate sparingly, a nip of this, a bit of that. It seemed the proper thing to do, and also the most sensible. Some Skandar jugglers came by after a while, and did wondrous things with torches and knives and hatchets, drawing hearty applause from the four diners. Calain tossed the rough four-armed fellows a gleaming coin — a five-royal piece, Inyanna saw, astounded. Later it rained again, though not on them, and still later, after another round of liqueurs, Durand Livolk and Tisiorne gracefully excused themselves and left Calain and Inyanna sitting alone in the misty darkness.

Calain said, "Are you truly a thief?"

"Truly. But it was not my original plan. I owned a shop of general wares in Velathys."

"And then?"

"I lost it through a swindle," she said. "And came penniless to Ni-moya, and needed a profession, and fell in with thieves, who seemed thoughtful and sympathetic people."

"And now you have fallen in with much greater thieves," said Calain. "Does that trouble you?"

"Do you regard yourself, then, as a thief?"

"I hold high rank through luck of birth alone. I do not work, except to assist my brother when he needs me. I live in splendor beyond most people's imaginings. None of this is deserved. Have you seen my home?"

"I know it quite well. From the outside, of course, only."

"Would you care to see the interior of it tonight?"

Inyanna thought briefly of Sidoun, waiting in the whitewashed stone room below the street of the cheesemongers.

"Very much," she said. "And when I've seen it, I'll tell you a little story about myself and Nissimorn Prospect and how it happened that I first came to Ni-moya."

"It will be most amusing, I'm sure. Shall we go?"

"Yes," Inyanna said. "But would it cause difficulties if I stopped first at the Grand Bazaar?"

"We have all night," said Calain. "There is no hurry."

The liveried Vroon appeared, and lit the way for them through the jungled gardens to the island's dock, where a private ferry waited. It conveyed them to the mainland; a floater had been summoned meanwhile, and shortly Inyanna arrived at the plaza of Pidruid Gate. "I'll be only a moment," Inyanna whispered, and, wraithlike in her fragile and clinging gown, she drifted swiftly through the crowds that even at this hour still thronged the Bazaar. Down into the underground den she went. The thieves were gathered around a table, playing some game with glass counters and ebony dice. They cheered and applauded as she made her splendid entrance, but she responded only with a quick tense smile, and drew Sidoun aside. In a low voice she said, "I am going out again, and I will not be back this night. Will you forgive me?"

"It's not every woman who catches the fancy of the duke's chamberlain."

"Not the duke's chamberlain," she said. "The duke's brother." She brushed her lips lightly against Sidoun's. He was glassy-eyed with surprise at her words. "Tomorrow let's go to the Park of Fabulous Beasts, yes, Sidoun?" She kissed him again and moved on, to her bedroom, and drew the flask of dragon-milk out from under her pillow, where it had been hidden for months. In the central room she paused at the gaming-table, leaned close beside Liloyve, and opened her hand, showing her the flask. Liloyve's eyes widened. Inyanna winked and said, "Do you remember what I was saving this for? You said, to share it with Calain when I went to Nissimorn Prospect. And so—"

Liloyve gasped. Inyanna winked and kissed her and went out.

Much later that night, as she drew forth the flask and offered it to the duke's brother, she wondered in sudden panic whether it might be a vast breach of etiquette to be offering him an aphrodisiac this way, perhaps implying that its use might be advisable. But Calain showed no offense. He was, or else pretended to be, touched by her gift; he made a great show of pouring the blue milk into percelain bowls so dainty they were nearly transparent; with the highest of ceremony he put one bowl in her hand, lifted the other himself, and signaled a salute. The dragon-milk was strange and bitter, difficult for Inyanna to swallow; but she got it down, and almost at once felt its warmth throbbing in her thighs. Calain smiled. They were in the Hall of Windows of Nissimorn Prospect, where a single band of gold-bound glass gave a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the harbor of Ni-moya and the distant southern shore of the river. Calain touched a switch. The great window became opaque. A circular bed rose silently from the floor. He took her by the hand and drew her toward it.

9

To be the concubine of the duke's brother seemed a high enough ambition for a thief out of the Grand Bazaar. Inyanna had no illusions about her relationship with Calain. Durand Livolk had chosen her for her looks alone, perhaps something about her eyes, her hair, the way she held herself. Calain, though he had expected her to be a woman somewhat closer to his own class, had evidently found something charming about being thrown together with someone from the bottom rung of society, and so she had had her evening at the Narabal Island and her night at Nissimorn Prospect; it had been a fine interlude of fantasy, and in the morning she would return to the Grand Bazaar with a memory to last her the rest of her life, and that would be that.

