He was a big, powerful-looking man, dressed quite well, but in clothes that looked a size too small for his frame, so that the seams were straining and the hems didn’t quite reach where they should have done. He had black hair that was stiffened up, so that he looked like a cove being held upside down, with a shock of white at the front. His eyes were the oddest part of him, though. They were something mechanical, like two chimneys pushed into his sockets, jutting out further from his face than his nose.

‘Can you see with those?’ I asked, deciding that bluntness was the best tack.

‘See with them, Fura, and see better than my old lamps ever could. It’s Crawly medicine. They can do things we still can’t, on any of the worlds. They’ve got some odd ideas about what looks pretty, it’s true, but I’d sooner be ugly than blind.’

‘I don’t think you’re ugly,’ I said. ‘Just strange.’

‘Mr Clinker was just dropping in to check on my eyes. He put them in for me. People forget that there’s more to the Crawlies than handling money. They do all sorts of things for us, and never with any complaint. Don’t you, Mr Clinker?’

We’ve all seen Crawlies speak on flickerboxes, but unless you’ve been in the same room as one you don’t really get a proper sense of how rum it is when they make our language. They haven’t got lungs or a throat or anything like that, so the only way they can make noises is by rubbing all those whiskery bits against each other, which sounds like someone shuffling papers or scuffing their heels, but the queer part is that you begin to hear words in that rustly, scrapy chaos, and then the words start making sentences, and you’re being spoken to by a creature that wasn’t born around the Old Sun.

‘We do what we may, Hasper.’ The Crawly took another slurp from its drink. ‘It is little enough.’

‘Are you some sort of doctor?’ I asked.

‘Asking about the glowy, are you?’ Hasper Quell said.

‘No, I wasn’t. There are doctors in the worlds that can sort out the glowy, if sorting it out was what I wanted. I was thinking of something else, something that monkey medicine can’t fix – at least not the doctors on Mazarile.’

The Crawly asked, ‘What is the nature of the ailment?’

‘A problem with a heart. A man’s heart. Is that the sort of thing you know to repair?’

‘That would depend on the nature of the problem.’

I hefted the bag. ‘If I paid for you – or another Crawly doctor – to go to Mazarile and examine someone, would you do that?’

‘That would depend on the payment.’

Prozor raised a hand as I made to open the bag. But Quell waved down her objection.