The people around Cenuij yelled and shouted and stamped their feet. He pushed his face against the slit, trying to hide his smile.

The firing went on, flat-sounding in the soft-walled roost. Three more stom fell as they crowded round the far end of the cavern, calling and screaming as they piled up there, trying to escape.

“The King! The King!” people cried as the guardsmen fought their way across the fallen bodies of the stom to the centre of the cavern.

“The blockhead’s dead, you brainless toadies,” Cenuij whis-pered.

The last few of the stom able to escape did so, launching themselves from the cavern mouth into the late dusk light. Dead and dying animals lay bleeding or struggling to move on the floor of the roost. The guardsmen reached the middle of the cavern.

Cenuij composed his face into an expression of abject grief and got ready to look away from the slit. He breathed deeply, closing his eyes for a moment.

“Look!” a voice cried. He opened his eyes again.

Something moved above the guardsmen, on the wall of the nest-space near the roof. A tiny figure, waving.

“The King!” somebody shouted. “Hurrah!”

A great cheer went up.

Cenuij stared, appalled.

The tomb was a part-buried black granite cube that had been placed, on Gorko’s instructions, on a hill beyond the formal gardens of house Tzant.

She remembered when the tomb had first been emplaced; one of the old servants had taken her back out after the ceremony so that she could see it again without everybody else around.

The duenna told her that the tomb was important and that grandfather Gorko had wanted her to see it like this. Neither Sharrow nor the duenna could guess why. Then they had gone back to the house, for cakes.

The other children had always been frightened of the black sarcophagus, because half-way up one side there was a small smoke-glass window and if you got a torch you could shine it in and see the embalmed corpse of old grandpa Gorko sitting in his best scuffed ballistic hides on his favourite motor-bike, crouched over the handlebars as though still alive, his black helmet and mirrored visor reflecting the torch-light and seeming to stare back out at you.

Most of the children her age ran away shrieking when they saw the old man’s cadaver, but she recalled thinking it was nice that Gorko had been put in a place where the little smoke-glass window showed the valleys and hills of the house parklands, so that grandfather could still have a pleasant view, even in death. And she never forgot that grandfather Gorko had wanted her to see the tomb specially, even if she still didn’t understand why.

When-as happened every season or two-her father’s chasing pack of debtors drew too close to his heels and he had to leave the latest hotel in the middle of the night and head for the temporary sanctuary of Tzant, she’d always liked to visit the tomb on the hill. She’d climb up one of the nearby trees, pull herself along an over-reaching limb and drop down to sit on tap of the sarcophagus, listening to the trees in the wind and looking out in the same direction as her grandfather.

In the shade of the trees, the black granite was cool to the touch on all but the sunniest days, and sometimes she would lie or sit there for hours, just thinking. There was a sentence-just three words-engraved on top of the tomb; it said THINGS WILL CHANGE in hand-sized letters cut a finger deep into the granite. People were a little puzzled by the words; it was neither a recognised saying nor a maxim of Gorko’s. But it was what he had wanted for his epitaph, and so there it was.

Every now and again she would clear the fallen leaves, broken twigs and dead insects from the little water-filled trenches of the tomb’s inscription. One winter she had prized the letter-shaped lumps of ice out of those trenches and thrown them one-by-one at Breyguhn, who was chucking snowballs up at her from the ground; one of the thrown letters had gashed Breyguhn’s cheek and she had run off screaming back to the house.

She lay back on the cool stone, her head cushioned by her coat. She hadn’t been up here for years. She looked up at the pattern of darkness the coppery leaves made against the blue-green sky, feeling the warm breeze move across her arms and face. She closed her eyes, remembering the first time she’d made love in the open air, a few months earlier in a bower in a shady, out-of-the way courtyard buried in Yada’s sprawling history faculty. That had been one evening during Fresher’s Week, she thought. She tried to remember the young man’s name but couldn’t.

She put a hand out to feel the chiselled letters of the cube’s strange inscription.

There was talk of the tomb being moved when the World Court sold house Tzant next year. She hoped it would be allowed to stay where it was. Probably some other noble family would buy the estate, or some newly rich person or big company, but she couldn’t see why they would object to letting her grandpa rest peacefully in his chosen tomb, looking out over a favourite view. She could understand somebody wanting to make the place their own if they moved in, but would they really grudge one small corner of the estate for the remains of the man who’d built it?

She closed her eyes. Yes, she supposed they might. The size of the tomb and the fact it was out of the way were both irrelevant details; it was a symbol, and the physical size of a symbol had no bearing on its importance-it was the thought that mattered.

Today hadn’t gone too badly so far, despite all her fears. She had managed to avoid both Geis and Breyguhn at the funeral; Geis had arrived late anyway, lucky to have got compassionate leave at all for somebody who hadn’t been a close relation, and Breyguhn had been as concerned to keep out of Sharrow’s way as Sharrow had been to ignore her.

Sharrow hadn’t seen Geis since the ball in his father’s house at Siynscen over a year earlier. He’d called her numerous times since then, especially since she’d gone to university, but she’d always found ways of avoiding meeting him face-to-face. She told herself that this was for his own good; if he had become infatuated with her at the ball, then-given that she had no intention of taking things further-it was as well that he had time to forget about her and find somebody else. She still occasionally felt herself flush when she thought about that night.

She didn’t regret having let Geis dance with her, and still did not believe she had done anything wrong, but to somebody watching it might have looked as though she was throwing herself at her cousin, and that really was embarrassing. As for the thought that it might have appeared she was only setting out to beguile him to thwart Breyguhn; that was worse.

Lying there on the polished black rock of the sarcophagus, Sharrow rubbed at one leg, remembering that shock of cold pain two seasons earlier.

She hadn’t seen Breyguhn since the northern winter and that mean-spirited attack in the skidder rink. Brey had gone to finishing school and her father had continued to gamble, working himself further and further into debt and despair; both of them were people she felt happy to ignore.

She heard the voices as though part of a dream.

It was Geis and Breyguhn.

“… sure it won’t come to a war,” Geis was saying. “Everyone has too much to lose.”

Breyguhn said something that ended with, “…dying?”

Geis laughed quietly. “Of course,” he said. “Everybody is. You have to be a little afraid of it just to give your best.”

The voices came from the left edge of the tomb, where the path came up from the overgrown little valley that lay between the hill the tomb stood on and the terrace bordering the house’s lawns and formal gardens. Sharrow rolled quietly over on her front.

“But you… you should never act afraid of it,” Geis said.