'I like to work! I'm good at it and I feel that I'm doing something worthwhile.' As always, Tiaan could feel her temper going. She tried to rein it in.

'Any fool can do what you do, fiddling about with dirty bits of machinery!' One chubby hand found a box of sweetmeats on the bedside cupboard. Tipping the contents onto her ample belly, Marnie sorted through them irritably. One disappeared into her navel. 'Damn it! All the best ones are gone. Would you like one, darling?'

'No thanks!' Tiaan said, though she was starving. Her temper began to flood. Marnie, despite her image as the wonderful earth mother, was as selfish a person as ever lived. She loved her children only while they were infants. Once off the breast she sent them to the creche, and at six indentured them to whoever offered the most for their labour. Marnie was one of the wealthiest women in Tiksi, but her children saw none of it.

Tiaan changed the subject. 'Marnie, there's something I've always wondered…'

Marnie bristled. 'If it's about your wretched father…'

'It's not!' Tiaan said hastily. 'It's about me, and you.'

'What about me, darling?' Marnie picked fluff off a chocolate-coloured delicacy and tasted it with the point of her tongue. She settled back on her cushions. No subject was dearer to her than herself.

'It's about where I got my special talent from – of thinking in pictures. When I think about something I see it in my mind as clearly as if I was looking at it through a window.'

'You got it from me, of course! And I got it from my mother. The fights we had when I wanted to come here.'

Tiaan could well imagine them. Marnie's mother had been a court philosopher, a proud and feisty woman. Her mother had been scribe to the governor, her sister an illusionist of national repute. How Marnie had let the family down!