‘You are the many. The visitors see you and your voices will be heard and your oppressors will be overthrown,’ Foeless said, and began a complaint against his own oppressors. How he had been arrested; how he used his gift of oratory to set himself free. Stories about agents sent against him, always thwarted by his insight and cunning, either turned away or converted to the cause. Stories which portrayed him as both victim and victor. Stories about how his simple dream of justice for all rather than for the few was constantly undercut by jealous scholars who knew nothing about the real world and ordinary good-hearted people. Stories of how the elite had tried to end gatherings which had sprung up in the Union, and how they had spread lies about him.

It was a long and rambling speech, laced with self-pity and self-aggrandisement. His audience began to grow restless. Whispering to each other, yawning. Some at the back of the crowd had sat down, and a few appeared to have fallen asleep.

Foeless Landwalker had spun out too many threads to be able to knit them into a concluding message, so at last he simply stopped speaking. For a few moments there was no sound but the murmur of the crowd, the low hum from his speech amplifier.

‘You must believe!’ he said abruptly, and the orange-shirts around Pilgrim repeated the phrase.

‘If you believe, they will come,’ Foeless said. ‘If you open your hearts and minds, they will come.’

A few people started up a chant of ‘They will come!’ but it died away when Foeless spread out his arms and told his followers to be still and to look inwards. To concentrate on the phrase they had been given to help them clear their minds and focus on the visitors.

‘Many nights you have summoned them,’ Foeless told the crowd. ‘I hope that you will summon them again tonight. And perhaps – who knows – this is the night when they will at last come down from the sky and show themselves.’

‘This is why he has to get his courage from a bottle every night,’ Intrepid told Pilgrim. ‘The little lights aren’t ever coming back.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

‘I told you: he’s outlived his usefulness.’