The tour group and I stood in the middle of Voss Bender Memorial Square, in front of a fountain depicting Banker Trillian’s victory over the rival banker-warriors of Nicea. Around the square stood the ancient buildings that had once served as Trillian’s headquarters. In between, a pleasing and aromatic mixture of green-and-red blossoms signaled not only the arrival of the summer’s wildflowers but House Hoegbotton’s crass attempt to memorialize the struggle that followed Voss Bender’s death. I had set the tour group loose on the square for a few minutes, and they currently wandered here and there, staring at everything with a freshness I could not understand.

I faced my interrogator, who doubled in an instant. A woman had spoken, but her husband stood beside her, just as resolute and nervous. Both of them had reached the far end of their fifties, the woman gray-haired and stuffed into a formless flower-print dress, matched to white stockings and blocky wooden shoes.

“I can’t say I much cared for the mad glint in her eyes, or the thick red smile she gave me,” I told Duncan later, relaxing in his apartment.

In fact, I looked at her as if she were a huge mushroom that had erupted through the courtyard tiles.

“That was no mad glint,” Duncan replied. “That was the spark of righteous purpose.”

Her husband, stocky muscle half-turned to fat, wore spectacles and, bizarrely, the kind of trousers and tunic that had gone out of style long before Old Fart had capitulated to New Fart—close to the kind of museum pieces I spoke about during the tour.

Helpfully, their jaunty name tags, affixed to the continents of their chests, disclosed not only names but locations. Mortar and Pestle, as I came to think of them, hailed from my birthplace of Stockton. Somehow, this did not reassure me.

“Are you Duncan’s sister?” Pestle asked again. This time it felt as if she’d poked me in the ribs with her finger.

“And what if I am?” I asked.

Mortar remained impassive while Pestle gave me a blank look, as if she hadn’t expected a question in return.

“We’d have a message for him if you were his sister,” Mortar said in a gravelly baritone, shifting uneasily. I could tell that this conversation hadn’t been his idea, but that he’d decided to make the best of it.

“Really? You’d do that?” I said. It wasn’t really a question, and I’d like to report that I delivered those words with the appropriate amount of withering scorn, but that’s not true. I was truly caught wrong-footed by the idea that two tourists could walk up to me and presume in such a way.

Mortar balanced on one leg for a second while Pestle hesitated; she definitely hated being asked questions.

“Absolutely. Absolutely that’s what I’d do,” Pestle said, finally.

“And what would the message be?” I asked her. I shouldn’t have bothered. I could have ignored her. I could have moved on to the next part of the tour.