She could not be sure of his identity until he had stopped. It was a young man, broad-shouldered and sturdy-framed and marked by mixed blood, and she did not quite know him. She saw the trappings: a toolbelt such as he had always wanted and could never afford, black and gold clothes, a sword and a rank badge. She recognized none of that. It was only when he stood in the cellar, on the other side of the bars, that she was sure.

‘Totho…?’ Her voice emerged in a quaver, not quite believing what she saw. ‘Is it you? It can’t be you.’

He stared at her, and his features were harder than she remembered. Still, there had been harsh times for both of them since they last parted.

‘Totho, don’t just stand there. You have to let me out. You must know what they’ll do to me.’

His face tightened further. ‘I don’t have the keys,’ he muttered, and continued to stare.

‘Totho… what are you doing here?’ she asked. ‘You went off to Tark… why are you wearing that… uniform?’

‘Because it is mine,’ he stated, and she began to feel her brief surge of hope draining away.

‘You mean… how long?’

He realized that she was seeing their history together unravel backwards, trying to recast him as a spy during all that time, because poor Che didn’t realize that people changed.

‘Since Tark,’ he said. He found it mattered to him that she knew she had already cast him off before he had found his new calling.

‘But why?’ she said, still trying to whisper but her indignation getting the better of her. ‘They’re the enemy, Totho! They’re monsters!’

He felt his anger grow in him. ‘I did it to save Salma,’ he snapped, ‘because otherwise they would have killed him. Or don’t you think that was worth it? Perhaps I should have just died alongside him.’

‘But that’s…’ She gaped at him. ‘But you’re free,’ she said, still determinedly marching up the wrong street. ‘You could run, surely, run to Collegium and tell them what happened here.’

‘You have absolutely no idea what happened here.’ He felt she was trivializing the sacrifice he had made, and suddenly he was on fire with it. He had never impressed her as a companion, as a warrior, most certainly not as a prospective lover, for all that she had once been life and breath to him. ‘Do you want to know,’ he asked her, voice shaking slightly, ‘what happened here?’

‘I don’t understand, Totho.’

‘I happened here, Che. That’s the simplest thing. Those dead Ants out there – I killed them. When the city of Sarn falls it is I who will break it. When this army or another like it is at the gates of Collegium, it will be me, do you understand? When the Lowlands becomes just the western wing of the Empire, then by rights my name should be on the maps.’

She was backing away from the wooden bars. ‘Totho?’

‘All my doing, Che.’ As she retreated so he had moved up to the bars himself, gripping them as though he were the prisoner here. ‘What your uncle dismissed as a toy back in Collegium, they have made into a weapon here. You remember how I always wanted to make weapons? Well now it’s happened, and my weapons win wars.’

Backing against the far wall of her cell, she stared and saw him at last, as not friend, nor lover, but enemy.

‘You?’

‘All me.’ Now he had her attention, his lust for recognition was leaching out of him, leaving only a hollow bitterness. ‘So I can’t just walk away from this, Che. I have become this. I have paid in blood, and none of it my own.’

‘Oh, Totho…’

He waited for her condemnation that he surely deserved, the last gasp of her defiance before the interrogators pried it out of her.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m so sorry.’ And the expression on her face told him, beyond any shadow or suspicion, that her concern was purely for him, for her lost friend.

Something was building in him, that hurt worse than burning, but he clamped down on it. He was Drephos’s apprentice. There was no emotion he could not master. ‘Stop saying that.’ He heard his voice shake. ‘I’ve found my place now. There’s nothing to be sorry for. Feel sorry for yourself. You know what they’ll do to you.’ In his mind arose the words, from the depths of his own soul. What they will do to her is nothing, compared to what they have done to me.

She was moving back to the bars now, and one hand slightly extended, as if to touch his own. He suddenly felt that, if he was to feel her skin on his, he might die. He stumbled backwards, until he felt the incline of the steps behind him.

‘It’s over,’ he said. ‘Everything’s over.’ He tried to suppress the next words, but they forced themselves out anyway. ‘I’m sorry, Che. I’m sorry it turned out like this.’

She was standing at the bars when he left her, and the lantern’s last shine glinted on the tracks down her face, and he thought they would be the only tears ever shed for him.

And where is the damned box? was the thought of Uctebri the Sarcad, stalking the bounds of his comfortable cell. It had gone wrong. Not irretrievably wrong, but wrong nonetheless.

He had been at pains to keep his antennae out, groping around for the Shadow Box’s location. It had mouldered in Collegium for a long time, but the Darakyon itself was becoming restive. It had sensed his interest and there was always the chance that it would find some champion for its cause. Reaching so far into the Lowlands is dangerous, his own people would have told him, had he cared to consult them. The Moth-kinden have not forgotten us.

No, that was true. In some decaying archive of Tharn or Dorax would be found the name of the Mosquito-kinden, and the time when the Moths broke them, hunted them down, and tried their best to wipe his entire kinden from history. These days the Moths had other matters on their minds, though, so a clever old man might stretch his arm as far as Collegium and cause no alarm, sound no warnings, especially if that old man was working through an Empire blinded to the magical world by its own Aptitude.

But the Empire itself was being coy. They had not sent some squad of soldiers or Rekef men to retrieve the box. The political situation, the distances, had all militated against that strategy. Instead they had hired hunters.

And one of those hunters knows too much. Uctebri had felt the touch of her mind, just briefly. Someone with training, with a gift for sly magic, was now in possession of his prize. In that brief contact of minds the acrid taste of betrayal was in his mouth. She will not bring it to me. She recognizes its value.

But she could not hide it, not a thing of that power, now that it had been awakened. He could sense her moving about, with that appallingly powerful treasure in her hands. Her deceits would hide her exact whereabouts, but he could have drawn a circle on a map and known for sure that she was within it.

He heard movement outside, knew before the man even entered that it was the Emperor. The ruler of the Wasps was in an ugly mood.

‘Your Imperial Majesty, you honour me with your presence.’ Uctebri the Sarcad bowed sinuously as the Emperor marched into his new suite of rooms.

‘We demand to know what progress you have made,’ snarled Alvdan the Second. General Maxin had come in behind him, but stood at the door as though he was no more than a guard. Alvdan had found himself relying more and more on that man recently, what with troubles in the Lowlands and similar. He reserved his own main attention for this, though: the Mosquito’s ritual that would elevate him beyond the misery of his father and his grandfather, and remove from him the one blight that had constantly mocked his reign and stolen his joy.

The matter of his succession: which potential traitor, from a nest of venomous things, should he take to his bosom, or even breed himself? His successor, the heir that would stand like an executioner beside his throne as soon as the child was born or the decision made. But if Uctebri’s ritual should achieve its impossible end, he need never worry about his successor again, because he would need none. He would live for ever.