‘It’s a suicide detail, Your Majesty.’

The Queen’s lips twitched. ‘That is not exactly how my people would describe it – but a desperate assignment, certainly. I will send a Lorn detachment to Collegium. Solidarity should demand more, but no more can I afford to give. Three battle automotives with crew, though I can ill spare them.’ She turned to the Fly messenger. ‘Master Frezzo?’

He stood forward. ‘Your Majesty?’ He looked pale, and when he risked a glance at Che she saw her own distress mirrored in his face.

‘It was you brought me the news of the Vekken army from Collegium,’ the Queen told him. ‘Now you must take this reply back, though one that I am loath to make. The Vekken will almost certainly be at the walls by the time you arrive.’

‘It will present no difficulty, Your Majesty,’ Frezzo said firmly. Che knew that he had the honour of his guild to uphold.

‘Then go,’ the Queen ordered him, and he saluted her and ran from the room. The ruler of Sarn turned back to Che and her companions. ‘You may stay here or you may leave,’ she told them. ‘Save that there is no safe passage guaranteed to Collegium any more.’

‘Someone should go with the Lorn automotives,’ Scuto said.

‘It is your choice.’

‘Then it should be me,’ Che decided. ‘Stenwold is my uncle.’

‘You and Achaeos need to continue your work here,’ Scuto advised her. ‘It’s looking more important all the time. Stenwold’s going to need me, though. A War Master indeed? You know how he is, always forgetting himself and playing soldier.’

‘Scuto, no-’ started Sperra.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Your Majesty, I’ll go. I’m an artificer and I never knew an automotive that couldn’t use another decent pair of hands.’

‘Scuto!’ Che reached for his arm but stopped just short of the spines.

‘Che, listen to me,’ Scuto insisted. ‘Stenwold is going to need to know what’s going on here, and I don’t just mean what that messenger can tell him. What’s going on with your work – stuff I wouldn’t trust to paper. I’m our best bet. I’ll be a good hand on the automotives, and I’m tough as a bastard. Remember the Pride, when it went up? Think you’d be standing here if my hide weren’t between you and that mess? And yet here I am, healthy as anything.’

‘You had better bloody be right about that,’ Sperra hissed. ‘Nobody as ugly as you was meant to be a hero.’

Salma opened his eyes to sunlight, and for a brief moment he thought it was her.

Then he recalled. The Broken Sword. Himself being smuggled out of the Wasp camp. He was about to sit up hurriedly, but remembered his wounds and eased himself up with care. The injuries tugged less than before, and he felt stronger. Looking around he saw Nero sitting close.

The Fly nodded to him. ‘You’re looking better than you have for a while.’

‘Where are we now?’ Propping himself up with one arm was about all he could manage, however improved he might look. Salma looked around, seeing a scrubby hollow and a dozen or so other people. There were a few feeble fires going, and an earth mound that smelled like bread, and that he realized must therefore be a scratch-built oven. ‘What’s going on, Nero? Who are these people?’

‘They’re on the run, like us,’ Nero said. He pointed out a mismatched trio in Ant-style tunics: a Spider, a Fly and a Kessen Ant. ‘They’re slaves who got out from the city before it surrendered-’

‘Tark surrendered?’

Nero grimaced. ‘I suppose you never heard. You never saw, either. The Wasps… they just took the city apart from the air, like your friend said they would do, until the Ants knew there was nothing for it but to give up, or to see Tark rubbed from the map. That’s how they deal with Ant-kinden, apparently. Anyway, those three were lucky enough to make a run for it, and now they’ve got nothing – just like the rest of us. As for them-’ He indicated the woman tending the oven, who had three small children holding close to her skirt. ‘They used to farm at a waterhole on the Dryclaw edge. Now Tark’s gone, though, the Scorpions are raiding unchecked, and there are dozens of little farmsteads, and whole villages, that are getting attacked and left burnt out. She thinks her husband might be alive, but he’s a slave of the Scorpions if he is, and being dead might be better.’

There were half a dozen young Fly-kinden sitting close together at the lip of the hollow, staring suspiciously at all the others. ‘They were slaves of the Wasps,’ Scuto identified them. ‘I get the impression they were a gang of some kind, probably from Seldis. They sell off their criminals down Seldis way. Anyway, they’re completely lost. They know the Wasps are going to take Merro and Egel, and they don’t want to go back to the Spiderlands in a hurry, and so they’re pretending they’re not part of our troupe here, but they’re sticking around all the same. And the gentleman and ladies behind you…’

Salma made the laborious effort of turning himself over to look. There was a covered cart there, he now saw, and a bearded man seated on the footboard was carving something in wood. A girl of around twelve was stretched out across the back of their draft-animal, which was a big, low-bodied beetle with fierce-looking jaws. Another girl of nearly Salma’s age was nearby, picking over the halfhearted bushes for berries. They were all white-haired and tan-skinned, and they wore loose clothes of earth-tones and greens. The older girl sensed Salma’s attention and glanced his way. She had a heart-shaped face and bright eyes, and she smiled timidly at him.

‘Roach-kinden,’ Salma identified them. ‘I didn’t think you had them in the Lowlands, but they roam all over the Commonweal.’

‘And the Empire too, although the Wasps really hate them,’ Nero agreed. ‘Oh they’re not seen much, but I hear they come south past Dorax from the Commonweal into Etheryon, and even down the Helleron-Tark road and west towards Felyal. The Mantis-kinden seem to tolerate them, or so I understand. These poor fools were found by the Wasp army as they were travelling, and a pack of scouts decided to do a little free-range looting. They don’t know what happened to the rest of their family.’

‘Refugees,’ Salma whispered, and he remembered how it had been during the Twelve-Year War. As the Wasps advanced they had displaced hundreds, even thousands, onto the roads of the Commonweal, to be preyed on by bandits or descend to thievery to feed themselves. The Commonweal’s rulers had done their best but there had been the war to fight as well, and the scale of the exodus had been unthinkable.

And now it seemed certain that it would happen here as well.

‘What can we do for them?’ he asked, and Nero laughed harshly.

‘Do? You can’t even stand, boy. What do you expect to do?’

Salma stared at him, and then slowly forced himself up to his knees. His head swam briefly, but he pressed his hands flat on the earth for balance. Whilst Nero looked on uncertainly, he rose slowly, first one foot beneath him, then the next, and then, forcing his legs to obey him, he raised himself upright. Pain shot through him from his wound, but he clenched his teeth and ignored it.

Now he was standing. Nero had stood up, too, hands ludicrously spread to catch a man twice his size.

‘I… can… stand,’ Salma got out, though he had to fight to keep his vision in focus. He knew that he might topple any minute, and placed a hand on Nero’s shoulder to steady himself. ‘Tomorrow, or the next day, I will walk,’ he said. ‘And then I shall be ready to act.’

A man called Cosgren joined the refugees a day or so later. He was a Beetle-kinden, but huge – the largest Salma had ever seen, and monstrously broad across the chest and shoulders. For the first day he was with them he was quiet enough, watching his travelling companions carefully and even fetching wood for a fire. The next day he waited until they were all awake and then addressed them: ‘Right, look at you. You don’t know the first thing about where you’re going, do you? So it’s going to be like this. I’m in charge. And because I’m in charge, I’ll get us to somewhere, but you all better do what I say, and that means I get what I want.’