“Fate, it’s heavy,” she said, shucking the cloak and hoisting it back on top of the ceremonial bowl. “They actually wear stuff like that?” She shook her head. “The weight of tradition.”

Sharrow sat side-saddle on the unwrapped motor-bike, looking glum.

“Hey,” Zefla said. “Any more news about Breyguhn?”

“Still staying where she is,” Sharrow said.

“Crazy,” Miz said.

Sharrow nodded. “I tried to call her; the Brothers said she’s there now as a willing guest. They said she wouldn’t talk to me.”

Zefla shook her head. “You think that’s the truth?”

Sharrow shrugged. “I don’t know. They might be lying, or Breyguhn might really want to stay; the way she was when I saw her last, it’s just about believable.”

“Think hearing about Cenuij could have flipped her over the edge?” Zefla asked.

“If she wasn’t long gone already,” Sharrow said. She got off the bike and walked towards the black cube of the tomb, squinting up at it. “Dloan,” she said. “Think you could give me a punt up there?”

“Surely.” Dloan put one of the hunting rifles back in its case, stepped to the side of the tomb and made a stirrup with his hands. Sharrow was lifted towards the top of the sarcophagus and pulled herself up.

“You be careful up there,” Miz called.

“Yes, of course,” Sharrow said, gazing at the top surface of the black granite cube. “I wonder if we can get this thing ope…” Her voice trailed off as she looked down at the bike she had been sitting on.

“Shar?” Zefla frowned.

Sharrow glanced around the warehouse. She sat on the edge of the black cube, turned and lowered herself on her hands, then let herself drop to the warehouse floor.

She walked over to the bike, a strange expression on her face. The others looked baffled. Sharrow put her hand on the bike’s front fairing and stared at the machine.

The bike was long and low-slung and had a single deeply contoured seat aft off a bulging gas tank and above a shiny V4 hydrogen engine. Its two wheels were dark tori of flexmetal, trenched by cross-cut grip-curves.

Above the sweep of the front wheel’s splash-guard, what appeared to be the bike’s light cluster and instrument binnacle was a solid, bulky mass covered with a thin aerodynamic fairing. Two stubby cylinders protruded from the matt-silver of the main casing, ending in a pair of darkly bulbous lenses. A couple of oddly impractical stalks protruded from the casing, a strap with no apparent purpose lay draped across the gas tank, and the two main instrument dials at the rear of the binnacle looked tacked-on.

Sharrow knelt down by the tipped front wheel, patting the roughened silver surface over the two dark lenses.

Miz shrugged. Dloan continued to look puzzled. Zefla took another swig from the bottle. Then her expression changed suddenly from incomprehension to amazement. She sputtered wine and pointed. “Is that the Lazy Gu-?” She coughed, then patted her chest.

“What?” Miz said loudly, then looked around guiltily.

Dloan looked puzzled for a moment longer, then smiled and nodded slowly.

Sharrow shook her head, rising and inspecting the point where the two instrument dials disappeared into holes cut in the binnacle. “No,” she said, inserting a fingernail into the gap and sliding it back and forth. “The real thing wouldn’t let you cut these holes in it.” She stepped back and folded her arms, looking the bike up and down. “But somebody’s gone to some trouble to make it look like one.”

The others crowded round the bike.

Miz peered closely at the instruments. “Maybe you get on, fire it up and it takes you to where the real thing’s stashed,” he said.

“Like a pair of magic shoes in a fairy tale,” Zefla nodded.

“Maybe,” Sharrow said.

Dloan leant closer, inspecting the instruments. He frowned, then tapped both main read-outs. They were old-fashioned electromechanical dials with slim, plastic needles pointing to numbers printed round the edges of the instrument faces.

“Hmm,” Dloan said, gripping the dials and shaking them; they moved in the binnacle.

“What?” Zefla said.

“According to these instruments,” Dloan said, straightening, “this thing’s doing fifty klicks an hour and it’s revving at sixty a second.”

“Never trust a Lazy Gun,” Zefla muttered.

“Really?” Sharrow said. “Let’s see…” She put a hand on each of the two dials and pulled.

“Hey, careful -” Zefla said, stepping back.

The dials clicked out of the binnacle, coming cleanly away. There were no wires trailing from them. Sharrow turned them over; the instruments had no obvious connections anywhere on their stainless steel surface.

“One needle’s moving,” Dloan said quietly.

Sharrow held the instruments in front of her. The speedometer needle swung a little, then steadied. The tachometer needle stayed steady. Dloan reached out, altered the orientation of the instrument cluster so that it was lying flat, then while Sharrow still held them turned the dials around ninety degrees and back. The speedometer needle shifted round the dial, but kept pointing in the same direction, towards one wall of the warehouse.

Sharrow nodded in the direction the needle was indicating. “Then let’s walk that way, shall we?”

They bumped into Feril while they were walking down the aisle, intent on the two instruments. Sharrow smiled awkwardly and turned the dials’ faces to her chest. The android just stood there.

“May I help?” it said.

Sharrow smiled. “May we borrow your car for a while?”

“The vehicle is a little temperamental,” Feril told them, sounding apologetic. “Might I suggest I drive you wherever you wish to go?”

Sharrow and the others exchanged looks. Feril looked up at the ceiling and said, “I know it wouldn’t even cross your mind, but just supposing you were thinking of taking something from the trove, it would be wise not to let the caretaker observe you doing so. I myself am quite neutral in the matter.”

Sharrow opened her jacket and concealed the bulky dials inside as best she could. “We’ll accept your offer of the lift, Feril, thank you.”

“My pleasure,” the android said.

Grey waves dashed themselves against black boulders; spray flew up, sunset lit, to blow across the tumble of stones in quick veils of grey-pink mist, dropping and whirling into the crannies between the rocks.

The wind blew into her face, strong and cool and damp. The sunset was a wide stain of red at the ocean’s edge. She turned and looked up the grassy slope to the road, where the car sat hissing quietly. Strands of steam leaked from beneath the vehicle and were torn away on the curling wind. There was a light on in the automobile’s rear compartment, and through the open door she could see Miz and Dloan peering at a screen they’d unfurled over the floor of the car.

Feril and Zefla sat on a couple of boulders at the side of the road about fifty metres away, looking out to sea, talking.

Miz got out of the car and walked down to her. He stood by her side, making a show of breathing in the brine-laced air.

“Well?” Sharrow asked him.

“I’ll tell you if you’ll tell me how the book led to the tomb,” Miz said, smiling faintly.

Sharrow shrugged. “The message in the casing,” she said.

Miz frowned for a moment. “What? ‘Things Will Change’?”

Sharrow nodded. “That’s the inscription on Gorko’s tomb.”

“But the tomb’s only… what?”

“Thirty years old,” she said. “And the book was missing for twelve centuries.” She smiled thinly at the sunset. “Gorko must have found out what was in the casing, even if he never got to the book itself. Maybe it was just good Antiquities research; maybe one of his agents was able to inspect the book, or remote-scan it while it was in Pharpech. But somehow he found out what the inscription was and had it duplicated on his tomb.”

Miz looked vaguely disappointed. “Huh,” he said.