THE SIGNALS OF DECAY, THE WEAPONRY OF DECEIT

9 Reunions

The viewing-gallery was built like a steeply raked auditorium. Scattered throughout its thousand or so seats were only a few dozen people, most of them asleep. She sat alone.

Her field of view was almost filled by the giant screen; the giant screen was almost filled by Golter. The great shown globe turned with a smooth and stately inevitability, a silent thunder implicit in the monumental graduation of the changing, revolving face it presented to the darkness, and something of its immense scale apparent in the linearity of that vast unhurriedness.

It shone; a gigantic disc of blue and white and ochre and green, god-fabulous in extent and more beautiful than love.

She sat looking at it. She was muscularly slim and of about average height, perhaps a little more. She was quite bald; beneath her blonde eyebrows her blue eyes were held in tear-drop shapes by small folds in the outside corners; her nose was broad and her nostrils flared. She wore dark overalls and clutched a small satchel to her chest as she sat watching the planet on the huge screen.

The local police chief had been very understanding. He had known Mister Dornay personally, and only an urgent profes-sional engagement had prevented him from attending the party himself. It must have been a terrible experience for her; he quite understood. An inquest would be held at a later date, but a simple recorded statement from her would almost certainly be quite sufficient. Doctor Clave had already determined the cause of death to be a massive brain haemorrhage; unusual, these days, but not unknown. She must not blame herself. Of course she was free to go; he perfectly comprehended her desire not to stay any longer than she had to in a place that now held such tragic memories for her. Anyway, he had no desire to detain her when she was the officially sanctioned quarry of the legally authorised but surely woefully misguided and arguably rather inhumane sect pursuing her; it would give him no pleasure whatsoever to have this horrible event occur within his jurisdiction. He was sure she understood.

Dornay’s private secretary was next to be interviewed; she left the police chief in Bencil Dornay’s study and joined the others in the house library, where Cenuij was making excited noises over a desk-screen.

“Okay?” Miz said, coming to meet her.

“Nothing to worry about,” she said, “but I’ve been told to get out of town.” She nodded to Zefla and Dloan, who stood by Cenuij’s shoulder.

“That’s it!” Cenuij said, pressing a button to take a copy of the display. He tapped the screen with a finger. The glyphs shown there were all roughly the same; variations on an elaborate, whorled, criss-crossed shape formed from a single line. On the desk beside Cenuij sat the notebook he’d been drawing in just after Dornay had died; its small screen displayed a shape similar to those on the desk-screen. “That’s the one,” he said excitedly. He tapped the notebook and one of the glyphs in turn. “Miykenns Capital, in Cevese script, Ladyr dynasty.”

Sharrow stared at the pattern drawn on the notebook-screen, seeing the single line leading into the complex glyph, its spiralled structure, and its central, tightening coil ending in a dot.

“That was what we… traced?” she said.

Zefla heard the catch in Sharrow’s voice, and put her arm round her.

“Yup,” Cenuij said, tearing the print from the desk-screen slot and grinning at it. “Shaky brush-work; a Cevese script scholar would have a fit-”

“Oh, Cenny, for goodness sake…” Zefla said.

“-but that’s it,” Cenuij said, smacking the print-out with the backs of his fingers. “Could contain a mistake of course, in the circumstances, but at the very least it’s Miykenns Darkside, almost certainly Miykenns Capital, and if these epicycles are right-”, he pointed at two small circles on one spiral, “- it’s in the time of the Ladyr dynasty.”

“So, Malishu?” Miz said.

Cenuij shook his head. “Doubt it, not then. Next, we have to look back to see where the capital was during the Ladyr dynasty.” His lip curled slightly. “Could be anywhere. Knowing the Ladyrs, they sold it to the highest bidder.” He turned back to the desk-screen. “Library: Miykenns; history; Ladyr dynasty. Display; the capital of Miykenns.”

The screen halved into text and a multi-layered holo map.

Miz peered. “Pharpech?” he said. “Never heard of it.”

“I have,” Zefla said.

“Congratulations,” Cenuij told her, zooming the bewilderingly structured map then swooping the view back again. “You probably form part of a small and very exclusive club.”

“Yeah,” Zefla said, staring at the ceiling with a look of intense concentration on her face. “One of my lecturers used it as an example of a degenerated… something or other.”

“Well,” Cenuij said. “It was supposedly capital of Miykenns under the Ladyrs, eight hundred years ago.” He scanned the text. “And hasn’t looked forward since. Last entry in the encyclopedia is-ye gods-twenty years ago; the coronation of King Tard the seventeenth. Prophet’s blood!” Cenuij sat back in surprise. “ ‘No pictures available.’”

“A king?” Miz laughed.

“Retro suburb,” Zefla breathed.

“The latest of the…” Cenuij scrolled the screen, then laughed. “Useless Kings,” he said. “Well, how disarmingly honest.”

“How far is this place from Malishu?” Sharrow asked.

Cenuij checked. “About as far away as you can get. Nearest rail line is… ha! I don’t believe it; it says two days’ march away!” He looked round the others. “This sounds like the place they invented the phrase ‘time-warp’ to cover.”

Zefla nudged Sharrow with her hip. “Nice and far from the Huhsz.”

“Hmm,” Sharrow said, unconvinced. “Does it say what their religion is?”

Cenuij scrolled the text. “Basically home-grown; monarchworship and theophobia.”

“Theophobia?” Miz said.

“They hate gods,” Zefla said.

“Fair enough,” Miz said, nodding. “If I lived somewhere not even within hailing distance of the outskirts of the backend-of-nowhere, I’d want somebody in authority to blame, too.”

Miz booked tickets for them all, to Miykenns. A series of cross-routed phone calls ensured that a trusted exec in one of Miz’s holding companies in The Meg had his sister’s best friend book another ticket, in the name of Ysul Demri, for the water-world of Trontsephori.

Zefla shaved Sharrow’s hair off and spread a thin film of depilatory oil over her scalp. Miz sat on the bed behind them and pretended to cry. Sharrow inserted the contacts, used dabs of skinweld to alter the shape of her eyes, spray-bleached her eyebrows and inserted small plugs into her nostrils, lifting them and flaring them.

She looked at her ears in the dressing-table mirror. “My ears stick out,” she said, frowning. She looked up at Zefla, standing behind her. “Do you think my ears stick out?”

Zefla shrugged. Miz shook his head. Sharrow decided her ears stuck out, and used skinweld on them too.

Dloan sat on the bed beside Miz with Sharrow’s satchel turned inside out on his lap. He unpicked the stitching, then reached in and withdrew her new identity papers, handing them to her. She looked at her holo in her ID while Zefla carefully removed the depilatory film.

“ ‘Ysul Demri’, eh?” Zefla said, glancing at the name on Sharrow’s new ID as she crumpled the stubble-studded film and threw it into a bin. She squinted at the holo. “Totally convincing. Always fancied being a bald, did you?” She started to spread hair-preventing cream over Sharrow’s scalp.

Sharrow nodded. “They’re supposed to have more fun.”

Zefla’s hands glided over her soft skin, gently rubbing the cream in. Miz made sensuous grunting noises in the background.

“Geis?”

“Sharrow. I hope you don’t mind me calling you… can’t we get vision on this?”

“No; I’m dressing at the moment.”

“I beg your pardon. Shall I call back?”

“No, it’s all right. It’s… good to hear from you, Geis, but do you mind me asking how you found me?”

“Not at all. I’ve had my comm people scanning all the public data bases for your name; I thought I might be able to warn you if it looked like the Huhsz were closing in. I hope you don’t mind…”

“I suppose not. My life seems to be pretty public-domain these days.”

“I don’t want to alarm you; we’re pretty certain the Huhsz haven’t got access to this sort of hacking power. But there’s a report on the local contract police data base that there was some sort of incident at a party at this guy’s house last night. Didn’t he work for the family, once?”

“That was his father. But, yes, there was an incident.”

“The police aren’t holding you, are they?”

“No. It’s been cleared up. I’ll be on my way soon.”

“I see. Anyway, Sharrow, I was calling for a couple of reasons. There are a lot of confused reports coming out of the Log-Jam at the moment, I won’t ask you about that… but I did hear about what happened to that monorail in the K’lel, and my satellite people tell me there’s a lot of Huhsz activity around an old nuclear-waste silo on the edge of the desert. I just wanted to say… Well, I’d better not say too much, even over this channel, though it is pretty secure… But I did want to say; congratulations. It took one of my best AIs seconds to come up with the same scheme, even after it was pointed in the right direction. It was brilliant.”

“Thanks. It was Miz’s idea, actually.”

“Oh. Still, it was good. But of course it won’t delay them for very long. I understand the holes in the Passports might continue to radiate for quite a while, but the Huhsz have placed orders for portable magnetic inclusion chambers with Continental Fusion Inc. and, well, it’ll make things difficult for them, I suppose, having to cart gear that size around with them, but I just wanted to say that my offer stands; I’ll do all I can-everything I can to protect you, if you’ll just give me the chance.”

“And I still appreciate it, Geis, but I’ll try and dodge them for a while longer.”

“I think you’re very brave. Please remember; if you need any help at all, I am yours to command.”

“The last person who said that…”

“Sorry?”

“Nothing. Yes, thanks. I’ll remember.”

She left the viewing-gallery, and in the double doors between the auditorium and the main corridor bumped into a man just on his way in. She started to apologise, then saw his bright smile, his bald head. He looked at her bald scalp and smiled even more broadly as the doors behind her opened and somebody else entered the narrow space between the two sets of doors and put what felt like a gun to the nape of her neck.

“Oh, Lady Sharrow,” the first young man said, sounding perfectly delighted and still gazing at her bald head. “You didn’t need to go to all that trouble just for us!”

They travelled separately to Ikueshleng, the space port for Golter’s eastern hemisphere. The others had already gone when she got there. She paid cash for a stand-by to Stager. She watched some screen while she waited, feeling nervous but trying not to look it. Golter had had some bad experiences with crashing spacecraft over the millennia, and as a result one of the few things that was strictly controlled about the planet was space traffic; the vast majority of commercial ships were restricted to two ports serving a hemisphere each, and both the resulting bottlenecks, though Free Ports and so not closely bureaucratically controlled, were inevitably dangerous places for people on the run.

She survived unchallenged and caught a shuttle around noon; half an hour later she was in Stager, the kilometre-diameter, five-wheel space-station that was the traveller’s usual next port of call after Ikueshleng.

She found a midsystem discount ticket shop in wheel five and bought a high bounce-factor single to Phrastesis Habitats via Miykenns/Malishu-station. She watched the clerk put her credit card into the reader, and tried not to look relieved when the transaction went through. She had to sign an insurance disclaimer, and scribbled something that might just have passed for Ysul Demri if you’d had a good imagination. She bought a disposable phone with a hundred thrials of credit embedded, a basic-model wrist-screen and a newssheet, ate a light lunch in a small, over-priced cafe, then she walked round the curve of the wheel’s outer rim to the viewing-gallery.

She sat between them, in the very back row of the gallery. She stared at the screen. The one on her right did the talking.

“Three baldies in a row!” he sniggered. “What a laugh, eh?”

The one on her left sat watching the screen with a jacket over his lap. He held the gun underneath the jacket, pointed into her side just below her ribs. Guns tended not to be terribly popular baggage items with the people who ran space-stations-she had reluctantly abandoned her HandCannon to a left-luggage agency in Ikueshleng-and she was almost tempted to believe the gun poking into her ribs was a fake, but she thought the better of doing anything that would ensure she’d find out.

She looked at the profile of the silent man holding the gun. He was identical to the one on her right. She could see no sign that either of them was an android.

“I said, what a laugh, eh?” The one on her right poked her with one finger. Her right hand flicked out, grabbed his hand; she glared into his eyes. His mouth made an O. He looked amused. The gun under her left ribs prodded briefly.

She let go of his hand. It had been warm; it had felt like a human hand.

“My, we’re touchy,” the young man on her right said. “I almost wish we’d brought one of our mannequins along.” He pulled at the collar of his tight grey, business-like jacket, adjusting his cuffs. “I take it you had your little flashback two days ago, did you?”

She watched the planet for a moment, looking down on what must be noon on Issier (there; white fluffs of cloud in the centre of Phirar, covering the archipelago) and nodded slowly.

“I believe I felt something, at one point,” she said.

“Just to let you know we haven’t forgotten you,” the young man said. “I hear you were seeing an old friend of the family; terrible shame about old Bencil Dornay. What a shock that must have been for you.”

She sought southern Caltasp under its own speckled cover of cloud, and identified the huge smooth curve of Farvel Bight, its northern limit hidden under the clouds that reputedly never broke above the Sea House.

“Our family likes its old servants to know we haven’t forgotten them,” she told the young man. “Or their children.”

“Indeed.” The young man said. “So now you’re on your way to Miykenns, aren’t you, Lady Sharrow…?” He paused. “Except you missed the ship you were booked on, and which the rest of your team took.”

She looked up, tracing again the route she’d taken to the Franck’s home, then on to Lip City.

“Did I?” she said. “Damn. I hate it when that happens.”

“And instead you’re off to Trontsephori, isn’t that right?”

She looked down the long coast of Piphram, straining to make out the lagoons and the dot that was the Log-Jam.

“Am I?” she said.

“No, Ysul,” the young man said almost gently. “No, you’re not.” He sighed. “You’re Phrastesis bound, according to your ticket. But somehow I don’t think you’ll make it all the way there.”

She looked from the burning bright heart of Jonolrey’s Mel desert into his eyes.

“You’re very well informed for a messenger boy,” she said. “You should be in the travel business.”

He smiled coldly at her. “Don’t be unpleasant, Lady Sharrow,” he said. He put out his hand and stroked her upper arm with one finger. “We can be so much more unpleasant to you than you can be to us.”

She looked down at the slowly stroking finger, then back to his eyes. He watched his finger too, as though it didn’t belong to him. “Not even,” he said quietly, “that greasy little over-achiever of a cousin of yours will be able to help you, if we decide to be really unpleasant to you… Lady Sharrow.”

She reached out to take hold of his stroking finger, but he took it away, folding his arms.

“You know,” she said. “I’m really getting a little fed up with you and all your attentions.” She frowned at him. “Just who are you? Why are you doing this? What sort of weird enjoyment do you get from it? Or do you just do whatever you’re told?”

He smiled tolerantly. “Let me give you a word of advice-”

“No,” she said. “Let me give you a word of advice.” She leant towards him, away from the gun. “Stop doing this, or I’ll hurt you-if you can be hurt-or I’ll kill you; kill or destroy both of you-”

The young man was pretending to look frightened; he was pulling faces at his twin sitting on her other side. The gun was stuck harder under her ribs. She ignored the gun and reached out with her left hand and took the other young man’s chin in her hand.

“No, listen to me,” she said, gripping his chin hard, feeling the warm smoothness of it, and forcing one finger into the side of his neck, to touch the beat of blood beneath his skin. He smelled of cheap scent. He looked at her and tried to smirk, but the way she was holding his chin made it difficult. The gun was a sharp pain under her ribs, but she couldn’t really care just at that point. She shook his chin a little.

“I’ll do whatever I can to both of you,” she said. “And I don’t give a flying fuck what you or your employers do to me; I’ve never liked being treated the way you miserable little pricks have been treating me, and I don’t respond well to that sort of persuasion, understand? You getting all this?”

She made a play of searching his eyes. “Are you? Whoever I’m talking to in there? Comprehend? You’ve made your point and you’ll get your Gun. Now just fuck off; or we’ll all suffer.” She smiled bleakly. “Yes, I’ll suffer most, I don’t doubt.” The bleak smile faded. “But at least I won’t be alone.”

She let go of his chin slowly, pushing his head away a little with her last touch.

The young man smoothed a hand over his scalp and readjusted his jacket collar. He cleared his throat, glancing at his image on her other side. “Your talent for destruction extends to yourself I see, Lady Sharrow,” he said. “How democratic in one so noble.”

She got up slowly, holding her satchel. “Eat my shit, you puppet,” she told him. She paused as she moved past the one with the gun, looking into his eyes and then glancing at his lap. “I trust the rest of your weaponry is rather more intimidating.”

She walked, trying not to limp, along the aisle towards the gangway, the back of her naked scalp and the area between her shoulder blades itching and tingling, waiting for the shot that would kill her, or just the start of the pain again, but she made it to the end of the aisle, then down the steps, then through the double doors without anything happening.

In the corridor outside she collapsed back against the wall, swallowing, breathing heavily and putting her head back against the soft bulkhead. She closed her eyes for a moment.

Then she made her eyes go as wide as they could, blew her cheeks out, and with a slight shake of her head, walked away.

She landed on Miykenns three days later. The shuttle bellied down onto the wide, calm waters of Lake Malishu, its still hot hull creating bursts of steam with each skimming kiss so that its progress was marked by a series of small, distinct clouds, each curling round itself like a gauzy leaf and rising into the warm, still air while the craft whizzed on, finally settling onto the lake’s mirror-surface in a long, unzipping trail of white.

Beyond the early-morning coastal mists, the Entraxrln towered distantly on all sides, as though the lake existed in the eye of some vast purple storm.

She stepped lightly onto the jetty on Embarkation Island. Miykenns’ gravity was barely seventy per cent of Golter’s; the ship she’d journeyed on had maintained one Golter-g during acceleration and deceleration, and so Miykenns gave her the delicious feeling that she was about to float away all the time; it was a sensation that had led to more than a few broken limbs and heads over the time that people from Golter had been landing on Miykenns and suddenly feeling as though they could leap tall buildings.

She looked around and breathed deeply. The heady, fruity air filled her instantly with a careless, dizzy optimism, and an aching nostalgia that was sweet and poignant at once.

She and her fellow passengers were presented with flowers by tall, smiling Tourist Agency youngsters and shown the way to the maglev terminal; Malishu’s usual informality manifested itself in a total lack of any visible officials between the shuttle jetty and the maglev platform, and its renowned organisational prowess was demonstrated in the fact that an empty train had departed just before the passengers got there.

People stood on the open platform watching the winking light at the rear of the train as it disappeared down the causeway heading across the misty lake for the city.

Then groans turned to cheers as it became obvious the slowly flashing light had stopped and was coming nearer. Applause greeted the returning train.

She sat in the nose of the observation car, a huge smile on her face as she watched the great towers and sheet-membranes of the Entraxrln draw nearer while flocks of birds drifted across the lake on either side like huge clouds of lazy snowflakes under the clearing morning mists.

The Entraxrln was a couple of kilometres tall around the lake; by the time the city became evident, nestled, packed and crusted around and inside its vast dark trunks and cables, she had to lean forward in her seat and crane her neck to see the pale reaches of the topmost spindles and the slowly swell-waving membranes of the vast structure.

She sat back in her seat, still smiling. “Welcome to Embarkation Island,” said a recorded voice as they hurtled, slowing, into Malishu Central Rail Station. It shouldn’t have been that funny, but she found herself laughing along with everybody else.

The Entraxrln of Miykenns had fascinated astronomers on Golter for millennia before people ever set foot on the globe. Observatory records written on clay tablets thirteen thousand years earlier, which by some miracle had survived all of Golter’s frenetic history in between and even remained translatable, spoke of the several theories attempting to account for Miykenns’s strange appearance; white and blue swirls on one side, and a strange, dark, slowly-changing aspect on the other, rarely obscured by the white marks that always dotted what was assumed to be the ocean, and on which-with a good telescope on a high mountain on a calm night-distinct and swirling patterns could just be made out, like drips of pale-hued paints dropped onto the surface of a darker tint, and stirred into thin lines and creamy whorls.

It had been five millennia from the season that tablet had been fired to the day when people finally set foot on Miykenns and discovered the truth.

The Entraxrln was a plant; a single vast vegetable which must have been growing on Miykenns for at least two million years; it was, by several orders of magnitude, both the oldest and the largest living thing in the entire system.

It covered three continents, two oceans, five sizeable seas and thousands of islands. It controlled the weather, it withstood tsunami, it tamed volcanoes, it diverted glaciers, it mined minerals, it irrigated the desert, it drained seas and it levelled mountains. It grew up to three kilometres tall on land, had covered mountains eight thousand metres high, and tendrils had been found buried in volcanic vents in the deepest ocean trenches.

Its roots, trunks, leaf-membranes and anchor-cables covered the land beneath like an enormous, airy mat, producing something that looked vaguely like a forest-with trunks and layers of canopy-but built on the scale of a planet-wide weather system. Consequently, a physical map of Miykenns was as bafflingly complex as a political chart of Golter.

Humanity had been colonising the Entraxrln’s great domatium for seven thousand years, spreading out amongst its mountainous trunks and beneath its dim, diminishing layers, heading away from the clearings where they had landed to inhabit the plant’s bounteous commonwealth of levels and carve and work its trunks for dwellings and artifacts, and to trap or farm its various parasitic and symbiotic fauna and flora for food. Malishu, favoured by the great lake the Entraxrln had left uncovered for its own mysterious reasons-and by its almost central position in the vast plant-had been the planet’s capital for most of those seven millennia.

She hired a tri-shaw with a breezily prolix driver and found a small pension in the Artists’ Quarter, at the base of one of the city’s eleven great composite trunks. The fluted slope of the helically netted column rose into the haze and mists above, the houses and narrow, zig-zagging streets and bridges petering out as the gradient grew steeper.

She screened the city news channel before she went out; it held nothing about her or the Huhsz.

She walked towards the inner city through the lunch-time crowds inundating the markets and marquee an galleries; her nose was assaulted by smells she’d forgotten she knew; of the fruits, bulbs, flowers and tubers of the various plants that coexisted with the Entraxrln; of the rainbow-skinned fish and spike-mouth crustaceans from the lake, and of the cooked meats and potages made from the animals that lived within the great plant; jelly-birds, glide-monkeys, bell-mouths, cable-runners, trap-blossoms, tunnel-slugs and a hundred others. Painters and sculptors, silhouettists and aurists, scentifiers and holo artists called out to her from their stalls and tents, telling her-as they told everybody-that she had an interesting profile or skull or aura or scent.

A few stares and a couple of shouts convinced her that baldness wasn’t a major fashion feature in Malishu this season, so she found a drug store and bought a wig and some eyebrow spray, then continued.

She grew tired after a while and paid a few coins for the one-way hire of a bike into the inner city, riding a little shakily and trying not to be too touristically distracted by the gradually heightening buildings and. the cloudy canopies of Entraxrln membranes fifteen hundred metres above while the half-kilometre-wide trunk column around which the inner city had grown up-like dolls’ houses at the base of a great tree-drew slowly closer.

“You just walked out?” Zefla giggled, a hand over her mouth. They were sitting in a lunchbar at the foot of a Corp tower in Malishu’s central business district.

Sharrow shrugged. “Oh, I was just getting fed up with it all. I don’t even know what they were supposed to tell me.” She stirred her salty soup. “Maybe they just wanted to show me how clever they were, that we hadn’t fooled them.”

“But no more of those pains?” Zefla said.

“Not so far.”

Zefla nodded. She had dressed as soberly as she could, in a dark two-piece. Her height didn’t attract attention in Malishu, where most people were around two metres tall. She’d tied her hair up and wore a rather dowdy hat. “You got a gun yet?”

“That’s next,” Sharrow said. “How’s the Central?”

“Comfortable.” Zefla smiled. “Been done out since, but the Bole bar is still the same.” Zefla’s smile widened. “Hey, Grappsle’s still there. He remembered us. Asked after you.”

Sharrow grinned. “That was good of him.”

“Yeah; we told him you were on the run.” Zefla bit into her sandwich.

“Oh, thanks.”

“Obviously hadn’t heard the news,” Zefla continued, chewing. “He just seemed to assume it was a jealous wife.” She shrugged. “Men, eh?”

“Hmm.” Sharrow sipped her soup. “And where are the boys?”

“Cenny marched Miz and Dlo down the City Library before they could unpack properly. They’re trying to find out more about this Pharpech place; a lot of stuff’s only available on non-standard format DBs, and some of it’s on flimsies and paper, for Fate’s sake.” Zefla shook her head at such incontinent archaicism and tore another bite from her sandwich. “Probably hit the University stacks tomorrow,” she mumbled through a mouthful of food.

Sharrow sipped her soup until Zefla swallowed, then said, “Had a chance to screen the legal situation?”

Zefla shook her head. “Got all I’m ever going to get from the public data bases in about five minutes. Under System law the Kingdom of Pharpech doesn’t exist; the area around it’s still theoretically Settlement Territory under the auspices of the (First) Colonial Settlement Board, Defunct. That takes us back to the thirty-three hundreds, and it’s got much more complicated since; there are at least fifteen competing and mutually aggravational land-title disputes, all dormant for way over a century so technically moribund, but there are just bound to be loop-holes; I can smell them.

“Going as far back as it’s sensible to go, the Kingdom was created as a Dukedom by the Ladyrs in return for tap-mining rights on the territory outskirts; it was declared capital when the Ladyrs needed a casting vote on the Planetary Board and the burgers of Malishu weren’t being cooperative. The then Duke declared himself King when the Ladyr dynasty collapsed, the Conglomerate that fell heir to the tap-mining rights got a Title by Use deed over their patch, which seems to have been the only bit anyone really cared about-and which has been closed down for three hundred years anyway-and… well, apart from removing its status as planetary capital, nobody ever got round to sorting out Pharpech’s legal status.

“If you want an opinion, with eight cents of de facto existence the Kingdom’s been going so long a decent gang of greased-up legal hot-shots could swing Full Diplomatic Acceptance and even a seat on the Miykenns World Council under Common Law in under a year. But in the meantime,” Zefla said, “it’s in Nowhere Territory.” She smiled happily and waved her arms. “Just one of those little legal oxbows on the great flood-plain of System law. There are zillions.”

“You got all that in five minutes?” Sharrow grinned.

“Maybe ten; I lose track when I’m enjoying myself.” Zefla shrugged. “Anyway, I’ll be heading for the Uni Legal Faculty myself soon. See if there’s anything the public DBs have missed.”

“You don’t think there’s anything we’ll be able to use?”

“No,” Zefla said. “Buying some defunct mining claim, forging docs and pretending to the throne…” She shook her head. “Pharpech’s complexities all seem to be in the distant past; there’s no confusion recent enough to exploit. Unless I can dig up something very unexpected indeed, we aren’t going to crack this one via the legal route. I’ll keep looking, though.”

“Okay,” Sharrow said. “I’ll check out the travel possibilities, but assuming that doesn’t take long, let me know if I can help you or the boys.” She reached into her satchel. “Here, I got this phone…”

“Right.” Zefla tapped the code for Sharrow’s disposable phone into her own. “How’s your hotel?”

“Comfortable. In the Artists’ Quarter.”

“What’s it like these days?”

“Full of artists.”

“No improvement, then.”

“Even more twee, if anything.”

“And the hunkies?”

“I have a horrible feeling nothing’s changed there either; the good-looking ones are gay and the interesting ones turn out to be mad.”

“Hard times,” Zefla agreed.

“Hmm.” Sharrow nodded, a pained expression on her face. “It’s been too long,” she said. “I hear words like ‘hard’ and I’m in danger of sliding off my seat.” She looked out at the gentle, filtered light of afternoon… “Doesn’t help having all these huge fucking towering columns rearing up all over the place here, either…” She sighed. “I may be forced to desperate measures; I haven’t seen one for so long I’m starting to forget what they look like.”

“Well, hey,” Zefla said, looking amused. “There’s always Miz. He’d be up for it.”

She shook her head. “I know. But…” She looked away.

“Old wounds, eh?” Zefla said, washing her sandwich down with some wine.

Sharrow gazed away with a lost expression Zefla knew from over a decade and a half earlier. “Yeah, old wounds,” she said quietly.


“Good afternoon, Madam. How may I help you?”

“Good afternoon. I’d like a FrintArms HandCannon, please.”

“A-? Oh, now; that’s an awfully big gun for such a lovely lady. I mean, not everybody thinks ladies should carry guns at all, though I say they have a right to. But I think… I might… Let’s have a look down here. I might have just the thing for you. Yes; here we are! Look at that, isn’t it neat? Now, that is a FrintArms product as well, but it’s what’s called a laser; a light-pistol some people call them. Very small, as you see; fits easily into a pocket or bag; won’t spoil the line of a jacket and you won’t feel you’re lugging half a tonne of iron around with you. We do a range of matching accessories, including-if I may say so-a rather saucy garter holster; wish I got to do the fitting for that! Ha; just my little joke. And there’s even… here we are; this special presentation pack; gun, charged battery, charging unit, beautiful glider-hide shoulder holster with adjustable fitting and contrast stitching, and a discount on your next battery. Full instructions, of course, and a voucher for free lessons at your local gun club or range. Or there’s the special presentation pack; it has all the other one’s got but with tyro charged batteries and a nightsight, too. Here; feel that-don’t worry; it’s a dummy battery -isn’t it neat? Feel how light it is? Smooth; see? No bits to stick out and catch on your clothes, and beautifully balanced. And of course the beauty of a laser is, there’s no recoil. Because it’s shooting fight, you see? Beautiful gun, beautiful gun; my wife has one. Really. That’s not a line; she really has. Now, I can do you that one-with a battery and a free charge-for ninety-five; or the presentation pack on a special offer for one-nineteen, or this, the special presentation pack for one-forty-nine.”

“I’ll take the special.”

“Sound choice, madam, sound choice. Now, do-?”

“And a HandCannon, with the eighty-mill silencer, five GP clips, three six-five AP/wire-flechettes clips, two bi-propellant HE clips, two incendiary clips, and a Special Projectile Pack if you have one; the one with the embedding homing rounds, not the signallers. I assume the nightsight on this toy is compatible.”

“Aah… Yes, and how does madam wish to pay?”

She slapped her credit card on the counter. “Eventually.”

She walked away from the gun shop, the satchel heavy on her shoulder. She bought a newssheet and read it on the open-top deck of the tram she took back to the Artists’ Quarter.

She scanned the flimsy, thumbing through its stored pages on fast-forward and stopping to look closely at something only once.

She’d glanced at the race results from Tile.

One of the runners-up the day before had been Dance of Death.

10 Just A Concept

“Mmm. Hello?”

“Hiya, doll. Oh. ‘Doll’, that wasn’t very… Shit.”

“Get on with it, Zef.”

“Sorry. Meet me at the Crying Statue in an hour; how’s that?”

“Too damn succinct for a lawyer.”

“I’m out of practice.”

“I know the feeling. The Crying Statue, in an hour.”

“See you there, doll… Shit.”

Two women made their way from the Crying Statue in Malishu’s Tourist Quarter across the carved-open arc of Tube Bridge to the University Precincts. Above them, the mid-morning mists were lifting into the air amongst the stalk towers and stay-cables of the Entraxrln, obscuring the distant, under-ocean view of the highest membrane layers.

They walked quickly along pavements still damp from the morning smir. Sharrow, in a long dark dress and jacket and the high-heeled boots she tended to favour when going anywhere with Zefla, strode determinedly with her head up, a severe, slightly forbidding look on her face, discouraging contact. The striking, sternly poised face, dramatic auburn hair and precise, upright carriage almost disguised the fact that every second step was a slight fall, a tiny flaw in the pattern, a misplaced beat in the rhythm of her body.

Zefla strolled-long-stepped in culottes and a light coat-shirt-with an almost disjointed looseness, head moving from side to side, smiling at everyone and no-one, walking with a kind of easy familiarity as though she belonged here, knew these people, made this walk every day.

Heads turned as they crossed the bridge over the trickle-throated bed of the Ishumin rivet and entered the partially walled warren of the university; merchants at stalls lost the thread of their sales pitch, people using phones forgot what they were talking about, passengers at tram stops neglected to press the call-button for the next tram so that it rushed clanking past them; at least two men, looking back over their shoulders, bumped into other people.

Sharrow started to get uneasy as they passed through Apophyge Gate into the dark clutter of the Literature Faculty prefecture. “You sure you weren’t followed?” she asked Zefla.

Zefla looked mildly incredulous. “Of course I was followed,” she said scornfully. “But never by anybody with anything lethal in mind.” She put her arm through Sharrow’s and looked quietly smug. “Quite the opposite, I imagine.”

“I’d forgotten we could be conspicuous,” Sharrow admitted, but seemed to relax a little. She lifted her gaze from the cramped cobble-barks of Metonymy Street to the airy sweep of stay-cables describing elegant arcs above the distant grid of the Mathematics Faculty. She began to whistle.

They walked on, still arm-in-arm. Zefla looked thoughtful for a while, then smiled; a youth crossing the street in front of them with an armful of ancient books, caught unintentionally in the beam of that smile, promptly dropped the tomes. Zefla went, “Whoops,” as she stepped over the crouching student’s head, then gazed at Sharrow.

“Whistling…” Zefla said.

“Hmm?” Sharrow looked at her.

They stopped at a street corner to study a Faculties map. Zefla bent, hands clasped behind her back, inspecting the map.

“Whistling,” she repeated. “Well, it used to mean only one thing.”

Sharrow had an uncharacteristically broad smile on her face when Zefla turned back to her. Sharrow shrugged and cleared her throat as they turned to head up a steep side street towards the History Faculty. “Damn, am I that transparent?”

“You look tired, too.”

