The King glanced round at his courtiers. They looked surprised and angry. He was aware that he was standing up in the swinging throne, in a position that might make a lesser man look a fool.

He thought quickly. Then he realised that it was quite funny. He started to laugh. He sat down in his throne, laughing, and looked round his courtiers, until they started to laugh too.

“What, good monk? Are they all blank?”

“Yes, your Majesty!” the skinny monk said, gulping, laying the first book down and taking up the next from the second clerk. “See!” He put that one down, lifted the next and the next and the last. “See, your Majesty! See, see; all blank! And look; the pages themselves are too slick and shiny to be written upon; no ink-pen will write, and even lasers will simply reflect. They cannot even be used as blank notebooks. They are truly Useless books!”

“What?” shouted the King. He put his head back and roared with laughter. “Useless!” he shouted, lying back in the Stom Throne and laughing so much that his sides ached. “Useless!”

He laughed until he started to cough. He waved away a courtier holding a glass of wine and sat forward in the throne, smiling kindly down at the monk.

“You are a good fellow, little monk, and a credit to your Order. You may stay as Our guest, and we shall have more to say to each other.” Intensely pleased at having successfully completed such an elegant speech, the King snapped his fingers at a secretary, who scurried forward, pen and pad at the ready, his head bowed. “See Our little monk is made welcome,” the King told him. “Find good apartments for him.”

“Yes, your Majesty.”

The secretary led the relieved monk away. The King inspected the shiny-paged books. He chuckled, and ordered them to be put with the smaller Useless items in the castle’s trophy gallery.

“Shit,” said Cenuij, sitting on the bed in Miz and Dloan’s room, staring at the little stick-on screen Miz had unrolled onto the covers. It showed a ghostly view of a glass display-cabinet containing a collection of old-fashioned electrical goods.

“Looks like a shop-window display from a historical drama,” Miz said. He rotated the nightsight view the fake jewel on the cover of the book was seeing, but all it showed was more useless kitchen hardware.

“Safe to broadcast this?” Dloan said, peering at the screen.

Miz shrugged. “It’s pseudo-directional after the initiating squirt and the transmitter’s freq-hopping. I doubt they have stuff to pick this up, even if they’re not quite as lo-tech as they pretend to be.”

“I trust this works on the same principle,” Cenuij said, holding up the miniature book on the thong round his neck. Beneath the rags he’d worn to make his way to The Broken Neck, he wore the plain black habit he’d dressed in since they’d entered the Kingdom.

“Yeah,” Miz said, “but don’t use it except in an emergency, just in case.” He tried the sonic display from another jewel set into the cover of the bugged book in the castle, but all it showed in the screen was a mono holo of the interior of a small display-case. The last fake jewel, an electrical field sensor, registered nothing, not even any activity in the electrical gear around it. Obviously any back-up power-sources they’d ever had had run out long ago.

“Nothing,” Miz said, clicking the screen off.

“I thought he’d put them in with the one other book he had,” Cenuij admitted. He shrugged. “Oh well, they got me into the castle. And His Majesty’s confidence.”

“Fun in there?” Zefla asked, pouring herself and the others a drink.

Cenuij waved one arm. “Stacked to the rafters with treasure, trash, petty jealousies, pathetic plots, superstition and suspicion,” he said.

“You must feel at home, Cenuij,” Sharrow said.

“Absolutely,” he agreed. “I’m not missing you at all.”

“Had a chance to look for the book yet?” Miz asked.

“Give me time,” Cenuij said, annoyed. “I’ve only been there two days; it’s a little early to start inquiring about the castle treasures. So far I’ve met the King once, the Queen and a couple of extremely unpleasant children far too often already, and I’ve had to hang out with a bunch of vapidly vicious courtiers and cretinously religious functionaries. The unholy life in Pharpech appears to consist largely of rising at an extremely early hour and chanting curses to God in draughty chapels between profoundly uninspiring meals and bouts of gossip whose mind-boggling pettiness is rivalled only by its poisonous malevolence.

“So far all I’ve discovered about the castle vaults is their approximate location. I suspect they’re higher-tech than the rest of this squalid retro theme-park, but I don’t know any more yet.” Cenuij drank quickly from his wine-mug. “So, what have you tourists been up to, while I’ve been infiltrating the very heart of the Kingdom and winning the confidence of its most powerful inhabitant, at no small risk to myself?”

“Oh, just farting around,” Miz grinned.

“We checked the weapons and stuff,” Dloan said.

“We burned the extra hollow pages from the Useless books,” Zefla said, “eventually.”

“Miz has identified the place the local criminal fraternity while away those long hours between acts of villainy,” Sharrow said. “Dloan is planning a journey into the deep country to make contact with the rebels, and Zefla and I are making discreet inquiries about the various artisan, merchant-class and women’s rights reform movements.”

“Oh well, at least you’re keeping yourselves busy,” Cenuij said. He smiled.

“It passes the time while you’re doing all the work, Cenny,” Sharrow told him.

The cathedral clock chimed flatly in the distance. Cenuij drained his wine-mug. “Quite. Well, that’s the hour for evensong; time to go and sing God’s hatreds. I’d better get back and carry on doing all that work, hadn’t I?” He handed Sharrow the mug. “Thanks for the wine.”

“Don’t mention it.”

The thief swung into the booth, through the floor-length dirty curtains and down onto the trestle bench across from Miz. The noise of the smoky inn abated only slightly as the heavy curtains swung back. A couple of yellow-glowing candles, one on each of the narrow booth’s side walls, flickered in the draught.

The thief was small for a Miykennsian. Dressed in dark, undistinguished clothes, he had a beard, several facial scars on his pale skin, and greasy hair. His nose was wide, the nostrils flared above lips set in a sneer. His eyes were deep-set, hidden.

“You wanted to see me, Golter-man?” His voice was quiet and hoarse, but there was a strange smoothness about it that reminded Miz of a razor applied to flesh; the way it slipped in, without pain at first, almost unnoticed.

Miz sat back, holding his tankard of mullbeer. “Yes,” he said. He nodded at the table. “Would you like a drink?”

The thief’s lips briefly shaped themselves into a smile. “I’ve one coming; why don’t you pay for it?”

“All right.” Miz sipped at his drink, saw the thief watching him with his contemptuous sneer, then opened his throat and sank about half the beer and set the tankard down with a thump on the rough wooden table. He wiped his lips with his sleeve for good measure.

The man sitting on the other side of the table didn’t look impressed. The curtain opened behind him; he turned and grabbed the wrist of the serving girl who came through, grinning at her as she put the bottle and cup down on the table. She smiled nervously back.

The thief turned to Miz. “Well, pay the girl.”

Miz dug into the pocket of his jerkin and handed the girl some coins. She gaped at what he’d given her, then tried to close her hand and turn quickly away.

The thief still held her wrist; he yanked her so that she fell back against the table. She gave a small cry of pain. The thief prised open her fingers and lifted out the money Miz had given her. He looked at the coins and seemed surprised. He took two of them, reached up and slipped them both down the girl’s bodice, then pushed her upright and slapped her behind as he propelled her out of the booth. He bit on a coin then put it and the rest away in his dark tunic.