Now, almost an hour past the agreed time for her rendezvous with Goodwill, most of the stalls in the cheap closing or already shuttered, Ysbel was beginning to wonder if he had spotted that she was the bait in a setup. Iryn’s people had staked out the cheap and were waiting to eavesdrop on her conversation with him, and natives recruited by the embassy and lent to the operation had been posted inside. Ysbel was pretty sure that the stallholder across the way had to be one of them – he’d pulled down the shutters of his place shortly after she’d taken her seat, and had been assiduously scrubbing tables and chairs ever since, taking great care not to look at her. And then there was the cleaner who was circling the water clock, making a show of whisking his coconut-leaf broom across the flagstones. He’d completed his sixth circuit when a voice in her link told her that there was activity outside the cheap.

‘A procession, it looks like. Stay in place and stand by.’

A few moments later Ysbel heard drums. A faint steady heartbeat.

The woman who owned the seafood stall came over and said bluntly that she was finished for the day. ‘All done. I must go home.’

Ysbel apologised, saying that she was expecting to meet a friend, but the woman confiscated the half-empty bowl of tea and ran down the shutters of the stall and said again, ‘All done,’ and hurried away, vanishing into the shadows beyond the water clock. The cleaner had vanished too, and the drumming was growing louder. The stallholder scrubbing tables looked up from his work; voices began to chatter over Ysbel’s link.

‘Groups of natives converging on the cheap from three directions.’

‘Do you have eyes? How many?’

‘Some kind of march, it looks like.’

‘Fireworks here. Fireworks and smoke.’

‘Give me numbers. Someone give me numbers.’

‘Fireworks and smoke here, too. Looks like a religious procession.’

‘I’m counting a hundred on the march here. A hundred at least.’

‘Definitely moving on the cheap.’

‘Any sign of the target?’

‘Nothing yet.’

‘Stay in place, everyone. Eyes wide and watchful.’

The drumming was inside the cheap now. Ahead of Ysbel and behind her. Echoing off its low roof. She could see lights and drifts of coloured smoke above the stalls, hear the crackle of fireworks. The stallholder was staring straight at her, as if expecting her to do or say something, both of them turning to look as a tall cloud of pink smoke rolled out of the aisle on the other side of the intersection, shadowy figures moving inside it as it washed around the water clock.