Sharrow rubbed under her eyes gently. “Worth every bag and line.”

“Who was the lucky fellow?”

“Musician.”

“Strings? Wind? Keyboard? Composition?” Zefla inquired.

Sharrow grinned at her, brown eyebrows flexing. “Percussion,” she said huskily.

Zefla sniggered, then assumed a serious expression, lifting her head up and enunciating clearly. “Don’t brag, dear; it’s unbecoming.”

“Ah, war is hell,” Miz Gattse Ensil Kuma said, sitting back luxuriantly in the perfumed pillows of the small canal-boat. He lifted the stemmed glass of slushed trax spirit from the boat’s table and sipped at it delicately, watching the gently glowing lanterns as they floated past them. The boat’s own lantern shone softly, creaking on the end of a bowed, spindly branch above them. People in fancy-dress passed on the canal walkway a few metres away, trailing streamers and laughing, their faces hidden by grotesque and fabulous masks. Above, over the dark city, fireworks blazed distantly, their flashes lighting up the layers of Entraxrln membrane and sometimes silhouetting the open weave-work of the composite trunks. The boat whirred quietly on along the raised, open section of canal.

Sharrow-actually, at that moment, Commander Sharrow of the anti-Tax League Irregular Forces Eleventh Clipper Squadron-sat across the little table from him. For the first time since they’d met almost a year ago she was out of uniform and not dressed in ease-fatigues or street sloppies. She wore a rainbow-mirrored half-mask that just covered her eyes and the bridge of her nose. It was topped by a cap of white and green-dyed lake-bird feathers; her dress was bright green, short, low-cut and clinging, and her legs, in the fashion of the day, were sheathed in a transparent covering of polymerised perfume-oil. She had long, perfectly shaped legs and they gleamed, they glistened, they glinted under the suspended lanterns that swung on bowed stalks over the dark canal.

He could hardly keep his eyes off those long, slinkily muscular legs. He knew the dry, slick touch of perfume-oil, the smooth, blissful feel of that slowly evaporating, few-molecules-thick covering; he had experienced it many times on other women and it was no longer quite so freshly erotic an experience as it had been once. But sitting here, alone with her in this little purring, gently bumping boat on the last night of the festival, he wanted to touch her, hold her, stroke and kiss her more than he could remember ever wanting any woman. The urge, the need was as scarifying and intense as he remembered from just before he’d first gotten laid; it burned in him, infested him, ran brilliant and urgent in his blood.

It was suddenly irrelevant to him that she was his Commanding Officer and an aristo-things that had, in some kind of piqued, invertedly snobbish way in the past prevented him from ever thinking of her as a woman (and a beautiful, attractive, intelligent one, at that; the kind he would normally know just from the first glance, the first word, that he would want to bed if he could) rather than his tactically brilliant but curt and scathingly sarcastic CO, or an arrogant over-privileged brat from Golter who had drop-dead looks and knew it.

“A toast,” Sharrow said, uncrossing her gauzily shining legs and sitting forwards. She raised her glass.

“What to?” Miz asked, looking at the colourfully distorted reflection of his face in her rainbow-mirror mask. His own mask lay on his chest, looped round his neck.

“Iphrenil toast,” she said. “The secret toast; we each toast what we choose to.”

“Stupid custom.” He sighed. “Okay.”

They clinked glasses. Masked figures dressed as deep country bandits ran along the canal, whooping and firing pop-guns. He ignored them and looked into her eyes as he drank from his glass. Here’s to getting you into bed, my commander, he thought to himself.

Her dark, mocking eyes looked back at him from behind the mask. A small smile creased her lips.

A flower grenade landed between them in the well of the little boat. She laughed a dark-brown laugh, electrifying him. She kicked the grenade over to him; he kicked it back; the perfumed fuse burned smokily. She trapped the fist-sized ball beneath her naked foot, watching it (and he could feel the SNB kicking in, this becoming a tactical situation for both of them, and he knew the possibilities and the potential courses she would be evaluating right then. He waited, in that lengthened instant, to see what she would do), then just as the fuse seemed to go out, she kicked the grenade over to him; he laughed, outlucked, and tried to kick the ball out of the way.

The flower grenade burst with a loud pop, scattering a cloud of colour all around him, surrounding him in a thousand tiny, expanding blooms. Some stuck to him; others were so small and dry they went up his nose and made him sneeze; the scent reeked.

He coughed and sneezed and tried to wave the flowers away, distantly aware of her clapping her hands and laughing uproariously. People on shore cheered and whistled.

He sat, wiping his nose on a handkerchief and brushing the sticky flowers off his dress jacket. Some of the blooms had landed in his glass; he wrinkled his nose, threw the scent-contaminated spirit overboard.

“Streme Tunnel!” shouted a ceremonially robed official sitting on a high seat on the canal path. “Streme Tunnel! Fifty metres!” He nodded to them as they acknowledged, waving.

Miz turned, looking forward over the bows of the small boat. Ahead, the tube-canal entered a wide basin where most people were decanting from their boats.

The circular canal-twenty kilometres long and one of two girdling what had once been the outer city-was really just an Entraxrln root-transport tube with the top half cut off; the section they were approaching now had not been sliced open, and soon disappeared into a dark mass of Entraxrln mat the size of a small range of hills and covered with the houses and tenements of Streme prefecture; Streme Tunnel was five kilometres long and took over an hour for the average boat to negotiate. Most people not asleep or amorously inclined tended to get out here.

He turned back to her, sighing and shrugging.

“Well,” he said, trying to put just the right note of regret into his voice, “it would appear to be de-boating time, up ahead.”

She set her mouth in a line; an expression he knew was not neutral, but which he still could not fully interpret. It might be annoyance or merely acceptance. Still, something in his chest seemed to release like a spring. Maybe, he thought.

She drank from her glass, frowning.

He sat back, deliberately relaxed, and crossed his arms. He thought quickly; do I want to do this? Yes. But it’s breaking the code we’ve all followed without ever discussing or agreeing it; no sex between neurobondees. With people from other groups, yes; with anybody else in the military habitats where they were based ninety per cent of the time, yes. But not in-group. Too many people thought it would upset the delicate web of anticipation and response that existed between the teams when they flew combat missions together.

I know, he thought, and I don’t fucking care. She’s the commander; let her decide; I want her.

So he uncrossed his arms and glanced back at the tunnel mouth as they entered the basin and the canal fluted out, broadening around them. He looked back into her eyes and said calmly, not too loudly, “So, what shall we do? Get out or go through?”

Her gaze slid from his eyes to the tunnel ahead, then back again. She took a breath.

She’s mine, he thought. Oh, don’t let me be wrong!

“What do you want to do?” she asked him.

He shrugged, adjusted a pillow at his side. “Well, I’m comfortable here…”

“You want to go through,” she said, the mirror-mask rising as she tipped her head back, as if daring him.

He just shrugged.

She looked at the people on the shore, and up at the sporadic bursts of fireworks above the city’s dark twinkle of lights. “I don’t know,” she said, looking back at him. And suddenly she was all haughty Golter noble, nose in the air, imperious and straight-backed, her voice commanding: “Persuade me.”

He smiled. A year ago, that would have been it; he’d have bridled at that arrogance, and laughed and said, Na, it’d be boring in the tunnel; let’s rejoin the others and have some real fun (and would secretly have hoped that she had wanted to go through, and so would be hurt that he’d said it would be boring)… but now he was a little older and a lot wiser, and he knew her better, too, and he was fairly sure now that he knew what it meant that she should suddenly revert to the behaviour of her earlier life.

And even then, even in that instant when he knew he was on the tremulous brink of something he wanted more desperately than he’d ever wanted anything before, and knew that it was going to break new and dangerous ground, and maybe endanger him, her and the others, and knew that he knew, and didn’t care, because life was there to be lived just this one time, and that meant gambling, seizing each and every chance for happiness and advancement; even then he found time to think, to be struck by the realisation: How old we have become.

Not one of us over twenty; her-this stunning, glorious creature in front of him-only just nineteen. And yet in the last year we have become ancient; from children to cynical, war-worn, half-careless, half-uncaring veterans who will take their enemies when and where they can in the darkness and the single-ship loneliness of the battle, coupling with them across microseconds of space, tussling and teasing and tangling with them until only one was left… and took their pleasures cut from the same template; total, intense and furiously concentrated involvement, immediately followed by utter indifference.

Persuade you, he thought. “Okay,” he said, smiling at her. “Come on through the tunnel and I promise I’ll tell you what I toasted to.”

She made a funny expression, drawing both ends of her mouth down, the tendons in her neck standing out. It was an expression he’d never seen on her before. He smiled despite himself, thinking how suddenly young she had looked.

“I don’t know,” she said, the mirror-mask looking down at her glass. “Then I’d have to tell you what I toasted to…”

She looked up into his eyes, and he wondered if it was possible to give a come-hither look from behind a mask. He settled back in the plushness of the cushions. Something sang in his soul. The tunnel entrance drifted closer.

Boat marshals called to them, reminding them this was their last chance to decant. People on shore made knowing, lowing noises and shouted ribald advice. He scarcely heard them.

“You’re persuaded?” he said.

She nodded. “I’m persuaded.”

He sat very still.

She reached up and took off the rainbow-mirror mask, just as the tunnel mouth came up to swallow them.

“This is it,” Zefla said. “31/3 Little Grant Terrace.”

The three-storey structure was even more darkly ramshackle than its neighbours. It was Malishu-vernacular in style, sculpted from bluey-purple layer-mat supported by fire-hardened beams of brown stalk-timber. It looked out over a narrow-railinged, bark-cobbled street to a view of the steeply raked roofs-some tented, some bark-tiled-of the Modern History Department, and out towards the city’s northern suburbs.

The place looked dead. The ground floor had no windows and the tall windows in the two upper floors were dark and dirty. The door, made from poorly cured bark that had warped and split over the years, hung crooked over a nailed-on extra sill. Zefla pulled on a string handle. They couldn’t hear any sound from the interior. Zefla tested the door but it was either locked or badly stuck.

Sharrow looked up at the guttering; a section hung loose, dripping water despite the fact the roof and street had now dried after the early-morning drizzle. She kicked fragments of a fallen roof tile into a weed-ruffed hole in the pavement, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “I take it being the world authority on the Kingdom of Pharpech doesn’t attract major funding.”

Zefla pulled harder on the string door-pull and stood back. “Maybe it does,” she said. “But the guy feels closer to the place living in an antiquated ruin like this.”

“Method scholarship?” Sharrow said sceptically. “More likely this is Cenuij’s idea of a joke.”

Zefla shook her head earnestly. “Oh, no. I can tell, he was genuine. I think he wanted to come himself, but he reckoned your man here would be more receptive to us.”

“Huh,” Sharrow said, frowning at the skeleton of a tiny animal lying just inside the doorway’s recess. “That description could cover a tankful of shit.”

A window creaked open on the third floor and a small, grey-haired, bearded man stuck his head out and looked down at them.

“Hello?” he said.

“Hello,” Zefla called. “We’re looking for a gentleman called Ivexton Travapeth.”

“Yes,” said the little man.

Zefla paused, then said, “You’re not him, then?”

“No.”

“Right. Do you know where we can find him?”

“Yes.”

Zefla looked at Sharrow, who started whistling.

“Could you tell us where he is?” Zefla said.

“Yes,” the little man said, blinking.

“Wrong department,” Sharrow muttered, folding her arms and turning to look back out over the city. “It’s the Formal Logic building and they’re working to rule.”

“Where is he?” Zefla asked, trying not to giggle.

“Oh, here,” the man nodded.

“May we see him?” Zefla said.

“Oh, yes.”

“Keep going,” Sharrow told Zefla quietly. “The Passports only last a year.”

“Good,” Zefla said. “Thank you. We’d have phoned or screened, but Mister Travapeth seems to discourage that sort of contact.”

“Yes.”

“Yes. Could you let us in?”

“Yes, yes,” the small man nodded.

Sharrow started to make loud snoring noises.

Zefla nudged her. “Please come down and let us in,” she said, smiling at the little man.

“Very well,” the grey-bearded man said and disappeared. The window banged shut.

Sharrow’s head thumped onto Zefla’s shoulder. She yawned. “Wake me when the door opens or the universe ends, whichever’s sooner.”

Zefla patted her auburn locks.

The door opened, creaking. Sharrow turned to look. The small grey-bearded man peeked out, looked up and down the street, then opened the door wide. He was pulling on a pair of floppy trousers with attached soft-shoes; he tied the cord and tucked his shirt into his trousers as he stood there, grinning at the two women. He was tiny, even smaller than he’d looked in the window. Zefla thought he looked cuddly.

“Good-morning,” she said.

“Yes,” he replied, and beckoned them to enter. Zefla and Sharrow stepped over the high sill into a dull but not dark space looking onto a small courtyard, partially shielded from them by a sheet hanging from the floor above. The air smelled of sweat and cooked fats. A grunting, wheezing male-sounding noise came from the other side of the grubby sheet. Zefla glanced at Sharrow, who shrugged.

“I hope you’re hearing that too,” she told Zefla, “or I’m more tired than I thought and flashing-back to last night.”

The grey-bearded man went on before them, still hitching up his trousers and tucking in the last few folds of his creased shirt as he bustled forward round the edge of the hanging sheet. They followed. The courtyard was small and cluttered; balconies ran round the two floors above, giving access to other rooms. A light covering of membrane made a gauzy roof above.

The floor of the atrium was covered with carpets and mats on which stood half a dozen over-stuffed bookshelves and a couple of tables covered with layers and rolls of paper. Exercise equipment in the shape of dumbbells, weights, heavy clubs and flexible bars lay strewn amongst the stuff of ancient scholarship.

In the centre of it all stood the tallish, gaunt figure of an almost naked elderly man with a white mat of hair on his chest and a shock of thick black hair on his head. He was clad in a grubby loincloth and clutched a pair of hand-weights which he was raising alternately, breathing heavily and grunting with each lift. There was sweat on his fined, tanned face. Zefla reckoned he was seventy at least, though his figure was relatively youthful; only the white chest-hair and a certain slackness round his belly revealed his age. “Ha; good-morning, lovely ladies!” he said in a deep voice. “Ivexton Travapeth at your service.”

He thumped the hand-weights down on a massive book that seemed to be holding down one corner of an age-brown chart, raising dust and making the table beneath shudder. “And how may this humble and undeserving scholar help two such radiantly pulchritudinous gentle-ladies?” He stood, arms crossed, biceps bulging, on the balls of his feet, facing them, still breathing heavily. His expression was somewhere between mischievous and lecherous.

“Good-morning, Mister Travapeth,” Zefla said, nodding as she stepped forward and put out her hand. They shook. “My name is Ms Franck; this is my assistant, Ms Demri.”

Sharrow nodded as Travapeth glanced, smiling, at her. “We’re researchers for an independent screen production company, MGK Productions. Our card.” Zefla handed him a card from one of Miz’s many front companies.

Travapeth squinted at the card. “Ali, you are from Golter. I thought so from your accent, of course. How may Travapeth help you, my saxicolous damsels?”

Zefla smiled. “We’d like to talk to you about a place called Pharpech.”

Ivexton Travapeth rocked back on his heels a little. “Indeed?” he said.

At that point the little man rushed out of the shadows behind the scholar, holding open a long grey gown. He jumped up and tried to put the gown over the tall man’s shoulders. He failed, and tried several more times while Travapeth boomed:

“Pharpech! Ali, dear, belovable lady, you utter a word-an almost magical word-which summons up such a welter of emotions in this well-travelled breast-” There was a hollow thud as Travapeth struck his white-haired chest with one fist “-I scarcely know where or how to begin to respond.”

The little man put the gown over one forearm and pulled a chair from beneath a table, stationing it behind Travapeth. He climbed up onto the chair and went to put the gown over the scholar’s shoulders just as Travapeth moved away towards a chest-high wooden stand holding a set of dumbbells. The little grey-haired man fell to the floor with a squeal.

Travapeth lifted the dumbbells from the stand, grunting.

“You say screen production company?” he said, straining to lift the dumbbells to his chin. The little man picked himself up and dusted himself down, retrieved the gown from the carpet and looked sulkily at Travapeth. Sharrow had her lips tightly closed.

“That’s right,” Zefla smiled.

The little grey-haired man scowled at Travapeth, then left the gown draped over the chair and returned to the shadows, muttering incoherently and shaking his head.

“Hmm,” Travapeth said, finally heaving the dumbbells level with the top of his shoulders and standing there panting for a moment. He swallowed. “I happen to know His Majesty King Tard the Seventeenth rather well,” he boomed. He smiled at the two women with a sort of radiant humility. “I was present at his coronation, you know, back when you two beautiful ladies were still suckling at the generous globes of your mothers’ breasts, I imagine.” He sighed contemplatively, perhaps sadly, then looked more serious as he strained at the dumbbells, and after a while relaxed. “And I have to say,” he panted, “His Majesty has shown… a consistent reluctance… to allow any sort of pictographic record… to be taken of his realm… which the modern world seems to regard as… bordering on the pathological.”

“We understand that,” Zefla said. “Nevertheless, Pharpech appears to be a fascinating and even romantic place, from what one reads about it, and we do feel that it would be worth some time and effort-by an experienced and highly talented team of individuals widely respected in their respective fields-to produce a true, factual and faithful account of life in what represents one of the last vestiges of a time gone by, miraculously still surviving into the present day.”

Travapeth seemed to strain again. Then he grunted; he put the dumbbells back on their stand and reached with a shaking hand for a stained towel lying crumpled on top of a bookcase.

“Quite so,” he said, shaking the towel until it uncrumpled. “But try explaining that to His Majesty!”

“Let me be candid,” Zefla said as Travapeth wiped under his armpits, and then his face. (Sharrow looked away.) “Our intention is to go there initially without any equipment-without even still cameras, if that’s what it takes-and perhaps, with your good offices, if that proves agreeable to you, establish some sort of understanding with whatever authorities control the sort of very limited access rights we’d require for the extremely respectful and tasteful prestige documentary production we have in mind.”

Travapeth nodded, blew his nose noisily into the towel and put it back on top of the bookcase. Sharrow coughed and studied the upper balcony. Zefla glided smoothly on. “We do of course recognise the difficulties involved, and we hope that-as a highly respected scholar and the foremost expert on Pharpech in the entire system-you would agree to act as our historical and anthropological consultant.”

Travapeth’sbrows knitted together as he flexed his shoulders and went to a sit-up bench, lying on it and jamming his feet under the bars.

“Yes, I see,” he said, clasping his hands behind his neck.

“Should you agree to this,” Zefla continued, “we would of course credit you on screen.”

“Mm-hmm,” Travapeth said, grunting as he did a sit-up.

“And, naturally,” Zefla said, “there would be a substantial fee involved, reflecting both the added academic weight your involvement in this prestigious project would contribute and the worth of your valuable time.”

Travapeth sat back on the narrow padding of the sit-up bench with a sigh. He stared up at the courtyard’s membrane ceiling.

“Of course,” he said, “financial matters are hardly my first concern.”

“Of course,” Zefla agreed. “I can well imagine.”

“But-just to give me a rough idea…?” He performed another sit-up then twisted, touching both elbows off his knees in turn.

“Might we suggest ten thousand, inclusive?” Zefla said.

The scholar paused, touching elbow to knee.

“Four immediately,” Zefla said, “should you be prepared to help us, then three on first day of principal photography and three on transmission.”

“Repeat fees?” Travapeth grunted, still swinging from side to side.

“Industry Prestige Documentary Production standard.”

“Single screen credit?”

“Same size, half the duration of the director’s.”

“Call it fifteen.”

Zefla sucked her breath in and sounded apologetic. “I’m not really authorised to exceed twelve thousand for any single individual.”

Travapeth sat back panting heavily. “Butler!” he shouted into the air, his voice resounding round the atrium. His sweatstreaked face looked upside-down at Zefla. “My dear girl,” he breathed, “you won’t need any other individual. I am all that you require; all that you could possibly ask for,” he leered.

From the corner of her eye Zefla caught Sharrow turning away with a hand stuffed in her mouth, just as the little man appeared from the shadows again, struggling to carry a huge hide bucket full of water.

“Fifteen,” Travapeth repeated, closing his eyes. “Six, five four.”

Zefla looked down, shaking her head and rubbing her chin.

“Well, then,” Travapeth sighed. “In three equal tranches; I can’t say fairer than that.”

The little man grabbed the chair with the gown draped over it and dragged it with him as he staggered up to where Travapeth lay panting on the sit-up bench; he climbed up onto the chair, heaved the bucket up level with his chest, then dumped the water over Travapeth’s deep-breathing, nine-tenths naked frame. Zefla stepped back quickly from the splash.

The scholar shuddered mightily as the water poured off him onto the mat beneath. He spluttered and blinked his eyes as his butler climbed down from the seat and walked away.

Travapeth smiled wetly at Zefla. “Do we have a deal, dear girl?”

Zefla glanced at Sharrow, who nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Ugh! Fate! Did you see his loincloth going clingy and see-through after the little guy poured the water over him? Yech!”

“Thankfully, my eyes were averted at that point.”

“And that stuff about ‘the generous globes of your mothers’ breasts’!” Zefla said in a booming voice, then squealed, hand over her mouth as they walked laughing down Imagery Lane through units and packs of students moving between lectures.

“I thought I was going to throw up,” Sharrow said.

“Well you shouldn’t have tried to put your whole hand into your mouth,” Zefla told her.

“It was that or howl.”

“Still, at least he seems to know what he’s talking about.”

“Hmm,” Sharrow said. “So far so plausible; we’ll see if Cenuij is impressed.” She nodded down the street to their right. “Let’s go down here. There’s a place I remember.”

“Okay,” Zefla said. They turned down Structuralist Street.

“Down here somewhere,” Sharrow said, looking around. The street was busy and edged with cafes and estaminets.

“Actually,” Zefla said, putting her arm through Sharrow’s again and looking up at the high membrane waving slowly two kilometres above. “Now I think about it, maybe I do kind of admire his brazenness.”

Sharrow glared at Zefla. “You really can’t hate anybody for more than about three seconds, can you?”

Zefla smiled guiltily. “Ah, he wasn’t that bad.” She shrugged. “He’s a character.”

“Let’s hope he stays a minor one,” Sharrow muttered.

Zefla laughed. “What’s the aim of this sentimental journey, anyway?” She looked along the crowded street. “Where are we heading for now?”

“The Bistro Onomatopoeia,” Sharrow told her.

“Oh, I remember that place,” Zefla said. She peered into the distance, a pretend frown on her face. “How do you spell it again?” she asked.

“Oh,” they chanted together, “just the way it sounds.”

She kept her cap down over her eyes and her boots on the rickety seat opposite. Her uniform jacket hung over the back of her own chair.

“Schlotch.” She said, and took another drink of the trax spirit.

“Schlotch?” Miz asked.

“Schlotch,” she confirmed.

“Mud scraped off a boot,” Dloan said, tapping her boot with the toe of his own.

She shook her head slowly, looking down at her hands where they were clasped between her uniformed thighs. She belched. “Nup,” she said.

Next round the table was Cenuij.

“A turd dropping into a toilet bowl,” he suggested, his gaze shining out from two black eyes he’d collected a couple of nights earlier. “From ten thousand metres.”

“Close,” she said, then giggled, waving one hand as the others started to heckle. “Na; na, not close at all. I lied. I lied. Ha ha ha.”

“The noise a-hic! shit-sock full of pickled jelly-bird brains makes when swung vigorously against an Excise Clipper escape hatch by a dwarf wearing a jump-girdle on his head.”

Sharrow glanced up at Zefla and shook her head quickly. “Too prosaic.”

Zefla shrugged. “Fair enough.”

Cara cleared his throat carefully. “The noise a speckle bug makes-” he began patiently.

They all pulled off their caps and started throwing them at him and shouting, “No!” “Choose another track!” “No, no, no!” “Fuck this goddamn speckle bug!” “Think of something else!”

Cara flinched, grinning under the barrage of caps, putting his arms out over the table so that his drink wasn’t spilled. “But,” he said, sounding reasonable. “It’s got to be right eventually…”

“Na, wrong again,” Sharrow said. She took some more trax. She felt drunker than she ought to feel. Could it be because it was on an empty stomach? They’d come to the Onomatopoeia for hangover cures and lunch, but somehow-it being their last day before another tour unless peace broke out-it had turned all too easily into another drinking bout.

Had she had breakfast? She accepted her cap back from somebody, and put it on over her crew-cut scalp. No, she couldn’t remember whether she’d had breakfast or not.

She drained the trax, said, “Next!” quite loudly, and put her glass down and pointed at Miz at the same time. Somebody refilled her glass.

Miz looked thoughtful. Then his thin, bright face lit up. “A Tax cruiser hitting another asteroid at half the speed of-”

They all started shouting and throwing their caps at him.

“This is getting too silly,” Froterin said, as Miz started to retrieve the caps. Froterin looked massively round them all. “Everybody’s starting to repeat themselves.”

“What was that?”

“Pardon?”

“Eh?”

Froterin stood shakily, his seat scraping back across the pavement, teetering and almost falling into the street. He put his hand onto his broad chest, over his heart. “But now,” he rumbled, “I think it’s time for a little song…” He started to sing: “Oh, Caltasp oh Caaaltasp…”

“Oh, Fate… My cap!”

“Give me my cap!”

“Mine first! I’m less drunk and I aim better anyway!”

“Throw something else!”

“I know!”

“Not my drink, you cretin; use his!”

“Oh CAAALtasp, oh CAAALtasp-”

“My ears! My ears!”

“It’s no good, sir; caps just bounce off it!”

“Oh no! His glass is empty!”

Vleit got out of her seat and tip-toed round to Sharrow while the rest tried to stop Froterin singing. Vleit had a wicked grin on her face, and when she got to Sharrow she crouched down and whispered in her ear.

Sharrow nodded vigorously and they both dissolved into fits of giggles and then throaty, coughing laughter. “Yes!” Sharrow nodded, crying with laughter. “Yes!”

“Oh CAAAALtasp, oh CAAAAAAALtasp, oh thank you very much,” Froterin said, and sat down with the mug of mullbeer Miz had brought him. He sat supping happily.

“She got it! Vleit-hic! shit-got it!”

“What?”

“What was it?”

“Come on!”

Sharrow sat shaking her head and drying her eyes on her shirt sleeve while Vleit got up from the cafe pavement, holding her stomach and still laughing.

“What?”

“That’s cheating!”

“What was the answer?”

“Not telling,” Sharrow laughed.

“You got to tell,” Miz protested. “Otherwise how do we know Vleit’s really won?”

Sharrow put her cap back on again and glanced at Vleit;they both started giggling again, then guffawing. “You want to tell them?” Sharrow said.

“Not me, commander.” Vleit shook her head, still giggling. “You tell them. Rank Has Its Problems; remember?”

“Yeah!”

“What was it?”

“Yeah; come on; tell us!”

“All right, all right,” Sharrow said, sitting up properly in her seat. Then, suddenly, she looked worried; her smooth brow furrowed. “Shit,” she said. “I’ve forgotten what the fucking word was.” She shook her head.

She put her head down on the table and pretended to cry. At least two caps bounced off her before Cenuij roared, “Schlotch!”

Sharrow looked up quickly. “You sure?”

“Positive,” Cenuij said precisely.

Sharrow sighed. “Yeah; schlotch.”

“So?” Miz said, arms wide. “What’s schlotch onomatopoeic for or with or whatever?”

“It’s the sound,” Sharrow said, leaning conspiratorially over the table, and glancing up and down the street. “Of…” She shook her head. “It’s no good,” she said with feigned regret. “I’m just not drunk enough yet to tell you.”

“WHAT?”

“Sharrow!”

“Oh, come on…Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Vleit; what the hell was it?”

“Sharrow; you said you’d tell; what is it?”

Sharrow grinned, fended off a flung cap then put her head back and laughed loudly while the others protested.

A timid-looking waiter approached from out of the bistro, holding a tray nervously to his chest as though it was a shield. He came up to Sharrow; she smiled at the young waiter and adjusted her cap.

The waiter coughed. “Um, Commander Sharrow?” he said.

“You read a good name-tag, kid,” Miz said, winking at him.

“Yeah,” Cenuij said. “Stick with us, we’ll make you a waiter. Oh. You are a-”

Sharrow waved them both to be quiet. “Yes,” she said, staring rather blearily at the youth.

“Phone call for you, Commander. Military.” The young waiter scurried back into the bistro.

Sharrow looked puzzled. She put her hand into the pocket of her uniform jacket, which was hanging over the back of her seat. She winced and grimaced, then brought her hand out covered in red goo. “What miserable scumbag put ghrettis sauce all over my fucking comm set?” she roared, standing and letting the red sauce drip onto the pavement.

“Shit,” Miz said in a small voice. “I thought I did that to Dloan’s jacket, back at the inn.”

“Dloan’s?” Sharrow shouted at him. She pointed at Dloan’s uniform. “How many bars on his jacket? One! How many on mine? Two!” she yelled, pointing at them with her other hand.

Miz shrugged, smiling. “I thought I was seeing double.”

“Fucking double guard duties,” Sharrow muttered as she strode past him towards the bistro interior. “Get that shit out of my pocket; now!”

“Must be strong stuff, that ghrettis sauce,” she heard Dloan musing. “Mil comm set’s supposed to be waterproof to a pressure of…”

Inside the bistro it was quiet and dark; only the staff were there. “Thanks, Vol,” she said to the proprietor as she took the phone.

“Commander Sharrow here,” she said, nodding appreciatively to Vol when he handed her a cloth for her hand.

She closed her eyes as she listened. After a while she said, “Comm set broke down, sir. No idea why, sir.” Her eyes screwed tighter. “Possibly enemy action, sir.”

She wiped her hand and nodded again to Vol, who went to sit at the far end of the bistro with the rest of the staff.

She glanced back through the bistro’s windows to the street at the group, who were trying to sort out whose cap was whose. She smiled, watching them, then returned her attention to the phone. “Yes, sir! On our way, sir,” she said, and made to put the phone down. “I beg your pardon, sir?” She frowned at her reflection on the other side of the bar, visible through the glasses and between the up-ended barrels. “The doc? I mean, surgeon-commander… of course, sir.”

She looked at her reflection again, shrugged at herself.

“Yes,” she said into the phone. “Hi, doc; what’s the problem?” She leant on the bar, pushing her cap up and rubbing her face. “What-? Oh, the check-ups.” She grinned at her reflection. “What is it; somebody taken a rad-blast, or are we talking exotic diseases?”

She listened for half a minute or so.

She watched the reflection of her face in the mirror go pale.

After a while she cleared her throat and said, “Yes, I’ll do that, doc. Of course.” She started to put the phone down again, then stopped and said, “Thanks, doc,” into it, and only then put it back behind the counter.

She stood there for a moment, staring at her image in the mirror. She glanced down at her shirt. “Shit,” she whispered, looking back up to her reflection. “And you’re pickling the little fucker.”

Vol came back round the other side of the bar with a tray full of dirty glasses. She started when she saw him, then leaned over, beckoning.

“Vol. Vol!” she whispered.

The aproned proprietor, burly-fit and placid as ever, leaned over to her and whispered back, “Yes, Commander?”

“Vol, you got anything’ll make me sick as a lubber?”

“Sick as a lubber?” he said, looking puzzled.

“Yes!” she whispered, glancing out at the others. “Filthy gut-grenaded,throat-scouring, turned inside-out sick!”

Vol shrugged. “Too much drink usually does the trick,” he said.

“No!” she hissed. “No, something else!”

“Stick your fingers down your throat?”

She shook her head quickly. “Tried that as a kid; got it to work on my half-sister, but never on me. What else?” She glanced at the others again. “Quickly!”

“Very salty water,” Vol said, spreading his hands.

She slapped him on the shoulder. “Fix me enough for two.”

She turned and walked towards the door, hesitated, then bit her lip and put her hand into a trouser pocket. She pulled out a coin and clutched it in her hand as she went out to the others. They looked up at her. Miz was still scraping her jacket pocket clean of sauce; the comm set lay on the table covered in red, like something butchered.

She spread her arms. “Well, they still haven’t sorted out the situation, guys,” she told them. There were various mutters, mostly of disapproval. “They’re still talking,” she said. “But meanwhile the festivities continue; looks like another tour at least. We’re overdue at Embarkation Asshole now.” She sighed. “I’ll go phone a truck.” She hesitated, then went up to Miz and presented the coin in her hand to him. “Toss that,” she told him.

Miz looked round the others. He shrugged, tossed the coin. She looked at how it landed on the table. She nodded and turned to go.

“Yes?” Miz said pointedly.

“Tell you later,” she told him, and went back into the bistro.

“Thanks, Vol,” she said, taking the glass of cloudy water from him and heading for the toilet. “Phone us a military truck, will you?” she called. She took a preparatory sip of the salted water. “Yech!”

“Commander Sharrow!” Vol called after her. “You said make enough for two; is that all for you?”

She shook her head. “Not exactly.”

“Bleurghch! Aauullleurch! Hooowwerchresst-t-t!” she shouted down the toilet-hole, and for a few moments, as her stomach clenched again (and she thought, Hell, maybe this’s doing the little bastard more harm than the booze would have), she listened to the noises she was making, and remembered the game they’d been playing, and actually found it all ridiculously funny.

