“Might!” Sharrow laughed. “Not in a million chances, child. He’d have hocked Skave the next time he lost heavily. He’d sell anything to get stake money. He’d sell us to get stake money.” Sharrow made a show of looking her half-sister up and down. “Well, he might get a good price for me, anyway.”

“He loved Skave,” Breyguhn said. “He’d never have sold him.”

“Rubbish,” Sharrow said with prodigious disdain.

“You don’t know!”

“All I know,” Sharrow said coolly as the klaxon sounded and the skidders came alive again, “is that you’re a pain and I can’t wait to get the hell away from here and go…” She flicked her eyebrows and made a thrusting motion with her pelvis, “… skiing.”

She twirled her car away over the white surface, avoiding Breyguhn’s crude lunge at her and showering her with icy spray as she raced off round the oval track.

Sharrow’s car stripped its track a minute later, leaving the broad metal bracelet laid out on the snow behind it like the train of some strange dress. Sharrow kicked at the accelerator but the skidder’s automatics had shut the engine off. She thumped her hands off the wheel, grimacing as her sore hand protested by jabbing pain along her arm, then she stood up in the car and waited for a break in the traffic of hurtling skidders and happily shouting, shrieking people, and made her way carefully but quickly across the white surface to the side.

Breyguhn claimed later she had turned back against the flow of traffic to see if she could help Sharrow, after noticing that her skidder had stopped. She knew it was against the rules but she just hadn’t thought. Then her accelerator had jammed and she must have panicked. She felt terrible about hitting Sharrow and crushing her against the barrier and breaking her leg.

Especially as it stopped her going on her skiing holiday.

Sharrow sat up in the bed, surrounded by cushions. Her father held her in his arms, patting her back.

“I know, I know, my love. Everything’s against us just now, isn’t it? Poor Skave taken from us; you with your naughty leg going and breaking itself, poor Brey hardly sleeping because she feels it was her fault, and me with two such unhappy daughters.”

He patted the back of Sharrow’s head as she rested her chin on his shoulder and looked at Breyguhn, who sat in a small seat near the door. Breyguhn crossed her eyes and shook her head quickly from side to side when their father mentioned Skave, made a silent scream and held her thigh when he talked about Sharrow’s leg, and then closed her eyes and tilted her head to one side as though peacefully asleep when he mentioned her.

“But we’ll be all right, won’t we, my pet? The medics will have that silly old leg sorted in no time, won’t they?”

Breyguhn mimed a limp, crooked leg suddenly becoming straight; she waggled it around.

“Of course they will. It’ll be as though it never happened, eh, won’t it? You’ll soon forget all about it, won’t you?”

Breyguhn mimed sudden forgetfulness with a finger to her lips and a series of stagily puzzled expressions.

Sharrow smiled thinly as her father patted her back. She looked at Breyguhn and slowly shook her head.

Breyguhn crossed her arms and sat there, sneering.

Sharrow bedded one of the younger medics while she still had the cast on, and got him to make sure that her leg would never be perfect again; she would always walk with a slight limp and so never forget.

Her father couldn’t understand why his daughter was still lame. He threatened to sue the family medical franchise, but couldn’t afford to.

At university, Sharrow’s limp became a trademark, a talisman, her insignia; like an eye-patch or a duelling scar.

She always did refuse to have any further treatment.

Her father just couldn’t understand it at all.

19 Spoiling Bid

The android and the woman stood beside an old-fashioned automobile on a weed-strewn quay in the old docks, looking out to sea. The antique car hissed every now and again and leaked steam. Behind it, beyond the shells of the ruined warehouses, mists rose perpetually from the warm waters of the inlet, climbing and re-climbing the frost-grey planes of a lifeless sky. Thrial was a red fruit wrapped in tissues of mist. Buildings in the distance wavered on the boundary of visibility.

The helicopter came swinging round the peninsula, its enginevoice rattling like drumfire off the cliffs and buildings looming through the mist. The machine slowed as it crossed the harbour mole, then swivelled in the air and landed quickly and gracefully in a swirling bowl of curling mist and a small storm of tiny stones and dead, windblown leaves.

She rocked on her feet. The android stood stock still.

Miz jumped down from the pilot’s seat, unclipping the control stalk from his ear and handing the instrument to a uniformed man who was sliding into the seat he had vacated. Miz looked pleased with himself. His right hand was lightly bandaged. Zefla and Dloan appeared from the far side of the helicopter; Dloan limped a little.

Zefla smiled when she saw Sharrow. “It’s Yada, end of next year, with three old cuties,” she said when they hugged.

“I heard. Hi, Dloan.”

“Good landing, eh?”

“Wonderful, Miz. This is Feril; my legalist and custodian while we’re here.”

“Hello to you all,” the android said. It pointed to the ancient, hissing steam car as it donned a set of driver’s goggles. “Allow me to take you to the Lady Sharrow’s apartments.”

Miz looked out over the misty city. The jet-faced sandstone apartment block sat half-way up a built-up hill looking out over an old canal basin connected by a flight of locks and an inclined plane to the city’s inner harbour. Sharrow’s rooms were on the top floor, one storey above the apartment Feril lived in. The android had only recently moved out of the top-floor apartment after renovating it.

It was the androids’ stated intention to return the city of Vembyr to a state resembling its condition during the time of the Lizard Court, when by general agreement the city had been at its most culturally vibrant and architecturally coherent. As well as rebuilding the ancient steam-powered automobile it had used to transport them from the docks, Feril had restored two other apartment blocks over the past few decades; this was its third.

All the rooms were tall. Wood panelling carved with intricate abstract patterns climbed from floors of polished wood to agate and marble dados, from which plain white plaster walls rose to fabulously complicated plaster friezes composed of leaves and vines and little peeking lizard faces. The room they were in was sparsely furnished with black wood and hide furniture that looked both severely formal and strangely organic.

“How much?” Sharrow said.

“Ten million,” Zefla said, nodding. She was standing by a panelled wall, running her hand over it.

Miz spread his arms as he turned from the window. He stood there, silhouetted. “The guy didn’t even look surprised!” he exclaimed.

“Judge did,” Zefla said, peering intently at the panelling. “You could see she’d thought it was just a formality, setting bail that high. She had to consult the Court AI right then, in front of everybody, probably asking if she could re-set the bail beyond anybody’s reach, but the rules say no. So Roa walked free.”

“Who’d risk ten mill on somebody that crazy?” Miz said.

“No clues, I take it?” Sharrow asked.

Zefla left the panelling and came to sit with Sharrow on a long couch. She shrugged. “Bail company. Had the money there in a cash-good chip within the hour. No idea who’s behind it.”

“Maybe it’s the same son-of-a-bitch named the noon race winner Minus A Fifth in Tile yesterday,” Miz said, leaning back against the window sill.

“Oh, Miz,” Zefla said, frowning at him.