The address of Goodwill’s friend was one of those poetic native confections – the Bookseller Swift Singletree at the Printworks of the Sign of Bird and Scroll on the Street of the Trees of the White Flowers. Rain was pattering on the broad leaves of the trees, not presently in bloom, as Ysbel followed Goodwill Saltmire up the steep street, past workshops housed in burrows roofed with turf or clay tiles and set amongst small vegetable gardens and orchards of dwarf fruit trees.

They’d left the runabout at the harbour because Goodwill didn’t want to draw attention to his friend. Zaquil was listening to chatter on human communications networks in the city and Ysbel had put up two of her bots to watch over this and the neighbouring streets. Although no one seemed to be following or watching them, she was on high alert, wondering why everything had gone so quickly wrong, whether it involved something more sinister than inter-agency rivalry. Something that Mother wanted to expose, perhaps, using the search for the map as bait. Some kind of darkwork against separatists, or a clandestine alliance between humans and natives. She was aware, too, that Goodwill might be leading her to a rendezvous with separatists, but felt a thrilling recklessness. She had got the better of the people who had tried to interfere with her mission before it had properly begun, and for now she was a free agent. Free to help Goodwill in any way she chose; free to ditch him if he tried to sell her out.

A carving of a hawk clutching a scroll in its talons hung above the door of a two-storey building at the top of the street, the walls of its ground floor windowless ragstone, the upper storey constructed from bamboo slats and roofed with plaited reeds. To one side, a narrow passage led to a yard of beaten earth and a square wooden outbuilding; after Goodwill scraped his fingernails down a soundingboard, its door was opened by an old native dressed in an elegant red silk gown and a matching skull cap with two long tassels that hung down his back. Despite his age, Swift Singletree was cheerful and spry, inviting his guests inside, settling them on cushions around a low table, offering a plate of fingerfood and pouring amber tea into thimblecups. His home was sparely furnished. A horn lamp illuminated a large book splayed on the slant of a knee-high lectern; a paper screen partly hid one of the tangles of straw in which natives slept; rush matting covered the floor.

While Swift explained how he and Pilgrim Saltmire had become friends more than forty years ago, Ysbel knocked back her mouthful of tea and picked amongst cubes of blue-black seaweed jelly, bean paste wrapped in fig leaves, fried dough scraps. She’d had nothing to eat all day apart from a tube of fruit paste on the hopper.