Zefla watched Sharrow looking at the facade of what had been the Bistro Onomatopoeia, and which was now an antique bookshop.

Sharrow shook her head.

“Oh well,” she said. She looked down at a coin she held in her hand. “Guess that proves it.” She put the coin back in her pocket. “You never can go back.” She turned and walked away.

Zefla looked a moment longer at the bookshop sign, then hurried after Sharrow.

“Hey,” she said. “Look on the bright side; we’re looking for a book, and what do we find in one of our old drinking haunts? A bookshop!” She slapped Sharrow across the shoulders. “It’s a good omen, really.”

Sharrow turned to Zefla as they walked. “Zef,” she said, tiredly. “Shut up.”

11 Deep Country

She sat at the window of the gently rocking train, watching the Entraxrln roll past outside, the airily tangled, cable-curved vastness of it and the sheer size of the twisting, fluted nets of the composite trunks making her feel tinier than a doll; a model soldier in a train set laid out on the floor of a quiet, dark forest that went on forever.

Here the Entraxrln seemed much more mysterious and alien than it did in Malishu; it imposed itself, it seemed to exist in another plane of being from mere people, forever separated from them by the titanic, crushing slowness of its inexorably patient metabolism.

From this window she had watched hours of it pass slowly by; she had seen distant clouds and small rainstorms, she had watched herds of tramplers bound away across the floor-membrane, she had gazed at trawler-balloons and their attendant feaster birds cruising the high membranes, she had caught sight of the high, dark freckles on the lofted membranes that were glide-monkey troupes, peered dubiously at herds of wild jemers loping across open spaces with a strange, stiff-legged gait, knowing that they would be riding the tamed version of the awkward-looking animals, and she had seen a single great stom black, somehow ferocious even as little more than a speck, and with a wingspan great as a small plane-wheeling around far above, effortlessly weaving its way between the hanging strings and ropes of growing cables.

Zefla sat opposite Sharrow, one elbow on the opened window-ledge, a hand supporting her head. The warm breeze blew in, disturbing the blonde fall of her hair. Her other hand held a portable screen. Her head rocked slightly from side to side in time with the creaking, flexing carriage.

The compartment door opened squeakily and Cenuij looked in.

“Welcome to nowhere,” he said, smiling brightly. “We just left the comm net.” He withdrew and closed the door.

Zefla looked vaguely surprised, then went back to her novel. Sharrow pulled out her little disposable phone. Its display flashed Transception Problem. She clicked a few buttons experimentally, then shrugged and put the phone away in her satchel.

Sharrow glanced at her watch. Another four hours on this train, another day on a second train, then two days after that they might just be in Pharpech if all went according to plan.

She looked out the window again.

“And this is the view from the back of the Castle; that’s looking south. No; north. Well, more north-east, I suppose. I think.” Travapeth handed the holo print to Zefla, who glanced at it and smiled again.

“Enchanting,” she said. Zefla passed the print across the conference table to Sharrow, who hardly bothered to glance at it.

“Hmm,” she said, stifling a yawn. She passed the print to Cenuij, sitting round the table from her. He looked at it. There was a sour, disgusted look on his face. He studied the holo as if trying to decide whether to tear it up, spit on it or set it on fire. Eventually he put it face down on a large pile of prints lying on the table.

They had hired a small office in a modern block in the city centre; Travapeth-clad in an ancient and grubby professorial robe that had probably once been maroon-had visited two days in a row, drinking large amounts of trax wine on each occasion and holding forth at some length-and with gradually increasing volume-on any and every aspect of the Kingdom of Pharpech that Zefla, Sharrow or Cenuij could think of.

Miz and Dloan, meanwhile, were tracking down any further information they could find on the Kingdom in data bases and publications; they were also completing the travel arrangements.

Zefla and Sharrow had been worried Cenuij would take exception to Travapeth’s bombastic demeanour; with Cenuij, things could always go either way when he met people who had as high an opinion of themselves as he did of himself. They had waited until Cenuij was in a particularly good mood before they introduced the two men to each other. It had worked; Cenuij seemed almost to have warmed to the old scholar, but today, after lunch in a private booth in a nearby restaurant, Travapeth had insisted on showing them the flat and holo photographs he had taken on his visits to the Kingdom, from the first time he’d gone there as a student fifty years earlier, up to his last visit, five years ago.

“Ah,” Travapeth said. He brought another carton of prints up from the floor at his side, depositing the carton on the table and delving inside. “Now, these are especially interesting,” he said, plonking the thick wad of prints on the polished bark table. Dust puffed out from between the holos. Sharrow sighed. Cenuij, a look of horror on his face, glanced beneath the table to see how many more cartons Travapeth had down there.

“These date from twenty years ago,” Travapeth said, helping himself to a blister-fruit from the bowl.

Something small and red wriggled out from a hole in the bottom of the carton the prints had been in; it ran fast and eight-legged across the table towards the edge. Travapeth brought his hand holding the blister-fruit crunching down on the insect as he said, “These date from the time of His Majesty’s coronation.”

Zefla stared at the old scholar’s hand as he rolled it back and forth, making sure the insect was fully squashed.

“As I say,” Travapeth went on, absently wiping his red-stained hand on a different coloured stain already decorating the thigh of his robe, “I was personally invited to the coronation by His Majesty.” He polished the blister-fruit on roughly the same part of the robe he’d wiped the insect on, and then bit into the fruit, talking through the resulting yellowish mush and waving the dripping fruit around. “I shink thish shirst one ish a short of zheneral zhiew…”

Sharrow put one hand under her armpit and her other hand to her brow.

“Enchanting,” Zefla said, passing the print to Sharrow. It was sticky. Sharrow gave it to Cenuij.

“Ah,” Travapeth said, swallowing. “Now; still the coronation day, but here we have the ceremony of the holy book being brought out of the vault.”

Sharrow looked up.

“Holy book?” Zefla said brightly. She accepted the print from the scholar’s thin, age-spotted hand.

“Yes,” Travapeth said, frowning at the holo. “The monarch has to be sitting on the book, on the throne in the cathedral when he is crowned.” He handed the print to Zefla, a leery smile on his face. “Sitting on it with fundament bared, I may add,” he added. “The monarch has to bare his nether regions to the skin cover of the book.” The elderly scholar took another deep bite from the blister-fruit and sat smiling at Zefla as he masticated.

“Fascinating,” Zefla said, glancing at the print and passing it on. Sharrow looked at it. She sensed Cenuij waiting, tense, in the other seat.

The slightly blurred holo showed a crowd of serious looking but colourfully attired men holding the poles supporting an opened palanquin in which something light brown and about the size of a briefcase sat, resting on a white cushion. The by-now-familiar ramshackle bulk of Pharpech Castle rose in the background, at the end of the small city’s main square. She quickly turned the holo from side to side and up and down, but the image of the book in the palanquin didn’t reveal any more from other angles.

“What sort of holy book is it?” Sharrow asked.

“Which one?”

She pretended to stifle another yawn, and smiled apologetically at Travapeth as she did so. She handed the holo to Cenuij, who looked at it then put it down. He jotted something in his notebook.

“I have to confess, dear girl, that I don’t know,” Travapeth admitted, frowning. He took another bite from the fruit. “Shome short of ancient tome shupposhed to have been a gisht shrom-” He swallowed. “- the Ladyr Emperor to the first of the Useless Kings.” Travapeth waved the dripping fruit around. Zefla flinched, then calmly wiped her eye. “I of course offered to inspect the book for His Majesty, to determine its identity, provenance and importance, but in this was refused, unusually.” Travapeth shrugged. “All I know is that it’s an encased book, some sort of precious metal, probably silver. It’s about as thick as your hand, as long as your forearm and its breadth is roughly twenty-eight and half centimetres.”

Cenuij sat back in his seat, fingers drumming on the table. Sharrow felt herself evaluating the scene, trying to gauge just how much interest they appeared to be showing. Too little might look as suspicious as too much.

Travapeth crunched into the core of the blister-fruit, frowned and spat a few seeds into the carton the holos had come from. “The book’s never been opened,” he said. “Rumour is it’s booby-trapped, but anyway it’s locked and naturally there’s no key. I might have at least been able to establish the work’s identity had the old King not had it recovered-or rather additionally covered-in the skin of some revolutionary peasant leader some years before I first travelled to the Kingdom.” Travapeth sighed.

“It’s a very colourful ceremony, the coronation, isn’t it?” Zefla said, turning to Sharrow and Cenuij and tapping her notebook stylo on the table’s polished surface. Sharrow nodded (thinking good girl), as Zefla turned back to Travapeth, who was taking aim at the office’s litter bin, stationed beneath a window near one corner of the room. He threw the core of the blister-fruit; it thumped soggily against the wall above and fell behind the bin. Travapeth shook his head.

“It would make very good screen,” Zefla said to him. She glanced round at Sharrow and Cenuij. “I’d just adore to record something like that ceremony,” she said (Sharrow and Cenuij both nodded). “So ethnic,” Zefla said to Travapeth, her hands out in front of her as though supporting two large invisible spheres. “So… so real.”

Travapeth looked wise.

“I don’t suppose,” Zefla said, “the current King is thinking of resigning or anything, is he?”

Travapeth wiped his hands on the front of his robe and shook his head. “I believe not, dear girl. The present King’s grandfather did abdicate; he took himself off to a monastery to pursue a life of holy despisal. But King Tard… well, he’s not really the religious type.” Travapeth frowned. “He does believe in their god, of course, but I don’t believe it would be inaccurate to term his religious observances perfunctory rather than assiduous.”

“They don’t ever re-enact-?” Zefla began. But Travapeth boomed on.

“Of course, sudden conversions to extreme holiness have been known to occur in the present royal family, usually following traumatic events in the life of the noble person concerned involvement in an unsuccessful coup, being discovered with somebody else’s spouse or one’s own mount, finding one has been made general of an army being sent to root out guerrillas and revolutionaries in deep country; that sort of thing. But for a monarch to take up holy orders is relatively rare; they tend to die in harness.” Travapeth’s eyebrows rose. “Literally so in the case of the King’s great-grandfather, who accidentally strangled himself to death in a very unlikely position while suspended from the ceiling of a room in a house of less than spotless reputation.” The old scholar gave a sort of grunting laugh and grimaced dubiously at Zefla as he took a drink from a goblet of trax wine, and gargled with it before swallowing.

“Well,” Zefla said. “Perhaps we might be able to catch some other ceremony. If we do get permission to work there.”

“Certainly,” Travapeth said, belching. “There’s the annual rededication of the cathedral, the maledictions before the annual glide-monkey hunt-that’s quite colourful, and the hunt itself is exciting… Well, they call it a hunt; it’s more of a spectator sport. Then there’s the New Year mass-executions day, the debtors’ flogging festival… and there are always events celebrating the birth of a new royal baby or the King’s acquisition of some new piece of technology.”.

“Yes,” Zefla said, tapping the stylo on the conference table again. “These pieces of modern technology that the Kings purchase every now and again; I take it they have purely symbolic value?”

Travapeth shook his head. “Not even that, sweet lady; they are bought merely to remove any monetary surplus from the country’s economy. This, ah, apparently strange behaviour is designed to keep the Kingdom stable by soaking up profit that might otherwise lead to progress and therefore instability. This is the very reason that Pharpech is also known as the Court of the Useless Kings.” Travapeth frowned and gestured with his hands. “This might strike us as a rather eccentric way to rule a state, but I think we have to respect the Pharpechians’ right to run their country the way they want, and certainly one cannot deny that it works; there has been no progress whatsoever in Pharpech for nearly eight hundred years. In its own way, that’s quite an achievement.”

Cenuij made an almost inaudible noise and jotted something in his notebook.

“Of course,” Travapeth sighed. “This practice can be taken too far; I was present in the Kingdom when His Majesty the present King took delivery of his radio telescope.”

“I thought the area was radio-opaque,” Cenuij said.

“Oh, absolutely,” Travapeth said. “And of course there’s no break in the canopy for hundreds of kilometres. But you miss the point, my dear sir. The telescope was not bought to be used; there was nobody in the realm able to operate it and no electricity supply available anyway. As I have related, modern technology with the partial exception of the guards’ and the army’s weapons-is effectively banned in the Kingdom.”

The old scholar suddenly looked quite sad, and dropped his voice a little. “Even my own modest camera fell foul of this rule after the unfortunate business of the King being thrown from his mount while performing the annual capital boundary riding, during my last visit…” Travapeth seemed to collect himself, sitting straight in his seat and raising his voice again. “No, sir; the King bought the telescope because it cost exactly the amount of money the treasury had to spend and because it was totally useless. Although I believe he did enjoy sliding around inside the bowl for a while, which goes against the letter but not the spirit of the Uselessness creed… But no,” Travapeth said, and came close to scowling. “My complaint is with the site the King chose for his telescope, which was the old castle library; he had the library torn down and all the books burned.” Travapeth shook his head. “Disgraceful behaviour,” he muttered into his wine goblet.

Sharrow stared at him, then made a small note in her own notebook, just to be doing something. Oh shit, she thought.

Zefla was shaking her head, making noises of polite outrage.

Cenuij had stiffened. “All the books?” he said, voice hoarse. “Burned?”

Travapeth looked up, eyebrows raised. “I’m afraid so,” he said, nodding sadly. “They went into the castle furnace; coated the whole city in ash and black, half-burned pages.” The old scholar shook his head. “Tragedy, really.”

“Terrible,” Zefla agreed.

“And for the townspeople, of course,” Travapeth said. “As I’ve said; Pharpech experiences rain only rarely, and the roof-tax tends to discourage people from covering the top-most floor of their dwellings, so all that ash made a quite terrible mess.”

“Were any very valuable books destroyed?” Cenuij said. He gave a small smile. “I’m something of an antiquarian book collector in my spare time. I’d hate to think…”

“To be honest, I doubt it,” Travapeth said, nodding to Zefla as she refilled his goblet with wine. “Thank you, dear girl.” He looked at Cenuij. “Pharpech is something of a desert for bibliophiles, dear sir. There is no literary tradition as such; only a very few of the top officials in the Kingdom, a couple of family tutors and sometimes the monarch can read at all. Though, as one might expect, this has led to a rich oral culture. But no, sir; the library was a Useless purchase, bought a few hundred years ago from an auction house here in Malishu; it had belonged to a noble family fallen on hard times.

“All the rare and valuable books had already been sold individually; what the King destroyed was merely the standard collected classics most noble families favour instead of wallpaper to line one room of their mansions, though usually the wallpaper is in more danger of being read. Its purchase as a Useless article was arguably a change of circumstance of only a very limited degree. I very much doubt that the system bibliocontinua lost anything irreplaceable in the vandalistic conflagration. But dammit, sir, it’s the principle involved!” Travapeth said loudly, banging his goblet down on the table and spilling wine over the holos and the patch of table in front of him.

“I couldn’t agree more,” Cenuij said. He made another note.

“As a result,” the old scholar said, dabbing at a patch of spilled wine on the table with the cuff of his robe, “the only book left in the whole castle is probably the one the monarch sits on during the coronation. Whatever it is.”

“Hmm,” Sharrow said, nodding.

“Right,” Zefla said, laying her stylo down. “Tell me some more about these festivals, Ivexton; which ones would you say are the most vibrant, the most colourful…?”


“So what do you think?” Sharrow asked.

Cenuij shrugged and stirred spice into his mullbeer. “I suppose it could be what we’re looking for,” he said.

They sat, all five, in a private booth in a cafe near the rented office. Miz and Dloan had their route organised; it would involve taking a flying boat from Malishu to Long Strand, a maglev express to LiveInHope, then two slow trains to the Pharpech outlands border, where there was a small settlement they could hire guides and buy mounts in. They hadn’t yet booked any tickets.

“I thought the book had been lost for a lot more than the eight cents since the Ladyrs,” Miz said.

“Anything up to two millennia, depending whose account you trust.” Cenuij nodded. “But that’s just since anybody admitted to owning it. Maybe the Ladyrs stumbled on it when they were dispossessing an uncooperative family or sacking a Corp that hadn’t paid its protection money quickly enough, maybe it had never really been truly lost. Maybe they didn’t know what it was they had-just another old unopened book that might come in handy one day.” Cenuij shrugged. “Anyway, sending it to a coprolite like Pharpech when the anti-imperial heat was on must have seemed like a neat idea at the time.” He supped his ale. “It worked, after all; nobody’s found it, though obviously old Gorko had his nose to the trail.”

“So do we go?” Zefla said. She sucked on an inhalant.

“Well,” Sharrow said, “I don’t see how Breyguhn or anybody else could have set up what happened to Bencil Dornay; the pattern he traced was pretty unambiguous, and it sounds like there is exactly one book in the castle at Pharpech.” She spread her hands. “I think we go.”

“Keeps you out of the way of the Huhsz, too,” Miz said, rolling trax spirit round in his glass. “Caught a recent news report? They’re saying two heavyweight missions left Golter yesterday, one bound for Tront and the other headed this way.”

“I heard,” she said. “At least they sound confused. Any more interesting race winners in Tile?”

Miz shook his head. “Nothing since Dance of Death.”

“How we doing for funds?” Zefla inquired, apparently trying to hold her breath and talk at the same time.

“Fluid,” Sharrow said. “Barely used a third of our allowance. The only drawback is response-time; shuffling the credit trail so it’s difficult to follow. But that shouldn’t be a problem unless we need a lot of cash very quickly.”

Miz held his small glass of trax spirit up to the light, frowning at it. “What sort of funds are we taking to Pharpech?” he asked.

“Cash, gold, diamonds and trinkets,” Sharrow said.

(‘This looks cloudy,” Miz said, nudging Dloan and nodding at the trax glass. “D’you think it’s cloudy?’)

“Getting past the border guards might swallow a fair amount,” Sharrow said to Zefla. “But once we’re in, everything’s supposed to be cheaper than dirty water.”

“Which is probably about all they have to sell,” Cenuij said.

“Think that’s what’s in this glass,” Miz muttered, squinting at the trax glass. He held it in front of Cenuij’s nose. “That look cloudy to you?”

“We’ll have to play it by ear regarding the gear we can take in,” Sharrow said. “Apparently it’ll depend what sort of mood the border guards are in.”

“No other way into this place?” Miz said, sniffing at the glass. “Struck me we’re doing all this horribly officially. I mean, I was standing in a holiday agent’s today talking about travel insurance. I mean, travel insurance! Have we really come to this?” He held the trax up to the light again, then waved it in front of Sharrow’s face. “Cloudy/not cloudy; what do you think?” he asked her.

“There are lots of other ways in,” Sharrow said, pushing Miz’s glass out of the way. “But they’re all even more complicated, too dangerous and involve walking or riding enormous distances in the company of people who kill, capture or rob other people as a way of life; the border guards sound like nursery wardens in comparison.”

“I still say a decent pilot could take a chopper or a VTOL in through-” Miz began, still frowning at his glass.

“Well, you try finding a plane,” Sharrow said, “anywhere on Miykenns. Flying boats or nothing; that’s your choice.”

“Yes, Miz,” Cenuij smiled. “I think you’ll find a lot of people felt the same way earlier in Miykenns’ history; that’s why there’s so little cable and membrane clutter around Malishu, and why the extensive Pilot’s Cemetery is such a poignant feature on the sightseeing circuit.”

“I bet I could-” Miz began.

“Something else,” Zefla said quickly, slapping the table. “We are not taking Travapeth.”

“He might come in useful,” Cenuij said.

“Yeah,” Zefla said. “So’s a broken leg if you want to kick yourself in the back of the head.”

“No Travapeth,” Sharrow said, then frowned at Miz, who had taken a small torch out of his jacket pocket and was shining it through the glass of trax spirit.

Zefla sighed. “The old guy’s going to be awfully upset when we don’t make the documentary,” she said. “He was talking about a book tie-in. And he could use the money.”

“He doesn’t think we’re going to get to make the thing anyway,” Sharrow said, brows furrowing as she watched Miz sniff at the trax glass again. “He’s got five grand,” she told Zefla, “for three days of sitting pontificating, flirting like a gigolo and having wine and food poured down him; easiest money he’s ever going to make.”

Miz made a tutting noise and put the trax glass to his ear. He flicked its rim gently with one finger, an expression of deep concentration on his face.

“Oh, give me that!” Sharrow said, exasperated. She took the glass from his fingers before he could protest, put it to her lips and drained it.

Then her face creased into a sour expression and she turned and spat the trax out behind her, onto the age-stained planks of the booth. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “What did you do; piss in it?” she asked Miz. “That was horrible!”

“Hell, I knew that,” he said, looking annoyed. “But was it cloudy?” He nodded at the stain on the planks. “We’ll never know now.”

“Oh, stop farting about and go and get us a bottle,” she told him.

“Not if you’re just going to spit it all over the floor,” he said primly, turning sideways in his seat and crossing his arms and legs.

I’ll get us a bottle,” Zefla said, rising.

“Filthy peacemaker,” Sharrow said.

“Hey, Zef; make sure it’s not cloudy…”

The Entraxrln deep country was sinking into an early-evening purple gloom. The layers of membrane here grew closer and thicker and the trunks and stalks were thinner but far more numerous; cables looped and curved and hung everywhere, strung with great tattered lengths and folds of wind-torn leaf-membrane. There was no longer any real sense of there being ground underfoot; although the undulating landscape resembled a purple downland, it was a landscape in which great holes had been cut and huge suspended skeins of material added; some of the holes lengthened to tunnels and dropped into deeper, darker layers further down, while others narrowed and doubled back, and throughout this bewildering three-dimensional maze great roots and tubes ran, undulating across the maroon layers like huge blood vessels standing out on the skin of some enormous sleeping animal.

The captain stood in the doorway of the guard cabin and watched the group of riders and their pack animals as they plodded off into the slowly gathering darkness along the track to the capital.

The captain pulled on his pipe a few times, surrounding his head with a cloud of smoke.

The guard sergeant struggled up the steps towards the captain, holding two sacks.

“Claim they’re not tourists, sir,” the sergeant said. “Say they’re travellers.” He deposited the two sacks at the captain’s feet. “Not a sect I’d heard of, sir, must confess.” He opened the sacks up. “Least one of them’s dressed proper for a holy man; Order of the Book, he said; wants to try and give the King some books, sir. I told him the King didn’t hold with books, but he didn’t seem bothered.”

The captain stirred some of their booty with his foot. Bottles clinked; he could see the usual collection of cameras, a couple of sets of magnifiers, a civilian nightsight and some cash.

“Two of them were ladies, sir; veiled, they were. None of them fitted any descriptions of undesirables. Guides were known to us; regular fellows.”

The captain squatted down, boots creaking. He poked at a piece of mysterious-looking equipment with the stem of his pipe. The piece of equipment started to play music. He poked it again and it went quiet. He lifted it and put it inside his shirt.

“Quite generous they were, really. It’s all here sir, naturally.”

The captain reached into a sack and pulled out a bottle, putting the pipe back in his mouth as he weighed the trax spirit bottle in his hand.

“Oh, dear; I wouldn’t touch that one, sir. Looks a bit cloudy if you ask me.”

She woke in the night. Her backside was sore. The room was very dark, the bed felt strange and the place smelled odd. There was somebody in here with her; she could sense breathing. A rippling blue-grey light flashed, jarring a confusing image of the room across her eyes. She remembered. This was the inn called The Broken Neck on the square beneath the castle; a haven after the long ride on the swaying, cantankerous and rank-smelling jemers and two nights in rough, communal guest-houses in the dark deep country. Cenuij had gained entrance to the monastery hospitale while they had come here, to the two best rooms in the inn and suspiciously spicy food and strong wine which had made her fall asleep over the table. Zefla had put her to bed; it was she who was sleeping in the other lumpy bed across the chamber.

Of course, she thought, as another silent burst of lightning flickered through the windows, and she calmed.

I am in Pharpech.

She got out of the massive, creaking, bowed bed with its pile of coarse blankets and two slightly softer sheets, waited for another flash, then with the memory of the room’s image held in her eyes crossed to the tall windows. They had a balcony; she hadn’t thought it looked very safe when they’d first taken the room, but she would trust it. The window creaked a little when she opened it. She stepped outside, closed the window and moved sideways along the bark-clad wall to the cable-branch railing.

The darkness outside made her dizzy. She could feel, even somehow hear that she was in the open air, but there was no light anywhere; nothing from the sky, where the membrane cut out any celestial light, and nothing from-she couldn’t think of this place as a city-the town, either. Her fingers felt for the thin railing and found it, gripped it. Like being blind, she thought.

The air was a little colder than it had been earlier; she wore an extremely modest nightdress, and only her neck and ankles felt the breeze. She stood there, waiting for another flash of lightning, frightened of the balcony and the three-storey drop to the alley beneath.

The lightning was there; far off in the distance, seemingly half above and half beneath the higher membranes. The light revealed part of the four or five kilometre-wide semi-clearing around Pharpech town, and the nearby composite trunks. The town itself was a half-glimpsed jumble of geometric shapes curving away beneath her.

And there had been something else, half-glimpsed to her right, level with her, only a few metres away. A figure; a person. Her heart jumped.

“Sharrow?” she heard Miz whisper, uncertain.

She smiled into the darkness. “No,” she whispered. “Ysul.”

“Oh, yeah.” Miz coughed quietly. “Your dinner repeating on you, too?”

“No,” she whispered, wanting to laugh. “The lightning.”

“Oh.”

She looked over, trying to see him. Eventually the lightning flared again. He was standing facing her, looking towards her the way she was looking towards him. She suppressed a giggle. “Forgot your jim-jams, huh?”

“Hey,” he said, his whisper close in the utter darkness. “These balconies aren’t that far apart. I bet I could get over there.” He sounded innocently delighted, like a small boy.

“Don’t you dare?” she whispered. She thought she could hear him moving; skin on thin, heat-cured cable.

She stared at where she knew he was, as if trying to force her eyes to see by sheer force of will. Then she looked deliberately away, hoping to see him from the side of her eye. She couldn’t.

“Miz!” she whispered. “Don’t! You’ll kill yourself. It’s three sto-”

The lightning came again, and there was Miz, standing on the outside of his balcony, holding on to its railing with one hand while reaching out towards her with the other. She had time to see the expression on his face; eager, happy and mischievous, then as the blue light disappeared she heard his breath and felt the draught of air as he leapt over to her balcony. She reached out and grabbed him, fastening her arms round him.

“Madman!” she hissed into his ear.

He chuckled, swung over the railing and hugged her.

“Isn’t this romantic?” he sighed happily. He smelled of sweet male sweat and smoke and-faintly-of scent.

“Get back to your room!” she told him, squirming in his embrace. “And use the doors!”

He moved sensuously against her, working her back against the bark-clad wall; he nuzzled her neck, smoothed his hands down her flanks and to her thighs and behind. “Mmm, you feel good.”

“Miz!” she said, pushing his arms down and away from her, taking his wrists in her hands. He made a plaintive noise and licked at her neck.

Then he just broke her grip on his wrists and took her face in his hands, kissing her.

She let him for a while, and let his tongue explore her mouth, but then (seeing again, without wishing to, the billowing curtains and the stone balustrade of another hotel bedroom, light-minutes and eight years away from here, and his face above her, beautiful and ecstatic and lit by the stuttering spasms of annihilation light swamping the dawn above Lip City) gradually she calmed the tempo of the kiss down, and guided his hands behind her shoulders and put her arms around him, and moved her head to one side of his, and rested her cheek on his shoulder and patted his back.

She felt him heave a deep sigh.

“What’s a chap got to do to get to you these days, Sha-Ysul?” he said, sounding sad and a little bewildered.

She hugged him tighter and shrugged, shook her head, knowing he could feel each movement.

The Entraxrln sky above them lit up again as the lightning moved closer.

“Hey,” he said, raising his head. “Remember that time in the inn in Malishu, in the top storey, with the fireworks and all that stuff?”

She nodded her head.

“That was fun, eh?” he said softly.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, it was.”

She kept hold of him and he kept hold of her, and she looked out to where the lightning played, and saw another couple of flashes, and even heard a little distant rumbling, and then eventually he shivered in her arms and kissed her forehead and let go of her. “ I’d better get back and make sure Dloan’s still snoring,” he whispered.

“Come by the door, then,” she said, taking his arm and trying to pull him towards the open windows. He resisted, staying where he was.

“Can’t,” he said. “Our door’s locked. Either I go back the way I came or I sleep with you.”

“Or on the floor,” she told him.

“Or with Zef,” he whispered brightly. “Hey, or both of you!”

“You have my bed,” she said. “I’ll sleep with Zef.”

“You did that once before,” he said, sounding unconvincingly hurt, “and I was very upset.”

“Only because we wouldn’t let you watch.”

“True,” he agreed. “Is that supposed to make it better?”

“Are you going in through this window or not?”

“Not. I’m going back the way I came; Dloan’s snoring needs me.”

“Miz-” But he had already slung one leg over the balcony; she felt the wind on her cheek as he swung the other one over too. “Maniac!” she whispered. “Be care-”

The lightning came and he made his leap; he gasped, then she heard the skin-on-railing noise again, and he whispered triumphantly, “There. Almost too easy.”

“You’re insane, Kuma.”

“Never denied it. But I’m so graceful. Good-night, my lady.”

“Good-night, madman.”

She heard him blow a kiss, then move away. She waited. A moment later there was a muffled thud and she heard him say, “Ouch!”

She smiled into the darkness, quite sure that he had bumped into something deliberately just for a laugh, just for her.

The lightning swept above, flooding the enclosed landscape with a quick, sharp, monochrome light that seemed to be over before it had fully begun, and-in providing such vanishingly brief instants of contrast-somehow only intensified the darkness.

12 Snow Fall

They had been lovers for a few months. It was only the second time they had been back to Miykenns since the perfume festival and their ride in the little canal-boat through the long, dark, scented vein of the canal. They delighted in their luck; Malishu was celebrating again when they returned, just entering a huge retro binge of ancient costumes and sporadically cheap food and drugs as people celebrated the 7021st Founding Week.

They had dined and danced and drunk; they had taken a short ride in a canal-boat and watched vivid holos flicker and pulse in the air above the city, depicting the arrival of the first explorers, scientists and settlers seven millennia earlier. The holos went on to display a brief history of Miykenns which they both watched as they strolled hand in hand down the narrow streets back to their inn beneath the bare hill near the city Signalling Museum.

The last part of the holo display was made up of edited highlights of the current war. They stood on the threshold of the inn, watching. Above the city they saw darkly shining fleets of liberated excise clippers flying in formation; the bombardment of the laser pits on the Phrastesis-Nachtel asteroid bases; rioting miners on Nachtel’s Ghost; and a Tax cruiser blowing up. “Hey,” Miz said, as the blossoming light of the cruiser’s death faded slowly above Malishu. “Wasn’t that the one we got, out past the Ghost?”

She watched the secondary detonations burst like sparkling flowers within the sphere of glowing wreckage that had been the Tax cruiser. “Yes,” she said, cuddling closer to him, fitting herself around him. “One of ours, indeed.” She rubbed one hand over the chest of his uniform jacket. “Anyway, let’s get back to the room, eh?” She turned away, taking a grip of his shoulder and trying to pull him in through the door.

“Hell,” he said, allowing himself to be pulled. “We took those pix; shouldn’t we get royalties or something?”

Their room was on the top floor, a tall, wide space roofed with translucent woven Entraxrln membrane, bowed like a loose tent over the supporting poles and beams.

They made love sitting on the end of the bed, facing a wall of mirrors; he beneath her and she on his lap, facing the same way so that they could see themselves in the dim city-light filtering down through the translucent roof as he put his arms up underneath hers, gripping her shoulders, holding her breasts, rubbing her flat belly, sliding down to the tight curls of hair and moist cleft beneath while her head kept turning to one side then the other, kissing him as her hands moved up and down his sides and thighs, holding his balls as he flexed slowly under her and she moved, clenching and loosening, up and down on him.

They were panting, straining, watching each other, gaze fastened to the same place on the surface of the mirror, watching with a kind of eager, ravenous solemnity as they concentrated, wrapped up in the approaching moment, conscious only of themselves and each other; the whole world, the entire system and universe shrunk to this pulsed, focused joining with nothing else, nowhere else, no-when and no-one else mattering, when the fireworks burst overhead.

The light was furious, shocking. They both stopped moving to gaze open-mouthed at the membrane fabric above. Then, as the noise cracked and thundered down into the room, they looked back into the mirror together and started laughing. They fell back onto the bed, giggling under the multi-coloured lights inundating the soft roof above them.

“What lousy timing,” she said, laughing so hard she laughed him out of her. “Shit.”

“Corn-screen would have had it happen just as we came,” he agreed. He shifted underneath her and she rolled off.

She lay on the bed beside him, gently bit one of his nipples. “You’re not giving up now are you?”

“Hell, no, I don’t want to!” he said gesturing at the roof, where red and green lights strobed and noise like gunfire rattled. “But this is fucking distracting!”

She was still for a second, then bounced off the bed.

“I’ve had an idea,” she told him.

She stopped his ears with little bits of tissue she soaked with her own spittle, and then she did the same to her own ears. The noise of the fireworks was lessened, deadened.

