Totho felt a lump in his throat at that. She knows very well that they cannot hold against the Wasps, not forever. The time would come, in the normal course of this fight, when they would accept whatever terms were offered them. Totho guessed that Maczech herself would be dead by that point.

‘Your city is free,’ he said quietly.

‘And will remain so as long as we draw breath,’ she declared, turning away.

‘Your city is free,’ he repeated.

Man by man, a silence fell on the Szaren’s little command-room. Maczech and her officers turned their heads, one by one, until they were all staring at him.

‘Explain yourself, halfbreed,’ she said.

He felt himself start to shake, ever so slightly, at the thought of having to put it into words. ‘The Wasps are defeated. The Szaren garrison, I mean. Not the Empire, just those here.’

Someone snorted in amusement, but Maczech’s face remained stern. ‘Some Rekef trick,’ she said slowly, ‘though I cannot see what it is supposed to achieve. Just waste our precious time, perhaps.’

‘Send a flier,’ Totho said. ‘Send a flier over the governor’s palace. High over, and he must not land.’

‘A trap,’ one of the officers decided.

‘For one scout?’ Maczech narrowed her eyes, trying to see past Totho’s face to the thoughts contained behind it. ‘Send one of the Fly-kinden. They see best in the dark.’

‘But-’

‘Please,’ she said, a calm word, without force, that silenced the man and sent him running to fetch a messenger.

‘I think you are mad,’ she told Totho. ‘Either a deceiver, or mad.’

He nodded tiredly. ‘You may be right.’ Abruptly his legs buckled and he fell to his knees. Something inside him was building, a pressure that he could not release. He shuddered, feeling the bile rise within him.

‘Is he ill?’ someone asked, and someone else called out for a doctor.

‘There was a woman with us named Kaszaat,’ Totho said. ‘She was of your people. But she died.’ His words were almost too quiet for them to hear. ‘That is why I have done what I did.’ It was not true, of course, or not wholly true. Some of the reason that he had done it would make sense only to Drephos.

‘Get him some water, at least,’ Maczech ordered, and a moment later Totho found himself holding a clay cup. He sipped and it tasted stale, chemical. He shuddered again. Meanwhile, around him, aside from the two Bee-kinden guards watching him with axes in their hands, the war council proceeded. He put his face in his hands, waiting.

Eventually the scout came back. Totho’s only fear had been that curiosity would tempt the Fly in to land, but she had kept to her orders, a middle-aged woman who barely reached past Maczech’s waist. On her return she looked unsteady, unsure of herself.

‘Report,’ Maczech instructed her, but the Fly had to swallow twice before she could say anything.

‘I saw… there are some Wasp soldiers leaving the city. I counted perhaps a few hundred, mostly in small groups.’ She glanced at Totho, and her eyes looked haunted.

Maczech was frowning. ‘What is this?’ she asked.

The Fly held up a hand. ‘Nothing else,’ she said, and then forced the words out of herself. ‘There was nothing else moving behind the Wasp lines.’

‘Well, they are asleep?’ started one of the officers, but the Fly broke in immediately.

‘I saw bodies. Bodies of sentries, of men stationed beside the artillery. Nothing else. There was a kind of… haze over the palace… a yellow haze.’

‘What is this?’ Maczech demanded again, but this time addressing Totho. The guards hauled him to his feet, and she saw something in his face that took her a step back. ‘What have you done?’ she whispered.

‘All gone,’ Totho replied. He thought of the effort, to haul those heavy kegs into the governor’s palace, until he had three of them stacked in an upper storeroom, six in another on the ground floor, four in the barracks itself. One of the guards had even offered to help him, but he had refused. It was trained artificer work, he had explained.

I had to do it with my own hands. That way I can blame nobody else, not Kaszaat and certainly not Drephos.

He felt a hand grip his chin, drag his face around until he was looking into Maczech’s eyes.

‘What has happened?’ she asked him. ‘Tell me clearly. Please.’

‘All the Wasps are gone,’ he said simply. ‘The whole garrison is dead. Except a few who must have been too far away from it.’ Her eyes still held him and he continued. ‘It was their own weapon, that they were going to use against you.’ So simple it had been, with those kegs, to rig explosive charges with a clockwork timer, and then creep out of the garrison again. Only small charges, ones you’d barely hear.

‘That’s impossible,’ one of the Bees said. ‘That means thousands of soldiers.’

‘Yes,’ said Totho, feeling the shakes return. ‘And auxillians, and servants and slaves, and beasts. But they’re all dead now. The city’s yours.’ He choked on the next thought before he could add, ‘Except for the palace and garrison quarters. I wouldn’t go there for at least a month. Maybe two months, just to be sure. And maybe you should draw your people away from your barricades, just in case. Put a few streets’ clear space between you and… it. It’s too heavy to drift far in the wind, but even so…’

They were all staring at him now and he saw that they were beginning to believe him. With believing came not triumph but a kind of stunned horror.

‘We never wanted this,’ Maczech said hollowly, shaking her head. ‘We wanted our freedom back. Was that so wrong? We wanted to drive them away, so that we could live in our city in peace. How has this happened? What have you done?’

The Bee-kinden were shuffling away from him, as though what he had become might be contagious somehow. They looked on him and saw an atrocity, a destroyer beyond their capacity to comprehend. An entire army dead in one night, with not a blow struck, not a battle-cry – just a small detonation and a slight yellowing of the air. Their expressions suggested that he, Totho of Collegium, had become an abomination.

He could not help but agree with them.

Major Krellac considered his options, none of which appealed to him.

He was a dutiful officer, who had never been considered anything other than dependable by his superiors. That was why they had given him the Myna relief force, where his orders would be straightforward, the tactical position simple. Colonel Gan had despatched him from Szar with strict instructions.

The situation had changed, however. He was conscious now of being a man confronted with history, a man whose name, for better or worse, would be remembered.

For worse seemed undeniably more likely, whatever course he chose.

On the one hand he had his orders: they were to enter the city of Myna, relieve the besieged garrison and put down the rebellion. Implied in that was his triumphant return to Szar, where Colonel Gan and the rest of the higher command would be celebrating their own swiftly anticipated victory over the local insurgents. There was no ambiguity in Krellac’s situation insofar as his orders went.

His scouts had just come back from Myna reporting that there was no garrison left to relieve. Krellac’s forces had been joined by almost half a thousand Wasp soldiers lucky enough to escape the city, and many of them were too badly shaken to even make proper report on the disposition of the enemy. Instead of catching the resistance in a pincer, he was presented with a battered but unified city. Colonel Gan had given him a siege train so, if necessary, he could pound down the city gates and fight the Mynans street to street, but that was not what his orders had detailed and he was unhappy about it.