The halfbreed had been very quiet, very still. He watched Stenwold warily as the old man pulled a scroll case from within his voluminous robe.

‘I had to fight for these, but they’re yours. I know that the Master Artificers have been stinting you, so I’ve made sure you’ve got everything that’s due to you. Your College accredits, Totho. As of now you’re confirmed as a journeyman artificer.’

Haltingly, the youth took the case from him, not even daring to open it. ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘I’m giving these to you now so that you’ll have them, whatever you decide,’ Stenwold explained awkwardly. ‘Just so you know I’m not a blackmailer.’ Though only I know all the things this business has had me do.

‘What would we need to do for you?’ Tynisa interrupted.

‘Difficult to say, right now,’ he admitted. ‘But go to Helleron and ask questions, meet my people there. Collect word as it comes in from the east, and find out what the Wasp foothold in Helleron amounts to. Sound simple enough? Then remember that the Wasp-kinden have agents as well, or can hire them. Our late-night guests were just such an example. You’ll need to keep a blade and a fallback escape plan handy.’ He grimaced. ‘As I said, this isn’t how I wanted it but right now, with what happened last night, I want you safely out of Collegium. Just now it’s more dangerous for you to be with me here, than alone in Helleron. So even if you don’t want to take me up on this suggestion, you should still leave the city.’ He looked from face to face. ‘Any thoughts yet?’

Salma stretched luxuriously, making it all seem like some minor matter, barely worth his attention. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ve already written to my Kin-obligate in the Commonweal. I’ll be a servant of two masters, Master Maker. Two masters with a common enemy.’

‘I can live with that, and you won’t be the first in that position,’ Stenwold said.

‘I want to help, too,’ Che added quickly. ‘I’ll do whatever you need me to.’

Stenwold felt a stab of sadness. I had wanted to keep you from this. But he had no safe place to keep her now, and if the Wasps marched on the Lowlands there might be no such place anywhere.

Tynisa still held her own counsel, but Stenwold saw Totho nod slowly, though not looking too happy about it.

‘I’ll go, sir,’ he said simply, and Stenwold wondered if it was the accredits just received that had made up his mind. Or maybe it was the lure of Helleron’s machines and factories, or something else.

‘Tynisa?’

She smiled at him. ‘Uncle Sten, there are things you aren’t telling us.’

And he thought, Blood will out, because she had seen through him just as sweetly. He was playing a blindfold game that all Spiders knew in their hearts from their earliest years. Here she was in his city, raised amongst his own resolutely practical kind, yet she could still have been a Spider-kinden princess.

‘And some of it I will tell you, if and when you agree, and some of it is not safe yet for you to know.’ And let them brood on why that is.

Tynisa was still looking at him keenly, considering carefully. ‘And you’re going to join us in Helleron?’

‘As soon as I can. When I have closed my business here.’

Her smile changed from the penetrating to the blithe. ‘Why not, then? Let’s all go.’ He wondered how much she had guessed at. Still, he now had their agreement, although he wondered if any of them had given it for the right reason. He was not even sure he would know what that right reason was.

‘So what’s the plan, Uncle Sten?’ Tynisa prompted him.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘before all this blew up I made arrangements for four of us to take the rail as far as Sarn, and go overland from there to Helleron. Sound good?’

‘If there’s no other way of travelling,’ Salma said. The idea of the rail automotive obviously did not sit well with him.

‘As it happens, there is,’ Stenwold confirmed. ‘If all of this was happening a month from now, we’d have the Iron Road to take us direct to Helleron, and damn the expense. However, the promised last hundredweight of track is slow to be laid, and we need to shift promptly. Because of this, by midday you four will be on board the Sky Without, which is leaving for Helleron today.’

‘The Sky Without being some manner of flying boat, as I recall,’ Salma remarked.

‘An airship,’ Totho breathed. ‘Very new. Very large.’

Salma grimaced. ‘Even better.’

‘I will send one of the Messengers Guild to Helleron. It’s about the only way to cover the distance before the Sky does. I’ll let my people know you’re coming. They should be meeting you at Benevolence Square, which is close on the airfield. My chief ally in Helleron goes by the name of Scuto, but the man you’ll meet will be Bolwyn.’

‘Well, Bolwyn’s a good Beetle name. Is Scuto maybe Fly-kinden then?’ Tynisa asked.

‘I’ll… let Bolwyn introduce you,’ said Stenwold non-committally. From inside his robes he fished out a square of folded paper. ‘Here. Keep this safe. This is Bolwyn.’

It was a portrait, a pencil sketch done with a minimum of lines and shading, but still giving a clear picture of a heavy-jawed middle-aged Beetle-kinden man. The signature, in spiky writing at its foot, read ‘NERO’.

‘Any questions?’ Stenwold asked, after they had each taken a turn examining the portrait.

‘Yes, what about you?’ Che asked.

He smiled at her fondly. ‘You’re worried about me?’

‘I am, Uncle Sten, yes.’

‘Why shouldn’t you be?’ he said. ‘A man past his prime, like me? Too great at the waist, too small of strength. A historian better suited to books than the blade. That’s what you think, is it?’

‘Well-’

‘Because that’s what the Wasps think too, I hope.’ Stenwold put on a smile for their benefit, but inside he was thinking, That Thalric, though. I can’t see him falling for it. ‘I’ll be with you in Helleron before you know it,’ he assured them.

He took a good look at them, though, before they all left the taverna by the back entrance. His last agents. His ward, his niece. His chips were on the table now, and he had nothing held back. It was win-all or lose-all on this hand.

I wish I had Tisamon here. Stenwold used to fear nothing when walking in Tisamon’s shadow.

He tipped the Merraia’s owner handsomely for use of the room, and more for telling skewed stories later, about who had come in and who had left where. Those four young people had walked in free and innocent but left with his mark on them. He could make a list of those others who had taken that mark to early graves. Not a great list, true, but he had no more of them he could afford to lose.

He hurried off into the brightening morning light, wondering just how many eyes were fixed on him, how many of the busy crowd were marking his steps.

The airfield lay eastwards and seawards of Collegium, beyond its walls, although smaller airstrips had sprung up within the city wherever the rich magnates could find space for them. The earliest flying machines had been erratic things. The accepted way of getting them off the ground had been to launch them off the promontory beside the harbour, and hope the wind took them before the sea did. The science of aviation had advanced a little since then, of course.

Collegium boasted the largest airfield in all the Lowlands, with Helleron a close second. Beetles and artifice, Beetles and industry, they always went hand in hand. When Ant-kinden built fliers or automotives, they were intended for war. Beetles built them for all purposes, for freight, for exploration, for the sole sake of the mechanics, for simply travelling faster between two points.

Even so, air travel by anything other than Art-wings or a mount was a new thing to the Lowlands. The first reliable flier had been tested here four generations ago, but regular air travel was one generation old at best, and expensive too. Collegium’s airfield had some four dozen fliers arrayed across its hard-packed earth. Each was different, the individual peculiarities of inventor and smithy making their mark. Orthopters, heliopters, even a few fixed-wings, but towering over them was a pair of dirigibles with their inflated gasbags, and towering over them floated the Sky Without.