Marty also slept – the deep sleep of a sick man. The afternoon had given way to evening as they headed north through flat, snow-patched fields and wraith-pale stands of silver birch. Studying his friend, unconscious in the seat opposite, during one wakeful interlude, Eusden had noticed how much older and weaker and iller Marty seemed when his eyes were not open and twinkling, his voice not rising and falling. The search he had embarked upon was also a flight from his own mortality. In that sense, it could not succeed. At its end lay only a choice of ways to fail. It was a dismal truth to grasp as darkness fell across the Jutland sky. Another station in another city. It was early evening in Århus, cold, dank and dark. Asked for a hotel recommendation, their taxi driver talked up the Royal on the grounds that it had a casino where he had once finished an evening in profit. They did not argue. The Royal turned out to have advantages other than in-house roulette: comfortable rooms and a central location adjacent to the cathedral, in the old heart of the city.
