And now Stenwold sat with his head in his hands after the War Council had adjourned, and there was a long-faced Beetle youth waiting to see him.

‘What is it?’ he demanded at last, because this young man was another of the lives in his hands and he had no right to ignore him.

‘Master Maker – excuse me, War Master, you should see this. In fact, you have to.’

Stenwold stood up, seeing that the youth was torn between emotions, unable to know what to think next. Stenwold had seen him before, but could not place him.

‘Take me, then,’ he said, and the young man darted off.

‘It’s Master Tseitus, War Master,’ the youth explained, and Stenwold placed him then: an apprentice of the Ant-kinden artificer.

‘What does he want?’ Stenwold asked.

‘He has… he… I’m sorry, Master Maker-’

Stenwold stopped him. ‘Just tell me. It has been a long day. I have no time.’

‘He made me promise to say nothing, Master Maker,’ the youth blurted. ‘But now he’s gone and-’

‘Gone?’ Stenwold demanded. ‘Gone where?’

‘You have to come and see!’ And they were off again, and the youth was definitely heading for the blasted wastes of the docks.

‘He was desperate to do something,’ the youth explained. ‘The bombardment was all around here. So he took her out.’

‘Her? What? You mean the submersible?’

‘An hour ago, Master, only we didn’t know if there was enough air… enough range… We never had a chance to properly test her.’

What he had to show Stenwold was an empty pool with access to the harbour. A lack of submersible.

‘What has he done?’ Stenwold asked, and the apprentice spread his hands miserably.

It became apparent the next morning, when Stenwold was dragged from his bed by an excited messenger who pulled him all the way back to the charred docks.

The Vekken flagship was sinking. It was sinking slowly, but by the dawn a full half of it was below the waves, despite all the pumps the Ants could lay on it. Supply ships and tugs were taking on men and material as fast as they could, but the vast vessel itself was foundering, slipping beneath the waves, heeling over well to one side so that the water was grasping at the closest of its great catapults that had wreaked so much damage across the harbourside of Collegium.

Of Tseitus and his submersible there was no sign. Whether he simply had not had the stocks of air, or had been destroyed by the Ants, or whether he had become locked to the metal hull of his victim and gone with it to the bottom, it was impossible to say.

Doctor Nicrephos was an old man, and very badly in fear for his life. He had listened for days now to the stories from the wall, about the patience and gradual Ant advance, the implacable faces of the Vekken, the diminishing resources of the city. He had lived in Collegium for twenty-five years. He knew no other home. For twenty of those years he had been the College’s least regarded master, clutching to the very periphery of academia, teaching the philosophy and theory of the Days of Lore to a handful of uninterested and uncomprehending students each year. Magic, in other words: something in which Collegium, as a whole, did not believe. There had always been calls to remove his class from the curriculum. It was an embarrassment, they said. There were always those Beetle scholars who believed that the past should stay buried, and that it was an insult to the intelligence of their people that a shabby old fraud like Doctor Nicrephos should be given his tiny room and his pittance stipend.

And yet it had never happened. There was too much inertia in the College, and he still had a few friends who would speak up for him. He had clung on, year in, year out, in this nest he had made for himself, and expected to die in office and then never be replaced. For a man who did not love the company of his own kinden, that would have been enough. His business was the past. He had no care for posterity.

And now it was all falling down. He would suffer the same fate as all the others if the Vekken breached the wall, either put to the sword or sold into slavery, and who would buy such a threadbare thing as he?

But he could not take up arms and walk the wall. He was barely strong enough to fly and his eyes were weak save when the room was darkest. There was something he could do, however, or there might be something: to gather his pitiful philosophy with both hands and make a weapon of it, and brace himself for the inevitable disappointment. He had been a seer of Dorax once, but throughout his years of teaching it had been a rare thing to even attempt to pluck at the world’s weave. He feared that, after so long, true magic was beyond him.

‘Close the curtains,’ he said, and one of his students did so, drawing the patched blinds to cover the falling sun. He had four in his class now: one other Moth who had likewise found his home society unbearable, a cynical but gifted Spider girl, a dysfunctional Beetle youth who could never sit still, and a Fly who came every tenday but never seemed to learn anything. He would need them all now, for whatever faint help they could give.

‘We are going to embark on a ritual,’ he told them, when they were all seated on the floor of his room. Between the walls and his desk there was so little room that their knees were all touching in their circle. ‘This ritual is to attack the Vekken army in ways that the material and mundane defences of this city are incapable of. Precisely what effect we can manifest I am unsure but, as I have taught you, the power of magic stems from darkness, fear, uncertainty, ill luck. All those gaps between the lighted parts of the world.’

‘All things that can’t be tested,’ said the fidgeting Beetle youth. ‘That can’t be proved.’

‘That is so,’ Doctor Nicrephos agreed, ‘and very close to the heart of the mystery.’

‘Doctor, is this going to work? I mean, really?’ asked the Spider girl. She cared, he knew, more for her politics and her rumours than for her studies.

‘Yes, Doctor, because I was thinking about finding myself a sword and going onto the wall,’ the Fly added. ‘I don’t see we can do any good here.’

‘But that is the very attitude you must banish, if we are to do good,’ Nicrephos insisted. ‘Belief is what you require. If you go into this without belief then, yes, we will fail. You must open your minds to the possibility, allow room for that uncertainty.’

That they looked doubtful was an understatement. With no other option, though, he pressed on. ‘Listen to me, close your eyes, all of you.’

With poor grace, they did so.

‘I require your help, your thoughts, your strength in this. It is a great magic that I intend, that I could not manage on my own. I want you to bend your thoughts on the Vekken camps. Many of you must have seen them from the walls, or from the air. Think of all the Vekken soldiers, hundreds and hundreds of them, with their tents all in lines so very exact, and inside those tents their palettes laid out just so. Imagine them going to sleep there at night, all at the same time, like some great machine. But they are not machines. They are men and women as we are. They have minds, although those minds bleed into one another. I want you to imagine that mind as though you could see it, the mind of all the Ant-kinden there, like a great fog hanging about their camp.’

He could see it himself, in his mind’s eye, a great shining jelly-like creature that squatted in and about all those orderly tents, the minds of all the Ant-kinden, touching and connecting.

‘We are going to insert something in that mind,’ he went on, after he had given them a good long chance to picture it. ‘We are going to put something dark in it. There are always areas of the mind that are ready to accept darkness. These Ants love certainty and order, and so they must fear doubt and chaos. You must think of all the doubt and chaos that you can, imagine taking it from your own minds and placing it within that great lattice-mind of the Vekken. All your fears, all your worries, all your pains and guilt, you must dredge these up for me and project them into the mind of the Ants.’