But that wasn’t going to happen — Batra had made that clear. She wiped the offending overlay from the view. She would have to take the prescribed route, and be passed like a baton from ship to ship. It looked complicated.
A lot of very clever processing had already gone on in her neural lace to predict what she’d want to look at effectively before she knew herself, and — fabulously convenient and highly technically impressive though this might be — it was this aspect of lace-use that most disturbed Anaplian and caused her to keep its application to a minimum. In the end, she didn’t even need to pull out any data-ends to check the raw figures; there was one fairly obvious route through this tangled scribble from Prasadal to Sursamen, and it would indeed take at least one hundred and twenty-nine and a bit days if she left any time within the next two days, assuming that the Morthanveld end of things went as fortuitously as it might. A lot seemed to depend on whether the Morthanveld Great Ship Inspiral, Coalescence, Ringdown decided to take in the Nestworld Syaung-un on its way from one globular cluster to another.
She was about to click out when a barely formed thought regarding exactly what a Morthanveld Great Ship and a Nestworld actually were started to blossom into a whole hierarchy of increasingly complicated explanations as the lace raced to retrieve and present the relevant information with all the desperate enthusiasm of an overenthusiastic child asked to perform a party piece. She shut it down with a sort of inward slam and clicked out again with the usual sense of relief and vague guilt. The last vestige of the lace’s presence informed her that her heart was still completing the beat it had been beginning when she’d first clicked in.
It was like waking up, though from a dream world where everything was more detailed, vivid, splendid and even plausible than reality, not less. That was another reason she didn’t like using the lace. She wondered briefly how Jerle Batra’s normality compared to hers.
“I’m sorry. I think I have to go,” she told him.
“Think, Djan Seriy?” Batra asked, sounding sad.
“I am going,” she said. “I must.”
“I see.” Now the man who looked like a fuzzy little bush sounded apologetic. “There will be a cost, Djan Seriy.”
“I know.”
6. Scholastery
Ferbin otz Aelsh-Hausk’r and his servant Choubris Holse were riding along an ill-kept road through a forest of cloud trees towards the Xiliskine-Anjrinh Scholastery. They had chosen to travel through the long half-night of the Rollstar Guime, which showed as a sullen red glow spread like a rosy bruise across the farpole horizon. They had pulled off the road only twice so far, once to avoid a troop of mounted Ichteuen and once when a steam truck had appeared in the far distance. The prince no longer looked like himself; Holse had close-cut his scalp, his facial hair was growing quickly (darker than his head hair; nearly brown, which peeved him disproportionately), he had removed all his rings and other regal jewellery and he was dressed in clothes Holse had obtained from the battlefield.
“From a corpse?” Ferbin had spluttered, staring down at himself wide-eyed. Holse had thought to inform the prince of the provenance of his new-to-him civvies only after he’d put them on.
“One with no obvious wounds, sir,” Holse had assured him reasonably. “Just a little bleeding from the ears and nose. Dead a good two or three days, too, so any fleas would assuredly have caught cold and jumped ship. And he was a gentleman, too, I might add. An army private provisioner, unless I’m mistaken.”
“That’s not a gentleman,” Ferbin had told his servant patiently. “That’s a merchant.” He’d pulled at his sleeves, held out his hands and shaken his head.
If there had been any aerial activity — unlikely in the near darkness — they didn’t see it. At any rate, nobody came swooping down to inspect them as they trudged on, Holse on his rowel and Ferbin on the mersicor his servant had brought to the folly overlooking the river four days earlier. Holse had dug a couple of wads of crile root from a saddle bag to help keep them awake as they rode, and they chewed on this while they talked. It gave their conversation what Holse felt was a rather comical, munchy sort of quality, though he thought better of mentioning this to Ferbin.
“Choubris Holse, it is your duty to accompany me to wherever I might choose to go.”
“I’d beg to differ, sir.”
“There’s no differing involved. Duty is duty. Yours is to me.”
“Within the kingdom, and within the rule of the king’s law, I’d not argue with you, sir. It is my duty beyond that reach I might think to question.”
“Holse! You are a servant! I am a prince! You’d be best advised to do as you’re damn well told even were I some lowly gent with no more than a tumbledown fort, a flea-bitten nag and too many children to his name. As servant to a prince — the senior prince, I might add — of the royal house of Hausk…” Ferbin broke off, choking on his own amazement and disgust at encountering such obduracy in a servant. “My father would have you thrashed for this, Holse, I tell you! Or worse! Damn it, man, I am the rightful king!”
“Sir, I am with you now, and intend to stay with you until the varsity and thence to whatever conveyance you might find beyond that which they are able to recommend you to. To that very point I shall be at your side, as faithful as ever.”
“And there you damn well have to stay! Wherever I go!”
“Sir, pleasing your pardon, my allegiance — at the bottom of the pot, after all reduction, as it were — is to the throne rather than to your good self. Once you remove yourself from the furthest extent of your father’s conquests, it is my understanding that I am bound to return to the seat of authority — which I would take to be the royal palace in Pourl, all other matters being in normal balance — there to take fresh instruction from, well, whomsoever—”
“Holse! Are you a lawyer?”
“Dear God forbid, sir!”
“Then shut up. Your duty is to stay with me. That’s the all and end of it.”
“My duty, begging your pardon, sir, is to the king.”
“But I am the king! Haven’t you been telling me for the last four days that I’m the rightful heir to the throne?”
“Sir, excuse my bluntness, but you are an uncrowned king who is riding most determinedly away from his throne.”
“Yes! Yes, to save my life! To seek help so that I may return to claim that throne, if the WorldGod lets. And, I would point out, in doing so I am following the highest precedents; does not the WorldGod find its own sanctuary from cares here at the core of our blessed world? Did not the Sarl people themselves flee persecution on their homeworld, escaping here to our own dear Sursamen?”
“Still, sir. Being a king has its expectations. One is letting people know you’re alive.”
“Is it really? Well, well,” Ferbin said, deciding to be witheringly sarcastic. “Do you tell me that now? And what else, might one ask?”