The hall was a hot bubble of groggy air trapped in the flooded darkness of a cold autumn night. Firelight danced with shadows across the heavy stones, springing from a dozen smoky torches and radiating from the burly heat of the great hearth. When the wind was allowed a brief entrance through the Keep's narrow arrow slits it could still inject a sobering chill of momentary wakefulness but for the most part the warmth from the orange flames was making everybody drowsy.

It was nearly midnight. For the past five hours the company had been feasting to celebrate the success of the hunt and to honour the Count's guests. When Count Arcturus heard Cerylia's true story, he'd insisted that they stay overnight, and for as long as she wanted afterwards. Cerylia had accepted the offer with good grace although she seemed just a little impatient. She told Peter that they would have to leave in the morning but that the Count's aid would be welcome if she could persuade him to lend her some more solid support.

Peter was surprised by the number of servants, soldiers and miscellaneous subjects who crowded the long tables and filled the room with a constant hubbub of laughter and conversation. He guessed there might be close to a hundred, all told and had to revise his initial impression of the atmosphere of abandonment which had marked his arrival at the Fortress. Obviously there was more to this place than first met the eye.

The Count sat at the centre of the High Table close to the fire, with Cerylia on his left hand side and Peter in the place to her left. Tarragon occupied the seat at the right hand of the Count. He wore a high collared black robe over an electric blue shirt, the robe being fastened at the front with a bright bronze broach. On his right hand side sat the seneschal, a fat and balding individual in his mid forties with watery eyes and a flat runny nose whom the Count introduced as Desmond. Desmond was wearing a black jacket and a thick woollen waistcoat in a bright shade of canary yellow. A gold fob watch glinted on his chest, flanked by silver medals with dark purple ribbons. He sneezed and snuffled his way through the banquet with repeated miserable grimaces and reacted only with lethargic ill humour to the Count's occasional attempts to engage him in the conversation. The impudent guard who had barred the travellers entrance to the Keep had obviously told the truth when he'd said the seneschal was in bed with cold, and it looked as if he would prefer to have remained there.

Cerylia had dressed her wound with a fresh bandage, pleased with the way it was healing. Aware that she was travelling light, the Count had insisted that both his guests choose clothing for the feast from the castle wardrobe. She had selected a long sleeved lilac dress trimmed with silver which concealed the bandage on her left arm but was cut low enough at the front to reveal a moderate but nevertheless (to Peter at any rate) disturbing amount of cleavage.

Peter rather liked the clothes he had selected for himself : a long tailed jacket, a clean white shirt, pleated with a thick lace ruff running along the line of the buttons, dark bottle green pantaloons and black leather boots, all of which gave him the appearance of a pirate in some epic nineteen thirties Hollywood swashbuckling episode.

The Count however was the most extravagantly dressed of them all, sporting a flamboyant red doublet slashed with scarlet silk and stitched with golden thread, a brilliant gold medallion, and the beads in his hair now changed to match the other reds and golds in his outfit. He drank copiously and ate prodigiously and laughed ever more loudly as the evening wore into night.

It was a lavish feast. The cooks had been preparing from the moment the Count's hunting party returned. As they'd waited to be summoned to the great hall from the rooms he'd allocated for them high in the Keep, Cerylia and Peter had been able to smell roasting, baking and stewing, and had almost managed to build up an appetite to match the meal.

The banquet started with three different soups of gradually increasing strength, followed by a light dish of curried eggs and pickles. After this, the diners were offered glasses of an aromatic cocktail tasting of lime and pear juice, a concoction to 'clear the palate'.  Then came a course of a game bird that reminded Peter of pheasant, accompanied by some crispy green broccoli. There were two more meat dishes;  'jugged hare' accompanied by tawny caps of bay bolete fungus and 'blue venison' served with battered field mushrooms, shallots and hunks of fresh brown bread and butter. Another dose of the cocktail followed before the main course.

"This is what we've all been waiting for!" the Count said with a grin. "The result of our magnificent hunt. We caught a proper White Hart. Not one of your piddling little Stables – this one came at us right out of the Old Wild Wood."

"Well, it's not actually the one you caught today, is it Sire?" said Tarragon. "In fact today's meal has been cooked from a beast that was slain a month ago. The meat needs to hang properly and age to bring out the flavour."