Then she picked up her knickers, lying on the floor at the side of the bed, held them with both hands, and ripped them.

“Hey,” she heard him protest, voice booming dully. “I bought you those…”

She put a finger to her mouth and shook her head.

She tore the delicate, perfumed material into two strips. She put one black band over his eyes, tying it behind his head so that he was made quite blind, and then she did the same to herself, so that in that shared but separate, self-created darkness, and surrounded by that distanced, heavy, undersea sound, they made love with only touch as their guide.

She was blind. Blind and surrounded by mushy, roaring noises and she knew there were lights exploding all around. Some part of her wanted to find this funny because she’d been in just this situation before not all that long ago, but she couldn’t laugh.

Anyway she couldn’t indulge herself, she had the others to worry about. Worrying for all of them; that was her job.

Somebody was calling to her, quietly screaming her name.

Iron taste in mouth. Smell of burning. She felt another part of herself start bawling at her to wake up; burning! Fire! Run! The roaring noise filled her head. Run!

But there wasn’t anywhere to run to. She knew that.

There was something else to worry about, too, but apart from knowing it was important, she couldn’t remember what it was.

The voice in her ears shouted her name. Why couldn’t they leave her in peace? Her head tipped forward; it felt terribly heavy and large. Still a smell of burning, acrid and sharp.

Her nose itched. She reached to scratch it and her left arm suddenly turned into a pipe full of acid, gushing pain into her. She tried to cry out but somehow she couldn’t. She was choking.

She struggled to put her head back. Her helmet clunked hard against something that shouldn’t have been there. Of course; she was wearing a helmet. But it didn’t feel right.

“Sharrow!” screamed a tiny voice through the roaring.

“Yes, yes,” she muttered, coughing and spitting, She acci-dentally tried to make a be quiet motion with her left arm, and the pain tore through her. This time she was able to shout.

She spat again. Noises tinkled and whined in her ears above the continual roaring and the voices shouting her name. At least she thought it was her name.

“Sharrow?” she heard herself say.

“Sharrow! Come in!-Was that her? Keep-! Miz!-debris!-from this range! -only water!-Are you crazy?”

What a lot of babbling, she said to herself, and could feel her brow furrowing as she thought, Miz? Didn’t she have something she was supposed to tell him, some secret?

She tried to open her eyes. But she shouldn’t even need to do that, should she?

She was exhausted. Her left arm wouldn’t move, she felt incredibly heavy and cold and there were lots of other pains and discomforts clamouring for her attention now, too.

“Sharrow! Fate, Shar; please answer; wake up!”

Shut up, she told them. Can’t get any peace these days…

… They sailed through a tunnel. It was dark, but a little paper lantern glowed above them and the air was sweet. He had joined her on the pillows, lean and hard and eager and gentle. They had lain together for a long time later, listening to the warm water gurgle beneath them and the tiny hum of the ship…

The ship! Where was the ship? It should be here, all around her. She tried to shift in the hard, uncomfortable seat but the pain in her arm came back. She heard herself cry out.

“Sharrow!” a voice said quite distinctly in her ears.

“Miz?” she said. It was his voice. She wondered why she was blind and the ship wasn’t talking to her.

“Sharrow? Can you hear me?”

“Miz?” she said louder. Her mouth felt funny. The roaring in her ears pulsated away, heavy and insistent, like some too-quick surf pounding into her ears.

“Sharrow; talk to me!”

“All right!” she shouted angrily. Was the man deaf?

“Thank Fate! Listen, kid; what’s your status?”

“Status?” she said, confused. “Don’t know; what do you-?”

“Shit. Okay; you’re spinning. First we’ve got to stop that. You’ve got to keep awake and stop the spin.”

“Spin,” she said. Spin? Was that something to do with the secret she’d been keeping from him? She made a determined effort to open her eyes. She thought they were open but she still couldn’t see anything.

She brought her right arm up; it was incredibly heavy. She tried to bring it to her face, but the arm wouldn’t move very far. It fell back, crashing into something and hurting her.

She started to cry.

“Sharrow!” the voice said. “Keep it together, girl!”

“Don’t call me girl!”

“I’ll call you anything I fucking want until you get that ship levelled.”

“Prick,” she muttered. She pushed her head as far forward as she could and rammed her right arm up. Heavily gloved fingers thumped into her face-plate. It felt wrong; wrong shape, wrong place. Her nose hurt. Her arm was quivering with the effort of keeping it there against her helmet. She felt down to the helmet rim, took a deep breath, then pushed up.

Snap. She cried out with the pain. Her nose burned; blood filled her mouth. Her arm crashed down into her lap.

But the ship was back; it was there around her. The lid-screens swam into focus while the ship’s systems whispered and tingled and swarmed through her, filtering down through her awareness as the transceiver in her helmet spoke to the wafer-unit buried in the back of her skull. She felt around, looked at the lid-screens and listened to the music of systems status, the roaring in her ears reduced to dull background.

She was a force at the core of sensation. It was like floating in the centre of a huge sphere of colour and movement and displayed symbols; a sphere made of in-holo’d screens, like windows to other dimensions, each one giving a summary of its state and singing a single note of song. She only had to look at one of those windows and will shift to be there, looking down onto the details of that landscape-itself often composed of more sub-windows-all the rest of the screens reduced to a smear of colour on the outskirts of her vision, where a flash of movement or an associated change in their harmonics would signal something needing her attention.

She floated in the middle of it all, taking stock.

“Fucking hell,” she said. “What a mess.”

“What?” Miz said in her ears.

“Got status,” she said, looking round. The ship was a wreck. “Good fucking grief.” What to do first?

“Reduce spin or you’ll black out again,” Miz said urgently.

“Oh, yes,” she said. The spin was insane; she looked to the main tanks, but they were empty. The bow thrusts had some water left. She woke the motor up, swung it to operating temperature and pushed the fuel through. Nothing happened.

Why wasn’t the burn working?

Spinning too much. Wrong route. She closed off one valve, opened another; water hit the reaction chamber and plasma went bursting out from the ship’s nose. Miz was shouting something but she couldn’t hear what he was saying. The weight got worse and the roaring came back and became a noise like darkness.

She felt something snap.

Wrong way! she thought, vectoring the thrust right round.

The worst of the weight lifted slowly; the roaring went back to what it had been before and then gradually faded. Her body started to lift in the seat, pulling out of the squashed, crumpled attitude it had taken up. Give it ten more seconds. She opened her eyes. The inside of the face plate was smeared with blood. She closed her eyes, sought out the suit-view in the lid-screen display and shifted down into it.

The emergency controls gleamed in the back-up lighting. No holos. The flattie status screens were blown or pulsing red.

She turned her head to the left.

The port instrument bulkhead had come to pay her couch a visit. It felt like the port-rear ceiling had had the same idea. That was what was stopping her head from going right back; probably what had nearly ripped her helmet off, too. Her seat had been half-torn from its mountings by the impact, which had caught her left arm between the bulkhead and the armrest.

She stared. Could that really be her arm disappearing into all that mangled-up shit? She ignored the memory of the pain and pulled hard.

It was as though she’d slammed an axe into herself. Her head jerked around inside the helmet; she fought the scream but it forced its way out of her throat anyway.

She blinked tears away. Her arm remained pinned.

So much for that idea.

She moved her head. Looked like her right arm wasn’t in terribly good shape any more, either. She tried to move it but it wouldn’t cooperate. Numb. “Be like that, then,” she muttered, trying to sound unconcerned.

Physically brave, she told herself. Physically brave. That was the one accurate phrase she remembered from when she’d hacked into her service file (though it had been embedded amongst a load of nonsense about her being impatient and arrogant; how dare they?). Physically brave. Remember that.

She shifted out of helmet-view. The ship’s bow tank drained, the pipes emptied and the motor cut out. She reached to the main tanks, but of course there was nothing there. The back-up tanks were dry too. The ship was still spinning, but only once every eight seconds.

“You did it!” Miz shouted. Broadcasting on radio; the comm laser was dead.

She attempted to sort some sense out of the nav gear’s gibberish and tried the ship’s external sensors, but they came up fuzz-grey. The back-ups were out, too, apart from one non-holo camera in the bow, fixed staring straight ahead. All it showed were lots of nebulae, a glimpse of a white disc ahead with a reddish-golden disc behind it, then nebulae again, then the white-disc/red-gold disc combination again, and so on.

“Where the hell am I?” she said.

“Can’t read you,” Miz said. “Open a data channel.”

“Only got input,” she said. “It’s open.”

“Shit,” he said. “Okay, here’s what I have.”

The nav gear started acting sensibly again. She was still on the Outside of Nachtel’s Ghost, about a quarter second Inwards from the engagement position, tumbling and twisting towards the moon.

“Right,” she said. “Just let me get my bearings here…”

The external view she had now-flagged as thousand magnification-showed a wrecked excise clipper spinning slowly in front of her, its black hull flayed and pitted, its rear end gone, ruptured plates fluting tumorously from the craft’s waist to shred away to nothing from about three-quarters of the way back, ending in a glinting mess of shining metal.

There was something biological, even sexual about the ruined ship, its matt-black skin like dull clothes ripped apart to reveal the flesh beneath, exposed and open. She’d never seen a ship so badly damaged.

She thought, Poor fucker; lift that driver’s chow-bucket off its hook and send it back to Stores… then realised that this was the view from Miz’s ship; he was following her, and what she was looking at was her own craft. She was the unfortunate pilot she’d been consigning to oblivion.

She selected trajectory forecast while she looked at the doc window. The medical unit seemed to have given up on her. Then she remembered where the doc’s tubes plugged into her. She shifted back to helmet-view, staring at where her left forearm disappeared between the bulging instrument bulkhead and the seat armrest; the gap was about three centimetres. Hmm, she thought.

She shifted back to nav; she was heading straight for Nachtel’s Ghost. The icy little world was still nearly a tenth of a light-second away and it would take her the best part of an hour to get there, but she was going to go right down the throat of the gravity well. Even if she could miss Nachtel’s Ghost she’d be pointing at Nachtel itself, with no way to miss it; seen from its barely habitable moon, the gas giant filled half the sky. She’d have to sling-shot.

Instinctively, she reached again for the main tanks.

“Shit,” she said.

She glanced at the group-status holo which had been part of the squirt Miz had sent. “Miz!” she shouted. “The others!”

“Vleit and Frot are dead,” Miz said quickly. “Zef’s chasing Cara but getting no reply. Kid, there’s nothing you can-”

“You’ve got damage, too!” she said.

“Yeah, some laser-work from the cruiser and ice abrasion from that water-screen you left behind when you got zapped-”

“Miz,” she whispered, “are-?”

“I’m sure, Sharrow,” Miz said, his voice thick. “Dead and gone. Probably never knew what hit them.”

“How did they do this to us?” she said.

“I don’t know,” Miz said wearily. “Cenuij wants to call War Crime on that engagement; says nobody reacts that fast and there must have been an AI in charge; I think we just got out-lucked. Cruiser took some damage and flared home; now forget about the engagement! Have you any reaction mass? We have to get you into orbit around the Ghost.”

She’d shifted into life support. “No point,” she said. “The recycler’s wrecked and I’m losing gas; I’ve enough to breathe for about… two hours, then that’s it.”

“That suit or cabin?”

“Suit. Cabin’s got less; pressure leak.”

“Shit,” Miz said. She could almost hear him thinking. “The doc,” he said. “It could floor your metabolism and-”

“The doc,” she said, “is fucked.”

“Damn,” he said. It was such a mild curse she almost laughed. “Could you bail out?” he asked her. “I could match with you; you could zap across… or I could get over to you…”

“I don’t think there’s quite the time,” she said. She glanced into suit-view and looked briefly at her one trapped and one… broken? dislocated? arm. “There might be other problems with that approach, anyhow.”

“What about reaction mass?”

She glanced around. “Nothing.”

“Come on! There must be something! Check!”

She initiated a checking routine, and looked carefully at each tank glyph in turn. The check routine said zero everywhere and staying that way. Her own senses told her the same thing. She tried blipping the feed from each tank in turn, just in case there was water there and it was a sensor or display fault.

“Nothing,” she said. “Displaying empty; acting empty.”

“Think think think,” she heard Miz mutter. She suspected he hadn’t meant her to hear that, or had simply been unaware he was speaking. Suddenly she wanted to hold him, and started to cry again. She did it quietly, so he wouldn’t hear.

“This might sound mad,” he said. “But I could use my laser; hit you in the right place, get some reaction that way…”

“It does sound mad,” she said.

“There’s got to be something!” She could hear the desperation in his voice.

“Hey,” she said. “Want to hear another crazy idea?”

“Anything.”

“Crash-land on the Ghost.”

What?”

“Cruise in and crash-land, like a plane.”

“You haven’t got any wings!”

“I’ve got a shape that looks vaguely aerodynamic; bit like the end of a spiked gun. And there’s the snow-fields.”

“What?”

“The snow-fields,” she said. “They’re hundreds of metres deep on the Ghost, in places; lo-grav. And there’s air.”

“Pretty thin air.”

“Getting thinner all the time,” she agreed. “Unbreathable in another thousand years; crap terraforming… but it’s there.”

“But how you going to fly?”

“Oh, I can’t,” she said, taking another look round the ship’s systems from the highest level. What a total fucking mess. If this was a simulation, she’d be clicking out now and hitting Replay to go back to just before it had all gone so horribly wrong, and try again.

“It was just an idea,” she told him. “I used to wake up in the night and try to think up ways out of horrible situations to get me back to sleep, and one idea I had was using the Ghost’s snow-fields to crash-land on.” She sighed. “But I always imagined I’d have some control as I went in.”

She shook her head at the unsaveable mess around her and swooped back into close-range nav view. “I think I’m dead, Miz.” She listened to her own voice, and was amazed at how cool she sounded. Physically brave.

“Forget it. I’ll run that idea of the crash-land past the machine; see what it thinks.”

“Aw, don’t spoil my fun,” she said. “I never even ran it through mine…”

“Fucking hell,” she heard him say after a while. “My machine’s as crazy as you.”

“It says it’ll work?”

“Um, three-quarters empty mass… drag… need details of the snow compression, depth it becomes ice… depends on the angle… no; the machine’s not quite as crazy as you. And you’d need some fine-tuning, in-atmosphere, at the start anyway…”

“Run an insertion past the machine anyway,” she said.

“Running it.”

“At least it’d be spectacular,” she said. “Burning up in the atmosphere or slamming into the snow. Better than hazing out from oxygen starvation.”

“Don’t talk like that!… Shit, there must be something…”

She had remembered some time ago what the secret was. “Hey,” she said gently. “Miz?”

“What?”

“Pick a number between one and two.”

What?”

“Pick a whole number between one and two. Please.”

“Oh… one,” he said. She smiled sadly. “Well?” he said.

He said it the way he had when she’d got him to toss the coin outside the Bistro Onomatopoeia, a week earlier.

She shook her head, even though it hurt and he couldn’t see.

“Nothing,” she said. “Tell you later.” She shifted back to the doc, down into the external read-outs. Cabin cold, external air poor and pressure falling. Aggregate radiation dosage… Oh, well. She felt herself shrug and grimaced as her left arm protested. She was going to die, anyway; she wouldn’t live long enough to experience the radiation sickness. And I’d have made a lousy mother anyway, she told herself.

She kept wanting to press Replay, to snap out of this disastrous simulation and start again, or just break the link and go for a drink with the guys. It didn’t feel right that she was trapped in this situation as firmly as she was trapped in the seat, pinned there by the weight of circumstance and chance.

At first, when she’d joined up, she’d thought she could never be one of the dead ones. She told herself they must have made a mistake, and she just wasn’t going to.

Later she’d started to get scared sometimes, when pilots she’d thought even better than she had died. Had she been wrong about how good they were, or wrong about skill saving you every time? Maybe it didn’t. Maybe luck did come into it. And that made it frightening, because nobody knew how to train for that. You carried a lucky tooth or a special letter or always made sure you were last out of the mess; she’d known people who did that sort of thing… A lot of them were dead, too.

“Look,” Miz said, “I’m still catching up with you; I’ll match velocities. I’ll get over to you. It can’t take-”

“Miz,” she said, quieting him. “No.” She let out a long, ragged sigh. “I’m trapped in here. I’d have to be cut out.”

“Oh, shit,” he groaned.

The way he said it, she knew he was talking about something else. “What?” she said.

“You don’t need that much to take you into the Ghost’s atmosphere at the right angle,” he said. “Just a nudge; a few seconds’ burst… Hey!” His voice brightened again. “I’ll nudge you! I’ll just fly alongside and-”

“Forget it; you’ll just break your own ship…”

“Look, if we can’t think of anything-”

“Wait,” she said.

“What?”

She reached into the ship’s plumbing, found no read-out for the relevant section of pipe, but the record of valves shut…

“Hey,” she said. “You know I put the thrust the wrong way at first; made the spin worse?”

“Yeah?”

“I got confused because before that I tried sending the water round the loop against the spin.”

“So?”

“So there might be water in the closed section of loop.”

“Isn’t it showing?”

“No read-out.”

“Shit,” he said. “There might be some in there.”

“Yes, and it might be frozen,” she said, shifting into the ship’s patchy temperature map.

“Hold on,” he said. “I’ll run it through…” His voice went away. She was left alone for a few moments.

She’d always expected to be re-living her life at this point, but it didn’t seem to be happening. She felt cold and battered and tired. This combat flying lark was supposed to have been just a little exotic incident in her life, something to tell people about when she was old. It had never been meant to get this important, never been planned to be this crucial and ghastly and hopeless. It certainly wasn’t supposed to be the end of everything. It couldn’t all just end, could it?

Yes it could, she thought. Somehow she’d never really thought about it before, but yes; of course it could. She didn’t just accept it now; she knew it now. What a time to learn that particular lesson.

“Yeah!” Miz hollered. “If it’s there, there’s enough!”

“Well,” she said. “We won’t know until we try.”

“But you’ve got reaction mass!” he yelled. “You can do it!”

“Two minutes ago you were telling me I was crazy to even think about this; now suddenly it’s a great idea.”

“It’s a chance, kid,” he said, quieter. There was something else in his voice, too; the equivalent of one arm holding some surprise behind his back, and a sly smile on his face.

“And?” she said.

“I just ran a routine for your in-atmosphere control.”

“Using your astonishing powers of laser control, you will fashion a pair of crude but serviceable wings from-”

“Quiet, smart-ass; dig down to the clip’s non-mil suite.”

“Pardon? Oh all right.” She shifted down the systems root to the clipper’s full display. What was this heap of civilian shit meant to do? Was he just trying to distract her?

“See the gyros?”

Gyros? No.”

“Labelled FTU1 and 2; Fine Trimming Units.”

“Yes,” she said. “Well, the bow cluster, anyway. Shit, I thought those were stripped when these boats were militarised.”

“They never got around to it,” Miz told her. “Now, can you get power to that bow cluster?”

“Yes. But wouldn’t it be better-?”

“No; it doesn’t matter that you’re tumbling on insertion if we get the burn timed right and you might need all the manoeuvring power in those gyros.”

“All right, all right,” she said. “They’re taking power.”

“Okay!” he yelled. “We’ll re-work the figures when we’re closer. Now, I’m going to try and match velocities; that should make things more accurate. Get ready for some incredibly skilful flying on the part of the Tech King, and then be ready to read out lots and lots of exciting numbers once I’m alongside, unless you can get the output comm link sorted.”

“Can’t wait,” she said, the tiredness tingling through her. She just wanted to sleep. She forgot about her left arm for a second and tried to stretch.

She cut off the shout of pain as fast as she could.

“What?” Miz’s voice said quickly.

She breathed hard a couple of times.

“I just remembered I paid my mess bill yesterday,” she lied.

“Wow.” Miz laughed. “You really do tempt fate, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said. “It must be male.”

“That’s more like it,” he said. “Okay; let’s see if I can get this thing spinning and twisting like yours…”

“Okay,” he said, and she could hear the fear in his voice. “Here we go, kid.”

They had talked it through for the last half hour; she’d given him all the data she could, he’d run it past his machine dozens of times and every time it came out Maybe. She’d got the gyros up to speed, braked each one in turn and the ship had responded. She’d settled on a routine that would let her use the gyros to control the ship during its descent through the atmosphere of Nachtel’s Ghost.

They’d done a tenth-second burst from the pipes into the reaction chamber and got power; there was water in the pipe and it wasn’t frozen. They’d got a recent snow-field map of the Ghost from their base via Dloan, who was escorting Cenuij’s damaged craft back there; they’d selected a big snow-field on the equator. Miz had shown her the view he had of her ship, perfectly parallel with his own and slowly rolling while the rest of the system revolved around it. She’d complimented him on his flying and tried not to look too closely at the damage.

But now he had to move away, and she had to make that last burn, hoping the water in the pipe-work would be enough, and it hadn’t frozen somewhere further up the duct, and that the pump would work, and that the power didn’t fail, or even fluctuate.

“You take care now,” she said.

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “Thirty seconds.”

“Me, worry?” she said, trying not to let him hear the fear and pain in her voice. She was finding it more of a strain now. Her arm was hurting really badly and she was frightened. She wanted to tell Miz that there was a precedent for all this, that when she’d been five years old she’d been saved by a fall into the snow, but she had never been able to tell him that full story, and he had never pressed her for it. She wanted to tell him she loved hint and she was pregnant by him, but she couldn’t tell him any of that, either.

“Look, ah… kid,” he said (and she just knew he’d be grimacing now, and that if he hadn’t had the helmet on he’d be scratching the side of his head), “I know there’s… you know; things we haven’t said during the last few months; I mean, me and you, since we’ve been, you know, well, together, but-”

“You’re making a complete mess of this, Miz,” she told him, her voice matter-of-fact while her eyes filled with tears. “Don’t say anything else now. Tell me later. Ten seconds.”

He was silent for six of them.

Eventually he said, “Good luck, Sharrow.”

She was still thinking what to say in reply when she opened the valve, the motor roared in the distance and she had to devote all her attention to the attitude and heading readings. She shifted to the view through the one little flattie camera in the craft’s nose.

The planet came up to meet her; a curved white wall. The ship encountered the atmosphere’s outer layers. She tried the radio and heard interference. “Miz?” she said.

“… ust hear y-”

She shouted, “If this goes badly and I make a crater, I want it named after me!”

If he replied, she never heard him.

The falling ship ploughed deeper into the planet’s atmosphere and began to judder and moan.

The five of them sat on the tavern terrace a little outside Pharpech city, she with her memories.

The others watched the huge stom as it wheeled and banked above the deep country a kilometre east of the tavern, beating back up towards the middle-layer of Entraxrln membrane it had cruised down from earlier. The monkey-eater birds mobbed it, stooping at its back and head in great plummeting circles, turning quickly this way and that, zig-zagging erratically, unpredictably, wings like jagged hooks in the air. The stom, four times the size of the monkey-eaters, moved with a ponderous grace that approached dignity, as it ducked its massive reptilian head and took what ponderous, almost gentle evasive action it was able to.

“Come on, baby,” Zefla said. Sharrow had handed her the binoculars; Miz watched through another pair of field-glasses.

“Put some effort in there,” Miz muttered.

Sharrow looked at Dloan, squinting in the same direction. His hands gripped the bark rail of the tavern porch, squeezing and releasing unconsciously.

She watched the stom as it struggled higher in the air, still beset by the scrappy, mobbing shapes of the monkey-eaters.

One of them was still falling.

The four of them had come out here for dinner at an inn called The Pulled Nail on the outskirts of the town after a day spent sightseeing. Cenuij hadn’t been in touch since they’d left him at the door of the monastery hospitale the night before; he was supposed to be trying to get an audience with the King. He would leave word at the inn if he had anything to report.

Pharpech in daylight hadn’t looked so bad. The people seemed friendly enough, though their accent was difficult to understand, and they had decided half-way through the day that they’d buy local clothes tomorrow; theirs made them too conspicuous, and people tended to ask them-in those strange accents, and with a hint of incredulity-what had possessed them to come to a place like Pharpech.

One of the things she’d found it hard to get used to was how difficult it was to access information. All it really meant, most of the time, was that you had to resort to rather obvious methods like asking people directions, or what a certain building was; nevertheless it was unsettling, and despite all her supposed maturity and sophistication she had the unnerving feeling that she was a child again, trapped in a baffling world of mysterious intent and arcane significance, forever making guesses at how it all worked but never knowing exactly the right questions to ask.

The first thing they’d done, on the advice of their two guides who were setting off back to the border that morning, was take their jemer mounts to a stable on the outskirts of town, where they sold the creatures-after much haggling on Miz’s part for slightly more than they’d paid for them. Then they became tourists for the day.

They had seen the great square in daylight, its flat, mostly un-roofed buildings crowded round the sloped paving stones like a strange rectangular crowd of people, all squashed up shoulder-to-shoulder, grimly determined not to miss whatever was going on in the square (and yet most of them were gaily painted and sported bright, full awnings, hiding little work-shops and stalls like shiny shoes peeking out from under the just-raised skirts of their canopies).

They had found the people fairly fascinating, too. A few of them rode on jemers though most were on foot like them, the crowding majority of then colourfully if simply dressed, but apart from their almost invariably pale skin-far more physically varied than they were used to; very fat people, unhealthily gaunt people, people in dirty rags, people with deformities…

They had viewed the castle from the outside; three stone storeys that looked planned and passing symmetrical, topped by a ramshackle excrescence of Entraxrln timber stacked and tacked and piled and leaning to produce a vertical warren of apartments, halls and the occasional grudged-looking concession to defence in the shape of gawky, teetering towers and forlorn stretches of battlement, all of it dotted randomly with windows and protrusions and capped by a few creaky towers pointing uncertainly towards the layers of leaf-membrane above as though in puzzled inquiry.

The rest of the town had been confusing, repetitive, occasionally riotous. The cathedral was small and disappointing; even its bell, which rang out each hour, sounded flat. The only really interesting feature the cathedral possessed was a stone statue of the Pharpechian God on the outside of the building, having various unpleasant things done to Him by small, fiendishly grinning Pharpechian figures armed with farming implements and instruments of torture.

They had walked the narrow streets, tramping up and down narrow lanes and twisting alleys, dodging water thrown from upstairs windows, treading in rotting vegetables and worse, continually finding themselves back where they had started, and often being followed by crowds of children-so many children-and sometimes adults, many of whom seemed to want to take them home or show them round personally. Zefla smiled generously at the more persistent proto-guides and talked quickly in High Judicial Caltaspian to them, usually leaving them bobbing in her wake looking beatifically bemused.

By lunchtime they were exhausted. They returned to the inn, then kept to the outskirts of the town in the afternoon, passing the high walls of various monasteries and prisons, a school and a hospital. The monastery hospitale where Cenuij had been given a bed for the night looked closed and deserted, though they could hear muted curse-singing over the high walls.

They found the royal zoo; a sad mouldering of cages and pits where sick animals paced to and fro or threw themselves at fire-hardened bars, snarling. A glide-monkey troupe huddled in a corner of their net-roofed pit, their connective limb membranes wrapped round them like cloaks, their large eyes peeking out fearfully. A tangle-tooth paced back and forwards in a small cage, head down, its emaciated body containing in its movements only an echo of the animal’s lithe power. One huge, bare cage contained a full-grown stom, sitting crouched by one wall, its wings tied and splinted, its snout and legs scarred and cut. Even while they watched, appalled at the size of the animal and the painful squalidness of its situation, the beast raised its metre-long head and hit it off the wall a few times, drawing dark-purple blood.

“Why is its wing splinted?” Zefla asked a zoo-keeper.

“Not exactly splinted, lady; more tied up,” the keeper replied. He carried a bucket full of something bloody and gently steaming. Sharrow wrinkled her nose and moved up wind. The keeper shook his head and looked serious. “See, she just roars and beats her wings against the bars of the cage all day if you don’t tie her up.”

They didn’t stay long in the royal zoo.

The town became farmland quite suddenly, the streets leading past the various walled institutions straight into fields, where the membrane-beds stretched like neat lines of straked, fresh wounds into the distance and the serried plants of the Entraxrln’s secondary or tertiary ecology sat troughed and still. A field-guard recommended the tavern, a kilometre away along one of the raised scar-tissue roads.

They sat on the terrace of The Pulled Nail, eating surprisingly subtly cooked meats and vegetables; then Dloan pointed out the stom as it flew down the dulling light of the evening from a distant gap in the second-highest membrane level; the beast turned, carving the air, heading for a composite trunk and the specks of a glide-monkey troupe. But the monkey-eater birds roosting further up the trunk-space had seen the reptile and stooped, their cries faint but furious through the still air, and began to mob the single black giant. It had turned, something resigned but almost amused about its delicately lumbering, slow-motion movements; a calm core of stolidity set amongst the jerky whizzings of the monkey-eaters, electrons to its weighty nucleus.

She supposed they were what people saw as noble beasts, something of their perceived authority evident in the fact they were one of the few species of Miykennsian fauna that had an original name, rather than a Golterian fix-up.

She could feel the others wanting the stom to escape unharmed, as it surely would, but only she, she thought, had seen the tiny grey-green scrap of one monkey-eater fly too close to the head of the stom; she’d had Zefla’s binoculars, and seen the bird skim daringly close to that huge head, and had a fleeting impression of the snapping jaws closing on it, wounding it, winging it as the bird was pulled off course across the air before escaping in a small, brief cloud of grey-green, and starting to fall.

It was falling still.

She could still just see it, naked-eyed now.

It was spiralling quickly down, five hundred metres beneath where it had been savaged, still trying to fly but only managing a half-braked helical dive towards the ground below.

Above it, just behind it, matching its hopeless, graceless, desperate rumble with a more controlled and smooth spiral of its own, another bird was keeping close station, refusing to leave its fellow.

She followed them both. The two dots were soon lost in the groundscape of undulating membrane matting in the distance. When she looked up again, the stom had made it back through the gap in the leaf-membrane a kilometre above. The other monkey-eaters gave up the chase and Miz, Zef and Dlo made appreciative noises and sat down to their meal again.

She sat down too, after a while.

She ate her meal slowly, not joining in the conversation, often glancing at the region where the two birds had disappeared, and only took a drink of her wine when one bird reappeared flying slowly, as though tired, flapping effortfully upwards, towards the columnar colony that was its home, alone.

13 At The Court of The Useless Kings

His Majesty King Tard the Seventeenth, Lord of Despite, Seventy-fourth of the Useless Kings, Lord Protector and Master of Pharpech, its Dominions, Citizens, Lower Classes, Animals and Women, Prime Detester of God The Infernal Wizard, Exchequer of the Mean and Guardian of the Imperial Charter, sat on the Stom Throne in the castle’s Great Hall, squinting narrow-eyed at the skinny, suspiciously clever-looking monk kneeling on the throne steps in front of him.

The throne room was a dark and smoky place. It was devoid of windows so that God couldn’t see in and it stank of cloying scents emanating from smoking censers because that kept His unquiet spirit entering. The throne was at one end of the room, and the King’s dozen or so courtiers and secretaries sat on small stools stationed on the steps of the throne’s square dais, their stature and significance expressed by how far up the dais steps and how close to the royal presence they were allowed to sit.

The Stom Throne-carved in the shape of one of the great flying reptiles, its wings forming the sides of the throne, its back the seat and its bowed head functioning as a foot-rest swung gently in the air above the dais, hanging by wires from the incense-blackened barrel-ceiling of the room and held just a few centimetres off the time-dulled and threadbare carpet spread across the top of the dais.

His courtiers said the throne was suspended like this to symbolise his authority and elevation above the common herd, but he just liked the way you could make the throne swing if you rocked back and forward a lot. Two very large, quiet Royal Guardsmen stood on the broad tail of the Stom Throne, armed with laser-carbines disguised as muskets; sometimes he’d get them to join in the swinging. If you got people to kneel close to the throne and then started to swing while they were talking, you could get the big carved beak of the Stom Throne to thump them in the chest or head and make them retreat off the dais, where officially he didn’t have to listen to them. He was thinking about doing that to this monk.

It was unusual for this sort of person to be presented to him; usually his courtiers kept them out. He always got suspicious of his courtiers when they did something out of character. He knew that-naturally-they feared and respected him, but sometimes he thought they wouldn’t be beyond talking behind his back or having little plans of their own.

Anyway, he didn’t like the monk’s face. There was something too narrow and sharp and penetrating about it, and there was a look of amused contempt about his expression that suggested he found the King or his Kingdom ridiculous. He distrusted the monk instantly. People had died for less. A lot less.

One of his courtiers mumbled into his ear about the monk’s mission. The King was mildly surprised by what he was told, but still suspicious.

“So,” he said to the monk, “you are of an Order which also despises the Great Infernal Wizard.”

“Indeed, your gracious Majesty,” the monk said, looking down modestly at the carpet. His voice sounded respectful. “Our Belief-perhaps not so dissimilar from your own, more venerable and more widely followed creed-is that God is a Mad Scientist and we His experimental subjects, doomed forever to run the Maze of Life through apparently random and unjust punishments for meaningless and paltry rewards and no discernible good reason save His evil pleasure.”

