In the Faculties the students ask after him for lectures, may we hear from the adventurer Cairdine Farrier, who has been all the way to Zawam Asu? Women seek his hand in marriage. He is seen with lady friends but he does not settle. The gossip says, admiringly, that Farrier is mad for an Oriati princess some years his junior, a forbidden love, not because of their ages but because the Metademe has placed an attaintment upon the blood of Oriati royalty.

If he knew her carnally he would forfeit his citizenship. How chaste and gallant he must be with her!

Mister Farrier really is devoted to his work, isn’t he? Even in love he wants to better the world’s unfortunate. Imagine giving your husbandry and your citizenship to a member of a royal line. Next, Farrier’s detractors say, he will adopt a cow and coax her into clothes, and she will write letters with ink from her teats. Daer Parliament, she will squirt, Msr. Farrier treets me vry well. Please invest in his veal enterprise. He is convinced us to haf the calves he neets.

For more than forty years, Caird’s had his hands around the throat of his classmate Cosgrad Torrinde, a man who he named, in the cruelty of their teenage arguments, a cruelty he now sometimes but not often regrets, the squid priest. Very few know for certain that Cosgrad Torrinde, Minister of the Metademe, is also the elusive Hesychast. More know that Cairdine Farrier is also Itinerant, the Emperor’s Adventurer: but not many more.

Farrier loves the world because he knows it so well, and he loves his princess because he knows her so little. In his fifty-four years, he’s spent not twenty-five at home.

Will you now admire Cairdine Farrier?

He knows how to write and argue in Aphalone, Old Vitatic, Seti-Caho, Uburu, Takhaji, Roque, and two sorts of Urun. He could sell horns to a ram. He speaks richly, and with a laugh in his eyes. When he tells you something, you feel that he is holding back a little more, and you want to know it, for it must be the best part. He can quote every revolutionary handbook from Somatic Mind to Manumission, and he has written his own, the Manual of Expedition. When he goes to the spice boutique to buy a jar of cardamom for one of his famous recipes, the women speculate over his purpose, and the men ask him for advice.