“There are lots of other ways in,” Sharrow said, pushing Miz’s glass out of the way. “But they’re all even more complicated, too dangerous and involve walking or riding enormous distances in the company of people who kill, capture or rob other people as a way of life; the border guards sound like nursery wardens in comparison.”

“I still say a decent pilot could take a chopper or a VTOL in through-” Miz began, still frowning at his glass.

“Well, you try finding a plane,” Sharrow said, “anywhere on Miykenns. Flying boats or nothing; that’s your choice.”

“Yes, Miz,” Cenuij smiled. “I think you’ll find a lot of people felt the same way earlier in Miykenns’ history; that’s why there’s so little cable and membrane clutter around Malishu, and why the extensive Pilot’s Cemetery is such a poignant feature on the sightseeing circuit.”

“I bet I could-” Miz began.

“Something else,” Zefla said quickly, slapping the table. “We are not taking Travapeth.”

“He might come in useful,” Cenuij said.

“Yeah,” Zefla said. “So’s a broken leg if you want to kick yourself in the back of the head.”

“No Travapeth,” Sharrow said, then frowned at Miz, who had taken a small torch out of his jacket pocket and was shining it through the glass of trax spirit.

Zefla sighed. “The old guy’s going to be awfully upset when we don’t make the documentary,” she said. “He was talking about a book tie-in. And he could use the money.”

“He doesn’t think we’re going to get to make the thing anyway,” Sharrow said, brows furrowing as she watched Miz sniff at the trax glass again. “He’s got five grand,” she told Zefla, “for three days of sitting pontificating, flirting like a gigolo and having wine and food poured down him; easiest money he’s ever going to make.”

Miz made a tutting noise and put the trax glass to his ear. He flicked its rim gently with one finger, an expression of deep concentration on his face.

“Oh, give me that!” Sharrow said, exasperated. She took the glass from his fingers before he could protest, put it to her lips and drained it.

Then her face creased into a sour expression and she turned and spat the trax out behind her, onto the age-stained planks of the booth. She wiped her mouth with her sleeve. “What did you do; piss in it?” she asked Miz. “That was horrible!”

“Hell, I knew that,” he said, looking annoyed. “But was it cloudy?” He nodded at the stain on the planks. “We’ll never know now.”

“Oh, stop farting about and go and get us a bottle,” she told him.

“Not if you’re just going to spit it all over the floor,” he said primly, turning sideways in his seat and crossing his arms and legs.

“I’ll get us a bottle,” Zefla said, rising.

“Filthy peacemaker,” Sharrow said.

“Hey, Zef; make sure it’s not cloudy…”

The Entraxrln deep country was sinking into an early-evening purple gloom. The layers of membrane here grew closer and thicker and the trunks and stalks were thinner but far more numerous; cables looped and curved and hung everywhere, strung with great tattered lengths and folds of wind-torn leaf-membrane. There was no longer any real sense of there being ground underfoot; although the undulating landscape resembled a purple downland, it was a landscape in which great holes had been cut and huge suspended skeins of material added; some of the holes lengthened to tunnels and dropped into deeper, darker layers further down, while others narrowed and doubled back, and throughout this bewildering three-dimensional maze great roots and tubes ran, undulating across the maroon layers like huge blood vessels standing out on the skin of some enormous sleeping animal.

The captain stood in the doorway of the guard cabin and watched the group of riders and their pack animals as they plodded off into the slowly gathering darkness along the track to the capital.

The captain pulled on his pipe a few times, surrounding his head with a cloud of smoke.

The guard sergeant struggled up the steps towards the captain, holding two sacks.

“Claim they’re not tourists, sir,” the sergeant said. “Say they’re travellers.” He deposited the two sacks at the captain’s feet. “Not a sect I’d heard of, sir, must confess.” He opened the sacks up. “Least one of them’s dressed proper for a holy man; Order of the Book, he said; wants to try and give the King some books, sir. I told him the King didn’t hold with books, but he didn’t seem bothered.”

The captain stirred some of their booty with his foot. Bottles clinked; he could see the usual collection of cameras, a couple of sets of magnifiers, a civilian nightsight and some cash.

“Two of them were ladies, sir; veiled, they were. None of them fitted any descriptions of undesirables. Guides were known to us; regular fellows.”

The captain squatted down, boots creaking. He poked at a piece of mysterious-looking equipment with the stem of his pipe. The piece of equipment started to play music. He poked it again and it went quiet. He lifted it and put it inside his shirt.

“Quite generous they were, really. It’s all here sir, naturally.”

The captain reached into a sack and pulled out a bottle, putting the pipe back in his mouth as he weighed the trax spirit bottle in his hand.

“Oh, dear; I wouldn’t touch that one, sir. Looks a bit cloudy if you ask me.”

She woke in the night. Her backside was sore. The room was very dark, the bed felt strange and the place smelled odd. There was somebody in here with her; she could sense breathing. A rippling blue-grey light flashed, jarring a confusing image of the room across her eyes. She remembered. This was the inn called The Broken Neck on the square beneath the castle; a haven after the long ride on the swaying, cantankerous and rank-smelling jemers and two nights in rough, communal guest-houses in the dark deep country. Cenuij had gained entrance to the monastery hospitale while they had come here, to the two best rooms in the inn and suspiciously spicy food and strong wine which had made her fall asleep over the table. Zefla had put her to bed; it was she who was sleeping in the other lumpy bed across the chamber.

Of course, she thought, as another silent burst of lightning flickered through the windows, and she calmed.

I am in Pharpech.

She got out of the massive, creaking, bowed bed with its pile of coarse blankets and two slightly softer sheets, waited for another flash, then with the memory of the room’s image held in her eyes crossed to the tall windows. They had a balcony; she hadn’t thought it looked very safe when they’d first taken the room, but she would trust it. The window creaked a little when she opened it. She stepped outside, closed the window and moved sideways along the bark-clad wall to the cable-branch railing.

The darkness outside made her dizzy. She could feel, even somehow hear that she was in the open air, but there was no light anywhere; nothing from the sky, where the membrane cut out any celestial light, and nothing from-she couldn’t think of this place as a city-the town, either. Her fingers felt for the thin railing and found it, gripped it. Like being blind, she thought.

The air was a little colder than it had been earlier; she wore an extremely modest nightdress, and only her neck and ankles felt the breeze. She stood there, waiting for another flash of lightning, frightened of the balcony and the three-storey drop to the alley beneath.

The lightning was there; far off in the distance, seemingly half above and half beneath the higher membranes. The light revealed part of the four or five kilometre-wide semi-clearing around Pharpech town, and the nearby composite trunks. The town itself was a half-glimpsed jumble of geometric shapes curving away beneath her.

And there had been something else, half-glimpsed to her right, level with her, only a few metres away. A figure; a person. Her heart jumped.