‘If it is, no one will bother us when we make camp.’

‘We lack both water and food.’

‘We can tap the digger’s boiler for water. If Intrepid isn’t here, he might still show up.’

The feet of their maras padded softly on sand, crunched across a run of gravel, the small noises seeming overloud in the immense stillness of the night. The steam shovel was tilted on a ridge of dirt, its arm bent in a sharp vee, its scoop resting on the ground like a curled fist. Beyond it, the thin glimmer of light outlined a sharp edge where the ground dropped away. The three riders paused, looking at a dark flatland stretching towards the sawtoothed shadows of mountains. A little way off, four small bright lights shone like fallen stars, defining a square; much closer, a fire flickered in front of the hump of a small burrow, and the three men sitting around the fire stood up as Pilgrim, Poppy and Fragrant rode down the slope towards them. One was Intrepid Windrush, still wearing his orange shirt, showing neither surprise nor anger as he stepped forward to greet them as they dismounted.

‘I wasn’t sure if I did the right thing, dropping all those hints,’ he said. ‘And I wasn’t sure that you would follow up on them, either. But I am glad you did.’

‘We should take you with us to Ogres Grave,’ Fragrant said. ‘To face justice.’

‘For what crime?’

‘Complicity in murder, to begin with.’

The other two men had come up behind Intrepid. Pilgrim belatedly recognised the scout, Dash Crow, dressed in a jacket that seemed to have been stitched from inflated tubes, telling Intrepid, ‘Your friend is more tenacious than I thought, but he’s either far too late or far too early.’

‘Tonight’s debacle changes everything,’ Intrepid said.

‘Nothing’s been decided yet,’ Dash Crow said. ‘And there’s still just about enough time to send them on their way.’

‘Whether they stay or go should be their decision.’

‘And your responsibility, if that’s how you want to play it.’

‘I do,’ Intrepid said, and turned back to Pilgrim and Poppy and Fragrant. ‘I sincerely regret the death of your friend. It should not have happened. Things got out of hand.’

‘You supported it,’ Poppy said.

‘More than that: you encouraged it,’ Fragrant said.

‘Up to a point, and not any more,’ Intrepid said. ‘And it was part of a much larger scheme that has already helped and benefited your people in a hundred different ways.’

‘Were you ever one of Foeless Landwalker’s acolytes?’ Pilgrim said. ‘And your friend there, was he ever a scout?’

‘All of us are scouts. Just not in the way you might think,’ Dash Crow said.

‘And this scheme,’ Pilgrim said. ‘It involves the Sweetwater Collective, doesn’t it?’

Intrepid smiled. ‘Well done.’