Grailblazers.

Welcome, purred the message, to Atlantis. Do you want to be enlarged?

"I think so," said Bedevere, "don"t you, Turkey? I think that"d be a jolly good idea, if it"s all the same to-"

Then we"ll have a bit less of it from both of you, and particularly him. Understood?

"Understood."

The finger shrank, until it became a hand, and it shrank and it shrank and it shrank until the hand closed over Bedevere"s fingers and shook them warmly. It was attached to an arm which connected it to a round, bright-eyed, middleaged man in a dark grey suit.

"Let"s get one thing straight, sir, shall we?" he said, smiling. "Here, we do things the civilised way. No heavy stuff. All sanctions strictly economic. Got that?" And he gave Turquine a look. Turquine growled and nodded.

"Splendid," said the round man. "In that case, sir, let me introduce myself. I"m Iophon, and this"- and the two knights noticed another, identical man standing beside him - "is Pallas. We"re from Exchange Control."

"I"m sorry?" said Bedevere.

Iophon smiled. "We"re here to make sure that only permitted amounts of authorised currency come in or out," he said. "You can"t be too careful, you know."

"Excuse me," said Bedevere. He pulled Turquine aside by the sleeve and whispered to him for a moment, and then turned back to Iophon, who was writing something on a clipboard. "I think perhaps there"s been a slight misunderstanding here."

"I hope not," said Iophon cheerfully. "Now then, if you"ll just let me have your amounts, denominations, account numbers and sort codes, I can pay you straight in. You"re expected, you see."

"Yes," said Bedevere, "like I was saying, a misunderstanding. You see, we"re not money, we"re people."

Iophon grinned a little. "That"s all right, sir," .he said. "People are accepted at more than two billion outlets galaxywide. People, if you"ll pardon the phrase, sir, will do nicely. Just sign here, and we"ll have you debited in no time." He held out the clipboard. Bedevere backed away slightly.

"I don"t think you quite understand," he said. "We don"t want to . . . to be cashed. I think we"d probably bounce. We just want to see someone about..."

The other man, the one referred to as Pallas, stepped forward. There was something extremely unsettling about him. Bedevere explained it later as his having the air of someone who"d grab you by the scruff of the neck, shove your head under a spring-clip and slam the till shut on you without a second thought.

"Look, sir," he said, "you can either be paid in or" - and he made an unpleasant little gesture - "paid out. Which is it to be?"

Turquine, meanwhile, had had enough. He was not, to put it mildly, as sensitive as Bedevere, and as far as he could see, here they were being threatened by two middle-aged men, the taller of whom came up to his breast pocket. He pushed past Bedevere and reached for a handful of lapels.

When he came round he was lying on his face. Whatever had happened to him, he hadn"t enjoyed it. Bedevere, he noticed, was still on his feet, and his face had that Neverseen-himbefore-in-my-life expression he remembered so well from their mutual schooldays. He groaned.

"Right," Pallas was saying, "that does it. Take them away and put them on deposit."

Turquine groaned and loosened his belt.

"I mean," he said "it"s inhuman. There"s something about this in the Geneva Convention, isn"t there - unusual or degrading punishment?"

"I think that"s the American const.i.tution," Bedevere replied. Somewhere at the back of the cell there was a dripping noise. There always is in prisons. They have worse plumbing than hotels.

"Four stone in two days!" Turquine burst out, and pointed to his stomach, which had slopped over his waistband and was threatening to run down his legs. "For G.o.d"s sake," he said bitterly, "if this goes on any longer, even my socks won"t fit. And," he added desperately, "they haven"t even given us anything to eat."

Bedevere nodded sadly. He"d never been exactly slender himself - he was one of those people who only have to look at a chocolate biscuit to start thickening up around the tummy - so it wasn"t quite so bad for him; but Turkey, he knew, had always been quite fanatical about keeping his figure. Even, he remembered, at school; not that there"d been any danger of running to fat on half a loaf and a mug of stale mead a day. He smiled wanly - and, since it was pitch dark in the cell, pointlessly - and tried to think of something cheerful to say. He couldn"t.

It"s no fun being put on deposit. You ask a five-pound note.

Bedevere stirred about in the straw, finding to his distress that there was rather more of him than he was used to, and that it took quite a lot of effort just to move it about. "You never know, there might be something clever we could do. Let"s just stop a minute and think, shall we?"

"Fine." Turquine glowered at him, or at least where he remembered seeing him last. It was very dark in the cell. "Let"s take stock o the situation, okay? We"re in a cell in the depths of some sort of castle . . ."

"Vault," said Bedevere.

