‘Arianna… you Spider-kinden have never cared much what wars have racked the Lowlands,’ Stenwold said. ‘So why-?’

‘You think I’m here on behalf of my people?’ she asked him incredulously. ‘You think I’m some agent of the Aristoi? That… that would be grand, Master Maker.’ Bitterness was rife in her tone now. ‘But I’m not Aristoi. I’m of no great family to help me get anywhere in the world. I’m the last daughter of a dead house, and all we had left went to pay my way into the College. This is my home, Master Maker. The College is all I have. And you, to me you are the College.’

In the face of all that solemn youth, he could only swallow and stare.

‘Most of the Masters just get lost in their own disciplines, Master Maker… Stenwold. May I…?’

He found that he had nodded.

‘They don’t care, you see, what happens elsewhere. And some others are worse, lots of the ones in the Assembly, they look only to their pockets and their social station, and little else… I’ve seen enough of that snobbery in Everis where I grew up. But everyone knows it’s you who has gone out there and seen the world. And you’ve come back with a warning, and nobody is listening to you. But a lot of us students do. Master… Stenwold. I want to help you.’

‘How?’ he asked. Suddenly the words were difficult to reach for. ‘What do you… how can you help me?’

She moistened her lips with her tongue, abruptly nervous. ‘I… I hear things, see things. I learned to stay out of the way, back home, so I’m good at not being seen. You… that was one reason I came through your window like that. So that you’d see… so you’d know.’

‘I understand,’ he said, thinking, One reason? And what are the others? He did not want to involve this young girl in what was about to happen and yet she was so desperate to help, and if he now said no? Why, she would surely go off and do something rash on her own, just to prove herself to him. Just as Cheerwell would have done, doubtless.

And he could use her, certainly.

She reached out and put a hand on his, a touch that dried his throat suddenly.

‘Please,’ she said, and he found that he could not refuse.

‘It’s wonderful, isn’t it!’ Cheerwell exclaimed. ‘I don’t often get the chance to travel by rails.’ She had taken the bench end closest to the open window, watching the dusty countryside pass by, feeling the wind blast at her face. The rumble of the automotive’s steam engine tremored through every fibre of her being. Out there, craning forward to peer along the carriage’s length, she could see the duns and sand-colours of the land turning into the green marshes that surrounded Lake Sideriti, whose eastern edge the rail line would skirt, posted up on pillars to keep it clear of the boggy ground.

Achaeos huddled beside her, wrapped in his cloak and looking ill. It was the smell of the automotive, or the motion, or all of it. This was not a way that Moths travelled comfortably, and he could not even fly alongside. The carriage had no ceiling, just an awning to cover the seats in case of rain, but the steam automotive made such pace that if Achaeos went aloft he would get swept away, left behind.

Beneath her feet, through the slatted floor, Che could see the ever-turning steel wheels strike occasional sparks along the rails, and the ground in between hurrying past in a constant blur. This truly was the travel of the future, she decided, and even though Achaeos disliked it so much, they would reach Sarn in two days. Even Fly messengers took the rail these days to retain their boasted speed of delivery.

On the bench in front of them Sperra slept fitfully, leaning against the carriage wall. Che had carefully shuttered that part of the window closest to her, in case the little Fly-kinden should stir in her sleep and just pitch straight out of it. She was still not entirely recovered from her injuries at Helleron, poor woman, but it had been her decision to join Scuto in his journey to Collegium. The Thorn Bug himself was off inspecting the engine, Che gathered. He might be an agent in Stenwold’s spy army but he remained an artificer first and foremost.

Of course that made her think of Totho, and she suddenly found no pleasure either in the journey or the machine that transported them.

Poor Totho, who had left them for the war at Tark for one reason only. She herself had never fully told Stenwold the truth, although he had probably guessed most of it. Only Achaeos and she knew with utter certainty. Totho had left them because he could not bear to be with her without having her affection. For that reason he had come all the way from Collegium to Helleron with her. He had come to rescue her from the Wasps, travelled into the Empire itself, for no other cause, and she had never seen it because she had never looked. There had been Salma to worry about. There had been Achaeos, too, who had become bound to her by forces she could not explain, and who she loved.

Poor Totho had fallen between the slats of her life and only in his misplaced farewell letter had he been recalled to her guilty attention.

She had told him casually, You are like a brother, and she, who had experienced her share of rejections and even derision, knew just what that felt like. Yet how easily the words had slipped out from her.

There had been no word yet from Tark. That the siege had started seemed clear, but Totho and Salma should have kept a safe distance away, watching the moves of Ant and Wasp like a chess match. Yet they should have been able to send word somehow. Which meant that something had gone wrong, and poor clumsy Totho, who had never been able to look after himself, not really, was there in the middle of it.

She put her arm round Achaeos, and hugged him to her. His blank eyes peered at her from beneath his hood.

‘You’re thinking about him again,’ he noted.

‘I am, yes.’

‘No doubt we will find word from him when we return,’ he said weakly. Sickened by their method of travel, he was not in much of a position to offer comfort.

The first margin of Lake Sideriti was passing them by now. The water was stained a bright turquoise by the sun and the plants that lived in it, as though beneath the surface was a great blue jewel that caught and reflected the light. Even Achaeos perked up somewhat at that sight.

‘They don’t make ’em any more like this old girl!’ came Scuto’s voice as he rejoined them, pushing his way down the carriage’s length to the amazement and disgust of the other passengers. He had his cloak flung mostly back, so the full spiky grotesquerie of his face and hunched body was there for anyone jaded enough to want to peruse it. Even his garments only emphasized the lumpy form beneath them, torn in a hundred places by his hooked spines. ‘I ain’t never had a chance before to see one of these up close and working.’

‘Scuto,’ she said, but he had seen the radiance of the lake, dotted with reed islands, that stretched virtually from their window to the horizon.

‘Well if that don’t beat the lot of ’em,’ he murmured, sitting down beside Sperra. She shifted sleepily, jabbed herself on his spines and woke with a start.

‘Wretched spickly bastard,’ she muttered, stretching and thus pricking herself again with a curse. ‘Are we there yet?’

‘Look,’ Che gestured, and the Fly glanced over the lake without much interest.

‘Lovely. Can I go back to sleep now?’

‘You got no heart,’ Scuto told her.

‘You can tell that, can you?’ She rubbed her arm where he had pricked her. ‘You’re a wretched nail-studded menace, that’s what you are.’

Cheerwell knew very little about her, other than she had worked for Scuto for years now. She was no artificer, but she was Apt and a good hand with a crossbow. She had some doctoring skills as well and a bag of salves and bandages, and so she must have trained a little. Fly-kinden got everywhere in the Lowlands and did all manner of work, legal or not, but Che realized that she had never really got to know one well. They tended to keep to their own kind and stay out of the way of larger folk. Sperra was about typical of her race: standing a few inches under four feet in her sandals, with a lean, spare frame. She kept her hair quite long but tied behind her, and she wore dark, unassuming clothes without any finery or ornament. Everyone claimed that Flies liked valuables, preferably those belonging to others. Whether they wore them openly in their own communities of Egel or Merro to the east, she did not know, but she could never recall seeing a Fly-kinden flaunting any such treasures.