Pilgrim realised, with a little kick of excitement, that this was one of the places where the visitors had been seen. The site where traces of big square buildings and imprints left by winged machines had been discovered beneath fossil sand dunes. He would have liked to make a detour and inspect the place and talk to the people who were working there, but there was no time, they had to get on. The road entered a range of low hills, dipping into a winding canyon, and the canyon opened up and Pilgrim and the two women reined in their maras. Foeless’s gathering was directly below. Bare paddocks walled with loose stones where maras were tethered, a row of large bell tents fashioned from animal skins or orange canvas on a ridge overlooking a crowd of cut-and-cover burrows and slant tents under a haze of smoke from campfires, and the outline of the flowersipper cut in the flat white salt pan beyond.

‘It’s much bigger than I thought it would be,’ Poppy said.

‘The camp or the pictogram?’ Pilgrim said.

‘Both.’

The flowersipper was sketched by trenches cut into the white salt to expose the dark mudstone that lay beneath. It was at least five stades from wing tip to wing tip. Tiny figures were working at its tail, deepening trenches which outlined three stylised feathers. Other figures were busy around the deflated envelope of a hot-air balloon that lay like a drop of blood at the end of the flowersipper’s long narrow beak.

Fragrant said that despite its size, the flowersipper would not be visible from Firestar or even from what she called low orbit – the path that visitor craft, if there were any visitor craft, might trace around the Mother beyond the edge of Her atmosphere.

‘It’s meant for Foeless’s followers, not the visitors,’ she said. ‘An advertisement for the credulous.’

‘There must be a thousand people down there,’ Poppy said. She was studying the camp through a short spyglass, slowly sweeping it back and forth. ‘No sign of Gentle, though.’

‘Perhaps he didn’t come here after all,’ Pilgrim said.

‘He could be in one of those tents, telling all he knows,’ Fragrant said. ‘Warning Foeless Landwalker’s people about us.’

‘Three people are bound to stakes, near the balloon,’ Poppy said. ‘A woman and two men, pretty near to naked.’

‘Staked out in the sun for punishment would be my guess,’ Fragrant said. ‘If we are caught when we go down there …’

‘It has to be done,’ Pilgrim said, ‘so we’ll have to do our best not to get caught.’