She had accepted her still-warm gift gracefully. Breyguhn couldn’t bear to touch the blood-matted thing. Still, while Sharrow had thrown hers away the day they left the Autumn Palace estates to return to their respective schools, Breyguhn had kept her trophy for years.

Dloan came out of the deep country the following morning, morose and unsuccessful. He’d had to shoot two inept bandits, but apart from that he hadn’t seen anybody. There might well be rebels and the like in the deep country, but they’d kept well out of his way.

They set off back to the town that afternoon with the wind soft behind them. Several troupes of stom flew over them a kilometre up, heading in the same direction. Leeskever nodded wisely.

They paid him at the same inn on the outskirts of the town they’d eaten at the day after they’d first arrived. Miz went into town alone, disguised. Their rooms were still being kept for them; a beggar had asked after them and the innkeeper had given him the note they’d left for him. Nobody else had inquired about them.

“A decent bed and hot water!” Zefla said, marching into her and Sharrow’s room. “Fucking luxury!”

She slept well at first, then woke during the depths of the night wondering what was happening, and thought there was something long and cold crawling over her skin at her throat.

She sat up, whimpering and pulling at her nightdress, then felt to the skin at the top of her chest, and with her hands there, looking into the utter darkness, hearing Zefla stir and make a fading, still-asleep huh-ing noise, she realised what was happening.

It was their way of saying they were still in touch, even here. So much for being off-net.

The feeling was like a cold finger drawn across her skin, right round the base of her neck, like an executioner sketching where the axe will fall. Then another line, then another and another, each one further out than the last.

The shape of the Crownstar Addendum was traced out on her skin, to the last strand, the last planet of the system.

The long looping orbit of Prensteleraf was drawn around her neck and down over the tops of her breasts. After a while, when no more happened, she lay down in the soft, sagging bed again.

The final signal, a few moments later, was a surprise: a single heavy but not painful line drawn around her scalp, about where would sit the rim of a hat, or a crown.

This was not a dream, she told herself before she fell asleep again.

But still, in the morning, she was not sure.

14 Vegetable Plot

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Miz whispered.

Dloan shrugged. He scratched his head, looking down at the great broad tail lying on the dust of the reeking cage. He lifted the tail, then put it back down again. “I need something to hold it up,” he whispered.

“Well don’t look at me!” Miz hissed, crouching at the stom’s snout with a tank of gas. He pumped the handle a few times and pulled the trigger again, squirting the gas towards the beast’s nostrils. Miz put his kerchief up over his mouth and coughed.

Dloan looked round.

“Hurry up!” Miz said. “This stuff is making me sleepy!”

Dloan took his knife and went to the stom’s side; he reached up and started cutting the ropes holding the animal’s left wing into its body.

“Dlo!” Miz said, eyes wide. “Are you crazy?”

Dloan said nothing; he let the ropes fall to the stinking floor of the cage. The stom’s great black wing unfolded gently like a collapsing tent. The beast stirred a little. Miz flinched back, gulping, then came forward again, spraying the gas quickly into the stom’s snout. “Shh!” he told the sleeping animal. “Shh! There, there…”

Dloan removed one of the planks that had held the wing straight, took it to the rear of the beast and by propping it between the wall and the cage floor, used it to keep the stom’s tail up off the dust. Then he disappeared underneath the tail.

Miz glanced at the front of the cage. Even with the intensifier glasses on the night was appallingly dark. Zefla was watching the zoo night-watchman’s hut, but Miz felt horribly vulnerable stuck in this cage crouched centimetres from the snout of an animal that looked like it could swallow him whole.

Not that he was sure he’d have swapped with Dloan. He watched Dloan’s feet kick on the floor of the cage as he pushed himself further in underneath the stom. Miz looked away.

He looked up at the barred ceiling of the cage. Of all the things he could ever have imagined doing in his life, squatting in a stinking cage surrounded by the rotted, half-eaten corpses of glide-monkeys in the middle of the night in the remotest, most backward part of the Entraxrln of Miykenns drugging an animal the size of a light aircraft while an accomplice interfered with the beast’s genitals, would not really have been the first to leap to mind.

The stom made a deep, sighing noise. Miz pumped more gas at it. Dloan wriggled out from underneath its rump.

“Got it?” Miz asked. Dloan nodded. Miz patted the animal’s snout gently. “Poor bitch; probably the most fun she’s had in years, and she slept through it.”

Dloan stood there, holding a wooden scraper and a small sealed pot, his trous and jerkin stained. He had an odd expression on his face.

Miz squirted one last burst of gas at the animal then stood up. “Right; let’s get going before she starts screaming rape.”

“No,” Dloan said, coming towards him.

“No?” Miz said, letting Dloan take the gas canister from his hand. Dloan put the scraper and pot down on the floor and crouched at the animal’s snout; he pumped the canister, spraying the gas into its nostrils. “Dloan!” Miz said, incredulous. “What are you doing?”

“Trying to kill it,” Dloan said. He kept pumping and kept spraying, while Miz shook his head and walked round in a circle, head in his hands, muttering.

Dloan pumped until the canister was empty and a dew of evaporating droplets lay around the animal’s nostrils. Little rivulets ran down its snout and fell spotting to the dust. Dloan swayed as he crouched there, mechanically spraying from an empty tank; Miz went over and grabbed him, choking on the cloud of gas. He pulled on Dloan’s massive shoulders and finally got him to move; they collapsed back on the floor of the cage. Dloan came to, shaking his head.

“Oof!” Miz wheezed. “Get off me!”

Dloan stood unsteadily, shaking his head. He swayed, looking at the silent animal, then retrieved the pot and the wooden scraper and stumbled for the rear of the cage. Miz followed him, scrubbing out their tracks in the dust as he went.

They re-locked the door with a piece of bent wire, collected Zefla from her look-out position near the watchman’s hut, and rendezvoused with Cenuij at a postern in an unlit section of the castle precincts.

“You stink,” he said as Miz handed him the sealed pot.

“Oh, shut up,” Miz told him.

Lines of bunting hung above the main square of Pharpech town; stalls, traders and entertainers provided foci for the swirling, milling crowds of people celebrating the annual migration of the glide-monkeys and the return of the stom, and especially the Royal Troupe.

Noise blared from the castle end of the square, where a group of men pretending to be stom danced round in a cleared arena in front of the royal reviewing stand. The stom-dancers held their arms out, displaying giant black wings made from dyed membrane and springy bark strips as they ran at and turned round each other, making unconvincing roaring noises. Priests and monks sitting in the higher levels of the reviewing stand and dressed in ceremonial robes, kept up a running cantillation describing the proceedings.

The King sat with the Queen, trying not to fall asleep.

Sharrow nibbled at a blister-fruit sorbet as she and Miz walked through the crowds, refusing offered bargains and brandished foods.