Only that was not that.

There as no sleep for them all that night — was it the effect of the dragon-milk, she wondered, or was he like that always? — and at dawn they strolled naked through the majestic house, so that he could show her its treasures, and as they breakfasted on a veranda overlooking the garden he suggested an outing that day to his private park in Istmoy. So it was not to be an adventure of a single night, then. She wondered if she should send word to Sidoun at the Bazaar, telling him she would not return that day, but then she realized that Sidoun would not need to be told. He would interpret her silence correctly. She meant to cause him no pain, but on the other hand she owed him nothing but common courtesy. She was embarked now on one of the great events of her life, and when she returned to the Grand Bazaar it would not be for Sidoun's sake, but merely because the adventure was over.

As it happened, she spent the next six days with Calain. By day they sported on the river in his majestic yacht, or strolled hand in hand through the private game-park of the duke, a place stocked with surplus beasts from the Park of Fabulous Beasts, or simply lay on the veranda of Nissimorn Prospect, watching the sun's track across the continent from Piliplok to Pidruid. And by night it was all feasting and revelry, dinner now at one of the floating islands, now at some great house of Ni-moya, one night at the Ducal Palace itself. The duke was very little like Calain: a much bigger man, a good deal older, with a wearied and untender manner. Yet he managed to be charming to Inyanna, treating her with grace and gravity and never once making her feel like a street-girl his brother had scooped out of the Bazaar. Inyanna sailed through these events with the kind of cool acceptance one displays in dreams. To show awe, she knew, would be coarse. To pretend to an equal level of rank and sophistication would be even worse. But she arrived at a demeanor that was restrained without being humble, agreeable without being forward, and it seemed to be effective. In a few days it began to seem quite natural to her that she should be sitting at table with dignitaries who were lately returned from Castle Mount with bits of gossip about Lord Malibor the Coronal and his entourage, or who could tell stories of having hunted in the northern marches with the Pontifex Tyeveras when he was Coronal under Ossier, or who had newly come back from meetings at Inner Temple with the Lady of the Isle. She grew so self-assured in the company of these great ones that if anyone had turned to her and said, "And you, milady, how have you passed the recent months?" she would have replied easily, "As a thief in the Grand Bazaar," as she had done that first night on the Narabal Island. But the question did not arise: at this level of society, she realized, one never idly indulged one's curiosity with others, but left them to unveil their histories to whatever degree they preferred.

And therefore when on the seventh day Calain told her to prepare to return to the Bazaar, she neither asked him if he had enjoyed her company nor whether he had grown tired of her. He had chosen her to be his companion for a time; that time was now ended, and so be it. It had been a week she would never forget.

Going back to the den of the thieves was a jolt, though. A sumptuously outfitted floater took her from Nissimorn Prospect to the Grand Bazaar's Piliplok Gate, and a servant of Calain's placed in her arms the little bundle of treasures Calain had given her during their week together. Then the floater was gone and Inyanna was descending into the sweaty chaos of the Bazaar, and it was like awakening from a rare and magical dream. As she passed through the crowded lanes no one called out to her, for those who knew her in the Bazaar knew her in her male guise of Kulibhai, and she was dressed now in women's clothes. She moved through the swirling mobs in silence, bathed still in the aura of the aristocracy and moment by moment giving way to an inrushing feeling of depression and loss as it became clear to her that the dream was over, that she had re-entered reality. Tonight Calain would dine with the visiting Duke of Mazadone, and tomorrow he and his guests would sail up the Steiche on a fishing expedition, and the day after that — well, she had no idea, but she knew that she, on that day, would be filching laces and flasks of perfume and bolts of fabric. For an instant, tears surged into her eyes. She forced them back, telling herself that this was foolishness, that she ought not lament her return from Nissimorn Prospect but rather rejoice that she had been granted a week there.

No one was in the thieves' rooms except the Hjort Beyork and one of the Metamorphs. They merely nodded as Inyanna came in. She went to her chamber and donned the Kulibhai costume. But she could not bring herself so soon to return to her thieving. She stowed her packet of jewels and trinkets, Calain's gifts, carefully under her bed. By selling them she could earn enough to exempt her from her profession for a year or two; but she did not plan to part with even the smallest of them. Tomorrow, she resolved, she would go back into the Bazaar. For now, though, she lay face down on the bed she again shared with Sidoun, and when tears came again she let them come, and after a while she rose, feeling more calm, and washed and waited for the others to appear.

