‘They didn’t send so much as a note of condolence after I informed them of Able’s death,’ Pilgrim said, with a little swell of bitterness. The Sweetwater Collective had been the only sponsor of Master Able’s work on the visitors, and he’d hoped, desperately, foolishly, that they would help him, too.

‘Shame on them,’ Swift said.

‘That’s why, having tried everything else, I am reduced to asking my kin and tribe for support. There’s also an idea about raising some funds of my own that I want to explore.’

‘Don’t be away too long,’ Swift said. ‘And don’t you dare forget about us.’

‘We’ll miss you,’ Ardent said, reaching across the table to grip Pilgrim’s hands.

Ardent wasn’t the quickest or cleverest of the three, but he was good-hearted and unstintingly generous. In some part, he’d be the first to admit, because he’d had an easier childhood than most pures, unblighted by prejudice and intolerance. Pilgrim and Swift had come of age in tribes which believed that what Pilgrim’s mother had called ‘the condition’ was not part of the continuum of sexual orientation but a phase or a mental or physical defect, something which could be cured by trials of endurance, folk remedies, vigils at shrines and prayers and petitions to the Mother, but Ardent’s tribe believed that pures were especially blessed by the Mother’s grace because they were unencumbered by base desires. Traditionally, they had served as seers or shrine keepers; Ardent had been sent to Highwater Reach to apprentice in the scholar trade so that he could take charge of the tribe’s archives when he returned home.

Pilgrim was grateful for his friend’s concern, told him that he would be back as soon as he had finished the work and written it up. ‘Hopefully with enough money left over to pay for a small printing of a slender monograph.’

Ardent said, ‘But who will agree to print it, if Able’s kin owns the rights?’

‘They own the rights to his manuscript, but the facts belong to everyone,’ Pilgrim said, trying to look and sound as if he believed it. ‘That’s why I am going to re-interview witnesses and find as many new ones as I can.’

Swift’s whiskers twitched when he smiled. ‘A sweet little revenge for their disgraceful callousness.’

‘This isn’t about them,’ Pilgrim said.

‘Really?’

‘Perhaps a little bit,’ Pilgrim admitted. ‘But mostly, I’m doing this for Able. He was trying to discover the truth about the visitors, and I want to finish what he began. Set it against the nonsense peddled by lunatics and charlatans. Speaking of which, Intrepid Windrush paid me a visit yesterday.’