'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
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
