He barked a laugh at that suggestion, but his face was still barren as the Dryclaw Desert, when she dared to look at it.

‘Miss Maker, you are Stenwold’s creature, and he is the Empire’s enemy. Whatever meagre help you could render to him, you would. Rather than let you loose to cause trouble I would have you killed without a thought. In fact, if there were even fifty-one out of a hundred parts of you that opposed the Empire I would thrust a knife beneath your chin rather than set you free.’ He turned away. ‘You are lucky, then, that you are still useful to us as a source of information.’

‘And after that?’ she said, forcing herself to her feet. ‘And what about after that? What hope have I then?’

At the word, ‘hope’ he laughed at her, shaking his head, half turning away, and the look on his face – of disdain, derision – was such that she attacked him.

She did not know how she did it, only that she believed him, then. She was a dead woman whether now or later, a woman totally without hope. Without any premeditation she went for his knife hilt and found her hand closed around it. Her other fist cracked against his jaw as she drew back to stab.

He had a hand on her knife wrist instantly, and for a second they swayed back and forth, as she used both hands to try and force the blade into him. He was far stronger than she was, however. She saw the muscles cord on his bare arms, and he was now pushing her back until she slammed into the wall. The knife fell from her fingers, ringing in her ears as it struck the floor, and he had a hand under her chin, where he had said he would stab her. She felt his thumb and fingers dig in there, and waited for the crackle and sear of the fire.

But it did not come. His temper, that had been only a scratch-depth from the surface a moment ago, had not stirred all this while. In fact, when she opened her eyes, he was even smiling slightly. She was horribly aware of how close he was to her, how strong.

‘Very good,’ he said, almost in a whisper. ‘And what then? My guards are outside the door. My people are all over the palace. My Empire owns this city. And what hope, you say? No hope whatsoever, even if you had it in you to kill me.’

‘Perhaps that’s all I hoped,’ she said, a whisper too, but there was something else in his eyes, now, and she wondered if she imagined that she saw respect there.

‘Hope only,’ he said, ‘that when we are done with you, the Empire can use one more live slave rather than one more dead Beetle. There is your hope, Miss Maker.’

‘Threats, still,’ she murmured.

He released her suddenly, as simply as that, reclaiming his knife from the floor and scabbarding it. ‘You’re right, of course,’ he said, the epitome of calm itself now. His demeanour admitted nothing of the smashed table, or her attack on him. ‘Threats oft repeated become dull edged with overuse. Enough threats, then. I’ll send you back to your cell now, and next time I call for you, I promise, there will be no threats.’

The guards took her back to the cell, where she found Salma sleeping fitfully, waking up and thrashing about, and then fighting for the blank respite of sleep again.

Tomorrow night they will do it, she told herself. I must be strong.

She wondered how strong she would have to be to resist the tortures of the Empire. And I am such a very strong person, by nature. I have such famous reserves of strength and willpower, she taunted herself bitterly.

She clutched at her knees and shivered, and could not sleep. When the tread of the guards outside signalled a new day, it gave her no joy, and when the vile food was passed in to them, she could not eat it. When the night comes, they will come for me.

Salma tried to comfort her, but he had only hollow words. What could he say?

And, of course, they came for her in daylight. This was the Empire, and torturers were not skulking figures of moonlight and darkness but working men for the working day. She was hauled from Salma’s side in mid-morning, and she knew this time it would be different.

Salma must have known as well. He actually tried to obstruct them. His arms were still bound, even though he could have flown nowhere. They had only untied him for a short space each day so as to leave him the use of them. Salma had charged them with his shoulder and they had knocked him down and kicked him until Che, through her own struggles, forced them to turn their attention to her.

Previously she had always been taken up, towards the sun. Now they just hauled her further along the corridor. She had a glimpse of several other cell doors like theirs, each with a hatch and a grille. Some were open, some locked against other prisoners or perhaps against no one. She had a brief glimpse of an airier cell, its bars all the way from floor to ceiling, leaving the occupant exposed to all passers-by. A woman watched her pass, a local girl, hands gripping the bars.

There was a single room at the end there, but with no hatch on the door. Che began struggling, but the two soldiers raised her almost off the ground, twisting her arms, and the way they manhandled her inside was effortless.

She could not see, for a moment, what it was all intended for. She thought at first it was a workshop, for the room was dominated by a big workbench, pitted and scarred with the use of years, edged with fittings for tools and clamps and vices. To her it seemed innocuous, something familiar from the College machine rooms, until she was dragged to the table and rolled onto it. Then she looked up, and she screamed and screamed and fought them, so that another man had to come and pull the buckles tight while the two soldiers devoted their entire efforts to pinning her down.

Yet it was nothing so much, out of context. This was a workbench, after all and, just as she would have expected, there were tools up there above her on the jointed arms that artificers preferred. Drills and saws, clamps and pliers and files – really nothing one would not find in any ordinary workshop. But they were poised right above her and the soldiers were clamping her to the bench.

Hokiak’s Exchange was still there in the dingiest corner of the eastern plaza, just as Stenwold remembered it. Furthermore, so was Hokiak himself, although the intervening years had not been kind to him.

He was the oldest Scorpion-kinden that Stenwold had ever seen, perhaps the oldest there was. They were a ruthless, primal people in their desert home and a man did not live long amongst them once his strength began to wane, unless he possessed some edge over his fellows. Hokiak’s edge was a self-imposed exile. Even when Stenwold had known him, he had been too old to go home. Now he was positively decayed, his waxy skin folded into sallow creases and his once-yellow eyes faded to a dim sepia. His throat was as creased as a discarded shirt and the characteristic large frame of his breed had slumped to fat now, and even that was ebbing like a low tide, leaving his bare chest an unsightly ripple of wrinkles and old scars. One of his foreclaws was a jagged stump that had not regrown, and his jutting jaws revealed a ghastly thicket of rotting spurs on protruding gums. He sat on a wicker chair and smoked, and occasionally skewered candied insects from a box with a thumbclaw.

The Exchange itself was clearly faring better than its namesake. Stenwold and Totho pushed into a small room made smaller still by stacks of heaped boxes. The air was thick with spices, and the pungent, dizzying tobacco that Hokiak still smoked. His staff was hard at work prising the lids off crates, cataloguing their contents and then nailing them back. There were three youngsters engaged at the work: a pair of Fly-kinden around Totho’s age and a dark Mynan girl no older than thirteen. They were supervised by a Spider-kinden man who couldn’t have been much short of Hokiak’s own years. Spiders aged rather better, though. This one had long silver hair and a trace of an aristocratic demeanour, but was almost skeletally thin.