The entire sorry business had gone from bad to worse, and he now was in danger of losing everything by it. He thought back to that moment of choice, by Atryssa’s deathbed, and wondered what he could have done differently that might have made this moment bearable.

He pictured coming to Tisamon with an infant and a story – or even a child of, say, six or ten. He pictured the wrathful reaction of the man. In seventeen years, time had dulled it a little, built over it like a coral, so that the shape of it remained but not the edges. Even so it had been a close-run thing between Tisamon’s self-control and his blade’s temper. No, if Stenwold had tried this trick ten years earlier, Tisamon would certainly have killed him, and killed the child.

Would he? Was Tisamon a man to kill an infant, his own daughter still in swaddling? Is that what I really believe of my old friend?

With a heavy heart Stenwold acknowledged that, yes, Tisamon was the man to do it. It would have been done in rage, and perhaps he would have later mourned the loss, but his pride would have spurred him to it, even so.

At least Stenwold had been able to encourage himself by the fact that they were gaining on their quarry, even though he had no real plan for tackling the reinforced Wasps when he found them. Before dusk, though, the ground ahead changed, and it did not take a tracker to tell him that the slavers had new transportation. The land before them was scuffed and scarred with a great reticulated trail. Some large tracked vehicle, or more than one of them, was now shipping the slaves eastwards. Stenwold feared that, whatever this conveyance was, it would travel faster than their own jolting relic.

That night he faced the prospect of a joyless camp. He turned to Totho instead, as the only one of his companions he still felt comfortable talking to.

‘We need to go faster,’ he said.

Totho cast a sidelong glance at their automotive. ‘It’s not going to be easy, sir,’ he said, ‘and it might not survive it. I needed to tighten every joint as it is.’

‘I’ll help you,’ Stenwold suggested. ‘If the two of us work through the night, we might be able to wring a bit of extra speed out of this contraption. And you don’t need to keep calling me sir. We’re not at the College now.’

Totho shrugged. ‘Well, s- Well, Master Maker-’

‘Totho?’

‘Well.’ Totho cut the honorific by dint of extreme effort. ‘I’m game if you are.’

It had been a good idea of his, Stenwold allowed, but he had not anticipated the problems with its execution. The chief problem was that Stenwold had been teaching history and busying himself with politics for the last decade, and Totho was fresh from the College and sharp with it. It was a short while before Stenwold realized that he simply did not understand some of the more technical points the boy was making. After that, he became reluctantly convinced that he himself was just getting in the way. Still a stubborn pride that would have befitted Tisamon kept him sweating and slaving away by the sputtering gas lamp that Totho had rigged up, until eventually the youth said, ‘If we both work… if we both work all night, sir, then neither of us will be in any shape to… to drive it in the morning.’ This awkward display of tact was shaming. Stenwold had never ceased to think of himself as an artificer, despite his lack of practice, but it seemed the rest of the world had stopped considering him one a long time ago.

When I get back to Collegium, I will have to brush up, he vowed. He slid himself out from under the automotive, confessing openly that this was a good idea, and in that case why didn’t he get some sleep now. He felt old and wretched.

When he approached the fire he found Achaeos was asleep, but Tynisa was not. Whether she was keeping watch or just waiting for him he could not say, but her hard stare fixed him as he approached the circle of firelight. Her gaze was filled with a slow-burning anger that, he reflected sadly, she must have inherited from her father. Faced with that, he paused at the edge of the camp, knowing that it was his duty, as her guardian, as a human being, to say something, to explain.

He could not. Wordlessly he turned away, and built up a meagre fire on the other side of the automotive. That was where Tisamon eventually found him.

He heard the tread before he saw the man, and then the lean, tall figure was striding out of the night to sit, silently, across the small fire from him. The guttering light chased shadows across the Mantis’s angular face. For a long time neither man trusted himself to speak.

‘We are neither of us the things we would have wanted to be when this day came,’ Tisamon said softly at last, without looking at him. ‘Look at us. What are we? You have become the meddling intelligencer, sending the young to their deaths. I am a sell-sword who has not cared, these last years, whose blood was on my blade. You said to Monger that I fought for honour, but until you called for me that had not been true for a long time.’ A heavy pause. ‘We did not think, when we were young, that we would end up here.’

‘We did not,’ replied Stenwold, heartfelt.

‘I…’ Tisamon stopped, stirred the fire with a stick. His lips moved, but for a long time there was nothing. Stenwold gave him his time. It was not as though he himself had anything to say.

‘Thank you for raising my daughter,’ said Tisamon, and seemed visibly relieved to be rid of the words. Stenwold stared at him, not quite sure he had heard them.

‘I have been thinking,’ the Mantis said. ‘At first, I decided that you had done me a great wrong, but then I could not describe to myself, precisely, what that wrong was. We believe, my people, in defining our grievances. How else could we hold on to them for so long? And so I realized that if you had not done me a wrong, then the whole of my world must turn inside-out, and so instead I find that I owe you a debt. Such a debt that a man can never truly repay.’

And your people take your debts just as seriously as your wrongs, Stenwold reflected. Tisamon would still not meet his gaze, had still not wholly come to terms with it all, but he had found a way to paint the past in colours that he could at last understand. It was a matter of honour, and he could live with that.

And at last the Mantis looked up, and the corner of his mouth twitched up too. ‘Do you remember, all those years ago, when you would talk and talk, and I would say nothing at all? How we have changed.’

And Stenwold laughed at that, despite himself, despite it all. He laughed and laughed.

And afterwards he said, ‘I’ll have to tell her, now. I’ll have to speak with her. You know that.’

‘Then tread carefully,’ said Tisamon, still smiling sincerely. ‘If she’s her father’s daughter, she might not take it well.’

She danced for them the next night. It was like nothing they had ever seen.

The slavers had put the two huge vehicles with the caged backs facing one another, and strung a wide fence around both to make a single big oval enclosure. They were all gathered around one end or the other, and most of the soldiers as well. Che was nervous. Something was going on, and the only thing she could think of was a blood-fight. Death-fights were not common in the Lowlands. In Collegium, for instance, they thought of themselves as far too civilized, and while the Ant cities loved a gladiatorial match they watched it for the skill and not the blood. The practice was known, though. The Spiders did it, in their southern fastnesses, and it was rumoured that Helleron had underground fighting dens, for the connoisseur of death as entertainment.

They had banked up fires either side of the palisade, with another burning in the very centre of the pen. Looking around, Che spotted Brutan, the slavers’ leader, and a fair number of the automotive crew, but not Thalric. Presumably he felt himself above whatever was going to happen.