Che peered straight ahead and blanked her mind of anything now but flying the machine to safety. She forced herself to keep the flier level and would worry about Salma later. Still, that sight of Salma, vaunting in the air with his sword gleaming in the sunlight, was something that would not readily leave her.

Salma toyed with the other Wasp, darting in and out, hovering where the soldier could only lumber after him through the air. Then the Dragonfly was gone and past him. As the Wasp turned, spitting a bolt of sting-energy at his taunter, Totho shot the man in the back with enough force to slam the steel head of the bolt right through his chest.

There were three further specks in the sky out there, insignificant now beside the receding bulk of the Sky Without. For a moment Salma wanted to go after them too, to dance amongst them in the sky and to take them if he could. His ancestors and his fallen kin were calling for him to do so, urging him to test himself.

But he was not a man alone. He had others he was responsible for. Stenwold had known, when he gave them this task, that Salma was no callow youth but had experience enough not to indulge himself.

Fast though he was, he had to push himself to catch up with the fixed-wing, and that meant the Wasp pursuers would never overtake it. He caught hold of a wing, pulled himself forward into the arms of Tynisa and Totho as he released his Art and his wings flickered and vanished from his back. He discovered that he was panting heavily after the brief flight, shamefully out of practice. Tynisa was giving him a wondering look. Totho’s expression was just relief that it was all over.

‘Which way to Helleron?’ he called. ‘Can we get there in this thing?’

Che glanced back and grinned at him. ‘I’ve taken a compass reading already,’ she said. ‘If we’ve got enough fuel we’ll make it. Otherwise it might mean a bit of a walk.’

She brought the fixed-wing down still some distance from Helleron because, from the noise the engine was making, it would not have been able to carry them much further. Landing was, she now discovered, distinctly the trickiest part of the flight. Or at least the flier itself did not enjoy it. When it finally ground to a halt while traversing the furrows of some farmer’s field, it had lost half a wing and the stabilizers from the front.

On solid ground at last, Che took a deep breath. That had been a harrowing experience, white knuckles clamped on the sticks, staring into the blue while trying to coax as much distance out of the craft as it could give her. She was glad to be travelling on nothing more challenging than her own two feet once again. Still… in a strange way she had enjoyed it. Beetles might possess the grace of stone blocks when the Art allowed them wings, but their artifice could make up for that sometimes.

‘Everybody in one piece?’ she called back, to a chorus of grumbles as her passengers began to extricate themselves from the mortally wounded flier.

The wronged farmer, whom they encountered shortly thereafter, told them that they were still about a day’s journey from Helleron, further away than they had hoped. He was not the coarse-handed rustic that they had been expecting. This close to Helleron even the sons of the soil saw a great deal of the Lowlands culture passing by. They offered him the salvage rights to the fixed wing and Tynisa haggled languidly with him until they had secured transport to the nearest thoroughfare, as well as a few provisions and clothes. The latter, she explained, would be important since the Sky Without would doubtless be at berth at Helleron’s airfield by the time they reached the city, and the Wasps would be out in force looking for them. Disguise would therefore be crucial, as they waited for Bolwyn at Benevolence Square.

‘Why do we think the Wasps are all over Helleron, then?’ Che asked.

‘Their agents will be,’ Tynisa said confidently. ‘The Wasps have had a good while now to put them in place. We need to find Bolwyn as quickly as possible, and then step well out of sight.’

Helleron crept up over the horizon like a looming black tide. The road they were following was a jostling two-way stream of travellers feeding the city’s eternal hunger for buying and selling. There were hand-carts and travelling tinkers laden with their packs; there were wagons drawn by horses or by great insects, mostly slow and patient beetles that could muscle along all day if need be. A few mounted wayfarers passed by too, either horse-borne or on bug-back. Much of the traffic was mechanical though, they noted, for Helleron was the centre of the artificing world, and its wandering children would return there in droves.

They watched the city come near from their perch on the hood of a great grain-hauling automotive trundling along on six metal legs – looking more like a beetle than those insects themselves. None of them had fully appreciated the concept of Helleron as the Lowlands’ epicentre of industry. They had envisaged something like Collegium but with a few more factories and without the elegant white buildings of the College.

But Helleron was vast, extending half again Collegium’s size, the greatest single city in all the Lowlands. It sprawled and it was dirty: whether its buildings had been raised of dark stone or not, they had been overlaid, day after day, with the grime of the city’s foundries and workshops. There was a pall in the very air, as though the visitors were gazing on the place through smoked glass. A hundred hundred chimneys gouted it out continually, their narrow windows aglare with forge-fire.

It was built on two scales, the city. The factories were huge grubs, extended and extended, comprising mazes of workrooms, storerooms and vehicle yards. Up on the western hills, where the air was clearer, there were mansions built as grandiose statements in stone, telling about their owners’ profits and losses. Between these hulks, however, swarmed the masses. The buildings that housed the workers of Helleron were crammed together, squeezed tight, beside and under and over, as though jostling for position beside the mighty flanks of their masters. The whole complexity was shot through with silver: the rails that were Helleron’s breath and blood, shuttling men and machines, crew and commodities, across the breadth of the city, north to the mines or south part-way to the Ant city of Tark. It seemed at first glance that the rails’ silver lacework was the only passage through the city. The walls of the buildings seemed so crammed together that surely not even the smallest insect could have crept between them.

They watched the sheer enormity of it grow and approach them across the distance. Even Totho, that champion of industry, was humbled.

‘Are we even going to be able to find this Benevolence Square?’ he asked.

‘Uncle Sten said it was near the airfield – which is over there.’ Across a cleared area of land the pale blister of the Sky Without was clearly visible. Che shaded her eyes, thinking for a moment that she might be able to discern some details, some dabs of black and gold, but she had forgotten the Sky’s great bulk. It was still further away than she realized.

Closer still, and they at last saw that there was indeed breathing space, even open space, in Helleron, but none of it had been left alone. There were squares, but they were roofed by the canvas of countless traders’ stalls, or else thronging with swarms of citizens. There were alleys and roads, but half of them were concealed under overarching buildings, the opposite sides of streets leaning in to turn a thoroughfare into a tunnel for the sake of a few extra square yards of living space in their upper storey. And where there were gaps between the buildings, these gaps were filled with people.

‘No outer walls,’ Salma said quietly. They turned to look at him in puzzlement and he gestured. It was plain to see, when you looked out for it. Helleron’s very commerce apparently made it proof against invasion – or so went the theory writ large in its streets. Helleron free was of greater use to all the rest of the world than Helleron chained would be to anyone.