‘The idea is to aim the bad luck it contains at your enemies,’ Solomon Firststar said. ‘I admit that now and then, when especially provoked, I am tempted to bang in a nail myself and think a bad thought. I never do, of course. I don’t believe in silly superstitions. And besides, it would affect the resale value.’

3.

‘Goodwill reckoned that Solomon Firststar told me about the wager because he couldn’t prevent me from interviewing Trina, and knew I’d find out,’ Ysbel told her boss, Mitkos Grimsson. ‘He also said that Firststar had been making a point by meeting us in a room full of the mementoes of creatures who enslaved and hunted their people.’

‘Your bailiff being a traditionalist, and Firststar a half-and-half accommodationist,’ Mitkos said.

‘I think that it was more to do with personal dislike than politics,’ Ysbel said. ‘Goodwill’s pretty blunt, for a native. He’d offended Firststar, and Firststar decided that he’d teach him a lesson. Let him know he was on the wrong side of history.’

She was in the station’s office in Ogres Grave; Mitkos was in the Gathering Place, one of the islands of what had been called Hawaii in the long ago, attending a summit meeting about the growing hostility to the human presence in the Union and the New Territories. He was looking out of a window her link had drawn in the air, a slightly pouchy middle-aged man with close-shaved hair that came to a point above his forehead, telling her, ‘Put a note in the file, so we’ll be covered if this spat jams thing up. Is there anything else?’

‘I’m still waiting for Survey and Surveillance to confirm or deny if Trina Mersdaughter is some kind of undercover operative.’

‘If she is, they won’t admit it. And in any case, it isn’t any of our business.’

‘So we just let it slide. Even though she admitted culpability.’

‘Does her story stand up?’

‘Pretty much,’ Ysbel admitted. ‘As far as it goes.’

Despite Solomon Firststar’s reservations, Trina Mersdaughter had not seemed especially doped. A slender young woman in her mid-twenties, around Ysbel’s age, with ringlets of glossy black hair wound with white thread, she’d sat crosslegged on a bench seat in the cabin of her boat, barefoot in an oversized jumper and stretch hose, explaining that she was one of Survey and Surveillance’s field operatives and had accepted the invitation to Solomon Firststar’s party because he had acquired an artefact of interest to her agency. Unfortunately, Joyous Hightower had also been interested in acquiring it, and outbid her.

‘To be clear, this was a copy of a bear carving,’ Ysbel said. ‘Some kind of map.’

‘I suppose Solomon told you all about it.’

‘He didn’t tell me why you and S and S are interested in it.’

‘That I can’t tell you.’