He recalled that the girl Cheerwell had been part of some duelling circle at Collegium, for all the good it had done her, but the Beetle-kinden were not unique in their ritual combat; Thalric himself had done his time amongst the Arms-Brothers when he was a junior officer, learning the blade and practising his social contacts. Rauth had taken the stance of an Arms-Brother duellist, and he was waiting for Thalric to join him.

Old habits, however inappropriate, die hard. Thalric felt himself drop into the correct stance without really choosing to, and a moment later he was making his careful advance.

Rauth lunged first, kicking off into the air and reversing his blade, coming down point first towards Thalric’s collarbone. Of course these were not the practice blades of dull bone usually seen in the sand circles of the Arms-Brothers. The steel flashed past Thalric as he swayed back, and his own stroke went wild, but he followed it up with three savage circular sweeps that Rauth dodged and ducked until he was on the very edge of the tier again. There was no parrying among the Arms-Brothers: the sword was for offence only, feet and wings were for defence.

Rauth was airborne again, passing straight overhead. Thalric spun as he passed, cutting across the man’s flight-path and scoring a narrow line across his calf. The man with the broken nose ran in suddenly, half-blinded and charging like a mad animal. Thalric stepped left and low, his leading leg folded double, and as the man went past he opened him up below the sternum with a single slice, and then sent him over the side with a spinning kick, launching him screaming down twenty feet into the unsuspecting garden.

Rauth had tried to make use of the distraction but as he pounced again from above his doomed comrade’s flight got in his way. He ducked back and Thalric drove up at him. For a moment they spun about one another in the air, swords drawing a complex web of lines about them, and then they were on the very balcony edge once again, back into their familiar stances.

Time to bring this to a close, decided Thalric. It was not a move from the Arms-Brothers manual but he launched a bolt of energy from his offhand at Rauth’s chest. The other man jumped back, but the flash seared across him anyway, and he dropped from sight off the balcony, injured but by no means done for. A moment later he was soaring back and around to come up on the other side. Thalric turned – and came face to face with the huge Scorpion-kinden hireling.

How-? was all he had time to think, and Bastard must have climbed up, before one of the great clawed hands pincered into his left shoulder.

The pain nearly made Thalric drop his blade. The finger claw was deep under his shoulder blade and the thumb wedged in near his collarbone, and the big man was doing his best to lift Thalric off the ground by his grip. Over the Scorpion’s shoulder Thalric saw Rauth arrowing in, sword forward. He flared his wings in a desperate flurry, gripping the Scorpion’s wrist, and kicked off from the tier’s edge. The movement spun the ungainly Scorpion about just as Rauth was coming in, and the assailant’s blade slashed across the huge mercenary’s back.

The Scorpion roared in pain and backhanded Rauth away, whereupon Thalric rammed his blade into the big man’s chest, and gripped him by the throat for good measure before blasting forth with his sting. The shock knocked the great man flat, and Thalric was flung away. A moment later he was falling.

The pain of his pierced shoulder was almost all he could think about and he barely got his wings about him to catch him in mid-air. He was already below the level of the treetops in the garden when he stayed his mad plummet. As he laboured back up he knew that he would not have the strength to fly after this final effort.

Rauth was just getting to his feet, sword already in hand, and Thalric saw his glance flick from his approaching opponent to the sword still lodged in the Scorpion’s body.

Thalric was feeling dead on his feet and every movement sent a jolt of pain lancing through him. Even so, he got to his sword first, hauling it from the corpse and bringing it into line with his enemy as Rauth bore down on him. Suddenly footsteps from behind brought the truth of the situation, though. He had forgotten Freigen the merchant, who presumably did not count flight as one of his assets. He had been all this time running up stairs, but now he was here and Rauth paused, waiting for the inevitable moment when Thalric’s attention proved insufficient to split between them.

An expression of shock crossed Rauth’s face in the very moment before Thalric, with the very last of his reserves, ran him through. The sword’s tip grated on armour first, but found its way between the metal plates, biting through the leather backing and deep into Rauth’s body. For the third time, Thalric felt the sword hilt slip from his fingers. He dropped to his knees, trying to even out his breathing, and it was a good many seconds before he turned round.

Freigen was lying face down with an arrow in his back, while the diminutive te Berro sat ten yards away at the far end of the balcony, calmly unstringing his bow. It had been, Thalric was forced to admit, an admirable shot.

He stood up at last, feeling a little strength return to him, and reclaimed his own sword from the first man he had stabbed. The Fly-kinden looked up with a diffident smile as Thalric approached to thank him.

‘Don’t mention it,’ te Berro said. ‘All suspicions confirmed now, of course. So, what about Ulther?’

‘I should do it,’ said Thalric.

‘Forgive me, but you don’t look in any shape for that.’

Thalric let out a harsh laugh: he felt about a hundred years old at this moment. ‘I don’t expect you to understand or approve, but I owe it to him to do it myself.’

‘Your operation, your choice,’ te Berro confirmed. ‘He’s in his harem, waiting to hear the news from his victorious assassins.’

Thalric nodded, still gathering his strength like an officer marshalling wavering soldiers. He wiped his blade off on dead Freigen’s back, and carefully sheathed it. No sense in alarming the servants as he went on his way to murder their master.

Chyses’ two men had remained in the storeroom to guard their retreat, in case anyone sought to bar it against them. Chyses himself had taken the rest where his map led, up stairs and through dim corridors lit only by the slanting moon. He carried a mineral-oil lighter which he struck up only when the map proved impossible to decipher in the gloom, and he led them with a kind of blind confidence.

Achaeos knew, though, even before they came to the large hallway, that Chyses was not entirely sure where they were.

The room itself quite obviously took him aback. The ceiling was two storeys high, with a grand flight of stone-faced steps taking up half the floor space. Chyses hissed to himself and took the map out again. Tisamon and Tynisa stood waiting a few paces to either side.

‘I think…’ Chyses said, trying to get the map angled towards moonlight. The windows were so high up on the wall behind them that their light slanted directly to the far end of the room, rippling up the stairs. Irritably, he struck up the lamp again, and tried to unpuzzle the map by its pale flame.

‘Let me see.’ Totho came forward, balancing the crossbow in one hand. Chyses jerked the map irritably away from him – and at that very moment a Wasp soldier appeared at the top of the stairs.

He did not run for help. Instead he started down the steps towards them with an angry cry. Later, Tynisa guessed that all he had seen were Totho and Chyses. She and Tisamon, silent and still in the darkness, had escaped his notice.

She was a pace towards the guard, still unseen, when Totho let fly with the crossbow. The first bolt, by sheer luck, caught the man in the shoulder. He lost his footing on the stairs and clattered back onto them with a yell. The second shot, following hard on the first, shattered into pieces against the steps, while the third took him in mid-chest as he sat up, a perfect target-range hit, slamming him down again and cutting short his cry of warning.