“Has she ever mentioned anything about where she comes from?” Wren asked eagerly.

Mr. Pondicherry thought for a moment. “Her ship is registered in Airhaven,” he said.

“Oh, we know that. I mean, do you know where she grew up? Where she was trained? You see, we think she comes from London.”

The auctioneer smiled at her indulgently, and winked again at Tom as he slipped the old telephone into a side drawer of his bureau. “Ah, Mr. N, what romantical notions these young ladies do have! Really, Miss Wren! Nobody comes from London!”

Afterward they took coffee on a balcony cafe and looked out eastward across the endless plains of the Great Hunting Ground. It was one of those warm, golden days of spring. A haze of green filled the massive ruts and track marks that passing cities had scored across the land below, and the sky was full of swerving swifts. Away in the east a mining town was gnawing at a line of hills that had somehow been overlooked until now.

“The strange thing is,” said Tom thoughtfully, “I’m sure I’ve heard that name before. I wish I could remember where. Cruwys Morchard. I suppose it was on the bird roads, in the old days…” He poured Wren more coffee. “You must think me very silly, to let myself be so affected by it. It’s just that the thought of another Historian, still alive after all these years …”

He couldn’t explain. Lately he had been thinking more and more about his early years in the London Museum. It made him sad to think that when he died, the memory of the place would die with him. If there really was another Historian alive, someone who had grown up among the same dusty galleries and beeswax-smelling corridors as him, who had snoozed through old Arkengarth’s lectures, and listened to Chudleigh Pomeroy grumbling about the building’s feeble shock absorbers, then the responsibility of remembering it all would be lifted from him; the echoes of those things would linger in other memories, even after he was gone.