“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.

“I have to confess, dear girl, that I don’t know,” Travapeth admitted, frowning. He took another bite from the fruit. “Shome short of ancient tome shupposhed to have been a gisht shrom-” He swallowed. “- the Ladyr Emperor to the first of the Useless Kings.” Travapeth waved the dripping fruit around. Zefla flinched, then calmly wiped her eye. “I of course offered to inspect the book for His Majesty, to determine its identity, provenance and importance, but in this was refused, unusually.” Travapeth shrugged. “All I know is that it’s an encased book, some sort of precious metal, probably silver. It’s about as thick as your hand, as long as your forearm and its breadth is roughly twenty-eight and half centimetres.”

Cenuij sat back in his seat, fingers drumming on the table. Sharrow felt herself evaluating the scene, trying to gauge just how much interest they appeared to be showing. Too little might look as suspicious as too much.

Travapeth crunched into the core of the blister-fruit, frowned and spat a few seeds into the carton the holos had come from. “The book’s never been opened,” he said. “Rumour is it’s booby-trapped, but anyway it’s locked and naturally there’s no key. I might have at least been able to establish the work’s identity had the old King not had it recovered-or rather additionally covered-in the skin of some revolutionary peasant leader some years before I first travelled to the Kingdom.” Travapeth sighed.

“It’s a very colourful ceremony, the coronation, isn’t it?” Zefla said, turning to Sharrow and Cenuij and tapping her notebook stylo on the table’s polished surface. Sharrow nodded (thinking good girl), as Zefla turned back to Travapeth, who was taking aim at the office’s litter bin, stationed beneath a window near one corner of the room. He threw the core of the blister-fruit; it thumped soggily against the wall above and fell behind the bin. Travapeth shook his head.

“It would make very good screen,” Zefla said to him. She glanced round at Sharrow and Cenuij. “I’d just adore to record something like that ceremony,” she said (Sharrow and Cenuij both nodded). “So ethnic,” Zefla said to Travapeth, her hands out in front of her as though supporting two large invisible spheres. “So… so real.”

Travapeth looked wise.

“I don’t suppose,” Zefla said, “the current King is thinking of resigning or anything, is he?”

Travapeth wiped his hands on the front of his robe and shook his head. “I believe not, dear girl. The present King’s grandfather did abdicate; he took himself off to a monastery to pursue a life of holy despisal. But King Tard… well, he’s not really the religious type.” Travapeth frowned. “He does believe in their god, of course, but I don’t believe it would be inaccurate to term his religious observances perfunctory rather than assiduous.”

“They don’t ever re-enact-?” Zefla began. But Travapeth boomed on.

“Of course, sudden conversions to extreme holiness have been known to occur in the present royal family, usually following traumatic events in the life of the noble person concerned involvement in an unsuccessful coup, being discovered with somebody else’s spouse or one’s own mount, finding one has been made general of an army being sent to root out guerrillas and revolutionaries in deep country; that sort of thing. But for a monarch to take up holy orders is relatively rare; they tend to die in harness.” Travapeth’s eyebrows rose. “Literally so in the case of the King’s great-grandfather, who accidentally strangled himself to death in a very unlikely position while suspended from the ceiling of a room in a house of less than spotless reputation.” The old scholar gave a sort of grunting laugh and grimaced dubiously at Zefla as he took a drink from a goblet of trax wine, and gargled with it before swallowing.

“Well,” Zefla said. “Perhaps we might be able to catch some other ceremony. If we do get permission to work there.”

“Certainly,” Travapeth said, belching. “There’s the annual rededication of the cathedral, the maledictions before the annual glide-monkey hunt-that’s quite colourful, and the hunt itself is exciting… Well, they call it a hunt; it’s more of a spectator sport. Then there’s the New Year mass-executions day, the debtors’ flogging festival… and there are always events celebrating the birth of a new royal baby or the King’s acquisition of some new piece of technology.”.

“Yes,” Zefla said, tapping the stylo on the conference table again. “These pieces of modern technology that the Kings purchase every now and again; I take it they have purely symbolic value?”

Travapeth shook his head. “Not even that, sweet lady; they are bought merely to remove any monetary surplus from the country’s economy. This, ah, apparently strange behaviour is designed to keep the Kingdom stable by soaking up profit that might otherwise lead to progress and therefore instability. This is the very reason that Pharpech is also known as the Court of the Useless Kings.” Travapeth frowned and gestured with his hands. “This might strike us as a rather eccentric way to rule a state, but I think we have to respect the Pharpechians’ right to run their country the way they want, and certainly one cannot deny that it works; there has been no progress whatsoever in Pharpech for nearly eight hundred years. In its own way, that’s quite an achievement.”