The King stared at the skinny monk. The man’s accent was off-putting and his language complicated, but he had the odd impression that the monk had actually been complimentary just there. He leaned forward in the gently swinging throne.

“D’you hate God too?” he said, wrinkling his nose and frowning.

The skinny monk, clad in a black cassock embellished only with a small metal box tied on a thong round his neck, smiled in an odd way and said, “Yes, your Majesty. We do, with a vengeance.”

“Good,” the King said. He sat back and studied the skinny monk. The monk glanced at the courtier who’d briefed the King, but the courtier kept shaking his head. One did not speak to the King until one was spoken to.

The King prided himself on being something of a statesman; he knew the value of having allies, even though the Kingdom itself was quite self-sufficient and under no immediate external threat. There were bandits and rebels in the deep country, as ever, and the usual closet reformers in the Kingdom and even the court, but the King knew how to deal with them; you asked a courtier and got them to check how they’d been dealt with in the past. Still, times changed on the outside even if they didn’t change here, and it never did any harm to have people in the world beyond who sympathised with Pharpech, and it had always annoyed the King that so few people out there seemed to have heard of his realm.

He’d quiz this monk. “How many of there are you?”

“Here in your realm, your Majesty? Only myself, of our Order-”

He shook his head. “No, everywhere. How many of you altogether?”

The skinny monk looked sad. “Vile number only a few thousand at the moment, your Majesty,” he admitted. “Though many of us are in positions of some power where we must, of course, keep our beliefs secret.”

“Hmm,” said the King. “Who’s your leader?”

“Majesty,” the monk said, looking troubled, “we have no leader. We have a parliament, a gathering of equals in which each man is his own high priest, and in that lies our problem.” The skinny monk looked up and smiled with more warmth. “You see, your Majesty, I have come humbly, on behalf of all my fellows, to petition you to become our spiritual leader.”

Petitions petitions petitions. The King was heartily sick of petitions. But at least this one was from outside the Kingdom, from people who didn’t owe him everything anyway and so had a damn cheek petitioning him for anything… No, this came from people who were doing it because of their respect for him and what he represented. He rather liked the idea.

“Spiritual leader?” he said, trying not to sound too taken with the title.

“Yes, your Majesty,” said the skinny monk. “We seek your approval of our humble creed because you are the head of a like-minded faith which has survived for many centuries, and so gives us hope. We wish to ask for your blessing, and-if you would be so kind as to grant it-for the ultimate blessing of your becoming head of our church. We would undertake to do nothing to disgrace your name, and to do everything to help honour the name of yourself and the Kingdom of Pharpech.” The monk looked touchingly modest. “Majesty, please believe we do not wish to impose upon your renowned good nature and generosity, but such is our heart-felt respect for you, and so great is our desire to gain your approval-undeserving wretches though we may be-that we felt we would be derelict in our duties to our faith if we did not approach you.”

The King looked confused. He didn’t want to give his blessing to people who were undeserving wretches. He had enough of those already.

“What?” he said. “You’re saying you’re undeserving wretches?”

The skinny monk looked uncertain for a second, then bowed his head. “Only compared to you, your Majesty. Compared to the unbelievers, we are the deserving and enlightened. As the saying has it; modesty is most effective when it is uncalled for.” The skinny monk smiled up at him again. His eyes looked moist.

The King didn’t quite understand that last remark-probably due to the skinny monk’s odd accent-but he knew the little fellow thought he’d said something mildly witty, and so made a little polite laughing noise and looked round his courtiers, nodding at them, so that they laughed and nodded at each other too. The King prided himself on being able to put people at their ease in this manner.

“Good monk,” he said, sitting back in the Stom Throne and adjusting his day-robe around him as the great throne swung gently, “I am minded to accept your humble request.” The King smiled. “We shall talk further, I think.” He put on his wise expression, and the skinny monk looked almost pathetically pleased. He wiped his eyes with the backs of his hands.

How touching! the King thought.

He waved one hand graciously to the side, making a curl in the thick incense smoke. He indicated a couple of clerks standing to one side, holding cushions on which sat large flattish objects: ornate metal boxes. “Now, I understand you have brought Us some presents…”

“Indeed, your Majesty,” the skinny monk said, glancing round as the clerks came shuffling forward. They stood in a line at his side. He took the box from the first of the clerks and held it up to the King. It looked like a larger version of the little box on the thong round his neck. “It is a book, your Majesty.” He fiddled with the lock on the metallic box.

“A book?” the King said. He sat forward in the throne, gripping the edges of the Stom’s wings. He hated books. “A book?” he roared. His courtiers knew he hated books! How could they let this simpering cur come before him if they knew he’d come bearing books? He looked furiously at the nearest courtiers. Their expressions changed instantly from smirking satisfaction to shocked outrage.

“But it is God’s book, your Majesty!” the skinny monk whined, jaw trembling as his thin hands struggled to open the book’s jewelled metal casing.

“God’s book?” the King bellowed, standing up in the Stom Throne. This was… what was it called? Sacrilege! The great throne swung to and fro while the King glared down at the hapless monk. “Did you say God’s book?” he shouted. He raised his hand, to order the heretical… heretic be taken away.

“Yes, your Majesty,” the monk said, suddenly pulling the book apart, pages riffling. “Because it is blank!”

He held the book up before him like a shield, face turned away from the King’s wrath, while the flittering white pages fell fanning apart.

The King glanced round at his courtiers. They looked surprised and angry. He was aware that he was standing up in the swinging throne, in a position that might make a lesser man look a fool.

He thought quickly. Then he realised that it was quite funny. He started to laugh. He sat down in his throne, laughing, and looked round his courtiers, until they started to laugh too.

“What, good monk? Are they all blank?”

“Yes, your Majesty!” the skinny monk said, gulping, laying the first book down and taking up the next from the second clerk. “See!” He put that one down, lifted the next and the next and the last. “See, your Majesty! See, see; all blank! And look; the pages themselves are too slick and shiny to be written upon; no ink-pen will write, and even lasers will simply reflect. They cannot even be used as blank notebooks. They are truly Useless books!”

“What?” shouted the King. He put his head back and roared with laughter. “Useless!” he shouted, lying back in the Stom Throne and laughing so much that his sides ached. “Useless!”

He laughed until he started to cough. He waved away a courtier holding a glass of wine and sat forward in the throne, smiling kindly down at the monk.

“You are a good fellow, little monk, and a credit to your Order. You may stay as Our guest, and we shall have more to say to each other.” Intensely pleased at having successfully completed such an elegant speech, the King snapped his fingers at a secretary, who scurried forward, pen and pad at the ready, his head bowed. “See Our little monk is made welcome,” the King told him. “Find good apartments for him.”

“Yes, your Majesty.”

The secretary led the relieved monk away. The King inspected the shiny-paged books. He chuckled, and ordered them to be put with the smaller Useless items in the castle’s trophy gallery.

“Shit,” said Cenuij, sitting on the bed in Miz and Dloan’s room, staring at the little stick-on screen Miz had unrolled onto the covers. It showed a ghostly view of a glass display-cabinet containing a collection of old-fashioned electrical goods.

“Looks like a shop-window display from a historical drama,” Miz said. He rotated the nightsight view the fake jewel on the cover of the book was seeing, but all it showed was more useless kitchen hardware.

“Safe to broadcast this?” Dloan said, peering at the screen.

Miz shrugged. “It’s pseudo-directional after the initiating squirt and the transmitter’s freq-hopping. I doubt they have stuff to pick this up, even if they’re not quite as lo-tech as they pretend to be.”

“I trust this works on the same principle,” Cenuij said, holding up the miniature book on the thong round his neck. Beneath the rags he’d worn to make his way to The Broken Neck, he wore the plain black habit he’d dressed in since they’d entered the Kingdom.

“Yeah,” Miz said, “but don’t use it except in an emergency, just in case.” He tried the sonic display from another jewel set into the cover of the bugged book in the castle, but all it showed in the screen was a mono holo of the interior of a small display-case. The last fake jewel, an electrical field sensor, registered nothing, not even any activity in the electrical gear around it. Obviously any back-up power-sources they’d ever had had run out long ago.

“Nothing,” Miz said, clicking the screen off.

“I thought he’d put them in with the one other book he had,” Cenuij admitted. He shrugged. “Oh well, they got me into the castle. And His Majesty’s confidence.”

“Fun in there?” Zefla asked, pouring herself and the others a drink.

Cenuij waved one arm. “Stacked to the rafters with treasure, trash, petty jealousies, pathetic plots, superstition and suspicion,” he said.

“You must feel at home, Cenuij,” Sharrow said.

“Absolutely,” he agreed. “I’m not missing you at all.”

“Had a chance to look for the book yet?” Miz asked.

“Give me time,” Cenuij said, annoyed. “I’ve only been there two days; it’s a little early to start inquiring about the castle treasures. So far I’ve met the King once, the Queen and a couple of extremely unpleasant children far too often already, and I’ve had to hang out with a bunch of vapidly vicious courtiers and cretinously religious functionaries. The unholy life in Pharpech appears to consist largely of rising at an extremely early hour and chanting curses to God in draughty chapels between profoundly uninspiring meals and bouts of gossip whose mind-boggling pettiness is rivalled only by its poisonous malevolence.

“So far all I’ve discovered about the castle vaults is their approximate location. I suspect they’re higher-tech than the rest of this squalid retro theme-park, but I don’t know any more yet.” Cenuij drank quickly from his wine-mug. “So, what have you tourists been up to, while I’ve been infiltrating the very heart of the Kingdom and winning the confidence of its most powerful inhabitant, at no small risk to myself?”

“Oh, just farting around,” Miz grinned.

“We checked the weapons and stuff,” Dloan said.

“We burned the extra hollow pages from the Useless books,” Zefla said, “eventually.”

“Miz has identified the place the local criminal fraternity while away those long hours between acts of villainy,” Sharrow said. “Dloan is planning a journey into the deep country to make contact with the rebels, and Zefla and I are making discreet inquiries about the various artisan, merchant-class and women’s rights reform movements.”

“Oh well, at least you’re keeping yourselves busy,” Cenuij said. He smiled.

“It passes the time while you’re doing all the work, Cenny,” Sharrow told him.

The cathedral clock chimed flatly in the distance. Cenuij drained his wine-mug. “Quite. Well, that’s the hour for evensong; time to go and sing God’s hatreds. I’d better get back and carry on doing all that work, hadn’t I?” He handed Sharrow the mug. “Thanks for the wine.”

“Don’t mention it.”

The thief swung into the booth, through the floor-length dirty curtains and down onto the trestle bench across from Miz. The noise of the smoky inn abated only slightly as the heavy curtains swung back. A couple of yellow-glowing candles, one on each of the narrow booth’s side walls, flickered in the draught.

The thief was small for a Miykennsian. Dressed in dark, undistinguished clothes, he had a beard, several facial scars on his pale skin, and greasy hair. His nose was wide, the nostrils flared above lips set in a sneer. His eyes were deep-set, hidden.

“You wanted to see me, Golter-man?” His voice was quiet and hoarse, but there was a strange smoothness about it that reminded Miz of a razor applied to flesh; the way it slipped in, without pain at first, almost unnoticed.

Miz sat back, holding his tankard of mullbeer. “Yes,” he said. He nodded at the table. “Would you like a drink?”

The thief’s lips briefly shaped themselves into a smile. “I’ve one coming; why don’t you pay for it?”

“All right.” Miz sipped at his drink, saw the thief watching him with his contemptuous sneer, then opened his throat and sank about half the beer and set the tankard down with a thump on the rough wooden table. He wiped his lips with his sleeve for good measure.

The man sitting on the other side of the table didn’t look impressed. The curtain opened behind him; he turned and grabbed the wrist of the serving girl who came through, grinning at her as she put the bottle and cup down on the table. She smiled nervously back.

The thief turned to Miz. “Well, pay the girl.”

Miz dug into the pocket of his jerkin and handed the girl some coins. She gaped at what he’d given her, then tried to close her hand and turn quickly away.

The thief still held her wrist; he yanked her so that she fell back against the table. She gave a small cry of pain. The thief prised open her fingers and lifted out the money Miz had given her. He looked at the coins and seemed surprised. He took two of them, reached up and slipped them both down the girl’s bodice, then pushed her upright and slapped her behind as he propelled her out of the booth. He bit on a coin then put it and the rest away in his dark tunic.

“You over-tipped,” he said, breaking the seal on the bottle and pouring some of the trax spirit into the little bark cup.

“Yeah,” Miz said. “What with that and this old-fashioned courtesy displayed to women-folk, I’m finding it really hard to fit in here.”

The thief drank from the cup, watching Miz over the rim. His throat moved as he swallowed. He refilled the cup. “I heard Golter men hand their women their cocks to keep when they take up with them.”

“Only the lucky ones,” Miz said. The thief looked levelly at him. Miz shrugged, spread his hands. “You didn’t hear where they keep them.”

The thief drank the second cup of trax, then flicked the last of the spirit out onto the rough table top. He spat into the little cup, wiped round the bowl with the hem of his hide waistcoat, then leant across the table to Miz, holding up the cup in his hands as though it was some jewel. “Drink?” he said, putting his other hand on the bottle.

Miz shoved the tankard over to the other man, took the bark cup and let the other man fill it. Miz knocked the trax back in one go. It was rough; he tried not to cough. The thief drained the tankard, then leant back, stuck his head out through the curtain and shouted something.

The serving girl came back through the curtain with another cup and two tankards full of beer. She looked at the thief, who looked at Miz.

Miz said, “Oh, no, please, allow me,” and dug for more coins in his jerkin.

He paid the girl roughly what the thief had let her keep the last time. She still looked pleased.

“So,” said the thief. “What was it you wanted?”

Miz supped his beer. “I might be interested in exporting some ethnic artifacts,” he said.

“Apply to the castle,” the thief told him.

Miz shrugged. “The ethnic artifacts I’m interested in…” Miz put his head to one side, looking up at the ceiling beyond the open-roofed booth, “… aren’t actually for sale. But I’d pay a good price to somebody who might help me come into possession of them.”

The thief swirled his beer round in his tankard. “What things are you talking about? Where are they?”

“Could be almost anything,” Miz said. “Some of them…” He imitated the thief, swirling his beer around in his tankard, “… might be in the castle.”

The thief looked into his eyes. “The castle?” he said, flatly.

Miz nodded: “Yes. How practical do you think it might be to have something from the castle fall into one’s hands?”

The thief nodded, seeming to look away. He stood slowly, holding the tankard. “Wait here,” he said. “I have somebody who might be able to help you.” He backed out of the booth through the dull, heavy curtains.

Miz sat alone for a moment. He drank his beer. He looked round the grubby booth. The place reeked of sweat, spilled drink, possibly spilled blood, and something Miz suspected was beer gone badly off. The Eye and Poker; he’d heard more inspiring names for inns. This one was in the less reputable part of Pharpech town, down the steep side of the hill from the castle and out to the east in an area of creakily tumbledown tenements that housed stinking tanneries and bone-meal works. Even with a gun in his pocket and a viblade in his boot he’d felt vulnerable walking in here.

He looked up at the top edge of the booth wall, a metre above his head and a metre below the yellow-stained ceiling of the bar. He was sure he could see little brown stalactites on the ceiling.

He turned his attention to the bark wall behind him. Now he looked carefully, there was a distinct line of greasy blackness at about scalp height, where countless unwashed heads of probably inhabited hair had left their mark over the years. Miz tutted, disgusted, and felt the back of his head. He altered his position in the seat, lifting his feet up and sitting sideways on the bench, his head against the side wall of the booth.

The noise from the bar seemed to have faded. He turned his head, frowning.

The heavy curtains jerked. Three crossbow bolts thudded into the bark at the back of the booth, neatly into the lower part of the greasy line he’d looked at a few seconds earlier, where his head had been.

He stared at them. Then he pulled his gun from his pocket and pushed the beer tankard over so that it spilled beer across the table and down spattering onto the stained floor; the puddle spread to the hem of the booth’s curtains, where it would be visible from the bar outside.

Miz got up on his knees and swung quickly and silently across to the trestle bench on the other side of the table. He sat on the table, feet on the bench, to one side of the booth. It was still very quiet outside; just a few whispers and the noise of a chair or two being scraped across uneven floorboards. There were three little tears in the heavy curtains where the quarrels had entered. The holes let in tiny beams of smoky light.

He waited, gun ready, heart pounding.

The curtain moved millimetrically; the light from one of the three holes blinked out.

He thrust an arm through the divide in the curtains and grabbed the man outside by the neck as he threw himself forward and out. He landed crouching, his back to the narrow bark divide between two booths, his arm tight round the neck of the man he’d grabbed, who thudded sitting onto the floor. It was the thief he’d first spoken to; Miz rammed his gun in just under the man’s right ear.

The bar had cleared almost entirely; only a haze of smoke and a few unfinished drinks on the tables showed that the place had been packed a few minutes earlier. Standing with their backs to the bar itself were three men holding crossbows. One of them had reloaded, one was about to fit the bolt into its groove, and the other had frozen in the act of pulling the crossbow taut again.

The one with the loaded crossbow was pointing it at him. Miz forced the thief’s head to one side with the barrel of the laser. The thief smelled rancid; he struggled a little but Miz pulled his arm tighter round his neck, never taking his eyes off the man with the crossbow. The thief went still. He wheezed as he breathed.

There were a couple of other men still in the bar, near the doorway; they both held heavy-looking pistols, but they seemed to be backing off towards the doors. Miz was more worried about the booth next to his. He thought he glimpsed its curtain move out of the corner of his eye. He shifted across the floor so that his back was to the curtains of the booth he’d been in.

“Now, boys,” Miz said, grinning at the man with the crossbow. “Let’s just take this sensibly and nobody’ll get hurt.” He stood up slowly, keeping the thief between himself and the three men with the crossbows. “What do you say?”

Nobody said anything. The thief in his arm went on wheezing. Miz could feel the man trying to swallow. He loosened his grip just a little. “Perhaps our friend here has something he’d like to contribute.”

The two men near the doors slipped outside. Miz prodded the thief with the gun again. “Say something calming.”

“Let him go,” gasped the thief. Still no reaction.

These bozos are waiting on something, Miz thought. He heard a noise somewhere behind him in the booth. They’d gone over the top! There was a squelching noise from the floor behind him. He whirled round, taking the thief with him. A long thin blade flashed out of the curtains and thudded into the thief’s torso just under the sternum, the glistening point appearing out of his back through the hide of his tunic. He made a grunting noise.

Miz had already ducked, dropping and turning. The crossbow bolt smacked into the back of the thief’s skull, sending his body jack-knifing forward through the curtains and into the man holding the knife, forcing him to fall backwards over the table.

Miz’s gun made a crackling, spitting noise. The man who’d fired the crossbow shook as the beams hit his chest, flames licking round the edges of the little craters on his jacket. He dropped the crossbow and hung his head. He stood like that for a moment, while Miz moved away from the booth where the man with the knife was still trying to extricate himself from the curtains and the body of the thief. Then the crossbow man fell slowly back, whacking his head off the bar and crumpling to the floor. Blood sizzled against the flames flickering on his jacket.

The other two crossbow men looked at each other. The one who had now loaded his quarrel smiled nervously at Miz. He nodded at Miz’s gun, swallowing.

“We didn’t realise you was from the castle,” he said, and very carefully took the quarrel back out of its groove. The other man released the tension in his bow and let it fall to the ground. They both glanced at the dead man lying on the floor.

The man in the booth got the thief’s body off him and from behind the curtains shouted, “Me neither, sire!” A terrified bearded face poked slowly from behind the booth’s curtains.

Miz looked warily around. He smiled insincerely at the two crossbow men and the knife-wielder. “Boys, you’re going to see me out of this rather rough neighbourhood.” He glanced at the man in the booth. “You go to the front door and get the heroes out there to give you their guns.”

The bearded man gulped. He came out from behind the curtains, leaving the thief’s body lying half in and half out of the booth. He walked to the door. He opened it gently and called out. There was some conversation, which became heated, and then the sound of running footsteps. The bearded man smiled at Miz in a sickly fashion. “They ran away, sire,” he said.

“Why don’t you do the same?”

The man needed no more prompting; he was out of the door in an instant. Miz turned to the other two. “Chaps, you and I are going to go out the back way.”

The two men looked at each other.

Miz frowned mightily. “There must be a back way.”

“Yes, sire,” one of the men said, “but it’s through the tannery.”

Miz sniffed the air. “Is that what it is?” he said. “I thought the beer was off.”

“You stink.”

“Blame the tannery,” Miz said as Zefla dried his hair.

Sharrow poked at one of Miz’s locally made boots with the toe of her own. “These are falling apart,” she said. “I thought you only bought them two days ago.”

Miz shrugged beneath hiss towel as Dloan handed him a glass of wine. “Yeah; don’t know what the hell I stepped in.”

“So,” Sharrow said, “the local ruffians don’t want to play.” She sat down in the one comfortable easy chair in Miz and Dloan’s room.

“Apart from playing Let’s Perforate Miz’s Head, correct,” Miz agreed. He looked at Sharrow as Zefla finished drying his hair. “I’m worried. Cenuij talked about the King having spies and informers; what if word of this gets back to the castle?”

Sharrow shrugged. “What can we do?”

Miz nodded at Dloan. “Why don’t we all go with Dlo tomorrow? We can call it a safari; get out of town for a few days, camp somewhere near deep country, let Dlo-maybe me too-head in, try and contact these revolutionaries.”

“Cenuij doesn’t think much of the idea,” Zefla said, tossing Miz a scent spray.

“Thanks,” Miz said. “Yeah, well, he wouldn’t, would he? 1 think it’s worth doing just to get away for a while.”

“You really think we might be in danger after tonight?” Sharrow asked.

“It’s possible,” Miz said, spraying under his arms.

“What about Cenuij?” Dloan said.

“He’s not in trouble,” Sharrow waved one hand. “We can leave a message for him with the innkeeper; it’s not worth the risk of using the comm gear.” Sharrow nodded, looking thoughtful. “Okay, we’ll go.”

“Camping out in the bush for a few nights,” Zefla said, crossing her eyes. “Oh, the utter joy of it.”

The airship drifted over the sunlit jungle, a blue-white bubble against the blue-white skies of tropical Caltasp after the rainy season. The canopy slid slowly by underneath, the tops of the highest trees only five metres or so beneath the keel of the open gondola, where she, Geis, Breyguhn and Geis’s martialer knelt, their long guns poking over the gunwales of the boat-shaped basket.

The smells and sounds of the jungle wrapped up around them, mysterious and exciting and a little frightening.

“We’re on a perfect heading,” Geis said, talking very quietly to her and Breyguhn. “The wind’s taking us over one of the best areas, and our shadow’s trailing us.” He looked at the martialer, a small, rotund, perpetually smiling man from Speyr who looked more like a comedy actor than a combat tutor. “Is that not so, martialer?”

“Indeed, sire,” the martialer smiled. “A perfect heading.”

When Geis had first introduced the martialer to her and Breyguhn, in the arbor of the Autumn Palace, he had asked him to prove his skills as he saw fit. The fat little fellow had smiled even more broadly, and-suddenly flourishing a stillete-whirled and thrown. A white-wing, fluttering past a trellis ten metres away, was suddenly pinned to the wood. Sharrow had been impressed and Geis delighted. Breyguhn had been shocked. “What did you do that for?” she’d said, almost in tears, but the little man had held up one finger, padded to the trellis and removed the knife with barely any effort. The white-wing, which had only just been held by one wing, had flown away…

“There!” Sharrow said, pointing to the forest floor.

They looked down as they passed slowly to one side of a clearing. There was a water hole, and on the dusty ground near it a large animal with smooth green skin lay dead, its guts spilled onto the ground. Another animal-smaller, but powerful-looking-stood in the pool of intestines, biting and tugging at something inside the fallen herbivore’s belly cavity. The predator raised its head to look at the balloon, its golden-red snout covered in green blood.

“A rox!” Geis whispered. “Wonderful!”

“Ugh,” Breyguhn said, watching from the other side of the gondola.

The martialer took the airship’s control box from his pocket and flicked a switch. The drifting vessel hummed almost inaudibly above them, coming to a stop. The rox, its broad jaws still working as it chewed on its kill, looked up at them, unworried. It put its head to one side, still chewing.

“Cousin?” Geis said to her.

Sharrow shook her head. “No,” she said. “You.”

Geis looked delighted. He turned and sighted along the long powder gun.

Sharrow watched Breyguhn grimace, looking over the edge of the gondola but not really enjoying what she was seeing. Sharrow turned to look too.

“You become one with the gun and the line and the target,” Geis whispered, aiming (the martialer sat nodding wisely). “Damn; he’s gone back inside the guts of the thing.”

“Yeaurk,” Breyguhn said, sitting down on the other side of the gondola.

“Don’t rock us!” Geis whispered urgently.

The martialer put the airship controls down, raised both hands above his head and clapped them loudly together. Sharrow laughed; the rox’s head came up, freshly green, and looked at them again.

“Got you,” whispered Geis. The gun roared. Geis bumped backwards in the gondola; a cloud of smoke drifted down the wind. The rox had stopped chewing. It collapsed to the ground, front knees thumping into the dust; dark-red blood pumped from its head as it fell over, kicked once and was still.

“Yes!”

“Well done.”

“Fine shot, sire.”

“Ugh. Is it over? Have you done it? Is there a lot of blood?”

“Take us over there, martialer; I want to get down and cut a couple of trophies.”

“Sire.”

“Poor animal; what chance did it have?” Breyguhn said, peeking over the gondola at the two corpses lying side by side.

“The chance of not being seen,” Geis said happily, and shrugged.

“It was quick,” Sharrow told Breyguhn, trying to ally herself with Geis’s maturity rather than with her half-sister’s youth, even though she was closer in age to Brey, who was only twelve.

“Yes,” Geis said, preparing the rope ladder as the martialer guided the airship through the warm air towards the clearing. “It wouldn’t know what hit it.”

“It still seems cruel to me,” Breyguhn said, crossing her arms.

“Not at all,” Geis said. “It killed that heuskyn down there; I killed it.”

“It’s the law of the jungle,” Sharrow told Breyguhn.

Geis laughed. “Literally,” he said. “And it didn’t suffer the way the heuskyn must have.” A puzzled, exasperated look appeared on his face. “I’ve often thought, you know, that that’s what matters; suffering. Not death, not actually killing. If you die instantly-really instantly, with no warning whatsoever-what are you missing? Your life might be terrible from then on until when you were going to die anyway. Of course, it might have been great fun instead, but the point is that at any given moment you just don’t know which. I don’t think there should be any penalty for killing somebody instantaneously.”

“But what about the people left behind, their family and friends?” Breyguhn protested.

Geis shrugged again, glancing over the side of the gondola as they drew slowly to a stop. “The law doesn’t pretend we prosecute murderers because of the effect on the murdered person’s nearest and dearest.”

He and the martialer hauled the rope ladder to the gunwale.

“But then,” Sharrow said, “if people knew they could be killed at any time, and their murderer would get away with it, everybody would be frightened all the time. No matter who you killed, they’d always have suffered.” She spread her hands.

Geis looked at her, face creased in a frown. “Hmm,” he said, his lips taut. “Yes, that’s a point. I hadn’t thought of that.” He looked at the martialer, who smiled at him. Geis shrugged, handed the martialer his gun and said, “Oh, well. Back to the drawing board on that idea.”

He took his knife from its sheath, held it between his teeth, then lowered himself over the side of the gondola and down the rope ladder.

Sharrow watched him descend. He climbed down out of the shadow of the airship; the sunlight glinted on the blade of the knife in his mouth. She leant out further, aiming her gun down at the crown of his head as it nodded its way down the ladder towards the ground.

“Excuse me, lady.” The martialer took the gun from her with a regretful smile.

She sat back in the seat. Breyguhn smirked. She tried not to blush. “I wasn’t actually going to fire it, martialer.”

“I know, Lady Sharrow,” he nodded, taking a round from the breech and handing her the gun back, “but it is dangerous to point guns at people.”

“I know,” she said. “But the safety catch was on and I’m very sorry. You won’t tell Geis, will you?” She smiled her most winning smile.

“I doubt that will be required, lady,” the martialer said.

“He might not…” Breyguhn said, smirking at Sharrow.

“Oh, he doesn’t believe anything you tell him anyway, Brey,” Sharrow said, dismissing the girl with a wave. She smiled again at the martialer, who smiled back. Breyguhn scowled.

“Hey, girls!” shouted a faint, taunting voice from below. “Any particular part of this beast you’d like?”

They camped on, a low rise at the edge of what was probably a range of small jagged hills the Entraxrln had grown over long before, leaving clogged canyons and deep, dark caves leading up steep V-sided ravines; tall spires, splayed and spread over the landscape in a way that looked geological rather than vegetable, were probably rocky pinnacles, wrapped in the Entraxrln’s intimate embrace and now acting as anchor-points for membrane cables. The landscape in the hills and beyond them was even more dark and choked than it had been in the three days since they’d left the town. They had passed a few little towns and villages, and seen a couple of small castles in the distance, homes of lesser nobles, but had encountered few other travellers.

Leeskever, their guide-a lean, garrulously knowledgeable and spectacularly ugly hide-trapper they’d met in the Broken Neck and who sported an eye-patch Zefla thought most dashing-said that if the gentlemen wanted to see any savages or outlaws, they’d be in there somewhere, but he wasn’t going to lead them any further. This was bandit country.

Miz decided that his place was looking after the ladies. Dloan went in alone, on foot.

They left the jemer mounts to graze and passed the next two days walking near the camp and climbing the more gently sloped cables with loop-guides, while Leeskever talked about the thousands of animals he’d killed and the half-dozen or so buddies he’d lost; to stom, tangle-teeth, other assorted wild animals, and the effects of gravity when people fell off cables; all of them in country much like this.

Sharrow slipped out of the camp a couple of times when Leeskever wouldn’t notice, tramping half a klick into the Entraxrln undergrowth to do some target practice. She used the silencer on the HandCannon and set up some blister-fruits ten, twenty and forty metres away.

On her second visit to her private shooting gallery, she heard something move above and behind her just as she was changing from one magazine to another; she slammed the clip home, stepped to one side and turned. She had the impression of something diving towards her, and fired.

The clip she’d just loaded was wire-flechette. She checked the magazine later; four rounds fired.

She wasn’t sure how many hit whatever it was trying to jump her, but it disappeared in an exploding cloud of purple blood she had to jump away to avoid. When she went back to stir the warm, gently steaming debris with her boot, she couldn’t tell what it had been, except that it had had fur rather than skin or feathers. The biggest bit of chewed-looking bone left was smaller than her little finger.

She decided she didn’t need any more target practice.

They sat, secured by ropes to hard-bark spikes stuck into the three-metre broad cable above them. They ate lunch, feeling a warm, sappy-smelling tunnel-wind blow about them, looking down the hundred metres or so to the ground. The rise holding their camp was visible a kilometre away across the grotesquely deformed landscape of the Entraxrln.

Leeskever shoved the tap-spike into a vein-like bulge on the surface of the cable. Clear water seeped through the membrane over the end of the hollow spike and started to fill a little cup hanging under its handle. He sniffed the wind. “That’ll bring the King’s stom, that wind,” he said.

They all looked at him.

“Glide-monkeys,” he said. “Stom come for the annual migration; there’s one male troupe that’s half-tamed; they roost in the trunk north of the town.”

“They don’t actually ride them, do they?” Zefla said.

Leeskever laughed. “Na! And never did, neither. Don’t you believe what people tell you. Stoma sooner eat you than smell you. Just legend, all that stuff about flying them.” He sipped water from the small cup, then passed it to Zefla. “The King and his court go up to one of the male roosts in the trunk and stand looking at the beasts, choose one as their own, tippy-toe up to it, waft some sleepy-gas at it and spray a mark on it. Coward courtiers and ministers have their aides do it; the rest pretend they’re brave.” Leeskever accepted the cup back from Zefla and hung it under the dripping tap-spike. “Then the dignitaries sit in their viewing-gallery, watch the stom take monkeys and cheer on their particular beast. Highly civilised spectacle.”

“Sounds it,” Miz said.

“What’s that?” Zefla said, pointing down.

“Eh?” said Leeskever. “Ah; now that is one of those tangle-teeth I was telling you about.”

“This the beast that has a taste for your companions?” Zefla asked him.

“Might even be the same one, for all I know,” Leeskever said.

They watched the long, striped back of the tangle-tooth as the quadruped padded slowly through the jungled confusion of roots, stalks and long tatters of fallen membrane on the level below.

Sharrow remembered the airship, and the animal Geis had killed. When he’d returned, blooded, to the gondola, he’d presented her and Breyguhn with nothing more nocuous and shocking than the animal’s ears.

She had accepted her still-warm gift gracefully. Breyguhn couldn’t bear to touch the blood-matted thing. Still, while Sharrow had thrown hers away the day they left the Autumn Palace estates to return to their respective schools, Breyguhn had kept her trophy for years.

Dloan came out of the deep country the following morning, morose and unsuccessful. He’d had to shoot two inept bandits, but apart from that he hadn’t seen anybody. There might well be rebels and the like in the deep country, but they’d kept well out of his way.

