Thalric’s smile was wintry. ‘Your voice has fallen on deaf ears all these years, Master Maker. My people tell me you have buzzed your tale in the Assembly for over a decade, and were simply brushed away for your pains. The discovery of your murdered corpse, on the other hand, might speak most eloquently, and remind them too readily of all your living words of warning besides. No, it is nothing so sinister that brings me here, Master Maker. I merely wanted to see you, speak with you. We have been enemies for a long time, since long before each knew of the other’s existence. The game is nearly done now. Only a few days until the world looks very different. I might then not have another chance to see my adversary.’

‘I did not think Wasp officers were allowed to be so indulgent,’ said Stenwold, innocently enough, but to his surprise a muscle twitched in the man’s face, a nerve touched.

‘They are not.’ Thalric looked away. ‘They are not, lest they fall. Will you drink with me, Master Maker?’

‘What?’

‘One drink. No poison, I promise, although I hear trying to poison Beetles is an uncertain business.’

‘You want… to drink with me?’

Thalric stared back at him, saying nothing, just waiting, and in the end it was sheer curiosity that made Stenwold accept.

Stenwold chose the drinking den himself. It was only four streets from the chocolate house, but a different character of place altogether, a vice den where rich dilettantes came to spend their money. Whilst a Spider-kinden woman danced and undressed in tired and practised stages, he and Thalric shared a jug of sharp and acrid Forta Water that made their eyes sting.

‘I will not speak of the superiority of the Empire,’ Thalric said. ‘I’ve beat that drum quite enough.’

‘And do you still like the sound of it?’

The Wasp gave a short laugh. ‘You’d try to recruit me, would you? Master Maker, nobody ever understands that I have only one love, and that is the Empire.’ He said it in such a way that Stenwold saw that ‘nobody’ included those of Thalric’s own party. He remembered the story of infighting at Myna that Kymene had told. ‘No, I just wanted to see you, to gain your measure, as no doubt you are similarly gauging me.’

‘You strike me as an unusual man, for one of your race.’

‘I try to be anything but. Perhaps that is what makes me unusual.’ Thalric drained his bowl without flinching, and poured some more. ‘Your niece is a remarkable woman.’

‘She said you were going to torture her.’

‘And?’ Thalric raised an eyebrow.

‘And I can read between the lines. You could have done so. Perhaps you would have, if she had not been freed.’

‘I would have had to, eventually.’

Stenwold frowned. ‘You’re not a happy man, Captain.’

‘Nor are you, Master Maker. I may have only now met you, but on paper I know you very well. College scholar, artificer, traveller – so what brought you to this sordid trade?’

‘You mean your trade.’

‘I do, yes.’

Stenwold had his own bitter smile for that. ‘You did – perhaps not personally, but your Empire. I was in Myna at the conquest. I realized the future then.’

‘A hazard of ambition is to make enemies,’ Thalric acknowledged. ‘Would it make things easier for you to know that I was part of that conquest. I was much younger then, of course.’

‘We all were, Captain Thalric. But you’re not here for Helleron.’

‘Am I not? If you don’t already understand, you can’t think that I will tell you.’ And there was a glint in Thalric’s eye that chilled Stenwold through and through. ‘Would you join me in a toast, now, Master Maker? It is a Lowlander habit, and I adopt it in deference to the… current allegiance of our surroundings.’

‘Name your toast,’ Stenwold said.

Thalric had been about to say something cutting, a needle-comment to bait him with, but at the last moment something twisted in him, that part of him that had clapped Aagen on the shoulder, and had once been Ulther’s prote?ge?, and instead he said, ‘Everything is going to change, Master Maker. The old will be swept away, the new will march in. The Lowland cities are no different to two score others that now serve the Empire. You have striven mightily against us, against the apathy and cupidity of your own people, and at last it has come to this. We meet now, because even if you stabbed me through the heart right here and now you would still be too late to turn aside the course of history. But I admire you, because at least you have tried. Because you also believe in your people, however misplaced that belief may be. So let us have an old toast, while we still can. To absent friends.’

Stenwold stared at him, thinking of Marius and Atryssa, so long dead now, but with him still, and he could almost see reflected in Thalric’s eyes some kindred loss, more recent but no less deep. He raised his bowl and clicked it against the Wasp’s own, and they drank.

Once Stenwold had gone, Thalric’s aide came to him, his face a mix of concern and disapproval. ‘Do you want me to follow him, sir? What was that all about?’

Thalric drained the last harsh dregs from his bowl. ‘It was an indulgence,’ he said, mostly to himself. ‘And we already know where he is going.’ He had held Stenwold Maker up enough, he felt. By the time the man arrived, it would all be over.

Stenwold’s head was spinning, but not from the strong drink. First his maddening conversation with Greenwise, highlighting that elusive cog missing from the machine he had been building in his mind. Why were the Wasps here? What were they waiting for? Then the baffling conversation with Thalric, a man racked by a confession he could tell nobody. The thought of Wasp fighting Wasp in Myna recurred to him and he could make nothing of it.

Greenwise Artector had confirmed only what Stenwold had already known. The Wasps were waiting, were looking elsewhere but Helleron. If so, why come here at all? Two thousand soldiers with vehicles and supplies was an investment the Empire would not make without reason. Was there some incursion they were here to put down?

In a few days…

Those were Thalric’s words, and not given as any revelation, just something said as a matter of course. Clock hands counting down, and yet for all this the Wasp had dropped no further clue. But there had been an apology, had there not? Unspoken, but there had been a heaviness to Thalric like a doctor coming to relatives with bad news. Something had been eating at the man. He had gone away with his bad news unsaid, and yet…

Stenwold was no Helleren, and he had come here expecting the city to be under attack, yet that was not the case. Thalric had been telling him, whether gloatingly or just unconsciously, that their move, when it came, would…

There was a queasy feeling growing in Stenwold’s stomach. The strong drink boiled there: not with any poison but a horrible suspicion, growing and growing. Here in Helleron there was one matter that the next day or so would bring to fruition. A commercial matter. A profitable matter. Something that would change the face of the Lowlands forever.

As soon as he had the idea, it put its jaws into him and shook him, and desperately he began to run, pushing through the streets of Helleron because he had questions, desperate questions, for Scuto.

He had to know more about the Iron Road.

When the Ant-kinden burst in it was a moment before he could speak, leaning against the door jamb of Scuto’s extended shack and gasping for breath. At last, and with everyone on their feet and staring at him, he got it out. ‘Marre’s dead.’

Scuto swore, baring pointed teeth. Totho, who had been carefully watching him at work, asked, ‘Who’s Marre?’

‘She was that Fly-kinden you sent to talk to the Moths, wasn’t she?’ Tynisa said to Scuto.