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lawyer was already there; she signed the necessary papers selling her share in
the shop to them. She'd left her personal phone in the cliff house, knowing it
would make her too easy to trace. After her lawyer had returned home and the
Bassidges had gone to bed she sat down at the house's antique desk-terminal
and stayed there until dawn, taking a couple of zing-tabs to keep herself
awake as she attempted to catch up on eight years of Antiquities news and
datagossip.
There were numerous outstanding contracts for the
Universal Principles
: several from universities, several more from big Corps known to invest in
high-value Antiquities, a few from wealthy individual collectors who
specialised in lost Unique books, and one anonymous contract. The latter
offered the best financial advance, though only for
Antiquities investigators with acceptable track records. She was almost
tempted to draft a tender and mail is to the
anonymous box number, but there was too much to settle first.
She suspected she'd end up looking for the book one way or the other.
According to one of the more pervasive rumours that had circulated within the
Dascen family and its attendant septs in the chaotic aftermath of her
grandfather Gorko's fall, the whereabouts of the last Lazy Gun - the one
stolen from the Huhsz by the Duchess seven generations earlier and hidden
after the Duke's death - had been discovered by Gorko's agents and its
location somehow recorded in the Unique book named the
Universal Principles
, which itself had been missing for a lot longer.
To Sharrow, the rumour had always seemed just mad enough to be true, though
how you could leave a message in something which everybody agreed had vanished
centuries earlier, she understood no better than anybody else.
At appropriate times during the night, to allow for the time differences
involved, she phoned the Francks in
Regioner, left a message for Miz in the Log-Jam, failed to track down anybody
by the name of Cenuij Mu in what passed for a city data base in Lip City, and
filed a visitation request with the Truth Dissemination Service of the Sad
Brothers of the Kept Weight, in the Sea House, Udeste province, Caltasp.
She checked on the last Lazy Gun's official Antiquities status too, just for
hell of it. There was, of course, only the one contract extant, from the World
Court, offering a graded reward schedule for information leading to the
weapon's safe apprehension and an equally impressive sliding scale of steep
fines and grisly punishments for anybody harbouring such information and not
releasing it to the Court.
Nine years earlier there had been tens of contracts; a unique one from the
Huhsz which specifically wanted the
Gun taken from them by $harrow's family over two hundred years earlier, and
all the rest, which just wanted a Lazy
Gun. She and the rest of the team had taken up one of the most lucrative
anonymous contracts which required the capture or destruction of either Gun.
They had fulfilled the contract but to this day none of them knew who it had
been who'd paid them (or paid all but one of them; Cenuij Mu had refused his
share after the Gun wiped a large part of Lip City off the map).
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Shortly after the Lip City explosion the World Court had legislated to forbid
anybody else taking possession of the last remaining Gun, though of course
every Antiquities specialist and team in the system knew damn well that the
Huhsz-despite being prevented from saying so officially - would attempt to top
any reward the World Court might offer for the fabled weapon.
She scrolled through the irreversible mutilations the World Court threatened
to inflict on anybody obstructing the lawful sequestration of the last Gun,
then clicked out of Antiquities Contracts to try another way of tracking down
Cenuij Mu in Lip City, once more without success.
Tansil Bassidge rose early and made breakfast; the two women ate together in
front of the kitchen screen, watching the all-hours news service, then Tansil
took her to the airport for the dawn stratocruiser.
She napped during the flight, landing at Udeste City Intercontinental a couple
of hours later, still just ahead of the dawn.
The region of Udeste lay just inside Golter's southern temperate zone, jutting
east into Phirar and west into Farvel, Golter's largest ocean; bounded to the
north by the Seproh plateau, its southern boundary was the narrow strip of the
Security Franchise, which guarded the forests and fjords of the Embargoed
Areas and - beyond - the mountains, tundra and cold desert of the historically
rebellious province of Lantskaar, which stretched all the way down to the pack
ice.
The Sea House lay at the very end of the final promontory of the Farvel Bight,
a gulf which stretched in an almost unbroken curve nearly two thousand
kilometres from the Areas to the House.
She hired a car and took the autotoll past and around the city-states,
bishoprics, Corpslands, enclaves and family estates of Inner Udeste, then
joined an interroute through the villages and farmlands of Outer Udeste's
western marches, across the moors towards the coast. The weather deteriorated
continually throughout the journey, increasing cloud compensating for the
rising sun so that she seemed to drive forever in a grey-brown half-light.
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