They set off back to the town that afternoon with the wind soft behind them. Several troupes of stom flew over them a kilometre up, heading in the same direction. Leeskever nodded wisely.

They paid him at the same inn on the outskirts of the town they’d eaten at the day after they’d first arrived. Miz went into town alone, disguised. Their rooms were still being kept for them; a beggar had asked after them and the innkeeper had given him the note they’d left for him. Nobody else had inquired about them.

“A decent bed and hot water!” Zefla said, marching into her and Sharrow’s room. “Fucking luxury!”

She slept well at first, then woke during the depths of the night wondering what was happening, and thought there was something long and cold crawling over her skin at her throat.

She sat up, whimpering and pulling at her nightdress, then felt to the skin at the top of her chest, and with her hands there, looking into the utter darkness, hearing Zefla stir and make a fading, still-asleep huh-ing noise, she realised what was happening.

It was their way of saying they were still in touch, even here. So much for being off-net.

The feeling was like a cold finger drawn across her skin, right round the base of her neck, like an executioner sketching where the axe will fall. Then another line, then another and another, each one further out than the last.

The shape of the Crownstar Addendum was traced out on her skin, to the last strand, the last planet of the system.

The long looping orbit of Prensteleraf was drawn around her neck and down over the tops of her breasts. After a while, when no more happened, she lay down in the soft, sagging bed again.

The final signal, a few moments later, was a surprise: a single heavy but not painful line drawn around her scalp, about where would sit the rim of a hat, or a crown.

This was not a dream, she told herself before she fell asleep again.

But still, in the morning, she was not sure.

14 Vegetable Plot

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Miz whispered.

Dloan shrugged. He scratched his head, looking down at the great broad tail lying on the dust of the reeking cage. He lifted the tail, then put it back down again. “I need something to hold it up,” he whispered.

“Well don’t look at me!” Miz hissed, crouching at the stom’s snout with a tank of gas. He pumped the handle a few times and pulled the trigger again, squirting the gas towards the beast’s nostrils. Miz put his kerchief up over his mouth and coughed.

Dloan looked round.

“Hurry up!” Miz said. “This stuff is making me sleepy!”

Dloan took his knife and went to the stom’s side; he reached up and started cutting the ropes holding the animal’s left wing into its body.

“Dlo!” Miz said, eyes wide. “Are you crazy?”

Dloan said nothing; he let the ropes fall to the stinking floor of the cage. The stom’s great black wing unfolded gently like a collapsing tent. The beast stirred a little. Miz flinched back, gulping, then came forward again, spraying the gas quickly into the stom’s snout. “Shh!” he told the sleeping animal. “Shh! There, there…”

Dloan removed one of the planks that had held the wing straight, took it to the rear of the beast and by propping it between the wall and the cage floor, used it to keep the stom’s tail up off the dust. Then he disappeared underneath the tail.

Miz glanced at the front of the cage. Even with the intensifier glasses on the night was appallingly dark. Zefla was watching the zoo night-watchman’s hut, but Miz felt horribly vulnerable stuck in this cage crouched centimetres from the snout of an animal that looked like it could swallow him whole.

Not that he was sure he’d have swapped with Dloan. He watched Dloan’s feet kick on the floor of the cage as he pushed himself further in underneath the stom. Miz looked away.

He looked up at the barred ceiling of the cage. Of all the things he could ever have imagined doing in his life, squatting in a stinking cage surrounded by the rotted, half-eaten corpses of glide-monkeys in the middle of the night in the remotest, most backward part of the Entraxrln of Miykenns drugging an animal the size of a light aircraft while an accomplice interfered with the beast’s genitals, would not really have been the first to leap to mind.

The stom made a deep, sighing noise. Miz pumped more gas at it. Dloan wriggled out from underneath its rump.

“Got it?” Miz asked. Dloan nodded. Miz patted the animal’s snout gently. “Poor bitch; probably the most fun she’s had in years, and she slept through it.”

Dloan stood there, holding a wooden scraper and a small sealed pot, his trous and jerkin stained. He had an odd expression on his face.

Miz squirted one last burst of gas at the animal then stood up. “Right; let’s get going before she starts screaming rape.”

“No,” Dloan said, coming towards him.

“No?” Miz said, letting Dloan take the gas canister from his hand. Dloan put the scraper and pot down on the floor and crouched at the animal’s snout; he pumped the canister, spraying the gas into its nostrils. “Dloan!” Miz said, incredulous. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to kill it,” Dloan said. He kept pumping and kept spraying, while Miz shook his head and walked round in a circle, head in his hands, muttering.

Dloan pumped until the canister was empty and a dew of evaporating droplets lay around the animal’s nostrils. Little rivulets ran down its snout and fell spotting to the dust. Dloan swayed as he crouched there, mechanically spraying from an empty tank; Miz went over and grabbed him, choking on the cloud of gas. He pulled on Dloan’s massive shoulders and finally got him to move; they collapsed back on the floor of the cage. Dloan came to, shaking his head.

“Oof!” Miz wheezed. “Get off me!”

Dloan stood unsteadily, shaking his head. He swayed, looking at the silent animal, then retrieved the pot and the wooden scraper and stumbled for the rear of the cage. Miz followed him, scrubbing out their tracks in the dust as he went.

They re-locked the door with a piece of bent wire, collected Zefla from her look-out position near the watchman’s hut, and rendezvoused with Cenuij at a postern in an unlit section of the castle precincts.

“You stink,” he said as Miz handed him the sealed pot.

“Oh, shut up,” Miz told him.

Lines of bunting hung above the main square of Pharpech town; stalls, traders and entertainers provided foci for the swirling, milling crowds of people celebrating the annual migration of the glide-monkeys and the return of the stom, and especially the Royal Troupe.

Noise blared from the castle end of the square, where a group of men pretending to be stom danced round in a cleared arena in front of the royal reviewing stand. The stom-dancers held their arms out, displaying giant black wings made from dyed membrane and springy bark strips as they ran at and turned round each other, making unconvincing roaring noises. Priests and monks sitting in the higher levels of the reviewing stand and dressed in ceremonial robes, kept up a running cantillation describing the proceedings.

The King sat with the Queen, trying not to fall asleep.

Sharrow nibbled at a blister-fruit sorbet as she and Miz walked through the crowds, refusing offered bargains and brandished foods.

“No; I think it’s just that he’s finally cracked,” she said. “The vaginal secretions of a female stom.” She shook her head. “He probably doesn’t need the stuff at all; I bet he just did it as a joke on you and Dlo.”

“He’d better not have,” Miz said, eyes narrowing. “Or he’ll find some unpleasant things being done to him as he sleeps.”

A great cry went up; children dressed as glide-monkeys ran into the arena in front of the reviewing stand and scampered squealing and giggling before the great black swooping shapes of the stom-dancers.

The King jumped, woken from a daydream. He clapped dutifully as the children over-acted, pretending to die, flapping and jerking on the cobbles of the arena to the sound of further cheers.

Deep in the castle, in the apothecary’s work-shop, a long trestle table held a collection of beaten metal canisters, each with a detachable top holding a pump-handle and a trigger. A pair of mud-coloured, slimly fingered hands gently lifted the most ornately decorated of the canisters on the table-the one with the royal crest on it-opened it up and smeared a clear, greasy gel round the bottom of the pressure vessel, and carefully replaced it.

The male stom nest-space, hollowed out of a huge trunk six hundred metres above the ground-layer three kilometres north of the town, was a dark and rank-smelling cavern of a place. The way up to it was by hoist-cage and internal ladders rising through narrow, blocked-off rainwater down-channels. There was an ante-chamber to the roost itself where the King, his courtiers, other members of the royal family, nobles and their hangers-on all assembled, crowding into the dark, springily floored, candle-lit space, talking in hushed voices while Royal Guards checked that the male stom there in the nest-space were quiet and restive and generally looked as though they were settling down for the night.

The atmosphere was unsurprisingly tense; Cenuij felt it affect even him. The air was warm and stank of male stom and sweating nobles. He slid through the crowd of men with their canisters of tagging-paint and their guns and swords. He stood behind the King’s arch-impietist as the priest exorcised the gas canisters of any divine influence. Then he slipped away to the hide at the end of the nest-space itself, to try and find a vantage point.

There was still a little light left from the dusk outside. Cenuij crouched down and peeked out of a vertical slit cut out of the back of the roost cavern, surrounded by the boots and legs of men peering through horizontal slits higher up. It was like being blind. Miykennsians were supposed to have rather better night-vision than Golterians, but he wondered how any of them could see anything in this gloom.

“Here we are,” the scratchy, nasal voice of the Queen said, and Cenuij felt somebody bump into him. He looked round.

The Queen-a blousy creature with far too much make-up, zero dress-sense and apparently so incapable of ever deciding what jewellery to wear each morning that she simply threw on all of it-ushered her eldest son forward.

“Daddy’s new choirboy will look after you,” she whispered. She smiled toothily at Cenuij. “Won’t you?”

Cenuij looked at the child; six or seven, fat, all gums and gapped teeth, grinning idiotically and holding a model stom in his hand. There was some sort of sweet-smelling sticky stuff round his mouth.

Cenuij smiled insincerely up at the Queen.

“Of course,” he said. The boy handed him the model stom, climbed over him leaving a trail of stickiness and plonked himself down in Cenuij’s lap, hogging the view through the slit and forcing a gasp of breath from Cenuij, who had to lift the child up for a moment to sit him in a position where he wasn’t crushing his testicles.

“Make sure he keeps quiet!” the Queen whispered.

The boy stuck his nose into the viewing slit, wiping his hands on Cenuij’s cassock. Cenuij stared at the back of the child’s grubby neck and thought of several different ways of complying with the Queen’s request.

The first few noblemen and courtiers were those brave enough to choose or unlucky enough to be landed with stom at the far end of the roost, near the mouth-shaped exit. They crept up through the centre of the chewed-out cavern, past the dozing forms of hunkered-down stom,. one or two of which watched them go past and made deep, rumbling noises that made their neighbours restless, but otherwise the stom did not react.

It was difficult for Cenuij, with so low a vantage-point and a fat, sticky child in front of him, to see much of what was going on, even though his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, but he knew that what was supposed to be happening was that the man concerned approached his selected stom, gently sprayed the sleeping gas into its snout, then sprayed a patch or two of paint onto the side of its barrel chest, just below and forward of the wing root. Judging by the general mutters of approval and the reappearance of each of the men concerned-looks of considerable relief on their faces-everything was going according to plan.

It came to the King’s turn. He had opted for one of the stom near the middle of the cavern; a large, middle-aged beast he’d seemingly chosen for a couple of years running because it had an excellent record at taking glide-monkeys. Cenuij ignored the sickly-sweet smell of the child in his lap and edged closer to look out over the boy’s grease-slicked hair. He watched the dark-clothed figure crouch down and walk between the rows of snoring, rumbling animals.

The King approached the stom he’d selected. Cenuij could just see him giving his gas canister a final couple of pumps. Then he aimed it at the snout of the huge sleeping animal, spraying it for a couple of seconds.

The stom didn’t react for a moment. The King crept forward towards it, spray-can held out in front of him.

The stom shook itself; its great long head came up. The King stopped, then stepped back. The people around Cenuij went very still. The stom opened its mouth and made a yawning motion. The King sprayed gas at its head for five, ten seconds. The stom shook its head, then opened its mouth and roared. It reared up on its legs until it almost touched the top of the cavern, unfolding its wings as its bellow echoed through the nest; stom throughout the roost stirred and came awake; two on either side of the King woke up too, their snouts waving in the air.

People started to shout and scream. The boy on his lap tried to force his head up into Cenuij’s chin so he could see better; he rammed the boy’s head back down, fastening himself to the slit.

“Run!” people shouted. “Run, your Majesty!” The stom in front of the King wobbled and staggered forwards; he raised the gas canister and squirted more gas at it; the beast reared upright again and stood swaying. The two stom on either side rose up too; others at the back of the cavern lumbered off their nest-bowls, shuffling forward, necks craning, trying to move down to the middle of the roost and blocking the view from the rear of the cave.

“Guards!” somebody shouted. Cenuij felt a delicious thrill in his guts. The boy on his lap started to cry. The King’s stom-just visible above the heads of the other animals-fell slowly forward and disappeared. There was a scream from the middle of the cavern. The floor shuddered. People screamed and shouted all around Cenuij. He clenched his fists. The boy squirmed out from his lap and ran away through the forest of legs.

Royal Guardsmen ran into the roost chamber, guns drawn. They fired at the animals nearest them, guns roaring and snapping; bullets and laser bolts burst amongst the crowded animals, producing screams and roars and clouds of smoke and vaporised skin. The three rearmost stom whirled round and charged the guardsmen, who kept on firing but had to retreat. Two stom fell howling to the ground, heads ruptured, pumping blood; one crushed a guardsman under it, another wounded animal grabbed one of the men, picked him up and tossed him against the curved wall of the chamber with one blurring shake of its head. A fusillade of shots tore open its chest and it fell. Behind it, the push towards the cavern mouth became a rush, then a stampede; the floor vibrated to the thudding, thumping steps of the giant beasts and the air was filled with their cries and the noise of the guards’ guns as they advanced again.

The people around Cenuij yelled and shouted and stamped their feet. He pushed his face against the slit, trying to hide his smile.

The firing went on, flat-sounding in the soft-walled roost. Three more stom fell as they crowded round the far end of the cavern, calling and screaming as they piled up there, trying to escape.

“The King! The King!” people cried as the guardsmen fought their way across the fallen bodies of the stom to the centre of the cavern.

“The blockhead’s dead, you brainless toadies,” Cenuij whis-pered.

The last few of the stom able to escape did so, launching themselves from the cavern mouth into the late dusk light. Dead and dying animals lay bleeding or struggling to move on the floor of the roost. The guardsmen reached the middle of the cavern.

Cenuij composed his face into an expression of abject grief and got ready to look away from the slit. He breathed deeply, closing his eyes for a moment.

“Look!” a voice cried. He opened his eyes again.

Something moved above the guardsmen, on the wall of the nest-space near the roof. A tiny figure, waving.

“The King!” somebody shouted. “Hurrah!”

A great cheer went up.

Cenuij stared, appalled.

The tomb was a part-buried black granite cube that had been placed, on Gorko’s instructions, on a hill beyond the formal gardens of house Tzant.

She remembered when the tomb had first been emplaced; one of the old servants had taken her back out after the ceremony so that she could see it again without everybody else around.

The duenna told her that the tomb was important and that grandfather Gorko had wanted her to see it like this. Neither Sharrow nor the duenna could guess why. Then they had gone back to the house, for cakes.

The other children had always been frightened of the black sarcophagus, because half-way up one side there was a small smoke-glass window and if you got a torch you could shine it in and see the embalmed corpse of old grandpa Gorko sitting in his best scuffed ballistic hides on his favourite motor-bike, crouched over the handlebars as though still alive, his black helmet and mirrored visor reflecting the torch-light and seeming to stare back out at you.

Most of the children her age ran away shrieking when they saw the old man’s cadaver, but she recalled thinking it was nice that Gorko had been put in a place where the little smoke-glass window showed the valleys and hills of the house parklands, so that grandfather could still have a pleasant view, even in death. And she never forgot that grandfather Gorko had wanted her to see the tomb specially, even if she still didn’t understand why.

When-as happened every season or two-her father’s chasing pack of debtors drew too close to his heels and he had to leave the latest hotel in the middle of the night and head for the temporary sanctuary of Tzant, she’d always liked to visit the tomb on the hill. She’d climb up one of the nearby trees, pull herself along an over-reaching limb and drop down to sit on tap of the sarcophagus, listening to the trees in the wind and looking out in the same direction as her grandfather.

In the shade of the trees, the black granite was cool to the touch on all but the sunniest days, and sometimes she would lie or sit there for hours, just thinking. There was a sentence-just three words-engraved on top of the tomb; it said THINGS WILL CHANGE in hand-sized letters cut a finger deep into the granite. People were a little puzzled by the words; it was neither a recognised saying nor a maxim of Gorko’s. But it was what he had wanted for his epitaph, and so there it was.

Every now and again she would clear the fallen leaves, broken twigs and dead insects from the little water-filled trenches of the tomb’s inscription. One winter she had prized the letter-shaped lumps of ice out of those trenches and thrown them one-by-one at Breyguhn, who was chucking snowballs up at her from the ground; one of the thrown letters had gashed Breyguhn’s cheek and she had run off screaming back to the house.

She lay back on the cool stone, her head cushioned by her coat. She hadn’t been up here for years. She looked up at the pattern of darkness the coppery leaves made against the blue-green sky, feeling the warm breeze move across her arms and face. She closed her eyes, remembering the first time she’d made love in the open air, a few months earlier in a bower in a shady, out-of-the way courtyard buried in Yada’s sprawling history faculty. That had been one evening during Fresher’s Week, she thought. She tried to remember the young man’s name but couldn’t.

She put a hand out to feel the chiselled letters of the cube’s strange inscription.

There was talk of the tomb being moved when the World Court sold house Tzant next year. She hoped it would be allowed to stay where it was. Probably some other noble family would buy the estate, or some newly rich person or big company, but she couldn’t see why they would object to letting her grandpa rest peacefully in his chosen tomb, looking out over a favourite view. She could understand somebody wanting to make the place their own if they moved in, but would they really grudge one small corner of the estate for the remains of the man who’d built it?

She closed her eyes. Yes, she supposed they might. The size of the tomb and the fact it was out of the way were both irrelevant details; it was a symbol, and the physical size of a symbol had no bearing on its importance-it was the thought that mattered.

Today hadn’t gone too badly so far, despite all her fears. She had managed to avoid both Geis and Breyguhn at the funeral; Geis had arrived late anyway, lucky to have got compassionate leave at all for somebody who hadn’t been a close relation, and Breyguhn had been as concerned to keep out of Sharrow’s way as Sharrow had been to ignore her.

Sharrow hadn’t seen Geis since the ball in his father’s house at Siynscen over a year earlier. He’d called her numerous times since then, especially since she’d gone to university, but she’d always found ways of avoiding meeting him face-to-face. She told herself that this was for his own good; if he had become infatuated with her at the ball, then-given that she had no intention of taking things further-it was as well that he had time to forget about her and find somebody else. She still occasionally felt herself flush when she thought about that night.

She didn’t regret having let Geis dance with her, and still did not believe she had done anything wrong, but to somebody watching it might have looked as though she was throwing herself at her cousin, and that really was embarrassing. As for the thought that it might have appeared she was only setting out to beguile him to thwart Breyguhn; that was worse.

Lying there on the polished black rock of the sarcophagus, Sharrow rubbed at one leg, remembering that shock of cold pain two seasons earlier.

She hadn’t seen Breyguhn since the northern winter and that mean-spirited attack in the skidder rink. Brey had gone to finishing school and her father had continued to gamble, working himself further and further into debt and despair; both of them were people she felt happy to ignore.

She heard the voices as though part of a dream.

It was Geis and Breyguhn.

“… sure it won’t come to a war,” Geis was saying. “Everyone has too much to lose.”

Breyguhn said something that ended with, “…dying?”

Geis laughed quietly. “Of course,” he said. “Everybody is. You have to be a little afraid of it just to give your best.”

The voices came from the left edge of the tomb, where the path came up from the overgrown little valley that lay between the hill the tomb stood on and the terrace bordering the house’s lawns and formal gardens. Sharrow rolled quietly over on her front.

“But you… you should never act afraid of it,” Geis said.

Sharrow heard what might have been a hand slapping stone.

“This fellow; old Gorko. He might have had nightmares about dying every time he fell asleep for all we know, but he acted like he wasn’t scared of anything. He knew what he wanted and he went out to get it, and even though he knew it was dangerous he didn’t hesitate for a second.” There was a pause. “He was a great man. A very, very great man. We could learn a lot from him.”

Another pause. Then, “Shall we sit? You look a bit tired.”

“All right.”

“Here; we’ll sit on this.”

Sharrow heard something flap, then a rustle. She wondered whether she should make herself known, or creep over to the edge and look down on her cousin and half-sister. She lay there, undecided.

“You’re so dashing these days,” Breyguhn said with a small laugh.

“Ah,” Geis laughed too. “It’s the uniform.”

“No it isn’t; I’m sure a slob in a uniform is still a slob.” (Sharrow gritted her teeth; she had said exactly that to Breyguhn a year ago. Breyguhn had disagreed, of course.)

Geis laughed gently again. “Well,” he said. “There are chaps in the year who could certainly do with a lesson in grooming, I’ll give you that. Some fellows can look untidy the instant after their man’s dressed them to parade spec. Mind if I smoke?”

“Of course not. Is that something else they do in the Navy?”

“Well, it’s not a regulation,” Geis laughed.

Sharrow heard a click, then smelled shoan smoke; the mild narcotic was banned in Yada and illegal in parts of Caltasp. She wasn’t a great fan of the stuff herself; it didn’t deliver much of a hit and it smelled overly sweet.

“What is that?”

“This? It’s shoan; from Speyr. Harmless stuff; gives you a bit of a buzz, you know.”

“Could I try some?”

“Well, I’m not sure your…”

“What?”

“I’m not sure that you’re old-”

“You were going to say that Daddy wouldn’t approve, weren’t you?”

“Yes. Yes, I was.”

“Well, that doesn’t apply now, does it?”

There was another pause, and what might have been a sigh or a sniff.

“Brey…” Geis said.

“Oh, give me that.”

After a while Breyguhn coughed, then stopped.

“You sure-” Geis said.

Breyguhn coughed again. “Woo,” she said after a few moments.

“You all right?”

“Fine.”

“Look, I haven’t really had a chance to say properly how sorry-”

“Oh, Geis, stop it.”

“I just wanted to say-”

“Don’t! Don’t!” Breyguhn sobbed, and then there was another rustling sound and Breyguhn said something else but suddenly it sounded muffled.

“There there,” Geis said gently, so quietly Sharrow could hardly hear.

“Oh, Geis,” Breyguhn said. “You’ve always… I’ve… Ever…” She broke down, sobbing. The sobs became muffled again.

“Brey, Brey…” Geis said softly.

There was silence, then some sounds that Sharrow wasn’t sure were from Geis and Breyguhn or from the grass and bushes around her, moving in the breeze. Then a noise like a moan.

“Brey,” Geis said, something chiding in his voice.

“Oh, Geis, please; please… I want to… so much…”

What? thought Sharrow. She pulled herself to the edge of the sarcophagus, where she could see the valley path and the bushes on the side of the hill. She glanced over the edge of the tomb.

Geis and Breyguhn were embracing and kissing, both kneeling on Geis’s Alliance Navy uniform cape, spread out on the grass at the side of the tomb. As Sharrow watched, Breyguhn’s hands pulled Geis’s shirt out of his trousers and then disappeared inside them. One of Geis’s hands moved to Breyguhn’s skirted leg and slid slowly upwards as he laid her down on the cape.

Sharrow stared amazed at Breyguhn’s face for a second, then pulled herself away when she realised Brey only had to open her eyes to see her looking down at her.

Sharrow lay near the edge of the black cube, listening to Breyguhn and Geis as their breathing became heavier and more laboured; she heard the rustling noise of clothes being moved over skin and other clothes. The breathing became louder still and started to sound like moans. Breyguhn shouted out at one point, and Geis mumbled something, but Brey whispered quickly, and soon they were moaning together again and Sharrow lay there, feeling herself blush despite herself, her eyes wide, her mouth closed round her right wrist, teeth biting her own flesh so that she wouldn’t laugh or cry out and let them know she was there.

“Sharrow!” Geis shouted.

Sharrow froze, skin pimpling. The black surface of the sarcophagus roof seemed suddenly very cold.

Had he seen her? How could he have known…?

Then she realised, and relaxed.

She smiled, feeling smug, then frowned, unsure whether it was a compliment or an insult.

She listened to Geis breathing hard as he said, “Brey; Brey; I’m sorry… I’m so sorry. I don’t know what-”

Breyguhn howled. Sharrow’s flesh crawled. Breyguhn sobbed something but she couldn’t make out what it was. There was some more rustling; hurried and urgent.

“Brey; please. I meant-”

“Leave me alone!” shrieked Breyguhn, and then Sharrow heard footsteps on the grassed path, and one last moan from Geis. Breyguhn appeared where Sharrow could see her, forcing her way through the bushes growing over the path; Sharrow started to edge away from the side of the tomb in case Brey turned and saw her, but Breyguhn didn’t look back; she disappeared sobbing into the undergrowth, heading towards the house.

Sharrow lay there for another ten minutes, not daring to move. She listened to Geis dressing, then smelled another shoan cheroot. She thought she heard Geis sit down again and give a small laugh.

Eventually she heard him rise, and then saw him too head back down the path.

She lay there a while longer before she dropped down where they had been. The flattened grass by the side of the tomb looked sordid somehow, she thought. You could tell exactly what had gone on here just by looking at it. She smiled to herself, and stooped to pick up a half-smoked shoan stub. She sniffed it, considering keeping it for later. Then she thought of Geis’s lips on it, and Breyguhn’s, and of his lips on hers…

“Yuk,” she said to herself, and let the stub drop to the grass.

She slipped her formal grey shoes back on and draped the ash-coloured coat over her shoulders. She took a slightly circuitous route back to the house, where the reception following her father’s funeral was going quietly ahead without her.

“Oh, cheer up, Cenuij,” Zefla said. She poured him some more wine.

“I will not cheer up,” he said, slurring his words.

They had gone back out to The Pulled Nail that evening; Cenuij had left the festivities at the castle as soon as decently possible and joined them.

He drank from his goblet. “I can’t believe that dunder-brained bumpkin survived,” he said, slowly shaking his head. “Climbed up the wall. You’d have thought any self-respecting stom would have plucked him off like a blister-fruit, but the brainless little shit survived!” He drank deeply from the goblet again. “Fucking ridiculous!” he said.

“What was that last comment?” Sharrow said, coming back into the private room they’d hired and sitting down at the table. “A self-critical assessment of your recent ideas, Cenuij?”

He looked at her, eyes watery. He pointed at her with the hand holding the goblet. “That…” he said, narrowing his eyes. He looked at her for a moment. Then he sighed and shook his head sadly. “That is actually almost a fair comment,” he conceded, putting the goblet down and placing his head on his hands. He stared at the table surface.

“Hey,” Zefla said, patting his back. “You’ve tried, Cen. Twice.”

“Twice!” Cenuij said, holding his opened hands out and staring at the ceiling as though appealing to it. “Prophet’s blood, twice!”

“Not to worry,” Zefla said.

“We’ll think of something else,” Miz said, rocking back in his chair.

“It’ll be all right in the end,” Dloan agreed, nodding.

Cenuij fixed Zefla, Miz and Dloan in turn with a bleary look. “Sorry, could you all be a bit more vague? I hate being bombarded with details.”

Miz grinned and shook his head. Dloan was expressionless.

“Oh, Cenuij…” Zefla said, putting her arm round him.

“ ‘Oh, Cenuij,’” he muttered, trying to imitate her. He shrugged her arm off and stood up. “Call of nature,” he said, heading wavily for the door.

As he opened the door, the noise of the inn’s main bar-where people were dutifully celebrating the fact the King was still alive-swelled to a roar, then sank back to a murmur again as the door swung to.

Miz shrugged. He reached into his jerkin and took out an inhalant tube. “Well, I was saving this until we’d got the damn book, but-”

“Yeah,” Zefla said, face brightening dramatically. “But what the hell, eh?”

Miz cracked the inhalant. They each took a few breaths.

“Anyway,” Sharrow said, after she’d let her breath out. “Maybe this vault isn’t as impregnable as Cenuij thinks.”

“Yeah,” Miz said, coughing. “Fucking hell; we took out the one they kept the C.A. in; compared to that anything else should be easy.”

“Just getting the equipment might be a problem,” Dloan said.

“Think team,” Zefla said, grinning broadly. She handed the tube back to Miz, who was looking at the door of the room and frowning deeply. “What’s the matter?” she asked him.

He nodded towards the door as his hand went to his pocket. “Gone very quiet down there all of a sudden,” he said.

The others listened. The background buzz of noise from the bar below had disappeared.

Miz rocked forward in his seat and took out his gun. “Personal experience,” he said, getting up and padding to the door, “has taught me it’s a very bad sign when Pharpechian bars go this quiet.” He looked at Dloan and nodded sideways to the door. “You go and check it out, Dlo.”

Dloan got up silently.

Miz grinned. “Hey, I was only kidding…”

Dloan held up one hand. “No; I’ll go,” he said.

Miz looked up at the expression on the big man’s face. “Yeah,” he said. “You go.”

As Dloan opened the door, there was a scream from downstairs, then a terrible wailing and crying. Sharrow looked round the others. Dloan went out. Miz watched him walk along to the stairs leading down to the bar. The wailing got louder. He closed the door.

“What the hell’s that?” Zefla breathed.

“Cenuij just told a joke?” Sharrow suggested. She reached into her jacket pocket and took out the HandCannon.

The wailing kept going. Dloan came back unharmed after a couple of minutes, closing the door behind him and sitting in his seat.

“Well?” Sharrow said.

Dloan looked at her. “The King is dead,” he told her.

“What?” Miz said, coming over to the table.

Dloan explained it as he’d heard it.

The King had been demonstrating to the banquet guests how he’d escaped from the stom that evening. He’d climbed all the way up a large tapestry hanging against one wall of the banqueting hall and stood on the rafters, waving his wine goblet around as he described his strength, dexterity, bravery, and sureness of foot. He had slipped and fallen, hit the heavy banqueting table with his head and spattered a surprisingly large amount of brains over the tenth course, a sweet.

“Yeah!” Zefla said, not too loudly, and then immediately covered her hand with her mouth. She looked round guiltily.

Miz took a last suck on the inhalant. “The King is dead,” he said, passing the tube to Zefla.

“At least this might cheer Cenuij up,” Sharrow said.

Miz looked at the door. “Yeah, where’s he got-?”

Cenuij opened the door and came in. He locked the door and crossed to and opened the window, then kicked a nearby stool underneath it; he climbed up on the stool and looked out. He turned back and smiled unconvincingly at them.

They were all staring at him.

“Cenuij?” Zefla said. “You okay?”

“Fine,” he said, voice hoarse. There was a sheen of sweat on his face. He nodded at the window. “Let’s go.”

“What?” Miz said, putting his gun away in his jerkin.

“Don’t put that away, we might need it,” Cenuij said. “Come on, let’s go. Just leave the money on the table.”

“Cenuij,” Sharrow said. “Have you heard? The King is dead.”

He nodded quickly, looking exasperated. “Yes, yes, I know,” he said. He nodded at the door he’d locked. “But a load of monks just turned up and asked for lodgings here.”

“So?” Sharrow said.

Cenuij swallowed. “They’re Huhsz.”

15 Escape Clause

Miz dumped a load of coins on the table and went out along the landing to check Cenuij was right. Zefla lifted the two remaining bottles of trax spirit. Sharrow shoved the inhalant tube into a pocket; she was surprised to find that her hands were shaking. Cenuij was persuaded that the drop from the window was a little too great; Dloan checked along the corridor outside and found some back stairs.

Miz came back from looking down into the hall of the inn.

“Yeah,” he whispered. “It’s the Huhsz.”

A minute later they were gone, quitting the inn’s rear court-yard and heading out onto a small track that looped round through a field to the road for the town.

They had hired torch-carriers to escort them from the town to the inn, but didn’t want to wait for the youths to rouse themselves from the inn’s kitchens, or attract the Huhsz’s attention with lights. They’d all brought night-glasses with them except for Zefla, who held onto Dloan’s hand as they walked quickly up the road. They looked back to see a tall carriage surrounded by dark figures being manoeuvred through the archway into the inn’s main courtyard.

“Sons of bitches,” Miz breathed. “I saw ten; how about you?” he asked Cenuij.

“Twenty; maybe more,” Cenuij said.

“Shit,” Miz said. He looked at Sharrow, a pale ghost striding alongside, unknowingly disguising her limp as she did so. “Now what?”

“Forget the book,” she said. “We run.”

“I have a better idea,” Cenuij said. He smiled at Sharrow as she looked back at him. “We hobble the Huhsz first, then we run.”

“How?” she asked.

“A word in the right ears in the castle ought to do it,” Cenuij said. “I’ll tell the arch-impietist I’ve heard the Huhsz are here and that they’re God-worshipping republicans. That should put the fear of God into the Pharpechian religious authorities. Especially at the moment.”

“Well, don’t take too long,” Sharrow said. “We’re going to get the fastest mounts we can find and set off for the railway.”

“It might be best if we didn’t split up,” Zefla said. “What if Cenuij is expected to stay in the castle, to join in the mourning or something?”

“Yes,” Sharrow said, looking at Cenuij. “What if?”

“Don’t worry,” he told her. “You arrange the transport; I’ll delay the Huhsz and get out in time.”

“Fate, feels like free-fall.”

Geis smiled. “Watch,” he said. He took a pen from the pocket of his Navy dress jacket, held it in front of him, then let it go. The pen fell slowly towards the floor of the elevator. Geis retrieved the pen when it was about level with his polished knee-boots and put it back in his pocket.

Sharrow jumped lightly and floated towards the ceiling, then pressed herself back down with her fingers, laughing.

