The Moon was rising above the darkening forest and frogs were tuning up their orchestra of whistles and croaks and barks when at last Zaquil materialised again, perching on the rail opposite Ysbel, faintly glowing in the dusk. He didn’t say anything, simply raised a hand and pointed to the star falling through the violet ribbon of sky caught between the treetops. It was a hopper, come to take Ysbel to Concord and the crux of her impossible choice.

23.

Two days later, Ysbel was sitting at a table by one of the stalls in a riverside cheap in Highwater Reach. Twenty minutes past nine in the evening by her link; the first quarter of the small night according to the elaborate water clock that stood in the crossing point of two aisles. A bowl of tea cooling at her elbow as she tried to ignore passers-by who stared at her with undisguised curiosity, and she told herself that natives were notoriously bad time-keepers, and anyway Goodwill was only a little late.

Special Operations had intercepted a tapcode message Goodwill sent to the bureau’s office in Ogres Grave, asking Ysbel to meet him in Concord. Iryn Moonsdaughter had sent a reply on Ysbel’s behalf, care of the public tapcode office in Concord’s central railway station, saying that she could be there within a day and asking what he wanted to talk about, and Goodwill had responded with a date, a time and a place.

Iryn told Ysbel about this after debriefing her about her forensic examination of the financial records, and her visit to the godown in Pleasant Bay and the railhead near the border with bear country. They were in a small room in the basement of the embassy in Concord. The hopper had taken Ysbel there directly, scorching the embassy’s manicured lawn when it touched down, and after a tech had cleaned and patched the cut on her forehead she’d been left to cool her heels for several hours in the windowless room’s over-bright glare, her boots and trouser cuffs still muddy, her blouson reeking of smoke from the beer drinkers’ fire, a deep, tender bruise developing across her hip, before Iryn arrived.

The woman was telling her now that Goodwill had last been seen in conversation with a government officer, five days ago.

‘His cousin, I suppose,’ Ysbel said. ‘Juniper Saltmire, chief clerk to a delegate of the Committee of the Five Hundred.’