"You're a dry old stick, Tarragon!" the Count said amiably. "Why ruin a good story for the sake a few inconvenient facts, eh?" 

Peter had to admit that the meat was delicious; it fell away from his knife, and filled his mouth with tangy, rich favours and a beautifully tender texture. He was glad that he had begun to go easy on the earlier courses to leave room to appreciate this one.

After the White Hart, came a vegetable soup and then yet another meat dish; wild boar with carrots, potatoes and fiery little radishes. By this time it was all a bit too much for Peter. His normal diet consisted of a quick pizza or a few hasty sandwiches and a pint in the Bull. Here, he suspected, he might soon be expected to eat the Bull. He began to pick more selectively at the food and let it digest slowly. But that just meant there was more time to quaff the ruby red ale which foamed in tankards on all the tables. 

 At some stage the Count lit a sweet smelling cigarette which seemed to be the general signal for many to do the same throughout the hall.

"Ganja!" he said with a grin. Peter suddenly made the connection between the three leafed design on his shield and the smoke in the air…

"Marijuana!" he said.

"They do call it that," Azbyc had admitted with a nod. And now it was nearly midnight and the air was thick with it, Peter was finding it hard to keep his mind clear. He shook his head to try to sharpen his wits against the combined effects of passive smoking and active drinking.

"Come.. Let's freshen the glasses and time for our dessert I think!" the Count was saying.

A serving maid arrived with a pitcher of red wine and Peter tried hard not to stare although he had never seen anyone like her in his life. The girl's face was a patchwork of light and dark skin, like the stripes on a zebra or some strange natural camouflage. Although he couldn’t have said for certain, he sensed that this wasn't any kind of body paint. It was the natural colour of her flesh. She was wearing a high buttoned, knee length blue dress with short sleeves and where her bare arms and legs showed beyond the hems and cuffs, they too were patterned in the same bizarre way.

Tarragon must have seen Peter's startled reaction to the maid.

"She's a half breed," he said with a languid smile. There was a hint of contempt in his voice as he continued. "Have you never seen one before?"

Peter shook his head, annoyed that his involuntary surprise had given him away. He wasn't sure whether Tarragon's contempt was a racist reaction to the half breeds or a response to his own ignorance. He was trying to appear blasé in the Autumn Country so as not to reveal too much about his origins to these people. He trusted Cerylia for the moment. He had to. But even though she'd now laid her cards on the table (or seemed to have), he knew that she still reserved an element of doubt for Count Arcturus and his court and he had wanted to do the same, for her sake as well as his own. He wasn't ready to trust Tarragon the way he trusted Cerylia. Now the Count's advisor had gleaned another piece of information about him – not only had he never seen Kestervaals but he hadn't seen a half breed before.

"I keep a few as bonded servants," the Count said. "I'm afraid they were on the losing side in one of my little campaigns a few stanzas before I inherited this title. Part of the terms and conditions of the surrender included several temporary hostages. O, don’t worry, I treat them well, don’t I?"

He winked at the maid who answered with a surprisingly frank, "As bonded servants generally expect, I suppose you don't do too bad."

The Count laughed uproariously as she went to fetch the dessert.

"In fact," he continued, "it was probably a blessing in disguise when I vanquished their former lord. It's not as if they had a great deal of freedom before, you see. And they've only got a couple more stanzas to go before they regain their liberty in any case. They'll probably waste it on going back to that wretched realm they call home, but what can you do?"

He shrugged, reminding Peter briefly of some strange aristocratic social security minister bemoaning the fecklessness of the poor.

"You could do a lot worse than to back me up," Cerylia said suddenly. She had been silent for the last fifteen minutes but now she seemed to see her chance and launched into her appeal with an earnest intensity at odds with the Count's own mood.

"Umm…" said the Count, taking a long swallow from his wine glass.

Peter held his breath, remembering Cerylia's explanation in the morning when the Count took her cover story to pieces. He was still struggling to understand the intricate politics of this radically different world, a learning curve made steeper by the weird physical laws, confusing social rules and deliberate misdirection which its inhabitants appeared not only to take for granted but to positively revel in.

