‘The small folk are imaginary creatures of folk tales,’ Teal said. ‘Spirits of place. The First People were as real as you or I. They made tools from bones and flaked stones, and ornaments from squirrel teeth, bone beads and snail shells. They left middens of oyster and clam shells on the banks of tidal rivers along this coast, and buried their dead under mounds of stone and earth or in the deepest parts of caves, often bedding them on heaps of flowers with small pots of grain or honey. One famous burial was of a woman of high status, with a necklace of fish-eagle claws around her neck and a bone scimitar in one hand and a soot-smudged forest buffalo horn in the other. A lantern that may have been meant to light her path to the land of the dead.’

‘An ancestor of mine excavated that grave,’ Pilgrim said. ‘Her bones and the grave goods are exhibited in the Library of All People.’

He told Teal that he had lived in Highwater Reach for six years, working as secretary for the famous scholar Master Able until his recent death; Teal said that she was sorry to hear that Able had passed – she knew of his work on the anatomy of the First People, and his proof that although they were smaller and slighter than modern people, their brains were comparatively larger.

‘The popular belief is that they were dim-witted savages,’ Teal said. ‘Your master’s work, and my own studies, show that they were far more than that.’

Pilgrim took the plunge, asked her if she had heard of the sightings of so-called visitors.

‘I may have heard a rumour of some kind of mass hysteria,’ Teal said, after a moment.

‘Master Able thought the sightings might be something more than hysteria,’ Pilgrim said, and explained that his master had first become interested in the sightings because he believed that the so-called visitors might belong to a remnant population of ogres, like the dwarf species whose bones had been found in caves on one of the Spice Islands. ‘But the eye-witness testimonies that he collected and collated suggested something stranger. His work was unfinished when he died, and I was trying to raise funds to complete and publish it when an unfortunate series of events led to my exile.’