Sidoun welcomed her with a nobleman's poise. No questions about her adventures, no hint of resentment, no sly innuendos: he smiled and took her hand and told her he was pleased she had come back, and offered her a sip of a wine of Alhanroel he had just stolen, and told her a couple of stories of things that had happened in the Bazaar while she was away. She wondered if he would feel inhibited in their love-making by the knowledge that the last man to touch her body had been a duke's brother, but no, he reached for her fondly and unhesitatingly when they were in bed, and his gaunt bony body pressed warmly and jubilantly against her. The next day, after their rounds in the Bazaar, they went together to the Park of Fabulous Beasts, and saw for the first time the gossimaule of Glayge, that was so slender it was nearly invisible from the side, and they followed it a little way until it vanished, and laughed as though they had never been separated.

The other thieves regarded Inyanna with some awe for a few days, for they knew where she had been and what she must have been doing, and that laid upon her the strangeness that came from moving in exalted circles. But only Liloyve dared to speak directly to her of it, and she only once, saying, "What did he see in you?"

"How would I know? It was all like a dream."

"I think it was justice."

"What do you mean?"

"That you were wrongfully promised Nissimorn Prospect, and this was by way of making atonement to you. The Divine balances the good and the evil, do you see?" Liloyve laughed. "You've had your twenty royals' worth out of those swindlers, haven't you?"

Indeed she had, Inyanna agreed. But the debt was not yet fully paid, she soon discovered. On Starday next, working her way through the booths of the moneychangers and skimming off the odd coin here and there, she was startled suddenly by a hand on her wrist, and wondered what fool of a thief, failing to recognize her, was trying to make arrest. But it was Liloyve. Her face was flushed and her eyes were wide. "Come home right away!" she cried.

"What is it?"

"Two Vroons waiting for you. You are summoned by Calain, and they say you are to pack all your belongings, for you will not be returning to the Grand Bazaar."

10

So it happened that Inyanna Forlana of Velathys, formerly a thief, took up residence in Nissimorn Prospect as companion to Calain of Ni-moya. Calain offered no explanation, nor did she seek one. He wanted her by his side, and that was explanation enough. For the first few weeks she still expected to be told each morning to make ready to go back to the Bazaar, but that did not occur, and after a while she ceased to consider the possibility. Wherever Calain went, she went: to the Zimr Marshes to hunt the gihorna, to glittering Dulorn for a week at the Perpetual Circus, to Khyntor for the Festival of Geysers, even into mysterious rainy Piurifayne to explore the shadowy homeland of the Shapeshifters. She who had spent all her first twenty years in shabby Velathys came to take it quite for granted that she should be traveling about like a Coronal making the grand processional, with the brother of a royal duke at her side; but yet she never quite lost her perspective, never failed to see the irony and incongruity of the strange transformations her life had undergone.

Nor was it surprising to her even when she found herself seated at table next to the Coronal himself. Lord Malibor had come to Ni-moya on a visit of state, for it behooved him to travel in the western continent every eight or ten years, by way of showing the people of Zimroel that they weighed equally in their monarch's thoughts with those of his home continent of Alhanroel. The duke provided the obligatory banquet, and Inyanna was placed at the high table, with the Coronal to her right and Calain at her left, and the duke and his lady at Lord Malibor's far side. Inyanna had been taught the names of the great Coronals in school, of course, Stiamot and Confalume and Prestimion and Dekkeret and all the rest, and her mother often had told her that it was on the very day of her birth when news came to Velathys that the old Pontifex Ossier was dead, that Lord Tyeveras had succeeded him and had chosen a man of the city of Bombifale, one Malibor, to be the new Coronal; and eventually the new coinage had trickled into her province, showing this Lord Malibor, a broad-faced man with wide-set eyes and heavy brows. But that such people as Coronals and Pontifexes actually existed had been a matter of some doubt to her through all those years, and yet here she was with her elbow an inch from Lord Malibor's, and the only thing she marveled at was how very much this burly and massive man in imperial green and gold resembled the man whose face was on the coins. She had expected the portraits to be less precise.