This much was clear. Cerylia was a member of the Stability Council and the Stability Council was at war with the Proton King. In fact the Stability Council (whoever they were) seemed to be embroiled in a much larger conflict of which their dispute with the Proton King was only a part. There had been a Truce Moot between agents of the Proton King and the Council. Peter wasn't sure exactly what a Truce Moot was but it seemed to be some sort of formal meeting to discuss the terms and conditions of the war. After that, the story became rather more complex.

According to Cerylia, she had been appointed to represent the Council at the Moot, together with this Sunanon character who was her lover. Eryndra and Kark were Agents whom the Proton King had appointed to fulfil corresponding roles in the negotiations and there were also other representatives from both sides. The Truce Moot had taken place in the 'Hollow Hill' in a distant Realm which Cerylia called Quitheria II, (though confusingly the Count insisted on referring to the same place as Axin, for reasons that were totally obscure to Peter).

To establish trust at the beginning of the Moot, both parties were required to exchange Tokens which were used as a kind of deposit against treachery. Again, Peter was rather vague on the nature of these Tokens but he had deduced that they were objects of considerable power and significance. There were 'tokens' and 'Tokens', it seemed, the capitalisation implicit in the speaker's tone of voice. Ordinary tokens were a relatively common and work a day part of the lives of these people but Tokens were rare and important. There were many classes of Tokens which served a variety of functions and there were some unique Tokens which were especially prized. It would have been far too simple to have given these things meaningful names, Peter realised. Oh no. That wasn't the way things worked round here! Instead there was all this ambiguous generic language which was designed to hide as much as it revealed, allowing for a complicated verbal dance round the truth in which all the parties to the conversation doffed their caps and curtseyed and twisted and span and revealed as little as possible whilst enjoying themselves immensely – or so it seemed to Peter at any rate. So he struggled to understand their intricate ploys and made the best he could of it.

The Stability Council had been betrayed, caught off guard by unanticipated duplicity in the middle of the Moot. Half of their delegation were slain before their enemies were put to flight, vanishing with the Token that had been the Council's ceremonial hostage in the negotiations. Worst of all, for Cerylia, the Proton King's Agents had fled with Sunanon, kidnapping her lover and forcing him to join them. This was the part of the story Peter found the most difficult of all to understand. Cerylia said that Eryndra had cast a Glamour over Sunanon and that the Glamour imparted a compulsion which overrode his true nature. Somehow, Sunanon had let himself be tricked by Eryndra and fallen prey to a cunning trap. Now he was helping the Council's foes to escape.

Cerylia was pursuing the murderous Agents, anxious to catch them before they could reach the safety of the Realms of the Proton King. She didn’t have many advantages but she did have the Token the Proton King's Agents had brought to the Moot and this was helping her to track them somehow. Tarragon and the Count were both very interested in the nature of this Token and asked a variety of subtle questions to try to find out what it was. Cerylia was evasive but Peter suspected that her questioners learned more than she would have liked. They were skilful politicians.

What exactly Cerylia planned to do if she ran down the enemy Agents was completely unspecified. Peter remembered some of the first words Cerylia had said to him when he tumbled into the Autumn Country.

"My enemies are subtle and various. One of them has taken something from me - something important. I seek to recover it!"

The Council's own Token? Perhaps. But something else, he now realised. Or rather someone else. She didn't need to make it explicit. Even Peter could easily work out that Cerylia was chasing the Proton King's agent to rescue Sunanon. For no justifiable reason he felt suddenly, if briefly, jealous of this unknown man with the missing little finger. As he began to appreciate the danger that faced Cerylia that feeling transformed itself into a fear for her and (if he was honest) for himself as well…

It seemed that he had landed slap bang in the middle of a full scale adventure. Not exactly what he'd anticipated when he stepped into the lift at the office only a few hours earlier!

"The Proton King is greedy. He is powerful and he is no respecter of reputations or Realms," Cerylia was saying, "You should be careful of him. It might be wise if you were to help me to thwart him."

 "Umm…" the Count repeated, taking a second long swallow from his wine glass. For a moment he did seem serious. Then Desmond sneezed loudly, spattering wine over the table, breaking the mood and making him laugh.

Cerylia was exasperated and she lost her temper.

