"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?"