"All right then, it"s a b.l.o.o.d.y vault, so what? We"re chained to the wall, in a vault, and . . ."

"In a bank," Bedevere went on, talking more or less to himself. He"d found over the course of a long acquaintance that when one has n.o.body but Sir Turquine for company, quite often talking to oneself is the only way to get an intelligent conversation. "In a bank," he repeated.

"Fine," Turquine growled, "in a bank, if it makes you any happier. Chained to a wall, fat as pigs and getting fatter by the second . . ."

"And heavier."

"Thank you, Mr Tactful. And, as you so perceptively sag, heavier. And..."

Bedevere opened his eyes. "Yes," he said quietly. "Heavier, and in a bank vault. On deposit. Yes, I think we"re an to something here."

"My G.o.d," Turquine went on, ignoring him, "I hate to think what this is doing to my arteries. They must be so hard by now you could use them for gun barrels. Ten years of eating highpolyunsaturated marge gone for nothing."

"Turkey," said Bedevere, "shut up whingeing for a moment, and listen to me."

Turquine stopped in mid-complaint. There was something about the boy Bedevere -he"d half-noticed it a few times over the years -that made you listen to him when he sounded like that. Not that he ever said anything remotely sensible, of course; usually he"d come up with some remark like, "I think we"re lost," or, "It"s late, perhaps we should be heading for home now," or even, "Hitting people doesn"t really solve things, you know." The trouble with young Bedders, if the truth were known, was that there was a lot of good warehouse s.p.a.ce standing idle between his ears.

"Right," Bedevere said calmly, "I want you to standup."

Ah well, thought Sir Turquine, why not? Nothing else to do. He stood up.

"You standing up, Turkey?"

"Yes."

"Thank you. Now walk forward until you reach the end of the chain."

"Is this some sort of aerobics, Bedders? Because if it is, I"ve tried all that, and . . ."

Bedevere shook his head. "Just do what I say, old man, all right? Thanks. You there yet?"

"Yes.) "Great. Now, then," said Bedevere, "I want you to fall forwards."

There was a faint clink in the darkness. "What did you say?"

"Fall forwards, there"s a good fellow," said Bedevere. "As if you were trying to fall flat on your face. Just try it, would you, please?"

"Are you feeling all right, Bedders?" Turquine enquired cautiously. "Starvation isn"t getting to you, is it? Because I"ve heard stories, not eating makes you go all light-headed. You aren"t seeing things, or anything?"

"No, thanks all the same," Bedevere replied calmly. "Now then, I"ll count to three. One. Two."

On the count of three, there was a grinding noise, and the sound of unhappy stone.

"Ah," said Turquine, catching his breath, "I think I see what you"re getting at. You think my increased weight will mean I can pull the chain out of the wall. Good thinking."

Bedevere, masked by the kindly darkness, made an exasperated face and counted quietly up to five. "That"s it, Turkey. Give it another go, why don"t you?"

It took seven goes before finally there was a loud crash arid a vulgar expression, m.u.f.fled by having Sir Turquine"s bulk on top of it. Then a small whoop of joy.

"Right," said Bedevere, "how are you doing?"

"Fine," Turquine replied. "Chain came out of the wall like a cork out of a bottle. My G.o.d, Bedders, I must have put on a h.e.l.l of a lot of weight to manage that!"

Bedevere sighed. "Splendid," he said. "Stout fellow, if you"ll pardon the expression. Now, come over here and help me with my chain."

With two extremely tubby knights yanking away at it, the staple holding Bedevere"s chain to the wall didn"t stand a chance. Bedevere would have preferred it if his comradein-arms hadn"t landed on top of him when the staple gave way, but you can"t make an omelette, as they say. He struggled out, stood up and dusted himself off.

"Now," he said, "we"re getting somewhere." He reached out with his foot and felt something cold, small and heavy. A pile of them. He nudged, and there was a heavy dunk, like a lead brick falling.

"Like I said," he muttered to himself, "a bank vault. Hey, Turkey, did you know that we were in a bank vault?"

"You may have mentioned it, yes."

"And do you know what we"re going to do next, Turkey? Well," said Bedevere, smiling to himself, "we"re going to rob it."

There was a silence broken only by that blasted drip. If ever I get out of here, Turquine thought to himself, I"m going to beat the pudding out of the first plumber I meet.

"What did you say?" he asked.

"We"re going to rob the bank, Turkey," Bedevere said cheerfully. "What"s up, got wax in your ears or something?"

Time, Turquine said to himself, to get a few things sorted out; such as priorities. "Look," he said, "a place for everything and everything in it"s place, that"s what my old mother used to say. Let"s get out of here first, and then we can think about-"

"You"re an idiot, Turkey, do you know that?" said Bedevere, highly pleased about something. "Listen. This is what we"re going to do."