"You're really not paying any attention to what I'm saying are you? You're just a drink sodden old wreck and you've smoked far too much of this weed! Don't you know there's a war on? You frontier lords are all the same! You just sit in your little castles and think you can wheel and deal your way out of trouble! Well, perhaps this time you can't!"

She bit her lip as the Count raised an eyebrow, seemingly content to let her rant until she ran out of steam.

"Cerylia, Cerylia…" he said mildly at last. "Temper, temper…"

Peter shrank within himself and wondered what would happen if his companion had offended their host too badly. Admittedly, Count Arcturus did seem irritatingly complacent but was it wise to risk angering him with an outburst like that? 

Dessert arrived; wild raspberries and cream, accompanied by thick fingers of a delicious sponge cake, flavoured with a hint of ginger and dripping with honey.

"If you'll let me speak?" the Count said, his mouth full of one of the honey cakes.

"First of all, there's always a war on. You should know that as well as I. It's just a question of who gets involved in the fighting and who doesn't. We frontier lords, whom you are so quick to condemn – we frontier lords have to deal with this sort of thing all the time. Now just because your precious little Stability Council has got itself tangled up in a bit of trouble it's serious all of a sudden. I didn't notice the Stability Council taking too much interest when the Old Techno-Gang overran Helicon IV. Oh no. And where were they when Lower Cattic fell to the Ice Sisters? Nowhere, that's where! Because the Stability Council has always meddled in other people's affairs but when it comes to getting their own fingers burnt they've always got a reason not to get involved. So excuse me if I find it a bit rich when a junior member of the Stability Council who wasn't even born the last time the Proton King went on the rampage, comes round lecturing me about lack of involvement."

But Cerylia wasn't to be browbeaten so easily and she responded angrily.

"Be serious! You know this isn’t one of the usual little brush fire wars! Everything's up for grabs now. And you'd better pray that the Stability Council wins through because if they don't, then the way is open to the Stable Worlds and all hell will break loose then! And I don't imagine our enemies will worry over much about the independence of the frontier realms if they can see a quick way through to the Stable Worlds. You could find this place annexed in a trice."

"She lowered her voice, adopting a tone that managed to sound understated but significant.

"In fact", she mused, "it's been a long time since the Stability Council paid a visit to your Realm. Perhaps we should have taken a closer interest in the Autumn Country before? I might recommend that when I return to the Council. And if anything were to happen to me here, I'm absolutely sure my superiors would want to investigate you very closely indeed. A rogue Realm like this could be a danger to us all. I'm sure the Autumn Country would benefit from a little more stability – we could put Citizens in here to mould new binding rules at any time, you know?"

"Are you threatening me?" the Count said, dangerously mild again.

"I'm not threatening anything," Cerylia answered, smoothly. "I'm merely pointing out that all decisions have consequences. You shouldn’t assume that there will be no consequences if you choose not to help me. That's all."

"Well that's not very profound is it?" Tarragon said, frowning. "We all have to live with consequences, but for some, the consequences are more painful than for others."

"Oh hush Tarragon," the Count said, waving his hand vaguely at his advisor. "Why can't we all be friends for a while, eh?"

He smiled widely, his extravagant personality swinging into a natural good humour again.

"Let me tell you a little story," he said. "It's the story of how I came to be the Master of The Autumn Fire."

Peter took another honey cake (they were moist, sweet and delicious) and a small gulp of ale.

"Once upon a time, I used to work for the Stability Council. Then I had a better offer."

The Count was addressing himself directly to Peter now which his target found somewhat disconcerting.

"Cerylia doesn't approve, of course," he said as though he were talking about some absent prudish maiden aunt who had a reactionary attitude to situations which every rational person would accept as perfectly proper. "I'm sure you understand. It's just good business sense to supply your services to the highest bidder."

He shook his head in mock sorrow.

"Have you heard of the game of Clients and Patrons, Pendramon?"

"I've heard of Client/Server…"

"Ah," the Count said, raising one eyebrow quizzically and exchanging a significant look with Tarragon. "Well Client/Server means different things in different places but none of them, I think, are quite the same as Clients and Patrons. Tarragon! The cards if you please!"

