‘You have a good grasp of their talk,’ said the Loquae. ‘At least the talk of their second emissary. The first was slain on entering the Felyal, by one of our huntsmen who had no time for diplomacy.’

There was the slightest murmur of amusement at this. It was a Mantis joke, Tynisa realized, for what it was worth.

‘And the second?’ Tisamon asked.

‘He spoke the same words you just put into his mouth. He told us we were warriors and so were his people. He offered us respect, admired our blades. All the while, our seers were looking into his thoughts. He was thinking, “Savages, living in trees and hunting wild beasts. Savages, and ripe for conquest.” When he was here his eyes could never be still for trying to guess our numbers and our strength.’

‘You slew him,’ Tisamon said.

‘We let him return to his people. He could not tell our strength and what report he might give of it would merely weaken their understanding of us,’ said one of the other elders.

Tisamon took a deep breath, feeling in this strained diplomacy that he understood Stenwold a little. ‘You must not fall into the same error that he did,’ he told the elders. ‘The Wasps are rash and foolish, and they understand little, but they are strong, and there are more of them than anyone here can know. I have been into their Empire. I have seen how they storm cities. They have armies comprising more soldiers than there are women, men and children in all of Felyal. If they come here with swords and their Art-fire, then we will slay hundreds of them, and tens of hundreds, but they will still send more. They will burn the forest and bring close their engines of war, their flying machines, their artificer’s weapons. Do you understand what I mean?’

‘We understand, Tisamon,’ said the Loquae. ‘You tell us nothing we have not thought for ourselves.’

‘And they will come here,’ Tisamon went on, yet the emotional response he had been expecting was not evident. ‘They can tolerate no land that has not felt the stamp of their heel. We hate the Spider-kinden for many ancient reasons, but amongst those causes we hate them because they seek to control, and because they live off the sweat of their slaves. The Wasps have a lust to conquer and rule that the Lowlands have never confronted before, and they hold more slaves, and more wretched ones, than any Spider Aristoi. And when they come here, despite all our skill and speed, they will sweep Felyal away as if it had never been. You must understand how we cannot ignore them. We must act.’

‘Must we so?’ said the oldest of the elders, a woman whose silver hair fell past her waist, and whose face was lined deeply as the very old of other kinden were, and not simply become taut and gaunt as most Mantis became with the years. ‘We know all of this already, Tisamon, and yet we ask ourselves if we should resist. For what would be the good? We cannot hold back time any longer. It has been five hundred years since the Days of Lore and the greatness of our race. We have dwindled and withered since, and become a pale ghost of the warriors we once were. Look at us now with unclouded eyes, and you will see a dying people.’ She paused and eyed him before continuing.

‘Where once we were sovereign and unchallenged, now we become adulterated with every generation. Our young men set sail not for sacred Parosyal but for the harbours of Kes to sell themselves as mercenaries. They turn their backs on their homes for the touted wonders of Collegium, the grimy wealth of Helleron. The Beetles cut wood at the edge of our forests and poison us with their gold, which buys those parts of us we cannot sell. Their peddlers visit our Holds and bewitch our young with their toys and their gauds, and they take their gold back from us again, without ever returning to us what we sold. We are become their shadows, become the savages that they take us for. Each generation is less than the last, until soon we shall be nothing but beggars sitting before their tables, bartering thousand-year skills for what crumbs they deign to give us. Faced with that, Tisamon, can you not see that a good clean death at the hands of warriors might be preferable. Let the Wasp-kinden destroy us, and finish the work that all the years have been doing. At least we can then die as the brave die.’

Tisamon knelt before them with head bowed, and Tynisa, craning her head around the doorpost, thought he was defeated. She felt the weight of their words herself, and she did not even belong to these people. Tisamon had one shot left, though.

‘I shall take a boat east along the coast,’ he announced.

‘For what purpose?’ asked the Loquae.

‘To see their army, and discover whether it is at Merro or Egel, or elsewhere,’ he said. ‘To see, that is all.’

‘And what then?’

‘Then I shall return,’ he said. ‘I will have a plan, by then, a proposal. Will you hear it?’

‘We can do no less,’ she said, ‘though we shall likely do no more. I imagine you will do what you think is right.’ Her eyes narrowed at the thought of where Tisamon’s judgement had led him in the past.

A

Thirty-Three

They made camp that evening in a half-burned Wayhouse, which seemed to Salma like a physical mirror to his own thoughts of late. There were a dozen charred corpses within that they hauled out and burned properly outside. It seemed likely that the destruction was Wasp work, for the Way Brothers kept rest-houses all over the Lowlands, and they turned nobody away and maintained only peace within their walls. Many a bandit had used them as a place of refuge, so they were seldom robbed or attacked by thieves either. The Wasps obviously had no such traditions, and Salma found it easy to imagine a scouting or foraging party descending on the place, killing, looting and then setting a half-hearted fire as they left. There was a Wasp army on the long road to Sarn, north of them, and Wasp soldiers were neither the most disciplined nor the most restrained.

It had pushed him to a decision, and before dusk he had lit some torches, and then stood on Sfayot’s wagon to address his followers.

They had gained well over four dozen since the defence of the village, so that Salma now had to pause before matching a name to a face for many of them. There were villagers that had actually followed after them, stout young men and women looking for something more than subsistence farming. Then there was the Fly-kinden engineer, and her whole extended family, who had fled Helleron before the Wasps seized it; the five Sarnesh crossbowmen who must have been deserters from some mercenary company; a lean old Spider-kinden archer and hunter who went on ahead each morning to stalk game; a Moth woman with a haunted face who had not given her name or said a single word to anyone since joining them.

He glanced at Nero, who nodded encouragingly, though the Fly did not know what he was going to say.

Salma was not entirely sure of that himself. What scared him was that they were now all listening, waiting for it. He looked from face to face: at the Fly gangers still clustered together, the escaped slaves, the bandits, their leader Phalmes with his arm about Sfayot’s eldest. The pair had slept together the night after the defence of the village, but Sfayot himself had not seemed to mind. ‘He’s strong that one, in lots of ways,’ the Roach-kinden had said of Phalmes. ‘She could do worse for a while.’

‘You’ve followed me this far,’ Salma began to address them. ‘I didn’t ask you to. I didn’t ask to be your guide or your leader, but here we are, all of us, and it seems to me we cannot go on like this. We cannot just drift aimlessly and finally end up beached somewhere not of our choosing. We need direction. Thus far you have looked to me for that. So from now, if you will let me, I will accept the mantle you have offered. I will offer you leadership, purpose and direction. Let me tell you what direction I would be taking you, though. Then you may not wish to continue with me, but we will see.’