"Tisana!" she cried. And to her shout she replied, "Yes, Tisana?"

Laughed. Drank again.

She had never before had dream-wine in solitude. It was always taken in the presence of another — either white doing a speaking, or else with a tutor. Drinking it now alone was like asking questions of one's reflection. She felt the kind of confusion that comes from standing between two mirrors and seeing one's image shuttled back and forth to infinity.

"Tisana," she said, "this is your Testing. Are you fit to be a dream-speaker?"

And she answered, "I have studied four years, and before that I spent three more making the pilgrimage to the Isle. I know the seven self-deceptive dreams and the nine instructive dreams, the dreams of summoning, the dreams of—"

"All right. Skip all that. Are you fit to be a dream-speaker?"

"I know how to mix the wine and how to drink it."

"Answer the question. Are you fit to be a dream-speaker?"

"I am very stable. I am tranquil of soul."

"You are evading the question."

"I am strong and capable. I have little malice in me. I wish to serve the Divine."

"What about serving your fellow beings?"

"I serve the Divine by serving them."

"Very elegantly put. Who gave you that line, Tisana?"

"It just came to me. May I have some more wine?"

"All you like."

"Thank you," Tisana said. She drank. She felt dizzy but yet not drunk, and the mysterious mind-linking powers of the dream-wine were absent, she being alone and awake. She said, "What is the next question?"

"You still haven't answered the first one."

"Ask the next one."

"There is only one question, Tisana. Are you fit to be a dream-speaker? Can you soothe the souls of those who come to you?"

"I will try."

"Is that your answer?"

"Yes," Tisana said. "That is my answer. Turn me loose and let me try. I am a woman of good will. I have the skills and I have the desire to help others. And the Lady has commanded me to be a dream-speaker."

"Will you lie down with all who need you? With humans and Ghayrogs and Skandars and Liimen and Vroons and all others of all the races of the world?"

"All," she said.

"Will you take their confusions from them?"

"If I can, I will."

"Are you fit to be a dream-speaker?"

"Let me try, and then we will know," said Tisana.

Tisana said, "That seems fair. I have no further questions."

She poured the last of the wine and drank it. Then she sat quietly as the sun climbed and the heat of the day grew. She was altogether calm, without impatience, without discomfort. She would sit this way all day and all night, if she had to. What seemed like an hour went by, or a little more, and then suddenly Vandune was before her, appearing without warning.

The old woman said softly, "Is your Testing finished?"

"Yes."

"How did it go?"

"I have passed it," said Tisana.

Vandune smiled. "Yes. I was sure that you would. Come, now. We must speak with the Superior, and make arrangements for your future, Speaker Tisana."

They returned to the chapter-house as silently as they had come, walking quickly in the mounting heat. It was nearly noon when they emerged from the zone of ruins. The novices and pledgeds who had been working in the fields were coming in for lunch. They looked uncertainly at Tisana, and Tisana smiled at them, a bright reassuring smile.

At the entrance to the main cloister Freylis appeared, crossing Tisana's path as though by chance, and gave her a quick worried look.

"Well?" Freylis asked tensely.

Tisana smiled. She wanted to say, It was nothing, it was a joke, a formality, a mere ritual, the real Testing took place long before this. But Freylis would have to discover those things for herself. A great gulf now separated them, for Tisana was a speaker now and Freylis still merely a pledged. So Tisana simply said, "All is well."

"Good. Oh, good, Tisana, good! I'm so happy for you!"

"I thank you for your help," said Tisana gravely.

A shadow suddenly crossed the courtyard. Tisana looked up. A small black cloud, like yesterday's, had wandered into the sky, some strayed fragment, no doubt, of a storm out by the far-off coast. It hung as if hooked to the chapter-house's spire, and, as though some latch had been pulled back, it began abruptly to release great heavy raindrops. "Look," Tisana said. "It's raining again! Come, Freylis! Come, let's dance!"

NINE

A Thief in Ni-moya

Toward the close of the seventh year of the restoration of Lord Valentine, word reaches the Labyrinth that the Coronal soon will be arriving on a visit — news that sends Hissune's pulse rate climbing and his heart to pounding. Will he see the Coronal? Will Lord Valentine remember him? The Coronal once took the trouble to summon him all the way to Castle Mount for his re-crowning; surely the Coronal still thinks of him, surely Lord Valentine has some recollection of the boy who — Probably not, Hissune decides. His excitement subsides; his cool rational self regains control. If he catches sight of Lord Valentine at all during his visit, that will be extraordinary, and if Lord Valentine knows who he is, that will be miraculous. Most likely the Coronal will dip in and out of the Labyrinth without seeing anyone but the high ministers of the Pontifex. They say he is off on a grand processional toward Alaisor, and thence to the Isle to visit his mother, and a stop at the Labyrinth is obligatory on such an itinerary. But Hissune knows that Coronals tend not to enjoy visits to the Labyrinth, which remind them uncomfortably of the lodgings that await them when it is their time to be elevated to the senior kingship. And he knows, too, that the Pontifex Tyeveras is a ghost-creature, more dead than alive, lost in impenetrable dreams within the cocoon of his life-support systems, incapable of rational human speech, a symbol rather than a man, who ought to have been buried years ago but who is kept in maintenance so that Lord Valentine's time as Coronal can be prolonged. That is fine for Lord Valentine and doubtless for Majipoor, Hissune thinks; not so good for old Tyeveras. But such matters are not his concern. He returns to the Register of Souls, still speculating idly about the coming visit of the Coronal, and idly he taps for a new capsule, and what comes forth is the recording of a citizen of Ni-moya, which begins so unpromisingly that Hissune would have rejected it, but that he desires a glimpse of that great city of the other continent. For Ni-moya's sake he allows himself to live the life of a little shopkeeper — and soon he has no regrets.

1

Inyanna's mother had been a shopkeeper in Velathys all her life, and so had Inyanna's mother's mother, and it was beginning to look as though that would be Inyanna's destiny too. Neither her mother nor her mother's mother had seemed particularly resentful of such a life, but Inyanna, now that she was nineteen and sole proprietor, felt the shop as a crushing burden on her back, a hump, an intolerable pressure. She thought often of selling out and seeking her real fate in some other city far away, Piliplok or Pidruid or even the mighty metropolis of Ni-moya, far to the north, that was said to be wondrous beyond the imagination of anyone who had not beheld it.

But times were dull and business was slow and Inyanna saw no purchasers for the shop on the horizon. Besides, the place had been the center of her family's life for generations, and simply to abandon it was not an easy thing to do, no matter how hateful it had become. So every morning she rose at dawn and stepped out on the little cobbled terrace to plunge herself into the stone vat of rainwater that she kept there for bathing, and then she dressed and breakfasted on dried fish and wine and went downstairs to open the shop. It was a place of general merchandise — bolts of cloth and clay pots from the south coast and barrels of spices and preserved fruits and jugs of wine and the keen cutlery of Narabal and slabs of costly sea-dragon meat and the glittering filigreed lanterns that they made in Til-omon, and many other such things. There were scores of shops just like hers in Velathys; none of them did particularly well. Since her mother's death, Inyanna had kept the books and managed the inventory and swept the floor and polished the counters and filled out the governmental forms and permits, and she was weary of all that. But what other prospects did life hold? She was an unimportant girl living in an unimportant rainswept mountain-girt city, and she had no real expectation that any of that would change over the next sixty or seventy years.