Majipoor Chronicles Read online

“Thank you,” Tisana said. She drank. She felt dizzy but yet not drunk, and the mysterious mind-linking powers of the dream-wine were absent, she being alone and awake. She said, “What is the next question?”

  “You still haven’t answered the first one.”

  “Ask the next one.”

  “There is only one question, Tisana. Are you fit to be a dream-speaker? Can you soothe the souls of those who come to you?”

  “I will try.”

  “Is that your answer?”

  “Yes,” Tisana said. “That is my answer. Turn me loose and let me try. I am a woman of good will. I have the skills and I have the desire to help others. And the Lady has commanded me to be a dream-speaker.”

  “Will you lie down with all who need you? With humans and Ghayrogs and Skandars and Lumen and Vroons and all others of all the races of the world?”

  “All,” she said.

  “Will you take their confusions from them?”

  “If I can, I will.”

  “Are you fit to be a dream-speaker?”

  “Let me try, and then we will know,” said Tisana.

  Tisana said, “That seems fair. I have no further questions.”

  She poured the last of the wine and drank it. Then she sat quietly as the sun climbed and the heat of the day grew. She was altogether calm, without impatience, without discomfort. She would sit this way all day and all night, if she had to. What seemed like an hour went by, or a little more, and then suddenly Vandune was before her, appearing without warning.

  The old woman said softly, “Is your Testing finished?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did it go?”

  “I have passed it,” said Tisana.

  Vandune smiled. “Yes. I was sure that you would. Come, now. We must speak with the Superior, and make arrangements for your future, Speaker Tisana.”

  They returned to the chapter-house as silently as they had come, walking quickly in the mounting heat. It was nearly noon when they emerged from the zone of ruins. The novices and pledgeds who had been working in the fields were coming in for lunch. They looked uncertainly at Tisana, and Tisana smiled at them, a bright reassuring smile.

  At the entrance to the main cloister Freylis appeared, crossing Tisana’s path as though by chance, and gave her a quick worried look.

  “Well?” Freylis asked tensely.

  Tisana smiled. She wanted to say, It was nothing, it was a joke, a formality, a mere ritual, the real Testing took place long before this. But Freylis would have to discover those things for herself. A great gulf now separated them, for Tisana was a speaker now and Freylis still merely a pledged. So Tisana simply said, “All is well.”

  “Good. Oh, good, Tisana, good! I’m so happy for you!”

  “I thank you for your help,” said Tisana gravely.

  A shadow suddenly crossed the courtyard. Tisana looked up. A small black cloud, like yesterday’s, had wandered into the sky, some strayed fragment, no doubt, of a storm out by the far-off coast. It hung as if hooked to the chapter-house’s spire, and, as though some latch had been pulled back, it began abruptly to release great heavy raindrops. “Look,” Tisana said. “It’s raining again! Come, Freylis! Come, let’s dance!”

  IX

  A Thief in Ni-moya

  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 recrowning; 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 Thomon, 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 rain-swept 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 rain
s 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 Inyanna?”

  “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 Khyntor, 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, “Your 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 seal 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. Inyanna 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 loft
y 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?”