The captain was interesting company, she could not deny: not so much for himself, but for what he was. At first she had thought of him as just like any of the self-important grandees of Collegium she had met with, for where was the difference between this soldier and an Ant commander or Beetle officer of the watch? To begin with, she thought she had the measure of his type. As their conversation progressed, however, as he opened up and they drifted from the common room towards his chambers, she sensed a jag of iron there. He spoke a lot of the world, the Empire, his family’s status back home, his future plans. The word he spoke most was ‘mine’. Tynisa was already quite used to her beaus boasting of their material possessions, their clothes, their investments and their property, but Halrad spoke exactly the same way about people, about cities, about concepts. He spoke in proprietary terms about literally everything, and when he said ‘my future’ he did not mean just the future in store for him, but the future that he would eventually own and control. In this way, she realized, he spoke for his entire people. He was the Empire in microcosm and she was fascinated.

And then they drank wine: he more than he realized and herself less than he thought. She asked him how he liked the Lowlands. ‘Potential,’ he decided. ‘You have many things here that we do not.’ His meaning, even in the words left unspoken, was clear. Some of those things would be cast aside by the Wasps, others possessed. Possessed as he possessed his rank and the soldiers who obeyed him because of it. Possessed as he had villas now in two conquered cities, and possessed the slaves who served in them.

Tynisa herself had not grown up, as most Spider-kinden would, with slaves at her beck and call. Beetle-kinden were resolutely proud about not keeping slaves: the trade was immoral, they said, and besides, paid servants worked harder. Even so, she knew that her own heritage was built on slaves’ backs, that Ants still bred slaves in their cities, that the concept of slavery was hardly new. She would certainly not have wished Halrad for a master, and he seemed milder than most of his breed. One night, deep in his cups, he told her about a rebellion in Myna, the same town Stenwold had named. His slaves, he explained, had been implicated in the revolt. He had to have them killed, he said casually, but there were always other slaves available. Ants and Spiders would kill their slaves for the same reason, she was sure, but they would at least have been executing those they considered human beings. For Halrad it was just casting aside a piece of broken property, nothing more sentimental than that.

They were now five days and five nights into the Sky Without’s voyage, passing over rivers, hills, bandits and badlands with the ponderous grace of an aging matron. He had wanted to sleep with Tynisa, of course, but she was adept at putting that off: the effect of the drink, the lateness of the hour, and her own ineluctable talent for finding good cause to slip away. She kept him lusting, but even so, she was beginning to feel herself come under his proprietary aegis, realizing that she herself was, in his eyes, already his. That could cause problems later, unfortunately.

She had not ventured anything so crass as, ‘So what are your plans?’ but she had always kept a deft hand on the tiller of the conversation. She knew that he had been sent to find a certain man, a Beetle-kinden from the College, and that Halrad had already dismissed this mission as futile, blaming his superiors for the waste of time, for sending him too soon back to grimy Helleron. He assured her that the Wasps were in Collegium simply because it had been marked for them as the cultural centre of the Lowlands. In matters of learning and understanding, everyone looked to Collegium, and the Wasps wished to understand. He never completed this thought with, ‘… because we are going to invade you,’ but it was there on his face, shining like a star, when he thought he had so cleverly hidden it.

Stenwold had been right in all particulars, and he had escaped the net as well. She found she was impressed and now she wondered, how much of her own string-pulling was inherent in her blood, how much she might have picked up, unknowing, from her foster-father.

Salma had been waiting, knowing it would happen. It could have happened anywhere, even in the common room. He knew they were not subtle, and that they had made plans the moment they had seen him.

In the event, it was a corridor on the stateroom deck, two of them suddenly blocking his path. They still wore their armour, with metal plates alternating in black and gold from throat to knee, tapering down from the waist. These were the light airborne, and his eye quickly noted each place where they were exposed: arms, legs, sides, face. These Wasps were equipped strictly for speed and flight.

Yet, they were bigger than he was, and there were two of them.

‘Didn’t think we’d see your kind here, Wealer,’ the first one began.

Salma raised an eyebrow politely.

‘On the run? Sinking ship? Is that it?’ the soldier pressed on. His comrade said nothing, just watched him. His fists were barbed, two bony hooks curving from their backs.

Salma just smiled. He had only his under-robe on, but he keenly felt the weight of his sheathed sword inside it. He was poised, taut as wire within, yet outside he seemed without a care.

‘Or maybe he’s a spy,’ the soldier said to his comrade. ‘Wealer spy, where he’s not wanted.’

‘Never wanted,’ the other man said.

‘Don’t think it’ll do them much good,’ the first said. ‘Spies or no spies, we’re coming back here, Wealer.’ He stepped in close, trying to bulk out as large as he could before Salma, but the Dragonfly stayed put, his smile one of utter unconcern.

‘I myself killed a lot of your kind,’ the soldier continued, low and slow. ‘Not proper war, though. Your lot don’t even know how to fight a proper war. Ants, Bees, even Flies put up a better fight.’

Still smiling, Salma glanced brightly from him to his colleague. ‘Sorry, gentlemen, do you have a point?’

‘Yes we’ve got a point!’ the soldier snapped. ‘Our point is, that if you think this is far enough to run, think again! We’re coming, Wealer. We’re coming to your lands and we’re coming here too!’

There was a silence then, in which Salma’s smile only broadened. It was quiet enough to hear a scuff of feet from behind, as the two Beetle merchants who had appeared in the doorway of their stateroom backed off a little, staring.

The soldier who had been speaking backed away from Salma instantly, teeth bared and fists clenched so hard the knuckles were white. The other just went for him, though – scoring the barbs on his hands through the air where Salma had just been. The Dragonfly was already two steps further back and turned side on, waiting. He had not drawn his blade, but his hands were up, palms out and ready. He saw a flicker in his opponent’s eyes: clearly he had seen Dragonflies fight unarmed before.

Even so the Wasp would have tried his luck, but his comrade, so talkative before, was now dragging him away. They had seriously broken orders, Salma guessed, but then he had heard it from a hundred throats that the one thing one could do so easily with the Wasp-kinden was provoke them.

Those engineers were a pragmatic lot. Where the metal met, as the saying went, there was little room for politics. When Totho had convinced them that he knew his trade they had let him in readily, his birth notwithstanding. He had always known how mechanics and engineers, all the grades and trades of artificers, kept an occult and inward society hidden away from laymen. This was his first taste of it: a dozen grimy, cursing men and women who regarded their human cargo as no more than freight that complained, and the airship’s master and crew as mere ornament, but who themselves worked every hour each day sent, and kept the Sky Without aloft as surely as if they were carrying it on their shoulders.