From somewhere inside the folds of his robes the lean advisor produced a deck of cards and handed them over to his master who fanned the pack and dashed off a couple of quick ostentatious riffle shuffles that would have done credit to a conjurer. Tarragon moved round to take up a place on the opposite side of the table as the Count swept his hand over the boards and cleared a broad space in front of them, knocking over a mug that was a quarter full of ale in the process. One of the thin rangy hounds that were lounging round the hall came over and gave the sudden alcoholic puddle a speculative lick. The Count didn’t seem to notice. He was now absorbed in dealing out a complex five pointed pattern of cards, face down on the table. The backs of the cards were checked with grey and red squares and fractured by a spiral which radiated from a central circle. They were slightly longer than the standard sets of cards Peter was used to but about the same width. At seemingly random intervals the Count tossed a card to Tarragon and slapped one down onto a pile at his left hand.

"A short demonstration then, whilst I tell you my story," he said.

He finished by placing the remainder of the deck in the middle of the table then turned twenty four cards face up, to form an inner circle around the stack. Peter wasn't surprised to find unfamiliar designs on the faces of the cards. Some clearly did belong to suits but not the spades, diamonds and clubs he was used to (although there were some hearts). The suits in this deck had symbols that looked like eyes, stars, worms, crowns and daggers. Many of the cards, though, had no obvious suit at all and appeared to be unique pictures from some mutant tarot pack. The 'One Armed Man' was a Cyclops figure with a huge single foot like a mollusc and a single arm with the shoulder blade set in front of his neck. 'The Blob' was some sort of giant amoeba which was shown relentlessly sucking fighting knights to their doom. 'Church Militant' was a blood stained cross and the 'Cats in the Box' were a pair of twin black animals, one dead in the corner and the other with its paws raised and claws out to scratch any intruder. The traditional Joker seemed positively mundane compared with these wild cards.

"In this game," the Count said, "the object is to construct a network of client cards and patron cards. Some of the cards are globally private," he indicated the ones he had laid initially, which were still face down, "others may be laid face down so that their identity is known only to one player, whilst a third category of cards are fully public. Shall we play, Tarragon?"

The advisor nodded gravely and placed one of the cards in his hand, face down next to a hidden card which he now turned over. A seven of daggers was exposed, the blades all bright red and the hilts worked with gold. The Count considered this for a moment then, laid one of his own cards face down across the two cards which had just been played.

"A little gamble," he said.

For the next minute or two there was silence as the players concentrated on their game.

"The Autumn Country is a franchise operation, you know Pendramon," said the Count in an aside. "Kind of a leasehold thing, I suppose you could call it. I used to do a few odd jobs for the previous incumbents, in between my little efforts on behalf of the Stability Council. They were brothers but not exactly on the best of terms if you know what I mean. When you get bad blood in a family it can be very bad indeed, eh? Well, frankly, if you ask me, they'd been here too long – sort of slipped into one of those millennial ruts that get your badly prepared aspirant immortal into trouble. Poor planning, if you ask me."

He played a queen of hearts on top of the ace of crowns, seemingly well pleased with the move, then drew a new card from the top of the deck. Tarragon turned over a card called the Sea Of Storms and moved it from one part of the array to another.

"The important thing to remember in the game of Clients and Patrons is that no card is intrinsically more powerful than any other, despite the special advantages which the wilds may possess in merit play," the Count said. "This is something that beginners often forget. The secret is all in the relationships, and any relationship can be turned about. There is a web of subtle connections on the table for those who know how to read the game – a hierarchy of interlocking Patrons and Clients in two opposing systems. And in the right circumstances even the two of worms can be Patron to the Lord of Decay."

He played three cards in quick succession;  snap, snap, snap, on the bare wood as he laid out an overlapping line of the six, seven and eight of stars, abutting one of the central ring of twenty four cards.

"Am I right Tarragon?"

"Very good, sire, but let's see how you like this…"

The advisor turned one of the cards face up which he had previously played face down against the central ring. The ace of eyes.

Azbyc whistled. "Not bad. Not bad at all…"

There was silence for a few moments as he considered his reply but as soon as he had played a seven of worms next to the 'One Armed Man' he launched back into his story.

