No one was in the thieves' rooms except the Hjort Beyork and one of the Metamorphs. They merely nodded as Inyanna came in. She went to her chamber and donned the Kulibhai costume. But she could not bring herself so soon to return to her thieving. She stowed her packet of jewels and trinkets, Calain's gifts, carefully under her bed. By selling them she could earn enough to exempt her from her profession for a year or two; but she did not plan to part with even the smallest of them. Tomorrow, she resolved, she would go back into the Bazaar. For now, though, she lay face down on the bed she again shared with Sidoun, and when tears came again she let them come, and after a while she rose, feeling more calm, and washed and waited for the others to appear.
Sidoun welcomed her with a nobleman's poise. No questions about her adventures, no hint of resentment, no sly innuendos: he smiled and took her hand and told her he was pleased she had come back, and offered her a sip of a wine of Alhanroel he had just stolen, and told her a couple of stories of things that had happened in the Bazaar while she was away. She wondered if he would feel inhibited in their love-making by the knowledge that the last man to touch her body had been a duke's brother, but no, he reached for her fondly and unhesitatingly when they were in bed, and his gaunt bony body pressed warmly and jubilantly against her. The next day, after their rounds in the Bazaar, they went together to the Park of Fabulous Beasts, and saw for the first time the gossimaule of Glayge, that was so slender it was nearly invisible from the side, and they followed it a little way until it vanished, and laughed as though they had never been separated.
The other thieves regarded Inyanna with some awe for a few days, for they knew where she had been and what she must have been doing, and that laid upon her the strangeness that came from moving in exalted circles. But only Liloyve dared to speak directly to her of it, and she only once, saying, "What did he see in you?"
"How would I know? It was all like a dream."
"I think it was justice."
"What do you mean?"
"That you were wrongfully promised Nissimorn Prospect, and this was by way of making atonement to you. The Divine balances the good and the evil, do you see?" Liloyve laughed. "You've had your twenty royals' worth out of those swindlers, haven't you?"
Indeed she had, Inyanna agreed. But the debt was not yet fully paid, she soon discovered. On Starday next, working her way through the booths of the moneychangers and skimming off the odd coin here and there, she was startled suddenly by a hand on her wrist, and wondered what fool of a thief, failing to recognize her, was trying to make arrest. But it was Liloyve. Her face was flushed and her eyes were wide. "Come home right away!" she cried.
"What is it?"
"Two Vroons waiting for you. You are summoned by Calain, and they say you are to pack all your belongings, for you will not be returning to the Grand Bazaar."
10
So it happened that Inyanna Forlana of Velathys, formerly a thief, took up residence in Nissimorn Prospect as companion to Calain of Ni-moya. Calain offered no explanation, nor did she seek one. He wanted her by his side, and that was explanation enough. For the first few weeks she still expected to be told each morning to make ready to go back to the Bazaar, but that did not occur, and after a while she ceased to consider the possibility. Wherever Calain went, she went: to the Zimr Marshes to hunt the gihorna, to glittering Dulorn for a week at the Perpetual Circus, to Khyntor for the Festival of Geysers, even into mysterious rainy Piurifayne to explore the shadowy homeland of the Shapeshifters. She who had spent all her first twenty years in shabby Velathys came to take it quite for granted that she should be traveling about like a Coronal making the grand processional, with the brother of a royal duke at her side; but yet she never quite lost her perspective, never failed to see the irony and incongruity of the strange transformations her life had undergone.
Nor was it surprising to her even when she found herself seated at table next to the Coronal himself. Lord Malibor had come to Ni-moya on a visit of state, for it behooved him to travel in the western continent every eight or ten years, by way of showing the people of Zimroel that they weighed equally in their monarch's thoughts with those of his home continent of Alhanroel. The duke provided the obligatory banquet, and Inyanna was placed at the high table, with the Coronal to her right and Calain at her left, and the duke and his lady at Lord Malibor's far side. Inyanna had been taught the names of the great Coronals in school, of course, Stiamot and Confalume and Prestimion and Dekkeret and all the rest, and her mother often had told her that it was on the very day of her birth when news came to Velathys that the old Pontifex Ossier was dead, that Lord Tyeveras had succeeded him and had chosen a man of the city of Bombifale, one Malibor, to be the new Coronal; and eventually the new coinage had trickled into her province, showing this Lord Malibor, a broad-faced man with wide-set eyes and heavy brows. But that such people as Coronals and Pontifexes actually existed had been a matter of some doubt to her through all those years, and yet here she was with her elbow an inch from Lord Malibor's, and the only thing she marveled at was how very much this burly and massive man in imperial green and gold resembled the man whose face was on the coins. She had expected the portraits to be less precise.
It seemed sensible to her that the conversations of Coronals would revolve wholly around matters of state. But in fact Lord Malibor seemed to talk mainly of the hunt. He had gone to this remote place to slay that rare beast, and to that inaccessible and uncongenial place to take the head of this difficult creature, and so on and so on; and he was constructing a new wing of the Castle to house all his trophies. "In a year or two," said the Coronal, "I trust you and Calain will visit me at the Castle. The trophy-room will be complete by then. It will please you, I know, to see such an array of creatures, all of them prepared by the finest taxidermists of Castle Mount." Inyanna did indeed look forward to visiting Lord Malibor's Castle, for the Coronal's enormous residence was a legendary place that entered into everyone's dreams, and she could imagine nothing more wonderful than to ascend to the summit of lofty Castle Mount and wander that great building, thousands of years old, exploring its thousands of rooms. But she was only repelled by Lord Malibor's obsession with slaughter. When he talked of killing amorfibots and ghalvars and sigimoins and steetmoy, and of the extreme effort he expended in those killings, Inyanna was reminded of Ni-moya's Park of Fabulous Beasts, where by order of some milder Coronal of long ago those same animals were protected and cherished; and that put her in mind of quiet gaunt Sidoun, who had gone with her so often to that park, and had played so sweetly on his pocket-harp. She did not want to think of Sidoun, to whom she owed nothing but for whom she felt a guilty affection, and she did not want to hear of the killing of rare creatures so that their heads might adorn Lord Malibor's trophy-room. Yet she managed to listen politely to the Coronal's tales of carnage and even to make an amiable comment or two.
Toward dawn, when they were finally back at Nissimorn Prospect and preparing for bed, Calain said to her, "The Coronal is planning to hunt next for sea-dragons. He seeks one known as Lord Kinniken's dragon, that was measured once at more than three hundred feet in length."
Inyanna, who was tired and not cheerful, shrugged. Sea-dragons, at least, were far from rare, and it would be no cause for grief if the Coronal harpooned a few. "Is there room in his trophy-house for a dragon that size?"
"For its head and wings, I imagine. Not that he stands much chance of getting it. The Kinniken's been seen only four times since Lord Kinniken's day, and not for seventy years. But if he doesn't find that one, he'll get another. Or drown in the attempt."
"Is there much chance of that?"
Calain nodded. "Dragon-hunting's dangerous business. He'd be wiser not to try. But he's killed just about everything that moves on land, and no Coronal's ever been out in a dragon-ship, and so he'll not be discouraged from it. We leave for Piliplok at the end of the week."