“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?”