"If you're going to keep your authority in the Autumn Country there are certain duties which you are required to perform on behalf of the Owner. One or two little courtesies as well – just simple rituals but important none the less. And then there's the role of Guardian of the Cross Roads and Watcher of the Angry Roads. Can't take these things lightly you know.

"The previous incumbents had let matters slip a bit. What with one thing and another, they were so busy with their own feuding that they hadn't got time to look after the Roads. That's where I came in. They asked me to broker the purchase of some automatic monitoring equipment. I used my contacts with the Old Techno-Gang to secure it for them. It was quite a complex deal, and rather a delicate business setting up all the triggers and alarms. I had a dispensation to talk to the Owner and he put a bit of other business my way. Interesting stuff too, and well worth my while."

The Count played another card then turned to Cerylia.

"What do you think, my dear?"

"I was never very good at Clients and Patrons," she said, a touch irritably, Peter thought.

"No.. No..  I can imagine that," said the Count with a nasty smile. "But you see, I on the other hand am very good at Clients and Patrons. Only Tarragon here can give me a decent game."

Tarragon had linked a ten of daggers to the central ring and now he exposed a card from the top of the deck. The card showed a confused melee of warriors struggling with swords, arrows and shields, whilst in the background overhanging them all was the unmistakable sinister mushroom cloud of an atomic bomb.

"Open Warfare," said Azbyc. "How droll!"

All of the hidden cards were turned over at this point and a complex process of association and collection ensued as they were gathered into tricks of varying numbers of cards which were assigned to one or another of the players. More than half of the cards in the central ring were removed from play and at the finish, only a handful of scattered cards remained face up on the table.

"Well that came out rather well," said the Count. "Down to the end game now."

He placed a card face down into the broken ring and removed two from the top of the pack.

"You know you just can't trust some people can you? It turned out that all this monitoring equipment from the Old Techno-Gang was just so much shoddy goods. Oh it stood up well enough when the brothers came to inspect it but once they left it unattended it began to break down. And all at the most inconvenient moments too – such as when they were engaged in one of their ceremonial tourneys or trying to settle some bet on the sports field. Well it just wasn't good enough and sooner or later there was bound to be trouble. Came a time when they let something (or someone) rather important slip through on one of the Angry Roads without sounding the alarm or providing even a token resistance. It was one of the Major Spirits and I'm afraid the Owner was rather upset. He saw it all as dereliction of duty and he took a very dim view of it. Now I just happened to be in the right place at the right time and so he gave the franchise to me.

"And that is how I, Azbyc Vewdx, acquired the title of Count Arcturus, Master of the Autumn Fire, Guardian of the Cross Roads, Watcher of the Angry Roads, Patron of the Final Harvest, Gatekeeper of the Seven Ways, and Defender of the Barriers."

Tarragon frowned as he played a six of crowns into the ring. The Count turned over the card he had played last, rolled away three of the remaining cards including the one that Tarragon had just played and took another ten carefully counted cards from the pack, leaving it almost empty.

"I don’t suppose you had anything to do with the breakdown in the monitoring equipment did you?" said Cerylia dryly. "I wouldn't have expected a sharp businessman like yourself to tolerate rubbish from any supplier. And you being such a good customer of the Old Techno-Gang and all."

Tarragon was down to his last chance. He played 'the seventeen moons', a card which depicted a ringed planet circled by a court of tiny worlds.

"Cerylia, Cerylia," the Count said, shaking his head in mock despair. "How could you think that? You're learning, that's how! Of course I knew the Watchers were defective. I'd arranged it with the Old Techno-Gang. And I'd prepared the way for my succession with the Owner first.

"That is why I am here and you…"

The Count laughed aloud now, delighted with the delicious incongruity of his sentence before he completed it.

"… and you are here as well, of course!"

He laughed again.

"But seriously, what I'm asking you to remember is that your circumstances are somewhat different from mine. I rule this castle, whereas you are homeless vagabonds who have come knocking on my door asking me for a favour. It doesn’t seem to me," he said, suddenly straight faced and altogether more menacing, "that you are in any position to preach to me, my dear Cerylia."

All of which, of course, though galling, was perfectly true.

The Count played one final card, the jack of stars, and with that, swept up the remaining cards and cleared the table.

