Luciano Borgotta, nicknamed Tartaglia, is a man with a hard fate. A young puppet-maker from the backwater planet of Burgo. A neuro-past, a master of contact-based impersonation, he has toured across half the Galaxy. He sat in the notorious Me-Gile prison on primitive Kemchu; later—junior executioner. Director of the "Vertaep" theater, he led a troupe of the count’s serf peasants, headed by Count Maltsov, a landowner-philanthropist. A suspect at a wudun resort in Kitta; a slave of the pompiliam ward-legate Guy Octavian Tumidus, a rower in the galley’s running compartment.