‘You crewed with Rackamore. You might not have been with him long, Fura, but you were his Bone Reader and he’d have been quick to let you into his confidences. As for you, Prozor, you sailed with him to many worlds and baubles. I know you know about the Fang.’

She didn’t answer him for a few seconds, and I certainly didn’t dare speak in her place.

‘The what?’

‘It’s a bauble. I know that much. But the name’s not an official one, and it doesn’t correspond to any of the baubles in our files. I also know – or so the rumour goes – that whatever Rackamore found there was enough to have him plotting to go back, when he could summon the nerve. Now, I wasn’t one to tread on a man’s toes when he was alive. The Fang was Rack’s business, not mine. But it’s different now. He won’t be going back, and if one of you doesn’t speak, the information stands every chance of dying with you.’ He picked up the quoin again, rolling it in his fingers just so we got a better look at it. ‘Ghostie stuff, that’s what I heard. Maybe it’s true, maybe it isn’t. You’d have to open it to know, wouldn’t you? But for that you’d need to know orbits, processionals, auguries – all the gen I don’t have.’

‘Then you’re out of luck,’ Prozor said quietly. ‘I don’t know anything about it. Maybe you caught a rumour, that’s all. If Rack had found a score like that, don’t you think he’d have gone back?’

‘He might have been waiting for the right time, mightn’t he?’ Jastrabarsk shifted the boulder of his head to look at me now, and slid the quoin onto the table right before me. ‘So that’s all it ever was – a rumour?’

I looked at the quoin again. I could read the low-bar denominations easily enough, but the higher value ones were tricky, and you need to know about bases and so on to make sense of their arrangements of bars. Not that I’d ever needed to know the value of a hundred- or thousand-bar quoin: that was for bankers and rich coves to drool over. The criss-crossed bars of this one floated above a diminishing, descending lattice of golden and silver threads, like I was looking into the guts of something that went further down than the table it was sitting on. No one could make anything like that now, which was why quoins were impossible to forge.

‘If it was more than a rumour,’ I said, ‘I didn’t catch it. Not in all the conversations I ever had with Rack. I’m sorry, Captain. Nothing’d make me happier than to take that beauty off your hands.’