"Game over, I think. Thank you Tarragon."

He turned to Cerylia again.

"Much as I have enjoyed your company, my dear, in the morning I shall wish you well but I will not be aiding your gallant enterprise. I have other matters to attend to."

From the tone of the conversation, Cerylia must have been expecting such a response to her request, but these final words made her shrink visibly. Seeing her reaction Peter realised just how fervently she had hoped against hope for the Count's assistance. His heart went out to her.

"Don’t worry, you've still got me," he said, reaching to take her hand. She pulled it back absently.

"That's what I'm worried about," she said, but she favoured him with a wan smile which took the sting out of her words.

"Oh cheer up!" said the Count. "Tomorrow is another day, as they say. Time for some music, eh? You must meet my minstrel. Desmond, where has A'lekim got to?"

By the time the musician arrived and presented himself before the table, the Count had lit another reefer and the tankards, mugs and glasses of all the others had been refreshed with wines and beers. The young man was in his early twenties, tall and well favoured with a shock of snow white hair and a melancholy expression. His face was fashioned with the same striking black and white patterns that had made Peter stare at the serving girl earlier in the evening. Another half-breed then, and one that seemed to take pride in his condition for he had chosen to emphasise the borders between the different coloured zones of his flesh by tattooing cross stitch marks in intricate white and black on the black and white skin. A strange black collar circled his neck, studded with clear glass lenses. The final effect gave his face something of the appearance of a patchwork clown doll, but one sown together with barbed wire.

A'lekim wore a silk chequered jerkin. The squares were the size of handkerchiefs and patterned in dark green and gold. His black jeans and trainers, however, would not have looked out of place on any high street in the west of Peter's own world. The combination of the elaborate pseudo mediaeval and the mundane was somehow more startling than any of the elements of his clothing taken in isolation. It reminded Peter of those children's toys where concentric circular wheels allow the heads, bodies and feet of wildly disparate figures to be matched against one another. There was nothing exactly wrong with the final result here, but still it wasn't quite right either.

The young man wore an oddly shaped pack from which a series of tubes emerged to frame the back of his head, looking like miniature organ pipes. From the corners of the pack, two thin aerials projected up a good metre or so into the air. A broad Lincoln green strap ran over his right shoulder and down to his waist and a number of thin silver whistles of varying lengths were clipped on to it. In his left hand he carried an instrument which looked to Peter's eye, very like a standard electric guitar although perhaps it had more strings than usual.

"If I ran my Court on traditional lines," the Count said, "I'd have a proper jester, or at least a minstrel who could double up as a jester and tell us all a joke or two. I'm afraid A'lekim hasn’t quite got the hang of jokes…"

"It's all a matter of timing," he shouted in a sudden 'helpful' aside to the waiting musician, flashing a smile unsubtle enough to fell an elm tree at twenty paces, as though he were imparting some profound wisdom.

"So you'll have to make do with a song or two," he continued in more normal tones to his guests.

"Alas 'tis true, I have no comic stories. With a patron of such wit and intelligence what joker could compete?" the young man answered, supplying a sly smile to accompany his words.

"Unfortunately," the Count resumed (with a touch of acidity, Peter thought), "A'lekim doesn’t seem to know any jolly tunes either, so I expect we'll be treated to some interminable ballad or a collection of melancholy little shoe-gazing nonsenses. Still, we can't finish the evening without some sort of entertainment, can we?"

He clapped his hands impatiently.

"Carry on then!"

 "With your permission, sire…"

A'lekim bowed low and made his way to the far end of the keep, away from the fire place. The rest of the court drew their benches back to the walls to clear a space for him. Large bowls of walnuts and raisins were circulating round the hall and the dogs had decided that there was no more food to be scrounged and gone to curl up by the fire.

