“What I don’t understand,” said Wren, “is why she won’t admit it. Surely it would be a selling point, in an Old Tech trader, to say they came from London and were trained by the Historians’ Guild.”

Tom shrugged. “I always kept quiet about it, when your mother and I were trading. London was unpopular in those years. What the Guild of Engineers had done upset the whole balance of the world. Scared a lot of cities, and led to the rise of the Green Storm. I suppose that’s why Clytie took another name. The Pottses are a famous London family; they’ve been producing aldermen and heads of guild since Quirke’s time. Clytie’s grandfather, old Pisistratus Potts, was lord mayor for years and years. If you want to pretend you’re not a Londoner, it wouldn’t be a good idea to go around with a name like Clytie Potts.”

“And what about those things she bought at Pondicherry’s?” Wren wondered.

“Kliest Coils?”

“I’ve never heard of them.”

“There’s no reason why you would have,” her father said. “They come from the Electric Empire, which thrived in these parts before the rise of the Blue Metal culture, around 10,000 B.T.”

“What are they for?”

“Nobody knows,” said Tom. “Zanussi Kliest, the London Historian who first studied them, claimed they were meant to focus some sort of electromagnetic energy, but no one has ever worked out a practical use for them. The Electric Empire seems to have been a sort of technological cul-de-sac.”

“These coils aren’t valuable, then?”

“Only as curios. They’re quite pretty.”

“So what’s Clytie Potts going to do with them?” asked Wren.

Tom shrugged again. “She must have a buyer, I suppose. Maybe she knows a collector.”