He still had a couple of clean dress shirts in the wardrobe. The pile of dirty linen was getting unreasonably large again. Without mod-dwarfs cleaning the rooms and taking care of such things, he had to organize his own laundry service.

The last of the dawn river mist was drifting away as he left Number Seventeen. A team of civic council mod-dwarfs were busy in the street, extinguishing the flames in the street lamps, trimming the wicks and refilling the little reservoirs with pressed yalseed oil ready for the night. He nodded to their wrangler and made his way down Tandier Avenue to Rose’s Croissant Café. It was his first stop every morning. Inside, he joined the usual bunch of early risers, plus a few nightshift people on their way home. These were working people, and he felt comfortable around them. It had taken a while for the other regulars to grow accustomed to him, but he was now accepted as one of them.

Rose herself was serving this morning: a big woman in her eighties, wearing a floral-print dress. ‘Half my girls are late,’ she complained as she brought his orange and mango juice over. ‘Out partying last night, no doubt. So it might take a moment longer this morning, sorry.’

‘Guidance is worth celebrating,’ he assured her.

She gave his face a shrewd look. ‘And they weren’t alone,’ she decided. ‘I think someone had a nice time last night.’

‘I’ll have scrambled egg and smoked lofish on brown toast, Rose, please. With tea.’

‘She’s a lucky girl,’ Rose declared as she left.

Slvasta grinned and opened one of the news sheets Rose provided for her clientele. The rack beside the door held both official news gazettes and pamphlets from the smaller political parties. Rose had been nervous the first week he started visiting her café when she saw him reading through the pamphlets, most of which were critical of the National Council, or the Captain’s officials (never the Captain himself, which Slvasta found interesting). But he was interested in the genuine grievances that were raised in the pamphlets – the way cheap old housing was kept in such bad repair, the rising cost of food, the lack of jobs and the low wages among the poor, the slow but noticeable increase in people drifting to Varlan from various outlying provinces, particularly Rakwesh. And always the rumours of nests – though most of those were satirical attacks on suspicious ties between merchant families and councillors. Then there was Hilltop Eye, a relatively new pamphlet that always contained some highly embarrassing stories of the aristocracy and their corrupt involvement with officials, or some family’s semi-legal financial affairs. Twice in recent months, the city sheriffs had tried to track down the ‘citizens’ collective’ that produced it – to no avail. Distribution was clever, with civic mod-dwarfs counter-ordered and given the pamphlets to take to cafés and pubs and theatres. Nobody knew who or what the citizens’ collective was, though the best rumour Slvasta had heard in the Regimental Council offices was that the Captain’s family was behind it, using public condemnation as an excuse for cracking down on families that didn’t pay their full taxes. The latest Hilltop Eye had arrived overnight while everyone was out partying (good tactics, Slvasta thought admiringly). Its main story was about the hundred-and-twenty-eight-year-old mayor of New Angeles, Livanious, who it seemed was diverting a lot of city funds into his own coffers to pay for outrageously decadent parties and keeping a seventeen-year-old mistress, Jubette, in a luxury villa on an offshore island – safely away from his (seventh) wife. Livanious, as everyone knew, was Captain Philious’s uncle.

So much for Hilltop Eye being produced by the Captain’s family, then, Slvasta thought cheerfully as he ate his scrambled eggs. There were quite a few people in the café chortling over the pamphlet as they had breakfast. It was a bold story to put into print, confirming what everyone ’path gossiped anyway. The problem the authorities had with Hilltop Eye was the way it encouraged other pamphlets to be equally audacious. Questions about the activities it reported were already being asked in several district councils. Nothing in the National Council yet. But if it carried on exposing theft and fraud like this, people would want to know just what Captain Philious was going to do about it. Probably a question the good Captain would be asking himself this fine morning.

*

Slvasta arrived at the Joint Regimental Council building just after eight o’clock. It was a monolithic stone building on Cantural Street, whose three lower floors were a maze of corridors leading to hundreds of small offices occupied by junior staff. Slvasta, at least, had an office on the fourth floor, with a broad arching window that gave him a view out into the central quad, with its fountain and topiary flameyews.

Keturah and Thelonious, his assistants, were waiting for him as he settled behind his desk. Both of them held bundles of files and papers, which made him shudder inwardly. Thelonious had bruised-looking eyes set in a pale face, and his shell was none too stable, allowing little bursts of nausea to trickle out – clearly badly hungover. Slvasta chose to ignore it.

‘What have I got?’ he asked.

‘Transport policy sub-committee meeting at ten,’ Keturah said. She checked her clipboard. ‘Aflar nest incursion briefing at fifteen hundred hours – the Marine Commandant will be chairing that one himself. Inter-region communication and cooperation budget sub-committee meeting, seventeen hundred hours.’

It was an effort, but Slvasta managed not to groan. ‘Okay. Reports?’

Thelonious stepped up to the desk and put his pile of files down on the oak top. ‘Two Falls in the last ten days. We’re just getting the notice from Portlynn. The other was way down south in Vondara.’

‘Thanks. I’d like the final Portlynn report when it comes in. For now, just get me some tea, please, and remind me about the transport meeting a quarter of an hour before it starts.’

‘Yes, sir,’ Keturah said with a hesitant smile.

Slvasta waved them both out. When the heavy door had shut behind them, he looked at the map of Bienvenido, which took up an entire wall. It was covered in tiny yellow pins, indicating Falls. They were denser in the tropics, becoming progressively sparser further from the equator. According to the Watcher Guild, the Faller eggs, which always came from the section of the Forest closest to Bienvenido, would naturally fall along the equator; it was only little inaccuracies in their trajectory as they left the trees, and the way they drifted on the long flight through space, that left them peppering the whole planet.

He went over and stuck two yellow pins in the new Fall zones. His map had several clusters of red pins for sweeps in which their officers had reported suspected impacts devoid of an egg. And, according to the Marine Commandant’s office, the Faller Research Institute hadn’t issued any requests for a new egg to experiment on for years now. He’d sent Keturah over there to check; she’d come back with a date with one of the junior clerks and his promise to report any such request when it happened.

The first red pin Slvasta had ever put in the map, the day he arrived, was just below Adice, where he’d encountered Nigel. Black pins were based on reports of people disappearing without explanation. He’d set the criteria as three or more people in one area to qualify. The heaviest concentrations, naturally enough, were in Rakwesh Province and the Aflar peninsula, west of the Spine mountains.

As always, he stared at the ‘Nigel’ pin. There were few other red ones near it, and no black ones within two hundred miles. If Nigel had taken any more eggs, it wasn’t anywhere within five hundred miles of Adice. In fact, Slvasta hadn’t read any report of missing eggs that matched the profile.