Peter watched the minstrel’s preparations with interest. It took him five or six minutes before the first note hit the air, during which the chatter of the crowd gradually subsided. First he reached into a large breast pocket and drew forth a series of oval and circular grey metallic disks roughly the size of tin can lids which he cast onto the floor and rearranged with his feet using his toes to poke them into position. Next he unclipped two pouches at the side of his pack and took out four spheres like black footballs. He adjusted some recessed control and one by one they rose into the air, hovering without visible means of support and moving to assume positions in the corners of the hall. Then he removed a thin black cable which had apparently been looped several times round his waist and laid it out on the ground, plugging the two ends together to form an outer circle surrounding the 'tin can' lids. This seemed to mark the limits of his performing area. He took a slim keypad from another pocket and tapped in a set of instructions, and suddenly the cable lit up in a subdued green, highlighted in six places by brighter yellow nodes. A web work of gold laser light sprang briefly into being, linking the cable, the flying 'footballs' and the aerials at the top of his pack. He tapped one foot sharply and a fan of green light sprang up in front of his face from one of the instruments on the floor. A'lekim twirled his fingers through the lines of light, and as he broke them a waterfall of whispering chimes fell into the hall. The musician was obviously unsatisfied with the result because he made some adjustments on his keypad, and the fan faded away only to emerge a few seconds later with the light more tightly focused. This time A'lekim seemed happy with the change and went on to test out the 'tin lids' which proved to be drum and cymbal analogues that responded to being stamped on. Peter realised that the sound was being projected from the four 'footballs' which were obviously very sophisticated speakers. In a few moments more A’lekim had completed all his tuning.

The first few simple and plaintive synthesised bars gave only a hint of what was to come but they were the prelude to a bass beat which thudded like a limping heart over which the guitar suddenly crashed with a wave of passion. Amazingly, the young musician was producing a sound which Peter might more reasonably have expected from a four or five piece band. It was a long way from the traditional folk style he'd imagined. This was, rich, full and loud and surprisingly Peter even recognised the song – the pensive, indirect and emotionally charged classic "Pearl" by the slightly obscure band "Chapterhouse".

A'lekim could sing well too, capturing the wistful despair of the lyrics perfectly.

"She used to love me, I gave her my soul; Those delicate hours, she lost control…"           

 The court sank into a collective spell of reflection. A'lekim was strung out on the staves of the song, his body wracked by some mystically repressed sexuality. When his eyes swept the hall they locked with Cerylia. She, too, seemed trapped by the music and watched his performance with rapt attention.

Peter caught himself in a sudden unexpected, unpleasant and surprisingly powerful wash of jealousy. Oh for heaven's sake grow up, he told himself angrily. You hardly know this young woman. You've really got to get a grip before the situation deteriorates…

Now that he had the hall under his spell, A'lekim gave them no opportunity to escape and segued directly into a couple of more up tempo pieces before beginning a long melancholy ballad. This last song was accompanied by a constant humming undercurrent produced by the most fantastic instrument Peter had ever conceived of, if instrument was the right word for it. The pack on the minstrel's back was home to a small hive of tiny winged luminous insects called sinukas. At the start of the song, they emerged from their layer and swarmed in a fiery cloud of yellow and green sparks around the musician's head. The vibrations from their tiny wings were amplified by a field that A'lekim was generating and then projected powerfully into the musical mix. By combining the beat from a row of paired wings of different lengths, the sinukas were capable of producing a widely varying range of frequencies which created an ethereal counterpoint to the main melody. Peter later learned that A'lekim controlled their behaviour with a combination of stimuli which taken together gave him a remarkably subtle degree of control. A fine mist of pheromones was used to manage the gross behaviour of the swarm, bringing the insects out of their hive and recalling them back again at the end of their performance. But the more time critical aspects of the music were the sinukas natural response to the intensity and frequency of ultraviolet light which radiated unseen by the humans from the black collar round the musician's neck.

A'lekim had only just launched into his next song when the performance was interrupted by a new arrival. A pair of glossy black and violet wings topped by a grey beak and beady eyes appeared silently at the open window, waited for thirty seconds or so on the stone ledge and then glided in from the night with a raucous caw of contempt for the music. The crow flew straight to the Count's chair and perched on his right shoulder. The Count stood up and signalled for his minstrel to stop amid a babble of rising noise from the court. The crow arched its wings awkwardly to retain its balance but didn’t move until he had regained his seat. It then side stepped up to his ear and croaked two or three guttural syllables which made the Count frown thoughtfully. He turned to Peter and Cerylia.

"There's been a change of plan," he said. "I think after all, I may accompany you tomorrow. As far as the Cross Roads at least."