He witnessed the sting-blast that felled Jemeyn, the man pitching back to trip the two following behind him, but of the shot that then struck Nero himself he saw nothing at all.

Axrad was very nearly too quick for her, his striped orthopter darting out from beneath the barrels of her rotaries and dancing along the length of the Starnest. Taki’s heart was heavy as stone. She had known Scobraan a long time and, although they had not always had kind words for each other, they had never been enemies. The Esca Volenti dived after Axrad, jinking with him, her aim creeping inexorably on to him.

Elsewhere, across the sky over Solarno, there were tens of private duels. Niamedh’s beautiful, sleek Executrix drove into a Wasp fixed-wing and forced it down into one of the carrier blimps, propellers shredding the cumbersome dirigible’s airbag. Drevane Sae’s jewelled dragonfly stooped on the streets of Solarno, the city of his lifelong enemies, his arrows picking off Wasp officers who were trying to organize the defence on the ground. The ugly, blunt-nosed Bleakness, constant scourge of the Exalsee, fired its broadside banks of shrapnel-casters at anything that came close, even as the Bleakness itself closed towards the great overhanging canopy of the Starnest.

Axrad’s flier was abruptly beyond the great dirigible’s frame, and it dropped out of sight instantly. Taki cursed, pulled up and high, knowing that, in his position, she would have then looped round the airship’s hull in order to meet her enemy. She was right, and he came back into view even as she was poised at the point of her dive, his fleet, agile ship leaping into sight for an ambush that she had not been fool enough to fall for. Instead he rose now to meet her, and she fell upon him, and their weapons began to blaze at the same time.

Two bolts clipped her hull, then a third smashed the window of her cockpit and clipped her shoulder, enough to make her tug on the stick without intention. She dragged her goggles down over her face against the blasting air, while Axrad’s undamaged vessel passed over her so close that their beating wingtips touched.

In the instant she was spiralling away, fighting to get back on the level, and she knew that he must be wrestling for just the same goal, and then the Esca was hers again and she swung back towards Axrad, towards the Starnest, seeing him find his place and commence a mirror-image move.

He had killed Scobraan, and who knew how many others, but he was a pilot to reckon with and she could not take that from him.

Elsewhere, the Creev’s Nameless Warrior danced with three Wasp orthopters. The halfbreed slave, the finest pilot of Chasme, had a ballista bolt jammed through his leg, pinning him to his weakening hull, though he barely felt it. He had no Art-flight anyway, and if his ship died, so would he. His rotaries, four of them, spat out their bolts, and span together about one axis to make a storm of shot, smashing one Wasp flier entirely, shredding its wings to ribbons, leaving a punctured carcase of its hull. He was faltering, though, his body and ship both wearing thin. He would die above his enemies’ city unmourned and unseen by any save for the Wasp that would bring him down – but not yet. He had some killing left to do before the end.

Axrad was now flying straight, and Taki knew that he would soon end it one way or the other. The Esca was shaking in unfamiliar ways: the poor ship had taken her share of beatings in this fight.

She pulled the trigger even as Axrad did, and she saw furrows raking into his hull before her rotary jammed altogether, and his shots slammed into the Esca’s undercarriage.

Oh.

She must dive aside now, but when she did he would find his place behind her, and then she would be lost. Another shot lanced past her, through the broken cockpit, heading for the engine casing.

She counted. Three bolts passed her by and one tore straight through the flesh of her arm. She screamed.

Taki pulled the release, and the broken frame of the cockpit fell away, and she kicked up, despite the pain, letting her wings flower.

Axrad pulled up at the very last moment, pulled up late because he had been so determined to bring her down that he had not realized he had already succeeded.

She was nearly caught between the two craft. Only a Fly-kinden’s swift reflexes saved her as the empty, abused Esca Volenti drove straight into Axrad’s flier, their wings snarling instantly, the Esca’s nose snapping on Axrad’s underside and then breaking through.

She did not notice if he was able to fly clear, as the two dying ships span madly down towards the earth.

She had a dagger, and the Starnest, which blotted out her sky, was very large, but even so it was all right because someone else had a larger blade than that.

She should have known that Hawkmoth, the old pirate, had preyed on airships before. Who knew how many he had assailed in the sky, and sent plummeting down to the Exalsee, where his shipbound confederates would be waiting? Over the Starnest’s taut canvas the Bleakness dipped low, a black and evil-looking flying machine, armoured and squat, with all the natural grace of a scarab in flight. From beneath it had unsheathed two curving blades, each the length of a man. There was no subtlety in it. The pirate simply threw his machine against the airbag and unseamed it, from stern to fore, with twin gashes seventy feet from end to end.

At first it seemed that even this had not affected this pride of the Wasp airforce, but then the difference told, the lighter gas venting out from the violated compartments, until the colossal bulk of the Starnest was dipping, sagging, and then falling down upon the city it had been sent to conquer.

He would not come to bed. Stenwold, instead, sat at his desk with reports and maps and tried to make sense of it.

‘You must sleep, surely,’ Arianna urged him. She was standing at the door to his study, wrapped in a robe of his that was vastly too large for her. ‘Stenwold, they will want you on the walls again tomorrow.’

‘And I shall go,’ he said. She noticed his hands were shaking. ‘Look at all this they have given me. The curse of this city is paper! We have a war on, and every man feels he must put it down on paper for me to read!’

‘Then don’t read them,’ she said. ‘They’ll tell you nothing you don’t already know.’

‘But there might be something,’ he said. ‘How could I go to the wall tomorrow knowing that I might have missed the one thing, the flaw, the gap…’ His fists clenched.

She approached him, put her hands on his shoulders. ‘Stenwold, please, come to bed.’

His whole frame was shaking. ‘What am I going to do?’ he demanded.

‘Sten… We fought the Vekken, didn’t we?’

‘The Empire aren’t the Vekken. Their general even told me as much, but I didn’t listen. The Vekken never hit us this hard so soon. The Vekken had not so many men who could just leap over our walls. I have lost…’ He choked. ‘I have lost one man in three of my own command already, after just two days’ full fighting. We cannot hold them.’

‘But-’

He blundered up out of his chair with a cry of rage and anguish, turning the entire desk over, scattering papers across the room. His face was distraught. She recoiled from him and he smashed a fist into a wall.

‘In the Amphiophos they are already talking about surrender,’ he said, staring at the plaster where he had just cracked it. ‘They are already saying that we only managed to hold off the Vekken until Teornis came to save us. They say that, and it is true. But who will save us this time, Arianna? We have spread this war across all the enemy. We… I made sure that the wasps would fight on all fronts: here, Sarn, the Commonweal, Solarno, the Spider-lands. Now we pay the cost! Who do we call on when our own walls shake? There is nobody!’