Deputy Cashier Callistes woke from his doze and pulled on his helmet. Bells were ringing all over his office. Either the world was coming to an end or someone was robbing the vault; which, in the circ.u.mstances, was six of one and half a dozen of the other.

With his five deputy clerks at his back and a big wooden club with nails in it clutched in his right hand, he tiptoed down the corridor, opened the safe door and went in. The deputy clerks, who were also brave men, followed him.

Once they were all inside, somebody with no sense of fair play hit them over the head with gold bars, took the keys, locked them in the safe and ran away. By the time they were rescued by a SWAT team of trained auditors, they were all so fat that it took hydraulic lifts to move them.

Because they were native Atlanteans, with their biorhythms linked by the central computer to their current accounts, their short spell on deposit meant that each of them came out of the vault not only many stones heavier but many millions of dollars richer; and they were therefore taken directly from the vault to the courthouse, tried and found guilty of embezzlement. Under Atlantean law there is only one possible penalty for such a terrible crime. They were loaded on to a lorry, taken to the Till and cashiered.

"I knew a bit of exercise would get the fat off," gasped Turquine, leaning on a doorframe and wiping the sweat from his eyes. "Look!" He pointed to the waistband of his trousers.

"Good job too," Bedevere panted in reply. "Only I don"t think it"s the exercise, somehow."

He was, of course, right. By leaving deposit without filling out the necessary withdrawal slips, both the knights had become hopelessly overdrawn, which accounted for the fact that they could barely stand up. It was probably just as well they didn"t know what was happening to them; or that if they hadn"t been picked up by a patrol fifteen minutes later, they would have been hit by ma.s.sive bank charges and killed outright.

"Where the h.e.l.l are we?" Turquine asked.

And that"s b.l.o.o.d.y typical of the man, Bedevere thought, as he leant on the doorpost and tried to coax some air into his traumatised lungs. I mean, Turkey, how am I supposed to know where the h.e.l.l we are? You think I nip over here an my days off for a spot of being hunted or something?

"Lord knows," he replied. "Look, is this actually getting us anywhere?"

Turquine stared at him. "Say that again," he said.

Bedevere put his back against the wall and slid down until he was crouching on his haunches. "Running away," he said. "I mean where"s the b.l.o.o.d.y point? It"s not as if we know where the door is. Why don"t we just . . .?"

"Well?"

Bedevere shrugged. "Forget it," he said. "Don"t mind me, I"m out of condition. Leave it to you."

Turquine made no reply, and Bedevere suddenly realised that he - Turkey, of all people - was more or less at the end of his rope. Probably as a result of his habit of absentmindedly eating the leftover pizzas.

"Stuff it," said Turquine. "I vote we stand and fight. Or stand, at any rate. Better still, let"s sit down and fight."

He sat down, let his head fall forward, and fell asleep.

About ten minutes later, the men from the Chief Clerk"s department arrived. They were clearly intended to be the heavies. You could tell this by the way the pencils in their top pockets all had rubbers on the ends.

"Okay," said Bedevere, "it"s a fair cop. I"m easy, but I think my friend here wants to hold out for a better exchange rate."

The clerks looked at each other, and Bedevere noticed that they were, in a curious way, all trying to stand behind each other. Then one of them was propelled forward, politely but firmly, and cleared his throat.

"Resistance is useless," he said.

"I know," said Bedevere.

"Well, all right, then," said the clerk, nervously. "Try anything, buster, and you"re history. You got that?"

"Absolutely."

"Good."

n.o.body moved. It was all rather embarra.s.sing, and Bedevere found he had this very strong urge to offer them all a cup of tea or something.

The spokesman made another soft, throat-clearing noise. He was standing on one foot now.

"We can do this the hard way," he whispered, "or-?"

"Sorry," said Bedevere. "Do you thinkyou could speak up a bit?"

"Yes, certainly. We can do this the hard way, or we can do it the easy way. If that"s all right with you," he added. One of his colleagues gave him a shove. He turned round.

"All right," he said, "I"ve had enough, you hear? And I don"t give a monkeys what they said at the office party." He threw his clipboard to the ground, trod on it, slowly and rather majestically walked to the very back of the small knot of clerks and stood there with his arms folded.

Bedevere had had enough, too. "Excuse me," he said. "I don"t want to be a pest or anything, but perhaps you could see your way clear to taking me to your leader."

"Right," squeaked a voice from the middle of the posse. "And no tricks, okay?"

"No tricks," Bedevere sighed.