The Peacock Cloak

further distress.
    “Not such a bad place if you like doing sweet nothing,” grunted Shoe, his wiry frame taut with dislike, as he turned to one side to spit.
    “Greetings everyone,” called out a tall white-haired man. “My name is Humility – Humility Joyousness Fortunas – and I’m the governor of Last Resort. It may sound an odd thing for a prison governor to say, but I sincerely hope that your time here will be interesting, pleasurable and rewarding.”
    No one had ever escaped from Last Resort, for it was on an island surrounded by hundreds of kilometres of open ocean, one of the remotest places on the planet. But (as the governor now made clear) the regime here was far from harsh. They’d find their accommodation plain but comfortable, he explained, they were free to roam, and they’d have plentiful opportunities work at trades, or to study, or to engage in sport and the creative arts. There was even a unique opportunity to take part in the excavation of an archaeological site.
    Not all the prisoners were grateful or impressed.
    “Who wants to make pots?” growled Pennyworth. “Who wants to dig up bloody old stones?”
    He and Shoe had lived their whole lives in the seamy underbelly of a city where you could walk for a whole day and still not come to its edge. All their notions of what was exciting and fun were formed from that experience. They’d lived for the whiff of violence, the heady joy of getting one over on some foolish sap, the sound of gunfire, the thrill of the chase. But here the cry of seagulls was the loudest sound, and you could see the island’s only hill at the end of its single empty street.
    “I’ll die of boredom,” Shoe gloomily repeated.
    “I wouldn’t have bothered to lay down my gun if I’d know this was coming,” said Pennyworth. “I’d have kept on shooting till they put a bullet through my head.”

    A few days later, the two thieves were riding in a bus along a bumpy coastal track, carefully avoiding looking out at the great blue ocean glinting with sunlight, for fear they might find themselves enjoying it.
    “So what is this dump we’re going to, anyway?” Pennyworth asked one of the other prisoners, a large toothless black man who was sitting across the aisle from them.
    The black man shrugged.
    “A settlement from the Old Empire or some shit like that.”
    “What, and we have to dig it up?”
    “Yeah, but the guy in charge is really soft. You don’t have to do much.”
    Pennyworth snorted.
    “Why do they want to dig it up anyway?”
    “Find out what it was for,” the black man said. “Or some shit. No one knows apparently.”
    “Or gives a crap,” said Pennyworth.
    The black man laughed.
    “Yeah,” Shoe said, “but you never know what we might find, do you? It’s amazing what people pay for that old crap.”
    He’d once been involved in a scam involving some fake Old Empire artefacts, and he had some idea of their worth. It was why he’d suggested to Pennyworth that they chose this work, as opposed to, say, potting, or working on the colony’s single farm.

    They came to a picturesque ruin on a slope above a rocky shore, some three kilometres from the main colony, with diminutive trees clinging picturesquely to its crumbled stonework.
    As they alighted from the bus, the young officer in charge came rushing to greet them with his hand outstretched.
    “Gestas? Dismas? Welcome to the Place of Wells! Wonderful to have you aboard, my friends! My name is Gravitas but most people just call me Officer Graves. Well, I am always down a hole in the ground!”
    The two thieves declined to smile.
    “I think you’ll really enjoy this work,” Graves continued undaunted. “I know the site doesn’t look much at first but I promise you that it’s one of those places you really fall in love with, once you get a feel for it.”
    Officer Graves beamed at them, full of benevolent hope.
    “What once stood here looks to have been a square building with a flat roof,” he told them. “A large building in terms of length and breadth but only a single storey high. You see the walls here? And here? The top of the roof was paved to make a flat terrace – you can see a few bits of it left round the edges – and the terrace was completely enclosed with a colonnade. There’s just that one single complete arch still left over there, look. Almost the whole roof has collapsed into the rooms below, as you can see, and what we’re doing now is removing the