‘It’s impossible to tell if you’re being serious.’

‘I hope so,’ he agreed. ‘Now, how are we going to track down Tynisa and Totho?’

‘Well, unless you can just magic them out of your robe,’ Che said, a little archly, ‘then I had better hunt down my relatives in Helleron, because they’ll know this city so at least they can help us look.’

It was a slum that Totho was led to. There was no other word for it. The skyline was dominated by the smokestacks of a factory whose long, uneven bulk rambled from here all the way down to the river. There were no windows in the pitted expanse of wall that now faced them, though huddled up to that blind countenance were hundreds of crooked little homes. Each had been built from whatever was ready to hand: wood, stone, brick and pieces of metal made each one an individual eyesore. There was no plan to them, either individually or in their general arrangement. The pathways between them were crooked, in-turning, shadowed both by the shacks and by the looming factory. The ground was little more than mud, under which fragmented cobbles occasionally shifted enough to twist an ankle.

Totho guessed that much of the slum’s populace must be out working, perhaps in that very factory, but there were still plenty of people about to watch him pass. Many were children, all thin and dirty, all staring at him. He had expected to be accosted, asked for money, but they kept their distance. He realized this was because his sword was still in his hand and, after that realization, it stayed there.

Depressingly, a large number of these people were halfbreeds. Most were Ant-Beetle crosses, just like himself, but there were some he could not even begin to identify, the mongrel results of a succession of taboo unions, or perhaps the get of kinden he did not yet know.

The adults he saw were evidently not interested in legal employment. One and all they gave him a level, assessing stare, but they had seen his guide and let him be. His guide was well known, even in shrouded outline.

Totho himself had already been given enough chance to study that uneven form. The man made a great show of his awkward, rapid shambling gait, but Totho noticed the way the cloak was pushed up and outwards by whatever was hidden underneath, and guessed this man was wearing armour, something outlandish and irregular, like some flashy prize-fighter. None of this made Totho happy about the present deal but if he stopped following now he would be lost, and then he would rapidly be prey.

His guide turned abruptly aside and went over to a door in one of the sloping shacks. A quick fumble with a key and he was inside, holding the door open and gesturing for Totho to follow him. Follow he did, but not without qualms and a close grip on his sword.

There was precious little light inside, and his benefactor seemed to have instantly disappeared. It was only when the back wall started to glow softly that he realized it was only a drape, with a lamp now lit behind it. He pushed his way carefully past the curtain.

‘Nine,’ said the voice of his guide as he did so. ‘Nine separate buildings.’ It answered his question.

From the outside this small terrace of ramshackle huts had looked no different from the others. On the inside it was revealed as all one, a single dwelling. The contours were, of necessity, irregular, and there were no internal walls, just posts to keep the undulating ceiling where it should be. More hanging drapes of hessian and wool were all his host had to differentiate sleeping quarters from kitchen, storeroom from workshop. Workshop?

Totho stared. Of all the things he had thought of on entering that door, it was not this, and yet here was something as familiar to him as his own name. Most of the floorspace was given over to benches on which half a dozen mechanisms had been anatomied for repair. Between the benches he recognized a big upright grinder, a bandsaw, a set of optic lenses and a punch-press. It was almost like coming home.

‘I took you for the type,’ his host remarked, and Totho snapped from his reverie. In his fascination he had almost forgotten the man existed.

‘Thank you for…’ He had decided to trust this man, and then, turning to look at him, he choked on his words. Scuto had cast his cloak back and he was indeed wearing armour, but it was an old leather breastplate that had been crudely cut to fit him. The rest of his shape was entirely his own.

As a child back in Collegium, Totho had watched puppet shows on occasion, and even then he had been more interested in how it was done than in the stories and jokes. There had been one puppet that turned up in most of them which was known as the Malefactor and existed to get other puppets into trouble and so start off the plot. It had a great hooked nose that almost met its upward-curving chin, and Scuto looked just like that long-remembered manikin. Between nose and chin his mouth appeared as a crooked line in skin that was nut-brown and slightly shiny, and above the nose his eyes were small and suspicious. He was frankly hideous. It was not even the face that made him so, or the hunched back, for he bristled everywhere with curving spikes. There were small ones the size of fish hooks, and others as long as knife blades, and they sprouted from him at random and all over. His breastplate, his very garments, were roughly cut to avoid these, but still his tunic was darned a hundred times over, and ripped even so. It was a wonder, Totho thought helplessly, that this man had not cut himself to ribbons.

‘Yeah, well,’ Scuto said sourly. ‘You ain’t a picture yourself, halfbreed.’ He shuffled over to one of the benches and put down his crossbow. It was a sleek repeater with a high magazine at the top, holding ten quarrels at least.

‘I- I’m sorry but…’ Even the sight of the crossbow could not keep Totho’s attention off the man himself.

‘But what, halfway? I’m a pureblood, me.’ Scuto’s smile showed barbed snaggle-teeth. ‘You don’t get so many of my kind down here, but the Empire knows us. They can’t stand us. Wonder why. Thorn Bug-kinden, that’s me, so live with it.’

‘You mean there’s…’

‘More of us?’ Scuto actually cackled, which improved his appearance not one bit. ‘Way north of here, boy, there’s more of us than anyone could sensibly want. And you know the real killer? There ain’t one of us quite like the other. You look on me, and you see a real ugly bug. Well that’s what I see in the mirror, boy, and that’s what I see when I look at all my folk.’

Totho nodded. ‘I think I can… understand that.’

‘Bet you can, you being a hybrid boy and all.’ Scuto looked him up and down, from a vantage point focused around Totho’s chest. ‘So, you going to admit to being one of Stenwold Maker’s little helpers?’

‘I suppose I am.’ At this point it didn’t seem that there was much point denying it.

‘That bag there says you’re an artificer, boy. You just carrying it for someone else, or can you do something useful with your life?’

‘I’ve received my accredits from the Great College,’ Totho said with pride.

‘Don’t mean squat to me, boy. Till you show me you can do something, you ain’t no artificer to me.’

‘Oh really?’ Totho heaved his bag onto a bench and began rifling through it. ‘How do you keep all this stuff here anyway? You couldn’t keep it secret. They’d… hear you milling through the walls. Why hasn’t it been stolen or something?’

Scuto spat, not as an insult, Totho guessed, but some local way of showing emphasis.

‘Listen, boy, in this neighbourhood I’m the man. That means half the eyes and spies out there are on my books. That means there are swords and crossbows out there that point where I tell them, and when I ask it, I can get a real doctor to come out here who knows he’ll be safe and get properly paid. It all adds up, because anyone out there who means me ill will run foul of the locals unless he’s got a damn army, believe you me. What with all that and your man Maker’s work to do, it’s a wonder I find time for my actual occupation.’