“You’re not supposed to do that,” Geis said, grinning as he watched her pull her dress down from where it had ridden up her legs.

“I see why you said we had to finish our drinks,” Sharrow said, steadying herself against the wall by the grab-handles. Geis still held both their glasses from the party, but he’d insisted they drink up before they took the elevator to inspect the gallery.

The air whistled round the lift like a distant scream.

Geis glanced at the depth display. “Should start braking now,” he said. The elevator shook slightly, the screaming noise altered in pitch, and weight gradually returned.

“What was this anyway?” Sharrow asked.

“Old gold mine,” Geis said as the lift slowed further and they felt their weight increase. The scream died to a moan.

“Feels like we’re almost through the crust,” Sharrow said, flexing her legs.

“Hardly,” Geis said. “But we are very deep; deep enough to need refrigeration to keep the tunnels comfortable.” The lift came smoothly to a stop and the doors opened.

“Where the hell is he?” Sharrow looked up at where the first hint of the slow dawn was turning the membrane sky a faint, streaky blue.

They had quit The Broken Neck almost as fast as they had The Pulled Nail. They returned to the stable on the other side of town where they’d sold the jemers they’d ridden in on. There hadn’t been any need to hammer at the door to get the proprietors up; like most people in Pharpech town, they had been awake all night, first celebrating the King’s miraculous escape, then mourning his tragic demise. Cenuij was supposed to meet them there, but they’d already waited two hours.

The stable had gone quiet behind them, the owner and his family finally gone to bed. They waited on the road outside. Zefla lay curled up asleep amongst their baggage, her head resting against a shallow bark crate full of empty beer jugs the stable had left out for collection by the local brewery. Dloan sat near her, looking down the road the way Cenuij ought to come, while Miz paced up and down and Sharrow alternated standing with her arms folded, foot tapping, and also pacing up and down. Their five mounts and two pack jemers snored and snorted fitfully, lying sleeping at the side of the road.

“Let me call him,” Miz said to Sharrow, coming up to her and waving the transceiver.

She shook her head. “He’ll call us as soon as he can.”

“Well let me go in and find out what’s happening!” Miz pleaded, pointing to the low, dark lump that was the town, barely outlined against the lighter darkness behind it.

“No, Miz,” she said.

Miz held his hands up in a gesture of desperation. “So what do we do? Wait here forever? Leave without him?”

“Wait till he comes. We can’t leave him here for the Huhsz. Anyway,” she said, “he’s probably the only one who remembers the route back to the railway…” Her voice trailed off as the transceiver in Miz’s hand buzzed.

Miz glanced at the dark, windowless wall of the stable behind him, turned away from it, then clicked the communicator on. “Yes?” he said quietly.

“Miz.” It was Cenuij’s voice. “You have the animals?”

“Yeah; we gave you the ugly one. What’s keeping you?”

“Desecrations. Listen; meet me behind the cathedral as soon as you can.”

What?” Miz said, glancing at Sharrow.

“Behind the cathedral. Ride in. Bring my mount. And something the same size as the book.”

“The same-?” Miz began.

Sharrow took hold of his hand, talking into the transceiver. “Cenuij, what about the Huhsz?”

“Taken care of. I have to go now-”

“Cenuij!” Sharrow said. “Reassure me.”

“Eh?” They could hear the note of impatience in his voice. “Oh… It’s all a Huhsz trick; flee for your lives. Happy?”

“No,” she said. “Get out of there.”

“Absolutely not. Behind the cathedral; bring a book. Out.”

The transceiver chimed once and went silent.

“Call him back,” Sharrow said.

Miz tried. “Switched off.” He shrugged.

Sharrow glared at the transceiver. “Bastard,” she said.

Miz put it back in his pocket and held his arms out. “Now what?”

The tunnel revealed beyond the elevator doors was four metres across and gently lit. The air in the tunnel was as warm as the evening breeze had been on the terrace of the villa five kilometres above on the shoulder of one of the Blue Hills of Piphram, where the New Year party was still in full swing. Geis showed her into a small electric buggy. He took a small bottle from his jacket and filled both their glasses with the echirn spirit. They clinked glasses solemnly, then he took the buggy’s controls and the vehicle jerked into motion, spilling a little of her drink on the yolk of her dress.

“Eek,” she said, and burped decorously.

“Whoops.” Geis grinned and handed her a handkerchief. “Sorry,” he said.

“That’s quite all right,” she told him, dabbing at her dress. The lights of the corridor moved smoothly past as they drove towards a set of steel-blue doors filling the tunnel ahead. She looked back towards the lift. “Hope they’re not missing you at the party.”

“Let them,” Geis said. He took a pack of cheroots from his jacket. “Smoke?” he asked as he slowed down for the doors.

“Shoan, right?”

“How’d you guess?”

“I’m a genius.”

Geis just grinned as the buggy halted; he jumped out, went to the tall doors, pressed his hand to a panel and stepped back. The metre-thick doors swung outwards slowly and silently, revealing a short stretch of narrower tunnel beyond and then a similar set of doors.

“Geis,” Sharrow said, hiccuping once as she drew on the cheroot, lighting it. “You’re collecting doors. Your art collection consists of several sets of nuke-proof doors.”

Geis swung back into the buggy and started it moving.

“Come to think of it,” he said, “they are antiques. I hadn’t thought of that.”

She stuck the cheroot between her lips and put her hand out towards him as they slowed for the second set of doors. “I demand my Finder’s Fee,” she said.

He took her hand and kissed it. “Later,” he said. He jumped out of the buggy and went to the doors ahead.

She frowned, looking at her hand, then turned to look back at the first set of doors; they had closed.

“Hey, Zef?”

“Mmm?”

“Up, girl; we need your pillow.”

“What?”

The gallery was a long cavern alcoved with short tunnels, each fitted with its own blast door; the gallery’s grey ceiling was half-hidden by cable runs, pipes and ducting. Geis turned all the lights on and had the alcove doors swing open. Each alcove held a few paintings, statues, full bookcases, or a piece of ancient technology.

She drank from her glass and smoked the shoan cheroot, walking with him from alcove to alcove, surveying the collected treasures, some belonging to Geis’s branch of the family, some the property of the Dascen house itself and not claimed by the World Court, and some the investments of Geis’s family’s companies.

She made a show of looking round. “You didn’t rescue old Gorko’s tomb when they removed it from Tzant, did you?” she asked, smiling at him.

He shook his head. “I couldn’t. It’s still under Court jurisdiction.” If Geis connected the tomb with his enjoyment of Breyguhn that afternoon of the funeral, it didn’t show on his face. “Ended up in a warehouse in Vembyr,” he told her, “if I remember correctly. I’ll bid for it, of course, if and when it…” He paused, looking puzzled. “Why are you grinning like that?”

“Nothing,” she said, looking away. “You don’t really think any of this stuff’s going to be at risk, do you?” she asked, drawing her light wrap over her bare shoulders as they moved beneath the chill down-draught of a ventilation grille.

“Oh, it’s just a precaution,” Geis said, glancing at her. “Are you cold?” he asked. “Here, have my jacket.”

“Don’t be silly,” she told him, pushing his offered jacket away.

He slung his jacket over his shoulder. “I don’t think there will be a war. Even if there is it’ll probably be over quickly, and probably just be a space war; but you can’t be sure. I thought it best to get this stuff to safety while there was a threat. It might look like overreaction, but these things are priceless; irreplaceable. And they are my responsibility.” He grinned at her. “I wouldn’t expect a student to understand, though. You lot all support the anti-Tax side anyway, don’t you?”

She snorted. “The ones who aren’t on establishment scholarships, or too deep in their studies to care, or permanently zonked, yes,” she told him.

He stopped in front of an alcove where a glisteningly polished marble statue showed two naked lovers embracing. He refilled her glass.

“Well,” he said. “I have some sympathies with the anti-Tax side, too, but-”

“You’re in the Alliance Navy, cuz,” she reminded him.

“In logistics liaison, on a sporadic commission,” he said. “I’m not likely to be fighting space battles.”

So what?” she said scornfully.

“I believe I have a duty to be there,” he said reasonably. “To represent the family’s best interests. But I don’t want to be put in a position of actually…”

“Fighting.”

“Making a mistake that would cost lives,” he said, smiling.

She ground the stub of the cheroot under one heel. “Very convincing,” she said.

She walked on. Geis stopped to swivel his boot over the cheroot stub as well.

They left Zefla at the stables with her mount and the two pack animals and rode into the town. Cenuij met them in a narrow cobbled street between the cathedral and a tall, teetering tenement.

It was still very dark; they didn’t see Cenuij until he appeared out of the shadows beneath an overhanging storey above a shop-front.

Sharrow jumped down and grabbed the throat of his cassock with one hand. She held the HandCannon in the other.

“This had better be good, Mu.”

“It is!” he whispered, as Miz and Dloan joined them. Cenuij pointed at the cathedral with one shaking hand. “The book is in there! In the cathedral! Now! And it’s practically unguarded!”

Miz bent forward, eyes narrowing. “Define ‘practically’.”

“Two guards?” Cenuij said.

Miz straightened and looked round at the dark bulk of the cathedral. “Hmm,” he said.

“Did you bring something the same size as the book?” Cenuij asked as Sharrow let go of his habit.

“Yes,” she said.

“Perfect.” Cenuij rubbed his hands together.

“The small matter of the Huhsz, Cenuij…” Sharrow said.

Cenuij waved one hand. “A detachment of Royal Guards-men went out to surround the inn over an hour ago. The Huhsz will be spending some time in custody; certainly they won’t be seeing daylight until the prince is crowned King next week.”

“So why’s the book in the cathedral now if the coronation’s not till next week?” Miz asked.

Cenuij’s smile showed up in the darkness. “The terms of the late King’s will dictated that when he lay in state in the cathedral it should be with his feet lying on the book. It’s a position of disgrace usually reserved for enemies’ skulls and unfaithful mistresses. His Majesty’s bibliophobia to the rescue.” Cenuij adjusted his habit and drew himself up and said primly, “I thought it too good an opportunity to miss.”

“You’d better be right about the Huhsz,” she told him. “Where exactly is the book?”

“Follow me.”

“I didn’t really have any choice, Sharrow,” Geis said wearily, following her past the softly lit alcoves. “I had to join the Navy, for my own self-respect and because, when you have this sort of power, this responsibility, you can’t choose not to have it when the decisions become tough. You can’t afford to prevaricate or delegate; you have to be engaged. You can’t stay neutral; you can say you’re neutral, and try to act as though you are, but that neutrality will always help one side more than the other; that’s just the way power works… the leverage it exerts.” He shrugged. “Anyway, it’s mealy-mouthed, dishonourable, even, to shy away from something like this. One side has to be more right than the other, has to be better for… for us, and I have a responsibility to try to work out which, and then to act on that evaluation. One has to declare for one side or the other.” He smiled ruefully. “I know it’s tough at the bottom, too, and maybe in worse ways, but it really isn’t that easy being at the top. There’s less freedom than people think.”

“If you say so,” she shrugged.

They came to an alcove where a giant plastic packing-case a couple of metres square sat on a couple of low trestles.

“Latest arrival,” Geis said, patting the case. “Shall we open it?”

“Why not?”

He unclipped the catches, swung a lever up and stepped back. The front of the case split, opening outwards like the blast doors earlier; a white tidal wave of tiny foam squares flooded from the interior of the case, spilling out over Geis and submerging him up to the waist; she gave a little yelp and stepped back, laughing as the white avalanche swept around her, the level of tickling squares rising to her knees before the flood subsided.

Geis had turned back to look at her, laughing and brushing foam squares out of his hair. Behind him in the packing case, still secured by straps and lapped by white foam squares, was another life-size statue of two lovers. The statue looked like part of a series; it seemed the two lovers were no longer merely embracing, but actually copulating.

Geis spread his hands. “The tide of history,” he laughed. She smiled. He waded through the wash of foam squares to her and stood in front of her, studying her. “You are so beautiful,” he said softly.

He let his jacket drop behind him.

“Geis,” she said.

“Sharrow…” He put one hand behind her neck and pulled her to him, kissing her. She put one hand against his chest and tried to push him away. His lips covered hers, his tongue trying to force its way between. He came closer, putting his other arm round her, pulling her to him.

She forced her head to one side for a moment, gulping. “Geis,” she said, laughing nervously.

He pulled her back and kissed her neck and ears and face, muttering things she could never remember later, and while she tried to push him away, still half-laughing, he ran his hands down her back, under her wrap and up between that and her thin dress. His lips found hers again as she started to speak his name, and his tongue slipped into her mouth. She almost choked, straining to pull her head back as he bent over her; she dropped her glass to push him away with both hands.

“G-” she managed, before they tumbled over backwards into the slope of white foam.

There were two guards in the cathedral sacristy, left there to look after the hated and possibly holy book while the nave of the cathedral was hurriedly prepared to accept the late King’s body, the head of which was currently being packed and stitched into something approaching physiological acceptability in the castle surgery.

One of the guards opened the door when Cenuij knocked.

“My son; I have come to exorcise the book,” he told him.

The guard frowned but opened the door. Cenuij entered. The guard stuck his head out into the cloister to look round. Miz put his gun gently against the guard’s head, just behind his ear, and the man went very still. Cenuij drew his own gun as the other guard was standing up and reaching for his carbine.

Geis straddled her, still kissing her, then suddenly pulled his face away, breathing hard, his hands parting her wrap and running down over her dress, over her breasts and belly.

“It’s all right,” he said breathlessly, smiling down at her. “It’s all right.”

She pushed her pelvis upwards, trying to heave him off; her arms foundered in the soft depths of foamy squares. “It is not all right,” she gasped.

He pulled his shirt open, buttons popping. “Don’t worry,” he said. He grabbed her dress around her stockinged thighs and pushed it up.

“Geis!”

He fell back on top of her, his head moving quickly from side to side as he tried to kiss her again. He grabbed her arms with his hands, then held both her wrists with one hand and started to undo his trousers. “It’s all right, Sharrow,” he said breathlessly.

“Geis!” she screamed. “NO!”

“Don’t worry; I love you.” He fumbled with her underclothes.

She went limp.

“It’s perfectly simple,” Miz said, addressing the two guards who were sitting on the floor of the sacristy. Cenuij stood by the locked door. Sharrow and Dloan lifted the book out of its palanquin and put it on a long, low vestment chest. Dloan slit the stitching on the book’s skin cover with a viblade. The guards watched, eyes wide.

“We’re going to take this actually quite worthless book away with us,” Miz told them, “and replace it with this rather attractive crate of empty beer jugs.” Miz pointed at the squat beer crate. The guards looked at it, then back at him. “And you aren’t going to say anything, because if you do, and we’re caught, we’ll destroy the book. So the choice is; raise the alarm and have to admit you let us take this supposedly incredibly precious article without really putting up a fight, or say nothing.” Miz spread his hands, smiling happily. “And live to spend these small tokens of our appreciation for your cooperation.” He counted out some silver coins and slipped them into the guards’ pockets.

Sharrow held the skin cover while Dloan slid the book out. The case revealed was made of stainless steel embedded with smooth stones of jacinth, sard, chrysoberyl and tourmaline and inlaid with whorls of soft gold. Dloan checked the lock mechanism. He smiled.

Cenuij pushed him out of the way and put his hands on the book’s case, gently turning it on its side. There was a single glyph on what looked like the spine of the metal box. It wasn’t a script that any of the others recognised, but Cenuij’s face radiated joy when he saw it.

“Yes,” he whispered, stroking the surface of the casing.

“This is it?” Miz asked quietly.

Cenuij glanced at the two guards then went, smiling, back to his position at the door.

Sharrow lifted the beer crate up onto the vestment chest. She shook the crate, rattling it, then crouched down to the lowest of the shallow, two metre-long drawers in the chest, sliding it out and lifting the elaborately embroidered robe within. She sliced off part of its train with the viblade, then tore the material into strips and stuffed those in between the dumpy beer jugs. She shook the crate again, seemed satisfied with its silence, put the top on and slid it into the skin book cover as she kicked the vestment drawer closed again.

Dloan had found some needles and thread. “How’s your invisible stitching?” he asked Sharrow.

She shook her head. “Not so much invisible as non-existent.”

Dloan shrugged. “Allow me,” he said modestly, sucking the end of the thread.

“I love you, I love you,” Geis mumbled, trying to push his hand inside her knickers.

She remained limp. “Geis,” she said, very quietly and meekly.

“What?” he panted. His flushed face looked down at hers, concerned.

“Get OFF me!” she roared, bringing her head up to crack his nose while one knee came up between his legs.

Her knee couldn’t connect because Geis’s trousers were in the way but her forehead thumped into Geis’s nose and mouth. He gasped. She pulled her hands free from his and wriggled round, turning underneath him and forcing her arms and legs through the depth of foam squares. She found the floor beneath and half-crawled, half-swam away, then staggered out to a wall, hauling herself upright.

Geis sat in the middle of the wedge of white foam. He touched the end of his nose, glaring at her and breathing hard.

“That wasn’t very nice, cuz,” he said. His voice was soft and flat. There was an expression of predatory appraisal in his eyes that sent a chill through her. For the first time in her life she felt frightened of a man. Her bottom lip started to tremble and she clamped her jaw shut, raising her head and glaring right back at him. They held each other’s gaze for a while.

He glanced towards the ceiling. “It’s an awful long way back to the surface,” he said quietly. “We’re very alone.” He started to slide through the hill of white foam towards her.

She swallowed. “Forget it, Geis,” she said, and was relieved, even in her terror, that her voice sounded level and calm. “Lay a finger on me and I swear I’ll bite your fucking throat out.” She wasn’t sure she didn’t mean it entirely literally, but the way it came out it sounded absurd and pathetic in her ears. Her heart pounded and she couldn’t breathe.

Geis stopped moving. He stared at her a moment longer, that same expression of raptorial calculation like a mask across his eyes.

She gulped a breath and tried to swallow again, her throat dry.

Then Geis gave a small laugh, relaxed and looked bashful. He sniffed, inspected his fingers for blood and attempted to waggle his two front teeth.

“Well, cuz,” he said. “I take it the answer’s No.” He grinned.

She pulled the wrap back across her shoulders. “That wasn’t funny, Geis,” she said.

He laughed. “It wasn’t meant to be funny,” he said. “Fun, yes, but not funny.”

“Well it wasn’t either,” she said, slipping one shoe back on and looking around for the other one. “Find my shoe and take me back to the party.”

“Yes, sir,” Geis said, sighing.

They returned to the New Year party via the buggy and the tunnel and the elevator. Geis joked and was charming and apologised offhandedly for what had happened. He offered her a drink from the echirn bottle and another shoan cheroot; she stared at the lift wall, monosyllabic. Geis laughed at her for being such a poor sport.

She joined the anti-Tax forces a few months later.

“I never really intended to pursue a life of crime,” Miz told the two guards, glancing at his watch. The others had been gone five minutes. He was giving them ten minutes’ start. The guards still sat on the floor, watching him. He’d taken the magazines out of their projectile carbines and was walking round the sacristy with the clips in one hand and his gun in the other.

He glanced up at a tall wardrobe, then looked back at the guards. “But I fell in with a bad crowd when I was young…”

He climbed up on a solid-looking desk at the side of the wardrobe, keeping his gun trained on the guards all the time. “My family.”

He peeked quickly at the top of the wardrobe, then put the magazines up there and jumped down. “Of course,” he said. “Society was to blame…”

They sat together under the furs in the rear of the open sleigh as it charged between the steep banks of snow. The sleighman cracked his whip over the heads of the twin sials straining in their jingling traces; a breeze stirred the tree-tops overhead, dislodging powdery snow and making the road lights swing on their wires.

“I did see a VTOL,” Miz said to her as the hotel came into view round the side of the hill. The hotel and the other buildings in the small village were speckled with lights creating pools of amber, yellow and white on the snow, and behind the hotel, on the uncovered handball court, glittered the sleek, silver shape of a private jet. Traditional music thudded from the hotel ballroom and mingled with modern sounds from the open windows of the bar, the combined cacophony echoing off the cliffs behind the village.

People in furs and ski clothes were sitting drinking steaming bowls of winter wine on the hotel’s front steps; the sials’ breath blew out in great white clouds as the sleigh drew up.

Sharrow looked at the svelte body of the private jet, and frowned.

They were waiting five kilometres out of town, where the road crested a ridge and a series of root-tubes were carried diagonally over the track on enormous bark trestles, leaving about enough room for a rider to pass underneath without ducking.

Dloan climbed to the top of one of the tubes and watched the road leading back towards the town. He saw the single rider approaching. There was nobody following.

“Okay?” Sharrow asked him as Miz reined the jemer in.

He shook his head. “Hell no,” he said, rubbing his behind. “These things really give you a sore bum when they gallop, don’t they?”

“Sharrow; cuz! Hello!”

The bar of the hotel was packed; Geis had to fight his way through the crowds to her and shout above the music thundering from the speakers to make himself heard. He was dressed in shorts and a light summer shirt that looked odd amongst the ski-suits and heavy winter clothes everybody else was wearing. He was tanned and looked fitter and better proportioned than Sharrow remembered.

“Hello, Geis. Geis; Miz,” Sharrow said, nodding from one man to the other. She saw Breyguhn moving through the press of people towards them. “Shit,” Sharrow breathed, looking away as she took her coat off. It was two years to the day since she’d last seen Geis, that night in the gold mine turned vault deep under the Blue Hills of Piphram. The last time she’d seen Brey had been even longer ago, at their father’s funeral.

“Mister Kuma,” Geis was saying, smiling thinly and drawing himself up. He nodded.

“Delighted,” Miz said.

“Sharrow,” Geis said, pushing between her and Miz. “Season’s greetings!” She turned her head, letting him kiss her cheek. “Great party!” he shouted. “Yours?”.

“No,” she said. “Just the hotel’s.”

Geis gestured to Breyguhn as she approached then turned to Sharrow. “Haven’t seen you since before the war,” he bellowed. “Had us sick with worry when we heard you’d been hurt. Why didn’t you answer my calls?”

“We were on opposite sides, Geis,” she reminded him.

“Well,” Geis laughed. “That’s all forgotten now…”

“Hello, Sharrow.”

“Brey; hi. How are you?”

“Fine. Enjoying yourself here?” Breyguhn wore a filmy white summer dress; her hair was up and artfully wisped and curled. She was carefully made-up and her face looked elegantly narrow. Sharrow wondered if she’d had surgery, or some grey-area genetic treatment.

“Yes,” Sharrow told her. “It’s been a good holiday. What brings you here?”

Breyguhn shrugged. “Oh,” she said, “a whim.” She glanced at Geis, who was smiling broadly at Miz while gesturing at the bar. “Not my idea,” Brey continued. “There was a family party in Piph and Geis suddenly decided it would be amusing to drop in on you and your friends and wish you Happy New Year. Nobody else wanted to come, but I thought I’d keep Geis company.” She shrugged. “It was a very boring party.”

“Piphram,” Sharrow nodded. “So that’s why you’re in your summer threads.”

“Like I say, it was all very spur-of-the-”

“Ordered some drinks,” Geis shouted, moving to shepherd them towards one corner of the packed bar. “Should be a booth over here for us…”

Breyguhn looked Sharrow down and up as best she could in the crush. “Anyway, you look well. Fully recovered from your war wounds?”

“Near as dammit,” Sharrow nodded.

“And how is the Antiquities business?” Breyguhn asked Sharrow as they moved amongst the merry, jostling warmth of the revellers.

“Pays the bills, Brey,” Sharrow said. They came to a booth being held vacant for them by a very large man in a formal suit and mirrored night-glasses who bowed to Geis and stood to one side. Miz winked at the bodyguard. They sat in the booth.

“Should be space for another three,” Geis said. “Your other team-mates are here, aren’t they?” he asked Sharrow, pouring from a huge pitcher of wine.

“They’re around,” Sharrow said, putting her coat, gloves and hat on the bench beside her. “Zef’s probably dancing. I’ll go and find her.”

“No, really,” Geis said. “There’s no-”

Sharrow slid out of the booth, past the bodyguard and away through the crowds towards the ballroom.

“Oh,” Sharrow said. She stared down at the message in the dust.

Miz looked too. “Very droll,” he said. He crossed the hotel room to the bar; he opened the cooler and surveyed the contents. “Very fucking droll indeed.”

Cenuij had gone pale. Sweat glistened amongst the hairs on his top lip. His hands shook as he touched the interior of the casing. “No!” he whispered hoarsely. He put one hand into the dust, stirring it as though searching for something else underneath, then raised the same quivering hand to his brow, and stared at the words engraved on the shining stainless steel. He shook his head. Zefla took his shoulders as he backed away and sat down, collapsing into a seat. He stared straight ahead. Zefla squatted at his side, patting his shoulders. He put his still shaking hands down into his lap. The dust left a mark on his temple.

Dloan shrugged and started packing away the equipment he and Miz had used to check and then open the lock on the book’s casing.

Sharrow turned back the frontispieces and the inside cover of the casing.

The Universal Principles, said the engraved legend on the titanium-foil cover in an antique version of Golter Standard script.

By The Command Of The Widow Empress Echenestria,

The Blessed Of Jonolri And Golter, To The Greater Glory

Of The True God Thrial, This Solar Year Six Thousand

Three Hundred And Thirty Seven, This Book Is Offered,

Being The Collected Dispositions Of The First And Second

Post-Schismatic Intervarsital Convocations (Historical,

Philosophical, Theological, Cosmological), Also The Last

Summation By The Condemned Un-Godly Machine

Parsemius, The Life-Elegies Of The Esteemed Imperial Poets

Folldar And Creedsunn The Younger, And The Presiding

Commentary Of The Court Sage System.

By Court Decree Maximal Made Perpetually Unique In The

Image Of The Single God-Head, These Are The Universal Principles.

The engravings on the four following pages of diamond leaf showed, firstly, a symmetrically spotted Thrial, followed by a diagram of the whole system, then a magnified nebula and finally a view of thin, bubble-like filaments and membranes; lines of tiny pits freckling the smooth hard sheet of cold diamond. Sharrow ran her fingers over the scratches of the second page.

“It might still be here,” she said. “Somewhere. Recorded somehow.”

Cenuij was silent.

Miz shook his head as he took a bottle from the cooler. “I doubt it, somehow.”

“Yes.” Sharrow sighed. “Actually,” she said, putting her hand into the book’s empty casing and lifting a little of the paper-dust in the bottom. “So do I” She let the dust run through her fingers.

“What about the message Gorko’s supposed to have left?” Zefla asked quietly, stroking Cenuij’s shoulder. “Has that gone too, if it was ever there?”

Sharrow shifted her focus from the lines her fingers made against the grey-brown dust to the three engraved words beneath.

“Oh, it’s here,” she said, staring at the sentence. “It was always here. It just wasn’t a message until Gorko used it somewhere else. But I think I know where he’s pointing us now.”

“You do?” Miz asked, looking surprised and pleased. “Where?”

“Vembyr,” she said. “The city where the androids are.” She let the case slam shut.

Zefla and Dloan were both involved in a complicated groupdance in the ballroom; Sharrow left them to it. She found Cenuij at the bar and steered him towards the booth.

Cenuij stumbled and almost fell over a table as they squeezed through the crowd. He laughed cruelly and told the people at the table it shouldn’t be where it was; how dare they move a table? Who gave them authority? So what if it was bolted to the floor?

She dragged him away. “You got drunk fast,” she said.

“Tell you the secret if you buy me a drink.”

“We have an early start tomorrow, remember?”

“But that’s why I started early this evening!” Cenuij said, gesturing wildly and knocking somebody’s drink. “Do you mind?” he snarled at the woman he’d bumped into. “People have to clean this floor, you know!”

“Sorry,” Sharrow said to the woman with a smile, pushing Cenuij onwards and then following him.

“Get me a drink,” Cenuij told her.

“Later. Come and meet my ghastly relations.”

“You mean there’s worse than you?” Cenuij said, horrified.

They arrived at the booth; she introduced Geis and Breyguhn.

The two men exchanged formal greetings, then Cenuij turned to Breyguhn.

“Ms Dascen,” he said carefully. He took Breyguhn’s hand and kissed it. Cenuij knew that technically Brey wasn’t a full Dascen at all; Sharrow guessed that addressing her as such was done more to annoy her than to flatter Breyguhn.

“Why, Mister Mu,” Breyguhn said, smiling at Cenuij and then glancing at Sharrow.

Cenuij breathed deeply and seemed to collect himself. “Your sister has told me so much about you,” he said. Sharrow found herself gritting her teeth to stop herself saying anything. “I, of course, believed every word,” he went on, “and have always wanted to meet you.” Cenuij smiled. He was still holding Breyguhn’s hand. “I would consider it an honour if you would grant me the next dance.” He gestured grandly in the very general direction of the ballroom.

Breyguhn laughed and stood. “Delighted.” She smiled at Sharrow as she and Cenuij made their way back through the shouting, laughing crowd.

Sharrow watched them go, eyes narrowed.

TEXTBEGIN UNSOURCED HOMING MESSAGE MIYKENNS/GOLTER ANON/TKEEP. COMMERCIAL MAXENCRYPT.

Ref.: COntracT #0083347100232 (TKEEP).

Please be advised Contract only partially fulfilled. Item now in our possession but only casing and already-known dedication still extant. Rest of text printed on paper which has rotted to dust over past twelve centuries. Nature of time lock on case and chemical composition of paper dust indicates this may have been intentional. Detailed examination of case and remaining contents reveals no other storage medium save (naked-eye visible) message engraved in rear of case, quote THINGS WILL CHANGE. unquote. Case believed to be late Terhama’a (Golterian) Limited, comprising precious and semi-precious stones and gold on steel, plus four diamond leaf engravings frontis. Total estimated value conservatively 10MnT. Please advise. Reply CME to one-shot homing dest. #MS94473.3449.1 [1] TEXTEND

TEXTBEGIN HOMING MESSAGE GOLTER/MIYKENNS TKEEP/ANON. COMMERCIAL MAXENCRYPT.

Ref.: OSHD #MS94473.3449.1[0]

Extant remains acceptable under Contract clause 37.1. Kindly deliver via Vessel ‘Victory’, Mine Seven Sub-Surface Crawler Base, Equatorial Region, NG, soonest.

TEXTEND


TEXTBEGIN UNSOURCED HOMING MESSAGE MIYKENNS/GOLTER ANON/HOUSE (S. JALISTRE) COMMERCIAL MAXENCRYPT.

Ref.: COntracT #0083347100232 (TKEEP).

Seigneur, please see attached message from agency. Confirm property to be delivered to Nachtel’s Ghost.

Reply CME to one-shot homing dest. #MS97821.7702.1[1]

TEXTEND


TEXTBEGIN HOMING MESSAGE GOLTER/MIYKENNS HOUSE/ANON. COMMERCIAL MAXENCRYPT.

Ref.: OSHD #MS97821.7702.1[0] Destination confirmed. Please deliver to our agents on NG as advised.

TEXTEND


She walked back from the hire-bureau through the morning rush-hour of bicycles, trams and cars. The streets were busy. Unlike Malishu, SkyView didn’t actually ban private transport, though it did discourage it.

The city was perched on a plateau that stuck half a kilometre above the surrounding sea of undulating Entraxrln canopy like a vast wart on pale skin. It was a chill, raw place even though it was only a couple of thousand kilometres from the equator, and less than two thousand metres above sea level. Denied the Entraxrln’s relatively balmy auto-climate, SkyView relied entirely on Thrial for its warmth, and the sun was noticeably smaller in the sky than it was seen from the surface of Golter.

The hire-bureau was near the main funicular station where they’d first arrived in the city three days earlier, rising from the purple gloom of the Entraxrln evening to the wide glory of a Miykenns sunset in brilliant cerise. Now, commuters who had just made the same trip swept her along with them through the cool, crisp, cloudless morning.

She had sent her first message early last night and received its reply after supper. She’d asked for the confirmation from the Sea House within minutes, but hadn’t waited for a reply; there was a three hour round-trip signal delay and it was then very early morning on Golter. She doubted the Seigneur was an early riser.

She read the two replies again, waiting on a traffic island while cars whirred and trams clanked past. She raised her face to the sunlight, seeking the weak warmth with a kind of hunger after the weeks in Pharpech’s perpetual gloom. The light shone down the canyon of city street, reflecting off high glass-fronted buildings on either side, pouring onto the river of traffic and the crowds of people. NG, soonest, she read once more, and then stuffed the pieces of flimsy into a pocket.

“Why there?” she said to herself. Her breath smoked in front of her face. She pulled on her gloves and fastened her jacket as the traffic stopped and she crossed the road in the midst of the crowd.

She watched a big seaplane roar overhead; it banked above the city as it started its approach. The plateau lake must still be ice-free. She watched the aircraft disappear behind the buildings with an expression on her face somewhere between wistfulness and bitterness.

Nachtel’s Ghost. They wanted her to deliver the book to Nachtel’s Ghost; outwards to the limits of the system, not inwards, not towards Golter, where the Sea House was. She walked back to the hotel, stopping and looking in shops and displays, making sure she wasn’t being followed. Her reflection, seen in one window, had a pinched, pale look about it. She inspected her face and saw again the message in the dust that was all that was left of the Universal Principles: THINGS WILL CHANGE.

