Majipoor Chronicles

"All the same," said Inya

It was well past dark when they finally left the tavern. Several moons were out, and the mountains that ringed the city, outlying fangs of the great Gonghar range, looked like jagged pillars of black ice in the chilly glimmer. Inya

She slept only fitfully. In the morning she met with Vezan Ormus and Steyg in the notary's office behind the bank and turned over to them her little sack of well-worn royal pieces, most of them old, some very old, with the faces of Ki

"You will be my guests," she told them grandly, "for a month of hunting and feasting, when I am in my estates."

"Oh, no," said Vezan Ormus softly. "It would hardly be appropriate for such as we to mingle socially with the mistress of Nissimorn Prospect. But we understand the sentiment, and we thank you for the gesture."

Inya

She accompanied them to their hotel, and waited outside while they packed, and saw them into their floater, and stood waving in the street as they drove off toward the highway that led to the southwest coast. Then she reopened the shop. In the afternoon there were two customers, one buying eight weights' worth of nails and the other asking for false satin, three yards at sixty weights the yard, so the entire day's sales were less than two crowns, but no matter. Soon she would be rich.

A month went by and no news came from Ni-moya. A second month, and still there was silence.

The patience that had kept Inya

One Winterday Eve Inya

The journey would be expensive and she had parted with her savings. To raise the money she mortgaged the shop to a family of Hjorts. They gave her ten royals; they were to pay themselves interest by selling off her inventory at their own profit; if the entire debt should be repaid before she returned, they would continue to manage the place on her behalf, paying her a royalty. The contract greatly favored the Hjorts, but Inya

It was no small trip. The most direct route between Velathys and Ni-moya lay across the Shapeshifter province of Piurifayne, and to enter that was dangerous and rash. Instead she had to make an enormous detour, westward through Stiamot Pass, then up the long broad valley that was the Dulorn Rift, with the stupendous mile-high wall of Velathys Scarp rising on the right for hundreds of miles; and once she reached the city of Dulorn itself she would still have half the vast continent of Zimroel to cross, by land and by riverboat, before coming to Ni-moya. But Inya