“Thank you. By this time I had some ideas. The people who kept trying to murder Iris—sorry, Patricia—and who kept going after me, or getting at Olga by mistake—they had to be relatives. But apart from one attempt, there was never any sign of them on the other side, in America that is. I remembered being told about a long-lost brother who headed west in the earliest days of the Clan. You know—we learned—that they, too, use a pattern to let them world-walk, however they can travel only from here to New Britain, to the place I’ve just been telling you about.

“What I’ve pieced together is something like this. A very long time ago one of the brothers headed west. He fell on hard times and lost his amulet. In fact, he ended up as an indentured slave and took nearly ten years to save the cash to buy his freedom. Once free, he had to reconstruct the knot design from memory. Either that, or his was deliberately sabotaged by a sibling. Whichever, the knot he painted was different. I can’t emphasize that strongly enough; where you go when you world-walk depends on the design you use as a key. We now know of two keys, but there’s another fact—the other one, this lost brother’s knot, doesn’t work in America. Our America. The one we go to.

“Anyway. he crossed over repeatedly, because it had been arranged that at regular intervals he should check for his brothers. They evidently intended to send a trade caravan to meet him, somewhere in Northern California perhaps. But he never found his business partners waiting for him, because they were elsewhere, traveling to another world where, presumably, they interpreted his absence as a sign that he’d died. He was cut off completely, and put it down to betrayal.”

“Preposterous!” Someone in the front row snorted, prompting Angbard to bring down the gavel again. Miriam took the opportunity to help herself to a glass of water.

“This brother, Lee, had a family. His family was less numerous, less able to provide for themselves, than the Clan. Just as the ability was lost to your ancestors for a generation or two, so it was with his descendants—and it took longer before some first cousins or cousins married and had an infant with renewed ability. They prospered much as you have, but more slowly. The New British don’t have a lot of time for Chinese merchants, and as a smaller family they had far fewer active world-walkers to rely on.