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.