A star was falling through the night, growing brighter as it slanted towards them, growing into a white glare that was hard to look at. A hot wind got up, flattening the flames of the fire at the mouth of the burrow and blowing dust and sand over the watchers, and the glare resolved into three intensely bright flames clustered beneath a dark, impossibly large shape that was lowering itself towards the square between the signal lamps.

32.

Mistress Ash’s Emporium was a windowless burrow with secondhand household goods piled on one side and books, pamphlets, leaflets, handbills, scrolls, posters and boxes of loose papers heaped in no discernible order on the other. Its owner sat crosslegged in a nest of cushions behind a low table at the back, in the feeble light of rush lamps dangling from the barrel ceiling. A hunchbacked elderly person in her late forties or early fifties, wrapped in a dusty black gown, its owner showed no sign that she recognised Pilgrim, even though there was an old wallsheet pasted on a hoarding across the greenway from her shop, displaying the famous image of the meeting between the first delegation of the visitors and the Committee of the Five Hundred, with Pilgrim, Poppy and Fragrant in the front rank of the onlookers.

Pilgrim had soon learned that his small fame too often complicated the simplest transaction or encounter, or was a lightning rod for the grievances of those who believed that the visitors were a mortal threat to the Union and its people. Fortunately, his contribution to the First Contact Project had been overshadowed by the Invisible College’s campaign to persuade the public and politicians to allow the visitors to establish an embassy and other offices. He was more concerned about the work he had left unfinished, which was why he had returned to the far south, following a trail which had led him to this musty archive of forgotten lives.

He shared a pot of mint tea with Mistress Ash while he told her the story of his quest. She said that she remembered the articles in question, although she didn’t recall a manuscript or any other papers. Pilgrim, with a pluck of sorrow and disappointment, supposed the constable had thrown them away, believing them worthless, and asked the bookseller about the disposition of the other goods. She told him that she had sold the pendant to a travelling gentleperson, and that she didn’t know where he was from or where he was going, only that he had bought it for his sweetheart. As for the map, although it was obviously a copy or an outright fake she had thought it was an interesting curio, and had included it in a consignment of books she had sold to a dealer in Circle Bay, the largest city in the southern territories of the Union.