‘I want you to cut this off,’ I told the gowned woman behind the counter, holding up my hand. ‘I know you can do that quickly. But I want it done quicker.’

She gave me a sympathetic look. ‘I’m sorry, dear, but you can’t just stroll in and decide . . .’

‘A ten-bar quoin says I can.’ I jammed it down on the counter. ‘That hand and arm in the window – the one with the twenty-mark price tag. That’s what I want put on. Let’s say – forty bars for the whole job, fifty if you do it inside the next ten minutes.’

The woman glanced over me at the robot, as if there were some test she was about to fail. But Paladin said nothing.

‘You don’t need that pretty one, dear. If you just want that bracelet off, you don’t even need a mechanical one. We can do it quick and clean, preserve the nerve endings, get a clean reattachment . . . putting it back on’ll take longer, of course, but you’ll get to keep your own, and that’s what most folk would want . . .’

‘I’m not most folk. Get the bracelet off me, and cut where you need to fix that metal one on. The one with the green inlay.’

‘You’re sure about this, dear?’ The woman was fetching keys. She went to the front of the shop, opened the glass panel at the back of the window display, fished out the arm I had selected. She pushed back my sleeve and offered it up as a comparison. ‘It’s a good match,’ she said. ‘Lucky for you it wasn’t the right arm.’

‘Yes, I’m all luck, me. Tell me what’s involved.’

She showed me the scooped-in end of the false arm. It was a concave surface, finely perforated. ‘This fixes itself onto you. Takes a few days to complete the bond, and it’ll hurt some while it’s doing it. Then it couples itself onto your nervous system. That won’t be the nicest, either. Once it’s done, though, you’ll have full use of the hand.’ She ran an approving finger over the jade inlay. ‘Very good work, this. Eleventh Occupation. They knew a thing or two about prosthetic surgery, in the Empire of the Ever Breaking Wave. Durable, too. This arm’s been on a few bodies in its time.’

‘You can skip the potted history. I want it. Do it now.’

‘You said fifty marks.’ A shrewd look came over the woman. ‘Anyone in that much of a hurry can probably go up a little more. Shall we say seventy?’

‘Sixty, or I’m walking out of here.’

The woman appraised me. There was a grudging respect in her eyes. ‘Sixty it is. But we haven’t discussed what you want doing with the hand, once it’s off.’