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another wounded animal grabbed one of the men, picked him up and tossed him
against the curved wall of the chamber with one blurring shake of its head. A
fusillade of shots tore open its chest and it fell. Behind it, the push
towards the cavern mouth became a rush, then a stampede; the floor vibrated to
the thudding, thumping steps of the giant beasts and the air was filled with
their cries and the noise of the guards' guns as they advanced again.
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 whispered.
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
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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
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