“I’ve just been to my bank, depositing a few sparkly little nuggets. A lucrative contract,” he shouted, “makes a happy scientist with very bad judgement. Drinks on me.” There was a raucous and delighted crowing of surprise, followed by a group yell for the waiter.

“How’s the show going, Cornfed?” said Isaac.

“Oh splendid, splendid!” shouted Cornfed, and then bizarrely added, very loud, “Lin came to see it on Fishday.”

“Right,” said Isaac, nonplussed. “Did you like it, Lin?”

She briefly signed that she had.

Cornfed was only interested in gazing at Alexandrine’s cleavage through her unsubtle dress. Isaac switched his attention to Lin.

“You would not believe what’s been happening…” Isaac began.

Lin gripped his knee under the table. He returned the gesture.

Under his breath, Isaac told Lin and Derkhan, in truncated form, the story of Yagharek’s visit. He implored them to silence, and glanced around regularly to make sure that no one else was listening in. Halfway through, the chicken he had ordered arrived, and he ate noisily while he described his meeting in The Moon’s Daughters, and the cages and cages of experimental animals he expected to arrive at his laboratory any day soon.

When he was finished, he sat back and grinned at them both, before a look of contrition washed over his face, and he sheepishly asked Lin: “How’s your work been going?”

She waved her hand dismissively.

There’s nothing, dear heart, she thought, that I can tell you. Let’s talk about your new project.

Guilt passed visibly over his face at his one-sided conversation, but Isaac could not help himself. He was utterly in the throes of a new project. Lin felt a familiar melancholy affection for him. Melancholy at his self-sufficiency in these moments of fascination; affection for his fervour and passion.

“Look, look,” Isaac gabbled suddenly, and tugged a piece of paper from his pocket. He unfolded it on the table before them.

It was an advertisement for a fair currently in Sobek Croix. The back was crisp with dry glue: Isaac had torn it from a wall.

mr. bombadrezil’s unique and wonderful fair, guaranteed to astound and enthral the most jaded palate. The palace of love; The hall of terrors; The vortex; and many other attractions for reasonable prices. Also come to see the extraordinary freakshow, the circus of weird. monsters and marvels from every corner of Bas-Lag! seers from the fractured land; a genuine weaver’s claw; the living skull; the lascivious snake-woman; ursus rex, the man-king of the Bears; dwarf cactus-people of tiny sizes; a garuda, bird-man chief of the wild desert; the stone men of Bezhek; caged daemons; dancing fish; treasures stolen from the gengris; and innumerable other prodigies and wonders. Some attractions not suitable for the easily shocked or those of a nervous disposition. Entrance 5 stivers. Sobek Croix gardens, 14th Chet to 14th Melluary, 6 to 11 o’clock every night.

“See that?” Isaac barked, and stabbed the poster with his thumb. “They’ve got a garuda! I’ve been sending requests all over the city for dubious bits and bobs, probably going to end up with loads of horrible disease-riddled jackdaws, and there’s a fucking garuda on the doorstep!”

Are you going to go down? signed Lin.

“Damn right!” snorted Isaac. “Straight after this! I thought we could all go. The others,” he said, his voice dropping, “don’t have to know what it is I’m doing there. I mean, a fair’s always fun anyway. Right?”

Derkhan grinned and nodded.

“So are you going to spirit the garuda away, or what?” she whispered.

“Well, presumably I could arrange to take heliotypes of it, or even ask it to come for a couple of days to the lab…I don’t know. We’ll organize something! What do you say? Fancy a fair?”

Lin picked a cherry tomato from Isaac’s garnish and wiped it carefully clean of chicken stock. She gripped it in her mandibles and began to chew.

Could be fun, she signed. Your treat?

“Absolutely my treat!” boomed Isaac, and gazed at her. He stared at her very close for a minute. He glanced round to make sure that no one was watching, and then, clumsily, he signed in front of her.

Missed you.

Derkhan looked away for a moment, tactfully.

Lin broke off the moment, to make sure that she did it before Isaac. She clapped loudly, until everyone at the table was staring at her. She began to sign, indicating Derkhan to translate.

“Uh…Isaac is keen to prove that the talk of scientists being all work and no play is false. Intellectuals as well as dissolute aesthetes like us know how to have a good time, and thus he offers us this…” Lin waved the sheet, and threw it into the centre of the table where it was visible to all. “Rides, spectacles, marvels and coconut shies, all for a mere five stivers, which Isaac has kindly offered to underwrite…”

“Not for everyone, you sow!” Isaac roared in mock-outrage, but he was drowned out by the drunken roar of gratitude.

“…offered to underwrite,” continued Derkhan doggedly. “Accordingly, I move that we drink up and eat up and hightail to Sobek Croix.”

There was loud, chaotic agreement. Those who had finished their food and drink gathered their bags. Others tucked with renewed gusto into their oysters or salad or fried plantain. Trying to organize a group of any size to do anything in synchronicity was an epic struggle, Lin reflected wryly. It would be some time before they set off.

Isaac and Derkhan were hissing to each other across the table in front of her. Her antennae twitched. She could pick up some of their murmurs. Isaac excitedly talking politics. He channelled his diffuse, undirected, pointed social discontent into his discussions with Derkhan. He was posing, she thought with amused pique, out of his depth, trying to impress the laconic journalist.

She could see Isaac pass a coin carefully across the table, and receive a plain envelope in return. Undoubtedly the latest issue of Runagate Rampant, the illegal, radical news-sheet for which Derkhan wrote.

Beyond a nebulous dislike of the militia and the government, Lin was not a political being. She sat back and looked up at the stars through the violet haze of the suspended lantern. She thought about the last time she had been to a fair: she remembered the mad palimpsest of smell, the catcalls and screeches, the rigged competitions and cheap prizes, the exotic animals and bright costumes, all packed together in a seedy, vibrant, exciting whole.

The fair was where normal rules were briefly forgotten, where bankers and thieves mingled to ooh, scandalized and titillated. Even Lin’s less outrageous sisters would come to the fair.

One of her early memories was of creeping past ranks of gaudy tents to stand next to some terrifying, dangerous, multicoloured ride, some giant wheel at the Gallmarch Fair twenty years ago. Someone-she never knew who, some khepri passer-by, some indulgent stallholder-had handed her a toffee-apple, which she had eaten reverentially. One of her few pleasant memories of childhood, that sugared fruit.

Lin sat back and waited for her friends to finish their preparations. She sucked sweet tea from her sponge and thought of that candied apple. She waited patiently to go to the fair.