‘I still don’t understand…’ Then Polly did get it. ‘I didn’t know what Cowl meant before. I see… cowl is the name for a monk’s hood.’

Abruptly she realized her robot transport had stopped moving. She glanced the other way and saw that Aconite was standing watching her. Turning back revealed that the illusory Nandru had disappeared.

‘I realize now that your words are not entirely the result of delirium.’ The troll woman stepped forward and reached down beside Polly into the back of the robot. Removing a square palm console, Aconite held it in her heavy three-fingered hand while running the nimbler fingers of her other hand over the machine’s display. After a moment she looked up, reached over and pulled aside the filthy collar of Polly’s blouse. She touched first the muse device briefly, before reaching up to flick Polly’s earring.

To Polly she said, ‘Speak to your hidden companion.’

Oh-oh, looks like I’ve been rumbled.

‘That is enough,’ said Aconite before Polly could say anything to Nandru. ‘Now, are you Al?’

Polly tried to overcome her confusion, but her brain was washing around inside her head like dirty water.

Nandru’s voice issued from the palm console. ‘Well, that’s a moot point,’ he said. ‘I guess that’s what I am now, but I wasn’t always like this. You’ve caught me on a bad day.’

‘You are a cerebral download,’ Aconite said, disapproval in her voice. ‘Yes, I see. A military log-tac computer with secure com-link, and the facility set for partial download of tactical information in the event of death. It would seem the level of redundancy was excessive and that you took advantage of that. So dead soldier, what is your name?’

‘Nandru. And I resent being addressed that way, that’s… thanatist.’

With a snort, Aconite switched off the console and dropped it back into the compartment beside Polly. Turning away, she snapped her fingers, and the robot began to follow her again.

I think she likes me.

Mounting the slope, the robot did not tilt in the least. With its back legs stretching down at full extension, its front legs bent double like a spider’s, it maintained Polly perfectly level as it climbed the incline. Soon they reached the basalt slab and, as Polly twisted to look round, they began heading for the arched entrance. Close up, Polly saw that the building was huge.

Then through the entrance and crossing a wide room, with arched windows all around, containing the chaotic glinting of metal and glass—insectile sculptures or esoteric machines, Polly could not tell. A whoomph as the entrance closed behind them, then a breeze stirring up Polly’s hair. The mask coming away from her face with a sucking sound. Also unmasked, Aconite picked her up from the robot’s container and briefly Polly glimpsed golden eyes amid lopsided but not unattractive features. Then bright aseptic light and a soft table underneath her, clothing cut away, something cold against her chest—then a stabbing pain and a sense of movement inside her chest. Abrupt unconsciousness followed.

On waking, after long oblivion, to find some flesh miraculously back on her bones, Nandru told her, He’s her brother.

And only later did she learn that she was the first of Cowl’s samples to survive.

The cold and piercingly bright light of the full moon precluded sleep, as did the itching underneath his dead tor. Sitting in the tent, Tack picked at the edges of the thing as if it was a huge scab, and just like a scab it began to peel away from his flesh, but was frangible and snapped like charcoal. Revealed underneath it was pink scar tissue—forming so fast because of the Heliothane boosting of his body. He continued snapping away pieces of the tor and, bit by bit, broke the thing off. His arm looked grotesque and felt as if it had been burnt, so he quickly applied a wound dressing taken from his pack. His arm ached as well as itched and he realized he had very little chance of sleep now.

Once masked and outside again, Tack collapsed his shelter and stowed it away. Taking up his pack once more, he rounded the boulder and headed off. Cowl’s citadel now glowed both with internal light and reflected moonlight, looking even more beautiful. Tack observed it in awe for a while, wondering why he had expected something ugly. Then he negotiated the steep slope down to the plain.

Within an hour he was back on level ground, then walking fast down a watercourse that wound in the general direction of the peninsula. He chose this route as a precaution against there being motion detectors aimed out across the plain above him. He suspected, though, that Cowl, if he entertained at all the possibility of the Heliothane getting through to him, would expect from them a massive assault, not a lone assassin.

After a further two hours, Tack reached a shallow estuary debouching beside the shoulder of the peninsula. Here he searched around until he found a trench formed by a wide crack in the granite, through which a small rill bubbled. Aiming to follow this as far as it would take him towards his destination, he was pleased when it continued meandering as far as a point adjacent to the citadel. On a nearby slab he again erected his tent, then climbed up the side of the trench to take a look.

Getting out to the citadel presented no problem. The sea would offer Tack more concealment than he had anticipated: since all his equipment was waterproof, by wearing his mask he could approach the place underwater. The problems started once he got inside it as, now gazing at the citadel through his monocular, he could see Umbrathane working on structures running round the outer surfaces of the lily’s petals.

With the exception of those who had established Pig City, the Umbrathane had dispersed into cells as they had fled into the past, so presenting the usual problems of any guerrilla organization. It was not so much the damage they could inflict—their attacks were mosquito bites to the great beast that was the Heliothane Dominion—but the extravagant use of resources needed just to track them down. Saphothere had conjectured that Cowl might be gathering them to him—and this was the case. So, to locate Cowl, Tack must not only avoid the citadel’s security system, but its hostile Umbrathane population as well.

Lowering the monocular, he decided that no matter what plans he made now, they would probably need to change once he entered the citadel. But the logistics programs Pedagogue had loaded him with were protean and his lethal skills at their peak. He must just go in and do what he had been sent to do. Sliding back into the trench, he opened his pack and began to extract those items that would assist him in the task.

First he donned a weapons harness, with all its stick pads and pockets to carry the necessary devices. Sliding the carbine into its back holster, next to the climbing-harpoon launcher, he hooked a further power supply and another two-thousand-round box for it at his right hip. A spare carbine he considered for one long moment, then left aside.

The five molecular catalysers—coins of red metal ten centimetres across, with a virtual console on the front—he pressed against stick pads in a line down one chest strap. Each of these was set to react with a different material, but each was also capable of being reset. Into one trouser pocket he emptied the pack of mini-grenades, and into the other he put the multispectrum scanner. The grenades were all set for a standard three-second delay—the countdown starting the moment they exceeded a one-metre proximity to the transponder in his weapons harness. Ten larger programmable grenades he attached around his belt; they were made of hard fragmentation glass and contained an explosive that made C4 look silly. His handgun, which could take the same explosive ammunition as the carbine, he adjusted for silent running—much like more primitive guns, with a silencer screwed onto the barrel, though this operated by slinging out a sound-suppressor beam in line with the bullet, generated by the same impelling charge.