“What?” she said. “What?”
“What happened? Are you all right?” His face swam in front of her, open and concerned.
“I’m… I’m…”
There were gasps from the crowd of people. She saw some of them glance at her and look away. Miz pulled her further back. Dloan appeared suddenly between her and the crowd. Zefla was at her other side, putting an arm round her.
She saw one person work their way out of the knot of people pressing round the centre of the dance floor and walk towards her. It was Cenuij; he seemed to be writing in a small notebook.
He came up to where she stood, flanked by Zefla and Miz. He made a final emphatic dot in the notebook, clipped the pen back in, snapped it shut and put it in his robe. He glanced back at the crowd and shrugged. “Dead,” he told them. He pulled a cheroot from his robe and lit it. “Told us what we needed to know, though.” He looked past Zefla. “Hmm.” He nodded. “Look; the bar’s free.” He walked away.
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.