For he found it. He found where the slaves, these myriad captives of war, were going, and he discovered that there was a little room left, after all, for a kind of horror that a connoisseur might savour as Ferro had savoured his wine.

The Wasps had built a cage, and the cage was like a honeycomb, and the honeycomb was vast, eight-score cells at least, all wooden-slatted walls and a hatch at the top of each. There had been woodland here before, but it had been hacked back for half a mile in all directions, the felled wood contributing to this abomination.

There were plenty of Wasps here: some were arriving, some departing with strings of slaves, others were plainly the custodians of the place. All of them wore the tunics and full helms of the Slave Corps. There was not a regular soldier, not a Consortium factor or clerk or artificer to be seen, but of the slavers there were dozens, stalking about the perimeter of the thing they had built, or walking atop it, looking down on their massed charges. Sfayot waited until twilight and crept closer, trying to find a vantage point to see into the wooden cells.

The sheer size of the construction awed him. They had built cells, and then built more and more, each one borrowing a wall from the last and, as more slaves had come, they had built and built, their labour becoming as mindless and instinctive as that of their insect namesakes. The cells looked to be designed each for perhaps four prisoners, but Sfayot guessed that none held fewer than eight, and many had more. The stench put the battlefield to shame. For that was a smell of death, while this was life, the most wasted, pitiful dregs of life: a sour, stomach-clutching stink of sweat and excrement, fear and despair. The slaves went in, he saw, and if they were lucky some slaver came and took them out. Otherwise, they stayed and some were fed and others starved or grew fevered from wounds, and eventually, he saw, some of them had died, and still their remains remained, because the slavers were working all the time bringing more people in. Every cell he could peer into had at least one collapsed form that did not move.

He saw one slaver take his helm off, just the once. The man’s face was hollow-cheeked, haunted. He looked away from the slave pens as though he would rather be a slave himself elsewhere than a master here. They had built something too large to manage, even with the force of slavers that was here. They had lost control, not to their prisoners but to entropy.

He knew, was absolutely sure, that he could not simply walk up and offer them money for a Roach girl. They would take his money and throw him in one of those cells, because men who could do this would have no possible shred of civilization left in them. No papers or promises or appeals would move them. He would have to go about this in a more direct way.

Sfayot waited until it grew properly dark, and then he crept forward. The slavers had set a watch, but it was a desultory one. They were expecting no Dragonfly retribution, and the warfront had moved on. He reached the outside edge of the pens, peering in and seeing Dragonfly-kinden bundled together, leaning on one another, without enough room to lie or even sit properly. Some slept, some just stared. None saw him. With creeping care, Sfayot ascended, using his Art to scale the wooden wall until he was atop the pens. The stench assailed him anew here, rising up from below almost as a solid thing. He was Roach-kinden, though. His was a hardy people who could survive a great deal. Methodically he began to search.

Sometimes there were slavers up there with him, landing in a shimmer of wings to give the prisoners a look over, and looking for what, Sfayot wondered, because it surely could not have been to check on their well-being. At these times he crouched low and called on his Art to hide him from their view. In truth, they were so careless in their examinations that he probably would not have needed it.

He searched and searched, as the hours of the night dragged away. Even with his keen eyes it was hard, peering between the slats and trying to see how many were in there, who lay atop whom, what kinden they were. Towards the centre was a knot of around a dozen cells whose occupants were all dead, every one. Sfayot was growing desperate. He began to move faster, glancing in at each hatch for a glimpse of white hair.

A voice hailed him softly and he froze, unsure where it had come from. When it spoke again he realized that it came from below. A Dragonfly man was looking up at him from out of a tangle of his fellows.

‘They tell me that Roach-kinden get everywhere,’ said the man, sounding, despite everything, quietly amused. ‘Now I see it’s true.’

‘Please…’ murmured Sfayot, horribly aware of all the Wasp slavers, of how close they all were.

‘What are you scavenging after, Roach-kinden?’ the Dragonfly asked. His voice was cultured, elegant, suited for polite conversation made over music. The man was around Sfayot’s own age, the Roach saw. The others in his cell were awake now, eyes glinting in the dark.

‘Please, sir,’ Sfayot said hoarsely. ‘My daughter. They took my daughter.’ He realized how pathetic the plea would sound to people already in cells.

‘Mine too,’ the Dragonfly told him. ‘Although she is out of this place at least. It seems strange to say that the life of a slave in the Empire may be the best she could have hoped for after having come here.’ He sounded infinitely calm and Sfayot wondered if he was mad.

‘Please,’ he said again, but then the Dragonfly said, ‘I know you, I think.’

In the dark, Sfayot could not have placed the man for any money, but Dragonfly eyes were always good. He just crouched there above while the prisoner studied him, and at last decided. ‘Yes, I remember. You were a thief, I think. A vagrant and a thief, like all your kind. You were brought before me. I sentenced you to work in the fields, but your family rescued you. It was a long time ago now, but I remember.’

Sfayot felt like weeping, clutching at the slats with crooked fingers. Now? he asked the heedless world. This man, now? In truth he had no idea whether it was true. It could have been some other Roach he spoke of. It was not so uncommon a sequence of events.

‘I had thought we were all taken from the battle, or else from the villages hereabouts,’ the Dragonfly said abstractedly. ‘Do we have a Roach-kinden girl amongst us?’ He did not raise his voice, but Sfayot numbly heard the word being passed back and forth between those who were still awake until at last some reply must have been passed back, for the Dragonfly informed Sfayot, ‘Five cells away, in the direction that I am pointing, is a Roach-kinden girl. May I take it that you intend to remove her from here?’

For a mad moment Sfayot thought the man, in this reeking, hideous place, was objecting to sharing captivity with a Roach. The Dragonfly’s face was sublimely serious, though.

‘I shall try.’

‘You have the means to get her out?’

The hatches were all secured with padlocks, something the slavers had apparently possessed in abundance, but the fittings themselves were wood. ‘I do,’ Sfayot said. ‘But it will take time.’ He was frowning. ‘What do you intend?’

‘Tell me,’ the Dragonfly – the Dragonfly nobleman, Sfayot assumed – enquired. ‘Were you really a thief, when I tried you?’

Lies, normally his first line of defence, did not seem to have followed Sfayot when he had mounted up here. It seemed impossible to tell anything but the truth to that calm, doomed face. ‘I can’t recall,’ Sfayot whispered. ‘Sometimes I was. Sometimes I wasn’t. I cannot remember.’

‘Ah, well.’ The answer had apparently been satisfactory in some way. He turned to a man in the next cell. ‘Kindly pass this on until it reaches my master-at-arms, if you would. Tell him that it is fit, after all, that he dies in battle.’