It was early evening. Pilgrim’s last in Highwater Reach. He had written to his sister and his mother, giving them the news about Master Able’s death and telling them that he was returning to the territory, and had used his meagre savings and the small amount of cash raised by selling most of his books to buy a ticket for the cross-continental train. He hoped that his mother, now a senior auntie, would support his plan to finish his master’s last project, and that his grandfather, even though he was ailing and had recently moved into the Elders’ Lodge, might also put in a good word.

Now, a few hours before the train was due to depart, Pilgrim had entrusted the remnants of his little library to his friends and they were sharing a bowl of mussels and drinking small beer at one of the stalls in the riverside cheap. Ardent Whitesand was assistant to a senior librarian, Swift Singletree a bookrunner who scraped a living by sourcing rare volumes for scholars and searching out misshelved books, manuscripts and hard-to-find oddities that fell outside the scope of the indexing system of the Library of All People. The three of them were united by their love of books and scholarship, by similarities in age and background (rural; hardscrabble) and because they identified as pures, those who were not affected by the urgent sexual heat which gripped men and women during the Season’s carnival of attraction and desire in spring and early summer, and had no interest in what Swift called the low comedy of procreation.

‘Doesn’t the Library have a fund for cases like yours?’ Ardent said as he cracked open the last of the mussels. Despite his bottomless appetite, he was a neat, slender person, carefully sucking up the morsel of flesh and plucking a square of cloth from the pocket of his brocade waistcoat and patting his lips.

‘I looked into it,’ Pilgrim said. ‘And was told that only scholars are eligible.’

He had asked his master’s friends and former pupils for help, too, but those few who had not criticised or condemned Able’s work on the visitors had little or no funds to spare, and the rest had advised Pilgrim to move on. One, meaning it kindly, had said that the best way to honour Able was to let his last obsession die with him, and remember him for what he once was rather than what he had become. Another had told Pilgrim bluntly that a bright young fellow such as himself should not waste his time chasing ghosts and phantasms.

‘What about the Sweetwater Collective?’ Ardent said.