It seemed sensible to her that the conversations of Coronals would revolve wholly around matters of state. But in fact Lord Malibor seemed to talk mainly of the hunt. He had gone to this remote place to slay that rare beast, and to that inaccessible and uncongenial place to take the head of this difficult creature, and so on and so on; and he was constructing a new wing of the Castle to house all his trophies. "In a year or two," said the Coronal, "I trust you and Calain will visit me at the Castle. The trophy-room will be complete by then. It will please you, I know, to see such an array of creatures, all of them prepared by the finest taxidermists of Castle Mount." Inyanna did indeed look forward to visiting Lord Malibor's Castle, for the Coronal's enormous residence was a legendary place that entered into everyone's dreams, and she could imagine nothing more wonderful than to ascend to the summit of lofty Castle Mount and wander that great building, thousands of years old, exploring its thousands of rooms. But she was only repelled by Lord Malibor's obsession with slaughter. When he talked of killing amorfibots and ghalvars and sigimoins and steetmoy, and of the extreme effort he expended in those killings, Inyanna was reminded of Ni-moya's Park of Fabulous Beasts, where by order of some milder Coronal of long ago those same animals were protected and cherished; and that put her in mind of quiet gaunt Sidoun, who had gone with her so often to that park, and had played so sweetly on his pocket-harp. She did not want to think of Sidoun, to whom she owed nothing but for whom she felt a guilty affection, and she did not want to hear of the killing of rare creatures so that their heads might adorn Lord Malibor's trophy-room. Yet she managed to listen politely to the Coronal's tales of carnage and even to make an amiable comment or two.

Toward dawn, when they were finally back at Nissimorn Prospect and preparing for bed, Calain said to her, "The Coronal is planning to hunt next for sea-dragons. He seeks one known as Lord Kinniken's dragon, that was measured once at more than three hundred feet in length."

Inyanna, who was tired and not cheerful, shrugged. Sea-dragons, at least, were far from rare, and it would be no cause for grief if the Coronal harpooned a few. "Is there room in his trophy-house for a dragon that size?"

"For its head and wings, I imagine. Not that he stands much chance of getting it. The Kinniken's been seen only four times since Lord Kinniken's day, and not for seventy years. But if he doesn't find that one, he'll get another. Or drown in the attempt."

"Is there much chance of that?"

Calain nodded. "Dragon-hunting's dangerous business. He'd be wiser not to try. But he's killed just about everything that moves on land, and no Coronal's ever been out in a dragon-ship, and so he'll not be discouraged from it. We leave for Piliplok at the end of the week."

"We?"

"Lord Malibor has asked me to join him on the hunt." With a rueful smile he said, "In truth he wanted the duke, but my brother begged off, claiming duties of state. So he asked me. One does not easily refuse such things."

"Do I accompany you?" Inyanna asked.

"We have not planned it that way."

"Oh," she said quietly. After a moment she asked, "How long will you be gone?"

"The hunt lasts three months, usually. During the season of the southerly winds. And then the time to reach Piliplok, and outfit the vessel, and to return — it would be six or seven months all told. I'll be home by spring."

"Ah. I see."

Calain came to her side and drew her against him. "It will be the longest separation we will ever endure. I promise you that."

She wanted to say, Is there no way you can refuse to go? Or, Is there some way I can be allowed to go with you? But she knew how useless that was, and what a violation of the etiquette by which Calain lived. So Inyanna made no further protest. She took Calain into her arms, and they embraced until sunrise.

On the eve of his departure for the port of Piliplok, where the dragon-ships made harbor, Calain summoned her to his study on the highest level of Nissimorn Prospect and offered her a thick document to sign.

"What is this?" she asked, without picking it up.

"Articles of marriage between us."

"This is a cruel joke, milord."

"No joke, Inyanna. No joke at all."

"But—"

"I would have discussed the matter with you this winter, but then the damnable dragon-voyage arose, and left me no time. So I have rushed things a little. You are no mere concubine to me: this paper formalizes our love."

"Is our love something that needs formality?"

Calain's eyes narrowed. "I am going off on a risky and foolhardy adventure, from which I expect to return, but while I am at sea my fate will not be in my own hands. As my companion you have no legal rights of inheritance. As my wife—"

Inyanna was stunned. "If the risk is so great, abandon the voyage, milord!"

"You know that's impossible. I must bear the risk. And so I would provide for you. Sign it, Inyanna."

