There was the queue. It looked surprisingly orderly, Horza thought, then he noticed that it was being supervised by the same security guards who had been inside the arena. Kraiklyn was near the front of the queue now, and a bus had almost finished filling up. Road cars and hovers waited behind it. Kraiklyn pointed at one of them as a security guard with a notescreen talked to him.

Horza looked at the row of waiting people and guessed there must be several hundreds of them in it. If he were to join it he would lose Kraiklyn. He looked around quickly, wondering what other way there might be of following.

Somebody crashed into him from behind, and Horza turned round to the noise of shouting and voices and a press of brightly dressed people. A masked woman in a tight silver dress was shouting and screaming at a small, puzzled-looking man with long hair, clad only in intricate loops of dark green string. The woman shouted incoherently at the small man and struck out at him with her open hands; he backed off, shaking his head. People watched. Horza checked that he hadn't had anything stolen when he was bumped into, then looked round again for some transport, or a taxi tout.

An aircraft flew overhead noisily and dropped leaflets written in a language Horza didn't understand.

"… Sarble," a transparent-skinned man said to a companion as they both squeezed out of the nearby crowd and went past Horza. The man was trying to look at a small terminal screen as he walked. Horza caught a glimpse of something which puzzled him. He turned his own terminal onto the appropriate channel.

He was watching what looked like the same incident he had seen for real in the auditorium a few hours earlier: the disturbance on the terrace above his own when he'd heard that Sarble the Eye had been caught by the security guards. Horza frowned and brought the screen on his cuff closer.

It was that same place, it was that incident, seen from almost exactly the same angle and apparent distance he'd watched it from. He grimaced at the screen, trying to imagine where the picture he was watching now could have been taken from. The scene ended and was replaced by candid shots of various eccentric-looking beings enjoying themselves in the auditorium, as the Damage game went on somewhere in the background.

… If I'd stood up, Horza thought, and moved over just a-

It was the woman.

The woman with the white hair he'd seen early on, standing in the highest pan of the arena, fiddling with a tiara: she'd been on that same terrace, been standing by his lounger when the incident on the terrace above took place. She was Sarble the Eye. Probably the tiara was the camera and the person on the higher terrace was a decoy, a plant.

Horza snapped off the screen. He smiled, then shook his head as though to dislodge the small, useless revelation from the centre of his attention. He had to find some transport.

He started walking quickly through the crowd, threading his way through people in groups and lines and queues, looking for a free vehicle, an open door, a tout's eyes. He caught a glimpse of the queue Kraiklyn was in. The CAT's commander was at the open door of a red road car, apparently arguing with its driver and two other people in the queue.

Horza felt sick. He started to sweat; he wanted to kick out, to throw all the people crowding around him out of his path, away from him. He doubled back. He would have to risk trying to bribe his way into Kraiklyn's queue at the front. He was five metres away from the queue when Kraiklyn and the two other people stopped arguing and got into the taxi, which drove off. As he turned his head to watch it go past, his stomach sinking, his fists clenching, Horza saw the white-haired woman again. She wore a hooded blue cloak, but the hood fell back as she squeezed out of the crowd to the edge of the road, where a tall man put his arm round her shoulders and waved into the plaza. She pulled the hood up again.

Horza put his hand into his pocket and onto the gun, then went forward towards the couple — just as a sleek, matt-black hover hissed out of the darkness and stopped beside them. Horza stepped forward quickly as the hover's side door winged open and the woman who was Sarble the Eye stooped to enter.

Horza reached out and tapped the woman on the shoulder. She whirled round to face him. The tall man started towards him, and Horza shoved his hand forward and up in his pocket, so that the gun pressed out. The man stopped, looking down, uncertain; the woman froze, one foot on the door's sill.

"I think you're going my way," Horza said quickly. "I know who you are." He nodded at the woman. "I know about that thing you had on your head. All I want is a lift to the port. That's all. No fuss." He gestured with his head in the direction of the security guards at the head of the main queue.

The woman looked at the tall man, then at Horza. She stepped back slowly. "OK. After you."

"No, you first." Horza motioned with the hand in his pocket. The woman smiled, shrugged and got in, followed by the tall man and Horza.

"What's he-?" began the driver, a fierce-looking bald woman.

"A guest," Sarble told her. "Just drive."

The hover rose. "Straight ahead," Horza said. "Fast as you like. I'm looking for a red-coloured wheeled car." He took the gun out of his pocket and pivoted round so that he faced Sarble the Eye and the tall man. The hover accelerated.

"I told you they put that "cast out too soon," the tall man hissed in a hoarse high voice. Sarble shrugged. Horza smiled, glancing occasionally out of the window at the traffic around the cab, but watching the other two people from the corner of his eye.

"Just bad luck," Sarble said. "I kept bumping into this guy inside the place, too."

"You really are Sarble, then?" Horza said to the woman. She didn't look round and didn't reply.

"Look," the man said, turning to Horza, "we'll take you to the port, if that's where this red car's going, but just don't try anything. We'll fight if we have to. I'm not afraid to die." The tall man sounded frightened and angry at the same time; his yellow-white face looked like a child's, about to cry.

"You've convinced me." Horza grinned. "Now, why not watch out for the red car? Three wheels, four doors, driver, three people in the back. Can't miss it."

The tall man bit his lip. Horza motioned him to look forward, with a small movement of the gun.

"That it?" the bald-headed driver said. Horza saw the car she meant. It looked right.

"Yes. Follow it; not too close." The hover dropped back a little. They entered the port area. Cranes and gantries were lit in the distance; parked road vehicles, hovers and even light shuttles lay scattered on either side of the road. The car was just ahead now, following a couple of struggling hover buses up a shallow ramp. Their own hover's engine laboured as they climbed.

The red car branched off the main route and followed a long curve of roadway, water glittering darkly on either side.

"Are you really Sarble?" Horza asked the white-haired woman, who still didn't turn to him. "Was that you earlier, outside the hall? Or not? Is Sarble really lots of people?"

The people in the car said nothing. Horza just smiled, watching them carefully, but nodding and smiling to himself. There was silence in the hover, only the wind roaring.

The car left the roadway and angled down a fenced boulevard past huge gantries and the lit masses of towering machinery, then sped along a road lined on both sides with dark warehouses. It started to slow by the side of a small dock.

"Pull back," Horza said. The bald-headed woman slowed the hover as the red car cruised by the dockside, under the square cages of crane legs.

The red car drew up by a brightly lit building. A pattern of lights revolving round the top of the construction spelt out "SUB-BASE ACCESS 54" in several languages.