She drew her jacket tighter still, recalling the chill granite surface of her grandfather’s tomb when it had still been at Tzant, and the freezing cold of the Ghost; the remembered fall in the remembered fall. She shivered.

16 The Ghost

Physically brave, she thought as the hired ship shuddered its way into the thin, cold, evaporating atmosphere of Nachtel’s Ghost. Physically brave.

She had left the others in SkyView. They would wait there until she had finished in Nachtel’s Ghost and decide where to rendezvous later. They’d had news from Golter; all Miz’s assets had been frozen while the Log-jam attempted to have a warrant issued for his arrest in connection with an unspecified offence within its jurisdiction. Miz had lawyers working on the case, and anyway had emergency funds he could access, but not until he was actually present on Golter. Sharrow had used up most of the rest of the contract expenses allowance chartering a private spacecraft to take her from SkyView to Nachtel’s Ghost; comm net gossip and news reports both had it that the Huhsz were waiting at Embarkation Island, and she’d been travelling as Ysul Demri long enough for there to be an even chance they knew her pseudonym.

She had not been back to the Ghost since the crash-landing that had both saved her and almost killed her. The crippled ex-excise clipper had fallen like a meteorite through the wasted air of the small planet-moon, slowing and slewing as it spun and wobbled and disintegrated on its long arcing plunge towards the planet’s snow-covered surface. She couldn’t remember anything after she’d shouted to Miz about wanting any crater she made being named after her. Miz hadn’t heard her, anyway.

The crash report later concluded she’d probably run out of gyro-manoeuvring power ten kilometres up, while the craft was still travelling at over a kilometre a second. It had started to tumble and tear itself to pieces immediately afterwards and only luck had saved her after that. The central section of the ship-containing the combat pressure hull, life-support systems and central plasma power plant-had stayed relatively intact, reduced to a jagged, roughly spherical shape that had continued to slow as it somersaulted and shed further small pieces of wreckage like burning shrapnel through the air.

She could recall nothing of those final minutes, and nothing of the crash itself, as the piece of wreckage containing her buried itself inside a snow-wave, one of the thousands migrating across the surface of the planet’s equatorial snow-fields like sand dunes across a desert.

A crawler carrying mining supplies had been within a couple of kilometres. The crew had found her, a few minutes before it would have been too late, crushed and folded inside the steaming, radiation-contaminated wreckage of the ship, buried two hundred metres under the surface of the snow-wave at the end of a collapsed tunnel of ice and snow.

The crawler’s crew had cut her out; the medics at First Cut mine had treated the physical injuries, while specialist war-embargoed systems were brought in from Trench City, the planet’s capital, to treat the radiation sickness that had brought her even closer to death.

It had been two months before they’d even thought it worthwhile restoring her to consciousness. When she awoke the war had been over for a month and the military standard interface wafer buried at the back of her skull had been removed. The effects of the synchroneurobonding virus were irreversible, while the nanotechnology and tissue-cloning techniques that repaired the ravages of the radiation pulse were only withdrawn after the course of treatment had finished.

And-perhaps-something else had been added; the crystal virus that had grown over the years and then lain dormant within her skull until a few weeks ago, when she’d been running with the others through the dried-up tank of the ancient oil-carrier, in the Log-Jam.

Her memories of the hospital in the mine complex were hazy. She remembered the Tenaus military prison hospital much better; gradually recovering, waiting for the final peace deal to be worked out, beginning to exercise her body in the gym to restore her lost fitness, and exercising her brain whenever she could, remembering-obsessively, the prison psychologist had worried-every detail she could dredge from her memory from the age of five onwards, because she’d been terrified that the treatment had altered her, made her somebody different by destroying some of her memories.

She wanted to recall everything, and to try to assess if the memories she found buried in herself were the ones she could remember from before; it seemed like a check on the kind of alteration she feared that the act of recalling a memory itself left a memory, and that that could be compared with the experience of remembering in the present.

In the end there was no sure way of telling, but she found no obvious holes in her memory. When she’d been allowed to send and receive communications, the people who wrote to her seemed to relate to her the way she remembered. Nobody seemed to notice any change; certainly they didn’t mention any.

They had to write to her because visits were not allowed and the light-delay from Tenaus Habitat to almost anywhere else was too long for real-time conversations. She had had one phone call with Miz, calling from HomeAtLast, in orbit above Miykenns. In a way it had been the best phone conversation of her life; the minutes-long gaps while the signal carrying the words you had just spoken travelled to their destination meant that you just had to sit there looking at the screen and the other person. Calling anybody else, she’d have watched screen or read something in between, but with Miz she just sat and stared at his face. They’d had an hour; it had only really been ten minutes and had seemed like one.

Had they put the crystal virus into her there, in Tenaus? Nachtel’s Ghost seemed like the more obvious place, while she’d been hovering close to death in a state more like suspended animation than anything else, beyond stimulus, sensation or dreams… but perhaps it had been done in Tenaus. Why would a Tax-neutral mining company want to implant a transceiver virus in a near-dead crashed military pilot?

But then, she thought, why would somebody in a military prison hospital want to do that either?

Why would anybody?

A cold, keen wind cut out of a sky the colour of verdigris. The sun dangled like a hopeless bauble dispensing thin amounts of light. Leeward, the dark train of a departing storm trailed its snowy skirts high into the swivelling tides of light. The snow-cliff at her back reared like an enormous wave, poised ready to break on the sloped black beach of the shield volcano’s flanks.

The crawler which had brought her here rumbled back on its tracks, over the clinker and the wind-drifted ramps of ash, reversing into the snow-tunnel. She watched its glinting metal carapace and maser-nostrilled snout slide back into the base of the snow-cliff and trundle back and up until the slope of the tunnel removed it from her view.

She turned and looked up the barely discernible slope of the volcano through veils of lifting steam and vapour towards the tumbled remains of the old geothermal station buildings, a set of fractured concrete blocks strewn haphazardly across the darkly gleaming lava field. Snow-covered pools dotted depressions in the lava, and in the distance-maybe twenty kilometres away the latest of the volcano’s vents piled white steam and smoke into the sky. She looked straight up. Overhead, the gas giant Nachtel hung hemispheric, pale gold and hazy orange in the sky, filling a quarter of it.

She pulled the hood of her jacket tighter against the thin, freezing wind, and set off across the fractured, grey-black lava field towards the ruined concrete buildings up the slope, clutching the empty book to her chest.

She was breathing hard when she got to the smashed blockhouses; the atmosphere was desperately thin, even though comparatively little effort was required to walk in the Ghost’s weak gravity. Agoraphobia was endemic in visitors to the planet-moon who ventured into the open; the air felt so thin and Nachtel could loom so huge above that it seemed each floating step must send the walker bounding away from the surface altogether, swept away into the green, subliming sky.

“Hello?” she called.

Her voice echoed round the concrete walls of the first collapsed concrete building. Quakes had left all the thick-walled, windowless structures canted and listing, and the concrete apron they had been built upon had split and sundered, leaving jagged chunks of material sticking up like broken teeth, their rusted reinforcing rods tangling or torn out like failed brace-work.

She held the book to her chest and walked over the tilted slabs of concrete from building to building, having to stoop and use her free hand in places where the fractured geography of the ruins made walking, even in that low gravity, impossible.

The building furthest upslope was the largest in the complex; she stepped over the fallen lintel of its broad doorway.

Though the structure’s walls were intact, its roof had folded in the middle, then caved in and fallen to produce a shallow “V” of concrete which slanted down into an ice-rimmed pool of standing water, which-perhaps still connected to the network of abandoned thermal pipe-work buried in the volcano-was warm enough to produce lazy strokes of steam in the calm, sub-zero air.

There was a narrow beach of black clinker gathered in one corner of the ruin, against the far wall.

There were two men there. She recognised them.

They were dressed only in swimming trunks and sat in the same two deck-chairs she remembered from the tanker. A flowery parasol stuck at a jaunty angle out of the black beach behind them, and between their seats there was a small folding-table holding bottles and glasses.

The one on the right stood up and waved to her.

“Delighted you could join us!” he called, then took a couple of steps forward to the water and dived lithely in with barely a splash. The waves looked tall and odd as they moved across the pool.

She stuck her left hand in her pocket and walked along the gentle slope of the collapsed roof. The young, bald-headed man who’d dived into the water swam past her, grinning and waving. The other was drinking from a tall glass. He watched his companion as he reached the far end of the pool, where the doorway was, and then turned and started on his way back.

“Have a seat, doll,” the young man said pleasantly, pointing at the deck-chair his twin had vacated. She looked at it, then looked around and sat. She kept her left hand in her pocket. The book was on her lap. She pushed the jacket’s hood back.

“Ah; red,” the young man said, smiling at her hair. “Very attractive; it suits you.”

His pale body looked trim and well muscled. She couldn’t see any cold bumps. His trunks were opti-cloth, and showed a few seconds of a tropical beach scene; golden sand, a single big roller and one graceful. surfer, forever climbing up onto her board and riding into a curling blue tunnel in the wave.

The other young man rose dripping out of the water and strolled up the beach, his skin steaming. His trunks showed somebody heli-diving, throwing themselves from a helicopter into a great fissure on some rocky coast, just as a huge pulse of surf surged frothing up the channel.

The surfer-trunked man reached under his deck-chair and threw his companion a towel. He dabbed at himself, then sat cross-legged on the dark clinker of the beach in front of them with the towel draped over his shoulders. He grinned at the other man.

“A pleasant journey here, I trust, Lady Sharrow?” the one in the deck-chair said.

She nodded slowly. “Acceptable,” she told him.

“I’m sorry,” he said, tapping his forehead. He lifted a glass from the tray of spirit bottles on the table between him and her. “May I offer you a drink?”

“No, thank you,” she said.

“May I…?” the other one said, leaning forward and nodding at the book on her lap.

She tipped the thick book in her lap so that she could hold it with one gloved hand, and then handed it to him. He smiled tolerantly and accepted it.

“It’s all right, Lady Sharrow,” he said, opening the book’s metal casing. “You won’t be needing your gun.”

She left her hand in her pocket anyway, gripping the HandCannon. The one sitting on the beach looked briefly at the interior of the book, studying the title page and the diamond-leaf plates for a couple of seconds each. He smiled as he read the words engraved in the back of the casing, and held the book up so that his companion in the deck-chair could read the inscription too. They both laughed lightly.

“Terrible, isn’t it?” the one in the deck-chair said to her. “Such a waste. Ah well.”

The one holding the book tipped it upside down so that the paper-dust fell out and drifted down to coat the black beach with a single swirled streak of grey.

“We are so careless with our treasures,” he said. He closed the book and set it to one side.

“We mistake the priceless for the worthless,” agreed the one in the deck-chair, topping up his glass from a bottle of trax spirit.

“I must say,” the one on the beach said. “You don’t seem terribly surprised to find us here, Lady Sharrow.” He sounded disappointed. He accepted a tall glass from his twin, then drank and smiled up at her. “We’d rather hoped you might be.”

She shrugged.

“Typical, isn’t it?” said the one in the chair to his twin. “Women only go quiet when you’d actually quite like to hear what they have to say.”

The other one looked at her and shook his head sadly.

“Anyway,” the man in the deck-chair said, “on behalf of the agency, and our clients-the Sad Brothers, in this case-thank you for the book. But now, as you can probably guess, we want you to look for the final Lazy Gun, if you don’t mind.”

She looked at him.

“No questions?” he asked her. She shook her head. He laughed lightly. “And we thought you’d have so many. Ah well.” He smiled broadly, waving his glass. “Oh, by the way, you did get our message, back in…?” He frowned, looked at the other young man.

“Pharpech,” the one on the beach provided.

“Ah yes, Pharpech,” the young man said, pronouncing the word with exaggerated care and a sort of conspiratorial grimace. “Was our signal received?”

She thought before answering. “The necklace?” she said. “Yes.”

The young man in the chair looked happy.

“Super,” he said. “Just so you didn’t think that being off-net meant being out of touch with us.” He put his drink down and lay back in the chair, hands behind his head. His underarms were bare and smooth. The hairs on the rest of his body looked thin and white; only his blond eyebrows held any hint of colour. She looked at the one on the beach. Sunlight gleamed on the dome of his skull. He didn’t seem to have any cold bumps, either.

“Well, don’t let us detain you, Lady Sharrow,” he said. He patted the book. “Thank you for delivering the piece, as per contract. We’ll be in touch, perhaps. Perhaps not.”

“Try not to take too long,” the one in the deck-chair said, still lying back soaking up the sparse sunlight, eyes closed.

“And don’t get caught,” the other one chipped in.

She rose slowly to her feet. The one with the girl surfing on his trunks lay there, hands behind his naked scalp, eyes closed, legs slightly spread. The one sitting cross-legged on the beach leant forward, whistling, and started trying to build a little tower of black clinker, but it kept falling apart.

“Bon voyage,” the one on the deck-chair said without opening his eyes.

She walked away for five steps, then turned. They were as they had been. She drew the HandCannon out and pointed it at the one with the heli-diving scene, which was playing across the stretched rear of his trunks just as it had been across their crumpled front.

She stood like that for nearly half a minute. Eventually the one she was aiming at glanced round at her, did a double-take and swivelled to face her.

He shaded his eyes, looking up at her. “Yes, Lady Sharrow?”

The one on the deck-chair opened his eyes, blinking and looking mildly surprised.

She said, “I was thinking of finding out the messy way whether you’re both androids.”

The two young men looked at each other. The one on the chair shrugged and said, “Androids? Why should it matter whether either of us is an android?”

She pointed the gun at him. “Call it simple curiosity,” she said. “Or revenge for what happened in the tanker, and in Bencil Dornay’s house.”

“But we only hurt you,” the one on the deck-chair protested.

“Yes, and you were so rude to us in Stager,” the beach one said, frowning tight-lipped at her and nodding emphatically. “All we’d been going to tell you was that we’d acquired the contract from the Sad Brothers and you’d be seeing us here if you got the book, but you were so horrible to us we didn’t.”

She kept the gun pointing at the one in the chair, then lowered it.

She aimed deliberately at the book, slowly closing one eye.

The man on the beach threw himself in front of the metal casing. The one in the chair leapt up, arms out towards her and his hands spread. He stepped over his twin, lying hunched up over the book.

“Now, now, Lady Sharrow,” he said. “There’s no need to turn vandal.” He smiled nervously.

She took a deep breath, then pocketed the gun.

“I really can’t work you people out at all,” she said.

The one standing facing her, trunks repeating the surfing scene, looked puzzled and pleased at the same time. She turned on her heel and walked away across the flaking concrete, back to the doorway.

Her skull and back tingled the whole way there, again waiting for a shot, or for the pain, but when she turned round in the doorway they were still in the same positions; one curled up, fetal, round the book casing, the other standing in front of his twin, watching her.

She walked down through the shattered ramps of concrete and the wilderness of fractured lava, back to the snow-cliff and the tunnel where the crawler was waiting.

The crawler took her back to Mine Seven; the weather stayed clear enough for her to take a flight to Trench City, where the hired spacecraft was waiting. She used its terminal to get in touch with the others. She couldn’t contact them directly, but there was a filed message from Zefla reporting all was well in SkyView. She left an entry in the personal columns of the Net Gazette letting them know she had made the delivery. Thinking of cryptic messages, she checked up on the Tile race results for the past week.

There had been one winner called Hollow Book, three days earlier, the day she’d left from Miykenns.

She scanned the other mounts mentioned, wondering if it could just all be coincidence. Shy Dancer? Wonder Thing? Little Resheril Goes North? Sundry Floozies? Borrowed Sunset? Molgarin’s Keep? Right Way Round? Mash That Meat? Scrap The Whole Thing? Crush That Butt? Bip!?… None of the other names seemed to mean anything. Unless Shy Dancer was another reference to Bencil Dornay, of course… and Wonder Thing could refer to the Lazy Gun, and… She gave up; if you thought hard enough there could be significance in every name or none, and there was no way of knowing where to draw the line.

She kept thinking about the crash and the time she’d spent in the mining hospital. She tried hacking into the relevant data banks from Trench, but the war-time records weren’t accessible from outside the mining complex where they were held. She left the meter running on the hired spacecraft Wheeler Dealer (and left its two-woman crew, Tenel and Choss Esrup, to lose more money in Trench’s casinos and game-bars) and took a tube train to the First Cut mine, where she’d been hospitalised originally, after the crash.

The First Cut mine had been the first large-scale mining operation to be set up on the Ghost. The supply of heavy metals in its immediate area had been mostly worked out millennia earlier and the big companies had moved to lusher pastures, leaving smaller concerns to work the thin veins of ores still left. First Cut’s accommodation warrens had been largely abandoned, an underground city reduced to the population of a town.

“Ysul Demri,” she said, sitting in the seat the clerk indicated. “I’m interested in the part the Ghost played in the Five Per Cent War and I’d like access to the complex records for the time.”

The clerk was a big, blotchily skinned woman who ran her section of the First Cut warren’s administrative affairs from a booth in a small, steamy cafe in Drag Three, one of the warren’s main hall-streets. People walked past outside, some pushing trolleys and stalls; in the centre of the street, small cars hummed past, warners chiming. The clerk watched her with one eye; the other was kept closed while she lid-screened.

“Only abstracts and interpretations available in the city archives,” she said.

A plumbing loom of eight small-bore pipes ran from the counter samovar-cisterns round the cafe’s walls to the various booths and over the ceiling to loop down to the central tables. The clerk put her cup under one of the small brass taps on the wall and poured herself a measure of something sweet-smelling.

“I know,” Sharrow said. She had bought her own cup, and filled it from the same tap the clerk had used. “I was really hoping to get to the raw stuff.”

The clerk was silent and still for a couple-of seconds, then she drank from her cup. “You want the Foundation,” she told Sharrow. “They took over the DBs when the hospital moved to new quarters, just after the war; hospital leases back what it needs from them, like us.”

Sharrow sipped the warm, bittersweet liquid. “The Foundation?” she asked.

“Commonwealth Foundation,” the clerk said, opening both eyes for a second and looking surprised. “The People. Haven’t you heard of them?”

“I’m sorry, no,” Sharrow said.

The clerk closed both eyes for a moment. “I guess not. We tend to forget, out here,” she said. She opened one eye. “Level Seven on down, any shaft. I’ll tell them you’re coming.”

“Thank you,” Sharrow said.

“But they don’t part with stuff without a good reason, usually. Best of luck.”

“To sum up; the history of Golter, and of the system, is one of a continual search for stability. It is a search which has itself consistently helped destroy the quality it was instigated to discover. Arguably, every conceivable system of political power-management has now been tried; none survive conceptually with any degree of credibility, and even the last full-scale bid to impose central authority in the shape of the Ladyr dynasty was more of a retro-fashion pastiche of previous imperial eras which even the participants themselves found it difficult to take seriously-than a serious attempt to establish a lasting hegemony over the power-functions of the system.

“The current stalemate between progressive and regressive forces has given us seven hundred years of bureaucratic constipation in the shape of the World Court and the associated but largely symbolic Council. Power today rests in the hands of the lawyers. Those whose function it ought to be merely to help regulate have-following the failure of nerve in those with the rightful claim and historical provenance required for leadership-come instead to legislate. By their very nature, they will ensure that having taken the reins of power into their hands, they cannot legally be wrested from them.

“What has to be remembered by those who care for the future as well as the history of our species is that law is no more than an abstraction of justice; an expression of a society’s political will and philosophical conceptions. Truth, right and justice are processes, not states. They are dynamic functions which can only be expressed and understood through action… And arguably the time for action is fast approaching. Thank you.”

The young lecturer executed a small bow to the packed theatre and started boxing his paper-written notes. The hall erupted, startling her. She stood at the back of the lecture theatre, clutching her satchel and looking round the two thousand or so people crammed into the space. They were all on their feet, clapping and cheering and stamping their feet.

Lectures in Yadayeypon had never been like this, she thought. The lecturer-a slim, medium-tall young man with dark curls and darker eyes-was escorted from the foot of the theatre by a shield of efficient-looking security guards in white uniforms who had taken up the first row of seats in the auditorium. The guards had to keep a hundred or so people back from the door the young man had exited through; the besieging crowd waved notebooks and cameras and recorders, pleading with the blank-faced guards to let them through.

She stood for a while, sporadically jostled by the departing crowds of mostly young and very polite people filing out of the lecture theatre. She was trying to recall witnessing a more charismatic speaker, but could not. There had been a startling buzz of emotion crackling through the whole theatre throughout the hour of the lecture she’d caught, even though the things the young man had actually been saying weren’t particularly original or dramatic. Nevertheless, the feeling was infectious and undeniable. She’d had the same feeling of excitement, of impendingness that she got sometimes when she heard an especially talented new band or singer, or read some particularly promising poet, or saw some screen or stage prodigy for the first time. It was something akin to the first, lustful stage of obsessive love.

She shook herself out of it and checked the time. There was another tube back to Trench in an hour. She very much doubted she was going to have any luck getting to see this fellow who seemed to control access to everything including fifteen-year-old hospital records, but she had to see the authorities anyway to get her gun back; they’d taken it from her when she’d gone into the lecture theatre.

The Commonwealth Foundation appeared to be part charity, part Irregular University and part political party. It seemed to have taken over most of First Cut’s largely deserted lower warren, and this young man, Girmeyn, gave every appearance of being its leader, even though nobody ever quite addressed him as such.

“Girmeyn will see you now, Ms Demri,” the white-uniformed guard said.

She had been watching screen, sitting in the draughtily warm cave of a waiting-room with about two hundred other people who were petitioning to see the man.

She looked up, surprised. She’d given up any hope of seeing Girmeyn when she’d seen the crowd. All she wanted now was to retrieve the HandCannon.

“He will?” she said. People sitting nearby stared at her.

“Please follow me,” the guard said.

She followed the white-uniformed guard as he led her to the end of the waiting-room and into a corridor. The corridor ended in a long, comfortably furnished chamber looking down into a huge cavern.

The cavern was walled in naked black rock. Its smooth floor was covered with ancient, glittering machinery which towered twenty metres into the space, almost level with the windows of the gallery. The complicated, indecipherable machines-so ambiguous in their convoluted design they could have been turbines, generators, nuclear or chemical reactors or agents of a hundred other processes-glittered under bright overhead lights. Huge pale stalactites fluted pendulously from the roof of the cavern in moist folds of deposited rock, counterpointed by stalagmites on the cavern floor beneath. Where the machinery got in the way, the deposits had merged, the never less than metre-thick columns conjoined to and mingling intimately with the silent machines.

She stared at the scene for a few seconds, made dizzy by the sheer weight of time implicit in the slumped topology of the palely gleaming, technology-enfolding pillars.

“Ms Demri?” an elderly white-uniformed man said.

She looked round. “Yes?”

“This way.” He held out his hand. Girmeyn sat behind a large desk at the far end of the room, surrounded by a variety of people with yolk-screens, hand-screens, brow projectors, patch-screens and, judging by the one-eyed aspect of a couple of them, lid-screens. She was shown into a large seat to one side of the desk, across a smaller table from a similar seat and just by the windows looking out into the cavern.

She sat still for a few minutes, watching what looked remark-ably like a prince conducting the affairs of state, before the young man stood up behind his desk, bowed to the people and walked over to join her. The men and women surrounding the desk mostly stood where they were; some sat down on seats and some on the floor. Sharrow stood up to shake his hand. His grip was strong and warm.

“Ms Demri,” he said. His voice was deeper than she’d expected. He bowed to her and sat in the other seat. He was dressed as he had been in the lecture theatre half an hour earlier, in a conservative black academic gown. He was even younger than she’d thought; early rather than mid-twenties. His exquisitely tangled medium-length hair was blue-black, his pale brown, depilated skin was smooth and unblemished. His lips were full and expressive beneath a long, delicate nose. His jaw was strong and he had a dimple on his chin. He sat relaxed but formal in the seat, his dark eyes inspecting her.

“It’s very kind of you to see me,” she said, “but I really only want access to some fifteen-year-old hospital records.” She glanced behind her. “There are so many people waiting out there, I feel positively unworthy.”

“Are you a student of the Five Per Cent War, Ms Demri?” he asked. There was a practised ease about his voice that belonged in somebody of immense experience and authority three times his age. His voice poured over her.

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

“May I ask where?”

“Well, I did attend Yadayeypon some time ago. But I’m independent now; it’s almost more of a hobby…”

He smiled, revealing perfect teeth. “I must have led an even more sheltered life than I thought, Ms Demri, if students have to carry such large pieces of ordnance around with them.” He glanced round to the desk and made a motion with one hand. The elderly guard who’d first greeted her brought the HandCannon over.

“It is safe to handle, sir,” he said, presenting the gun to Girmeyn, who inspected it.

From the way he held it, she knew he had probably never held a gun in his life.

The elderly guard stooped towards her; he held the gun’s magazine in one hand, and in the other, between two fingers, a General Purpose HandCannon round. She looked up at it and then him.

“You shouldn’t keep a round in the breech like that, ma’am,” he told her. “It’s dangerous.”

“So I’m told,” she said, sighing. The guard went back to the desk. Girmeyn passed the HandCannon to her just as the elderly guard had to him. She put it in her pocket.

“Thank you,” she said. He seemed to be expecting something more. She shrugged. “The competition for research grants is unusually fierce this year.”

He smiled. “You think these old hospital records will help you in your studies?”

She was starting to wonder. She had a feeling-somehow quite distinct but utterly vague at the same time-that there was something important going on here, but she had no clue whatsoever what it might be. “They might,” she said. “I can’t help thinking this is all getting out of proportion. It’s not an especially important request, I’d have thought, and you’re obviously so busy…” She waved one hand.

“Details matter, though, don’t you think?” he said. “Sometimes what appear to be utterly inconsequential actions have the most enormous results. Chance makes the casual momentous. It is the fulcrum upon which the levers of action rest.”

She chanced a small laugh. “Do you always speak in epigrams, Mister Girmeyn?”

He smiled broadly, dazzlingly. “Occupational hazard,” he said, spreading his hands. “Allow me to attenuate my portentousness for you.”

She grinned, looked down. “I heard the latter half of your lecture,” she said. “It was very impressive.”

“In content or delivery?” he asked, slinging an arm over the back of his chair.

“In delivery, absolutely,” she told him. “In content…” she shrugged. “To employ a phrase you might take issue with; the jury’s still out on that.”

“Hmm,” he said, frowning and smiling at the same time. “The usual answer to that question is ‘both’.”

She glanced round at the people round the desk, most of whom were pretending not to look at Girmeyn and her. “I’m sure it is,” she told him.

“My arguments didn’t touch you, then?” He looked sad. She had a brief, vertiginous, revelatory feeling that she could very easily fall in love with this man, and that not only had hundreds, perhaps thousands of people already done so, but that many more might yet.

She cleared her throat. “They worry me. They sound so much like what so many people want to hear; what they believe they would say if they were sufficiently articulate.”

“Using your chosen terminology,” he said quietly, “I would have to plead guilty: And enter a special defence of being right, and the current law wrong.” He smiled.

“I think,” she said carefully, “that perhaps too many people want things to be simple when they are not and cannot be. Encouraging that desire is seductive and rewarding, but also dangerous.”

He looked away a little, as if inspecting something far in the distance over her left shoulder. He nodded slowly for a few moments. “I think power has always been like that,” he said, his voice low.

“I have a… relation,” she said, “who I think has become, largely because of her environment, quite thoroughly deranged over the last few years.” She met Girmeyn’s gaze and looked into the darkness there. “I have the disquieting feeling that she wouldn’t have disagreed with a single word you said today.”

He shrugged with exaggerated slowness. “Still, don’t be alarmed, Ms Demri,” he said. “I am just a humble functionary. Indeed technically I am still a student.” He smiled, still holding her gaze. “Two years ago they asked me to lecture; last year they began to call me professor, and now people come to me and ask for my help, and some invite me to visit them and advise them… oh, all over the Ghost.” He smiled. “But I am still a student; still learning.”

“Next year, the system?”

He looked puzzled, then favoured her with another broad, ravishing smile. “At least!” he laughed.

She couldn’t help laughing too, still gazing at him.

He wouldn’t look away. She held his gaze, drinking it in.

Eventually she started to consider being the one to break off because otherwise they might sit here like this for the rest of the day. Then the elderly guard approached again. He stood to one side and coughed.

“Yes?” Girmeyn said, laughing a little as he looked at the other man.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the elderly guard said, glancing at her. “The dinner this evening; the train is waiting.”

Girmeyn looked genuinely annoyed. He held his hands palms up towards her. “I must go, Ms Demri. Can I persuade you to accompany me? Or wait for me here? I would love to talk longer with you.”

“I think it would be best if I left,” she said. “I have to leave the Ghost very soon.” There was a voice inside her screaming, Yes! Yes! Say yes, you idiot! But she ignored it.

He sighed. “That’s unfortunate,” he said, rising. She got up too. They shook hands. He held her hand while he said, “I hope we shall meet again.”

“So do I,” she said. She smiled, still holding his hand. “I don’t know why I’m saying this,” she said, feeling her face, neck and chest go warm, “but I think you’re the most remarkable person I’ve ever met.”

He made a small, snorting laugh and looked down. She let his hand go and he put them both behind his back. He looked up at her again. “And you are the first person to make me blush in about ten years.” He bowed formally. “Till the next time, Ms Demri,” he said.

She nodded. “Till then.”

He started to turn away, then said, “Oh, you may have your records.”

“Thank you.”

He turned and began to walk away. She watched him stop, a couple of steps away. He turned back to look at her, his hands still clasped behind his back. “Why did you really come here, Ms Demri?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Something I just couldn’t get out of my head,” she told him.

He considered this, then shook his head once and walked away through a door set in the wall behind the desk, followed by his functionaries and attendants.

She stood there for a while, wondering exactly what it was she was feeling. Then the elderly guard approached, handed her a data chip, the HandCannon’s magazine and extra round, and saw her to the exit. As she walked towards the doors she looked out at the silent, glittering cavern on the far side of the glass.

For a few minutes she had quite forgotten it existed.

She caught the next tube to Trench City and sat on the train with a big grin on her face, awash with a strange, exhilarating feeling that she had just experienced something consummately important whose meaning was still hidden from her, but growing. It took an act of will to run the data chip she’d been given through her wrist-screen.

The records told her nothing. If there had been anything exceptional about the hospital where she’d been treated, or its staff or systems, she couldn’t find it. The First Cut mine itself had been just another mining complex, owned by the usual anonymous Corp which rented the shafts and remaining deposits out to the smaller cooperatives, collectives and entrepreneurs.

She gave up on the chip and just sat there, thinking of that enormous cavern and its mysterious, time-encrusted machines, the dark subniveal space they inhabited resonating in her like some awesome chord.

She dragged her all-girl ship crew out of an all-boy sex-show joint in Trench and left for Golter that evening.

“Hi, doll. Just replying to your message. Sure got us beat. We’ve made some inquiries into this Keep agency and got precisely nowhere. Looks brand new; no previous jobs, contracts… nothing. Best set of commercial references you’ve ever seen, but no pattern to them. Rumour is they put in a loss-leader tender for the book contract; had the other agencies changing their underwear on the hour, but nothing’s been heard of them since. No physical address and no record of who’s working for them, either. How the grisly twins you met in the tanker came to be on the pay-roll, we can’t work out. Can’t see any reason why you shouldn’t ask the Sad Brothers why they employed that particular agency, like you suggested, but something tells me you won’t get any joy there. Whole thing stinks. Much like the Sea House, come to think of it.

“None of us had heard of this Girmeyn guy or the Commonwealth Foundation. The public access records all look innocuous enough. I’ve started a legal look-see, but so far it’s coming drier than a bar in Temperance City.

“The info chip they gave you; if it’s that data-dense and unsorted, the only thing we can think of is hand it over to an AI; hire one or ask your cousin for a favour… though I guess you’d have to tell them what you’re looking for, which might not be so smart. Suppose you’ve already thought of that, though.

“Sorry this is all so unhelpful. Umm… We’re all fine; there doesn’t seem to be any monk-like activity nearby. We’ll be leaving soon. See you at the arranged place. Love from all. Well, apart from Cenny, maybe. Ah, shit…” Zefla made a pained face then shook her head. “Just call me Ms Tactful. What the hell; have a safe voyage. See ya, doll.”

The image faded inside the holo-screen. Sharrow realised she’d tensed up a little as she’d watched the signal; she let go of the seat’s arms, letting her body float within the chair.

The control and data-screens of the Charter Spaceship Wheeler Dealer glowed gently around her. The bridge, like the rest of the ship, was unusually quiet; the vessel was just past the mid-point of its journey to Golter, in free-fall a couple of hours before it would turn its engines back on to begin braking. Equally conducive to the relative hush was the fact that the ship’s two crew-women, who favoured heavy-duty industro-thrash music, were both soundly asleep in their bunks.

Sharrow stared into the unreal grey depths of the holo-screen for a while, then sighed.

“Ship?”

“Ready, client Lady Sharrow,” the computer toned.

“You’re not an AI, are you?”

“I am not an Artificial Intelligence. I am a semi-”

“Never mind. Okay; thanks, I’m finished here.”

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