Totho’s own sword was in his hand, and he crouched behind his bag and waited, peering into the darkness.

‘Who are you?’

‘Good question,’ rasped the voice of the stranger. ‘I’m the one who just saved your life. That good enough for you?’

‘No,’ Totho said firmly.

‘Does the name Stenwold mean anything to you?’ the stranger asked.

‘And if it did, why should I trust you? I’ve… relying on the word of strangers… hasn’t turned out so well recently,’ Totho finally got the words out. In truth he was terrified because he could not see the man at all, but he himself would be silhouetted, just as the Wasps had been.

‘Founder’s mark, boy!’ the stranger snapped impatiently. ‘All right, moment of truth. Blink and you’ll miss it. The name’s Scuto. Did Stenwold at least tell you that much?’

‘Scuto?’

‘Ringing a bell, is it?’

It was, but there was more to consider than that. Founder’s mark. It was an oath Totho had heard from artificers at Collegium who had arrived to study there from Helleron. In truth it meant nothing, for a native Helleren might have been working for either side in this conflict. It was an artificer’s oath, though, and he decided to let its familiarity carry the vote.

‘All right,’ he said, standing up wearily. ‘I’ve got a sword here. I’m not giving it up. If you’ve got somewhere… a bit drier to go, then… well…’ Wearily he shouldered his dripping bag.

‘Good boy,’ came the voice of the stranger. ‘Now you just follow me.’

‘I can’t see you.’

‘Then just walk straight. Ain’t no way out of this alley but the way we’re both going.’

The taverna went by the name of the Merraia, just like the one in Collegium where Stenwold had outlined this ill-fated errand to them. Inside it were three low-ceilinged storeys, with a central open space for the airborne and a rope ladder for the rest. The bottom storey was open to the street on one side, and there Che and Salma took a table where they could watch the traffic.

Unlike the Collegium place, which had been a haunt of the locals, a good half of this taverna’s clientele were Fly-kinden, as though they really had set up a little slice of their warren-city of Merro here in Helleron. Most of the surrounding buildings also seemed to be adapted to that diminutive people’s stature and practices, with ground-floor doors and windows boarded up, high windows added into walls, and probably fallback hatches opening in the roofs.

The other patrons of the taverna were not the sort to ask questions of a pair of fugitives, lest they themselves become the subject of questioning in return. Che saw Beetles, Spiders, halfbreeds, and a few others who must have belonged to kinden she had never encountered before. Each table was the hub of a little business deal, over food and wine and the music of a zither.

‘What are we going to do?’ she asked. Salma shrugged. His customary smile was absent.

‘We have to look for the others,’ she insisted.

‘It’s a big city,’ Salma said. ‘I didn’t even realize cities this big existed. Shon Fhor, heart of the whole Commonweal, isn’t this big. I could fly over this place every day for a year and I’d not see them if they were on a rooftop waving a flag.’

Che opened her mouth, shut it again immediately.

‘Not that I won’t,’ he said. He downed the shallow bowl of wine and refilled it from the jug their host had provided.

‘We need help,’ said Che. ‘Uncle Sten has people here, so if we can only make contact…’

‘Stenwold’s friends are compromised,’ he said seriously. ‘As you saw, they already managed to turn Bolwyn.’

A shiver went through Che’s stomach as she remembered what she had seen, and she put down her own bowl. ‘Salma, I’m going to say something very strange.’

That brought a hint of his smile back at last. ‘That’s something new?’

‘Salma, when I saw Bolwyn, just before everything went wrong, he…’ She put a hand to her forehead, feeling abruptly tired and frightened. ‘He… I thought he… He seemed to…’ She pursed her lips in frustration at her inability to get the thought out. ‘He wasn’t Bolwyn – just for a moment. I know that sounds mad. I just… I can’t explain it. It wasn’t make-up or a mask, and it wasn’t some new Art thing, because…’

‘Because you always know Art when you see it,’ Salma put in for her. ‘Like that thing the Wasps do, with their lightning. That’s Art.’

‘And this wasn’t. It…’ She shuddered. ‘It was horrible. I don’t know what it was.’ Reviewing her last few words she felt abruptly disgusted with herself. ‘I’m sorry, I must have imagined it. There are more important things…’

‘It must have been magic,’ Salma told her.

She laughed. ‘Of course, that’s just what it was. Magic.’

He continued to look at her, his slight smile still there, until she realized that he was being quite serious.

‘Magic?’ she asked him. ‘Salma, no offence, but there’s no such thing as magic. That’s just something that primitive people believe, or at least that people believed in before the revolution. Moth-kinden and that kind of thing, I mean. Come on now, magic?’

‘Primitive people, is it?’ His smile widened. ‘Like my people?’

‘Your people are sophisticated people, civilized people. Or that’s what you’re always telling us.’

He placed a hand on hers across the table, not as a gesture of intimacy but to impress on her the import of his words. ‘I believe in magic, Che. I’ve seen magic done. My Kin-obligate – in the place where I grew up, the prince there had a seer in his privy council who could see into the future.’

‘Salma, it’s easy enough to take a guess at what might happen. It’s a trick for the credulous, really.’

‘I saw him conjure up the soul of a dead man, and question it.’

Now it was her turn to smile. ‘I’m sure that there was a rational explanation. Smoke and mirrors and that kind of thing.’

‘The dead man was my father.’

She stopped whatever was about to come out of her mouth, and instead emptied her bowl of wine.

‘I heard him tell me about the Battle of Shan Real, where he had died. When I later heard the story from a soldier who had been there, it was all absolutely as my father’s shade described it.’

‘But Salma, that old wizard could already have heard it from a soldier as well – maybe someone fleeing the battle, ahead of the rest.’

Neither his gaze nor his smile faltered.

She took a deep breath. ‘I don’t want to offend you, Salma. You’re a friend – the best friend anyone could ask for. You saved my life and my uncle put his trust in you, but I don’t believe in magic. I’m sorry.’

He shrugged. ‘Of course. I won’t tell you about the Silver Faces then, because that wouldn’t change anything.’

‘And why would it change anything?’

He was openly grinning at her now, so that she still could not tell whether he was making fun or not. ‘Oh it’s just a legend, in any case, from long ago. It was said that they could capture your reflection in a mirror, you see. It was said, that way, they could get to look like anyone.’

Che’s stomach twisted again, seeing in her mind’s eye Bolwyn’s shifting face, but she fought it down. I do not believe in magic.

‘They were the very first spies, apparently, and the best,’ Salma continued, voice low like a man telling a ghost story. ‘A secret order of intelligencers. No man could tell them apart from those they copied. They were just a myth, you’ll say, and I’m sure you’re right. True, they’re reported as fact in the chronicles of the Commonweal: from when we used them against our enemies, when our enemies used them against us. But this was long ago, before your revolution, and many strange things are reported in the earliest annals, that no one today, no young Beetle-kinden lass, anyway, would ever credit.’ He laughed at her expression that, behind its attempted defiance, now had a small child’s wide-eyed awe at the inexplicable. ‘Remember, your revolution never reached us, so we’re just ignorant primitives.’