As she was escorted towards the hopper, Goodwill told Ysbel that they would be travelling halfway around the world, to a meeting in the Dreaming.

‘The Dreaming?’

‘That’s what the person who invited us there calls it. I believe you know it as Australia,’ Goodwill said, his mouth making an odd shape to accommodate the human word. ‘Apparently, the articulate bears were taken there after their camp closed down.’

Ysbel thought about that. ‘It’s a good place to hide. Big, uninhabited and a long way from anywhere else. Who invited us?’

‘We will find out when we get there,’ the old female said. ‘We have been asked to bring you, and Goodwill claims that you can be trusted. I can only hope that he is right.’

She was Goodwill’s cousin, Juniper Saltmire, chief clerk to a delegate of the Committee of the Five Hundred, and had organised use of the hopper – it was the one Ysbel had seen when she had arrived in Concord at the beginning of this long strange adventure, on loan to the government of the United Territories. The young males were her aides. Two more were waiting aboard the hopper, and the pilot was a native, too. Ysbel was the only human on the little expedition, and although it wasn’t quite clear if she was a hostage or a guest, she didn’t feel especially threatened. Goodwill and his cousin had gone to a lot of trouble to liberate her from Special Operations, and she was eager to find out who had issued the invitation, had all kinds of questions she wanted to ask.

The hopper threw itself into the sky as soon as its passengers were webbed into their seats, and after it reached the freefall stage of its long, suborbital lob and its motor cut off, Goodwill told Ysbel that the trail to the Dreaming had begun with something he had been given by Clarity Forrester when, thanks to Juniper’s intervention, the librarian had been returned to his former position. He pulled a piece of paper from his vest and unfolded it and leaned into his seat’s webbing so that he could hand it to Ysbel.

‘I suppose this is a drawing of the infamous carving,’ Ysbel said.

‘The very same. I expect you have noticed the figures.’

‘They’re hard to miss.’

There were two of them, their round, featureless heads disfigured by crude gouges. They loomed over miniature representations of bears cutting down crops with sickles and loading carts with their harvest. And arching over the entire scene was a star with a long fiery tail.