‘Do you know why? Maybe you don’t. But I can tell you,’ Foeless said, and with gathering energy talked about sabotage, and the conspiracies of the elite and their hatred for what was happening here. ‘We are doing a great thing. A tremendous thing. World changing. And they hate that. Hate to see that ordinary people have power. They have done everything they can to silence and sabotage me. They arrested me in Ogres Grave. You remember how that went. They have arrested some of the people I sent out to spread the word, too. They have arrested people at gatherings like this one, in the Union and elsewhere. They have tried to use secret rays to silence us. Mind rays. Dampeners. I haven’t told you about that before, because we stopped it and we didn’t want to frighten you.’

From the glances the orange-shirts were exchanging, Pilgrim reckoned that this was the first they had heard of it too.

Foeless’s voice pitched higher as his outrage grew. He named enemies. He spoke about attempts to shoot down the visitors’ sky boats.

‘Not that anyone could, but they tried,’ he said. ‘And they sent people to spy on me, and to plant wrong ideas in people’s heads. One of them came to me today. Told me that the visitors had been here before. Long ago, when bears still lived in cities. Before they went mad.’

A cold thrill passed through Pilgrim, from the soles of his feet to the nape of his neck. The hairs of his pelt prickled as they raised up.

‘He asked me if I knew about that visit, and of course I did not,’ Foeless said. ‘Because it isn’t true. How do I know? Because I am the only one who has been granted an audience with the visitors, and they did not tell me this thing about the bears. And because they do not lie, it never happened. It is a made-up story. Another foolish attempt by the elite to undermine me. An attempt to distract me. To sabotage the Calling Down by interfering with the purity of my thoughts. But we will make it better. I promise. We will rest and we will gather and we will call them down.’

Scattered hoots from the crowd. People stamping their feet to show approval, the noise quickly dying away.

‘We’ll begin by dealing with the cause of tonight’s trouble,’ Foeless said. ‘Staking him out under the cleansing gaze of the sun is not enough. He must be silenced.’

Another clatter from the voice amplifier. Foeless stepped towards the orange-shirts and took something from one of them and turned and strode towards the two prisoners tied to their posts. The crowd’s noise was swelling, like streams of water flowing together into a flood. Pilgrim felt an awful void opening inside his chest.