Majipoor Chronicles

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?'