Majipoor Chronicles Read online

  “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,” she said.

  “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 naïve,” said Inyanna. “I still believe that the Lady and the 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 globlet 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 white-washed 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 Agourmole, 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 showed 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 Inyanna 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 everything, 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 pul
sing, 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.