‘Good job you’re coming with us, really,’ said the artificer. ‘If it were just me and the stoker alone with her, who knows? She’s quite a piece of work, isn’t she?’

Thalric looked unmoved, or at least affected to be. At a signal from him, Che and Salma were bundled inside. The Wasp looked at them critically: the bound Dragonfly, the awkward-looking Beetle.

‘Chain them anyway,’ he told the soldiers. ‘Necks to the wall, like the woman. I’m not a man for gambling.’

‘Will you look at that,’ Stenwold breathed, peering through his telescope. He had known, he should have known, what he would see here, but it still shocked and frightened him. All these years he had been preaching it, and now here was proof, but how much he would rather have been wrong.

‘Is that Asta?’ asked Tisamon, hunching over his shoulder.

‘If they still call it that.’

‘What’s Asta?’ Tynisa asked. Beside her, Totho stirred in his sleep. He had been working on the automotive the whole night through.

Tisamon went instantly quiet, and Stenwold sighed inwardly. To his knowledge neither of them had even tried to reach out to the other. Such reticence, at least, Tynisa had inherited from her father.

‘When we passed through here last, this was a tiny village, little more than a caravan stopover point. It was fairly cosmopolitan, more Beetle-kinden than anything else, though the name’s from the Scorpion. There’s an oasis there, you see. Northernmost one of the Dryclaw. Now… well, just look at it.’

They were now at the very bounds of the Lowlands. Whilst to the south and the west the Lowland world was bounded by sea, and to the north by the great landslip of the Barrier Ridge, the eastern edge of its expansion had been checked by the desert. The great barren waste of the Dryclaw stretched for hundreds of miles, and there were only two ways round. South of the desert lay the narrow coastal Silk Road that led to the Spiderlands, and north… well, north was here.

Passage north of the Dryclaw was never easy, but it had been easier in the past. The land had left its people only two roads. One led south of the Tornos mountains and north of the Darakyon Forest, a rocky and unappealing path of steps and leaps. The other ran south of the forest, where the land turned from wood to scrub, from scrub to desert, and here was Asta, this little caravanning town, the oasis.

Except that Asta was no longer little, nor was it trade that drove so much traffic between it and the eastern world. The original mud-brick buildings of the village were now surrounded by a great host of sheds and long, low halls, all with the appearance of having been hastily constructed. Beyond them extended a veritable tent city and all of it was rendered in black and gold. The Wasps had come to Asta and it was no longer a village. It was a staging post.

‘This is an invasion in the making,’ muttered Stenwold. If only the old men of the Assembly were here with me now! If they could see this then how could they doubt me? He was suddenly afraid for his home city, for poor blind Collegium with all its flaws. Would realization come to the Assemblers only when the Wasps were at their walls?

He silently watched the automotives and pack trains coming in, the dash back and forth of the flying sentries, and the thunder of the orthopters, the drilling squads of soldiers. Even for the Imperial Army there was a huge concentration of troops down there.

‘How are we going to find them, in all of that?’ Tynisa asked.

‘Nightfall,’ said Tisamon. ‘I’ll go.’

‘You’re sure?’ Stenwold asked.

The Mantis nodded. ‘In the meantime we have another problem. Any closer and they’ll see us. Especially in this device.’

‘We’ll leave it here for now,’ Stenwold confirmed. ‘We can use the cover of the trees to get closer.’

He sensed a sudden change in mood behind him. Craning back to look, he saw that Tisamon was shaking his head slowly. ‘You forget,’ the Mantis said, ‘this is the Darakyon.’

‘Oh, not this again-’

‘It is not a place that we should go,’ Tisamon said implacably. ‘Any of us.’

‘I told you,’ Achaeos had been silent all day, hunched in the rear of the automotive with his hood up. Now he pushed it back, eyes narrowing in the sunlight. ‘My people know more of this than any of you, and they do not venture into the Darakyon without good cause.’

‘That’s because your people are superstitious,’ Tynisa told him. ‘It’s just a forest.’

Tisamon did not look at her. ‘My people once claimed the Darakyon: a hold of we Mantis-kinden. No longer. Now no man may live there, and only fools travel its paths unprepared. You are all unprepared.’

‘What… what happened?’ she asked him, but he just shook his head, still turned away from her.

‘Don’t just-’ she started, but there was a sudden light touch on her arm. Achaeos’s expression had lost some of its aloof distance.

‘Crimes were done there,’ the Moth said, ‘by my people and his, together. After the revolution, when we feared to further lose our waning power. More than that is a secret held only by the Skryres, who know and see all. But this is known: those who did these terrible things, they have not left. They are still there and they do not receive visitors well. Why do you think the Mantis-kinden will not live here any more? Why do you think the Wasps or the Beetles have not already felled these trees for their furnaces? Time has been stilled within these trees for five hundred years.’

‘I…’ Tynisa wanted to mock him, but he so clearly believed what he said, and she could tell that Tisamon did as well. ‘This is ridiculous.’ She contented herself with that.

In the end, they made a compromise by clinging to the very forest edge. Even here the shadows lay heavily on them. Totho seemed oblivious to it all, but Stenwold cast a few anxious glances about him as it grew dark. Tynisa remembered his dealings with Dr Nicrephos in Collegium, and guessed that he was a Beetle of unusual experience.

They set the lowest of low fires, embers stoked merely to blunt the chill that seemed to hang about them. As the night approached, while the trees behind them seemed to draw the darkness to themselves like a mother summoning her children, Tisamon stood up.

‘Don’t take any risks you don’t have to,’ Stenwold warned him. ‘That’s not a town, it’s a military camp and they’re going to be watching.’

‘Don’t lecture me, O historian,’ said Tisamon, and Tynisa guessed he was eager for his skills to be put to use again.

‘I’m going with him,’ she told Stenwold.

A chill descended between the two older men.

‘I don’t think that’s wise-’ started Stenwold, but she folded her arms.

‘It’s my sister we’re going to find, near enough. She’s not even going to know who… who this man is, so I’m going.’

Stenwold grimaced, glancing at Tisamon, whose shadowed face was unreadable. Then, after a moment, the Mantis nodded curtly. No words, no encouragement, but at least that. A moment later he was gone, buckling his claw gauntlet to his arm. Tynisa took one more look at Stenwold, who was looking unhappier than ever, and then followed him into the gathering dark.

‘Well…’ he began, and had nothing to follow it with.

‘I’m sure that… Tynisa can look after herself,’ Totho said awkwardly.

‘I just feel there’s an explosion waiting between those two. I didn’t ever want to leave them alone.’

‘She’s right about… well, if the first thing Che saw was your man there… He’s not exactly…’

Stenwold conceded the point. ‘It’s an imperfect world.’ A moment later he frowned. ‘Where’s Achaeos?’

For the Moth had vanished.

Sitting with them in the shadow of those trees had taken courage he had not known he possessed. It had been the fat Beetle and the grease-fingered Totho that had been the spur. They had made their little camp, as happy as anything, and even Tynisa had joined in and had not cared. She was Spider-kinden and she should know better. It pained him to see how they had blinded her by bringing her up amongst the Beetles.