She stared a long time at the document, a draft of many pages. Her eyes would not focus properly and she neither could nor would make out the words that some scribe had indited in the most elegant of calligraphy. Wife to Calain? It seemed almost monstrous to her, a shattering of all proprieties, a stepping beyond every boundary. And yet— and yet—

He waited. She could not refuse.

In the morning he departed in the Coronal's entourage for Piliplok, and all that day Inyanna roamed the corridors and chambers of Nissimorn Prospect in confusion and disarray. That night the duke thoughtfully invited her for dinner; the next, Durand Livolk and his lady escorted her to dine at the Pidruid Island, where a shipment of fireshower-palm wine had arrived. Other invitations followed, so that her life was a busy one, and the months passed. It was mid-winter now. And then came word that a great sea-dragon had fallen upon the ship of Lord Malibor and sent it to the bottom of the Inner Sea. Lord Malibor was dead, and all those who had sailed with him, and a certain Voriax had been named Coronal. And under the terms of Calain's will, his widow Inyanna Forlana had come into full ownership of the great estate known as Nissimorn Prospect.

11

When the period of mourning was over and she had an opportunity to make arrangements for such matters, Inyanna called for one of her stewards and ordered rich gifts of money to be delivered to the Grand Bazaar, for the thief Agourmole and all members of his family. It was Inyanna's way of saying that she had not forgotten them. "Tell me their exact words when you hand the purses to them," she ordered the steward, hoping they would send back some warm remembrances of the old times together, but the man reported that none of them had said anything of interest, that they had simply expressed surprise and gratitude toward the Lady Inyanna, except for the man named Sidoun, who had refused his gift and could not be urged to accept it. Inyanna smiled sadly and had Sidoun's twenty royals distributed to children in the streets, and after that she had no further contact with the thieves of the Grand Bazaar, nor did she ever go near the place.

Some years later, while visiting the shops of the Gossamer Galleria, the Lady Inyanna observed two suspicious-looking men in the shop of the dragon-bone carvings. From their movements and the way they exchanged glances, it seemed quite clear to her that they were thieves, maneuvering to create a diversion that would allow them to plunder the shop. Then she looked at them more closely and realized that she had encountered them before, for one was a short thick-framed man, and the other tall and knobby-faced and pale. She gestured to her escorts, who moved quietly into position about the two.

Inyanna said, "One of you is Steyg, and one is called Vezan Ormus, but I have forgotten which of you is which. On the other hand, I remember the other details of our meeting quite well."

The thieves looked at one another in alarm. The taller one said, "Milady, you are mistaken. My name is Elakon-Mirj, and my friend is called Thanooz."

"These days, perhaps. But when you visited Velathys long ago you went by other names. I see that you've graduated from swindling to thievery, eh? Tell me this: how many heirs to Nissimorn Prospect did you discover, before the game grew dull?"

Now there was panic in their eyes. They seemed to be calculating the chances of making a break past Inyanna's men toward the door; but that would have been rash. The guards of the Gossamer Galleria had been notified and were gathered just outside.

The shorter thief, trembling, said, "We are honest merchants, milady, and nothing else."

"You are incorrigible scoundrels," said Inyanna, "and nothing else. Deny it again and I'll have you shipped to Suvrael for penal servitude!"

"Milady—"

"Speak the truth," Inyanna said.

Through chattering teeth the taller one replied, "We admit the charge. But it was long ago. If we have injured you, we will make full restitution."

"Injured me? Injured me?" Inyanna laughed. "Rather, you did me the greatest service anyone could have done. I feel only gratitude toward you; for know that I was Inyanna Forlana the shopkeeper of Velathys, whom you cheated out of twenty royals, and now I am the Lady Inyanna of Ni-moya, mistress of Nissimorn Prospect. And so the Divine protects the weak and brings good out of evil." She beckoned to the guards. "Convey these two to the imperial proctors, and say that I will give testimony against them later, but that I ask mercy for them, perhaps a sentence of three months of road-mending, or something similar. And afterward I think I'll take the two of you into my service. You are worthless rogues, but clever ones, and it's better to keep you close at hand, where you can be watched, than to let you go loose to prey on the unwary." She waved her hand. They were led away.

Inyanna turned to the keeper of the shop. "I regret the interruption," she said. "Now, these carvings of the emblems of the city, that you think are worth a dozen royals apiece — what would you say to thirty royals for the lot, and maybe a little carving of the bilantoon thrown in to round things off—"