‘Admirable,’ she echoed. He was not entirely sure she had understood his words.

‘Capable of being admired,’ he explained lazily. ‘I have lived in a great many places, both inside and outside the Lowlands, Felise, and I have never met anyone quite like you.’

She was trembling again, and he knew that this was the point where the loose string in her head that was keeping her in check might snap, or not. He fought down his own anxiety and made himself wait.

‘I…’ There was the look of a lost child on her face, and the ‘I’ she spoke of was someone else, someone surfacing from long ago to take brief possession of a body long vacated. ‘Where am I? What is this place?’

‘Just a Wayhouse on the road. We’ll go to Collegium tomorrow.’

‘What’s… Collegium?’ She seemed dazed.

He wondered what would happen if he led her deliberately astray now, invented some other purpose for her. How long would the deception last, and could it be that simple? But, no, here came her familiar expression once more, ice spreading across her face and making her cold and hard again.

Abruptly her sword was back in its scabbard. ‘He is there,’ she reminded herself.

‘Or has been there,’ he corrected, allowing himself to sit up, gingerly touching his throat but finding not a mark on it.

‘He is there,’ she repeated. ‘And I will fall on him, and all his allies, and leave not one alive.’

The worrying thing, for Destrachis, was how this thought seemed not to fire her up but to calm her down.

Lieutenant Graf perused the dispatch, keeping his expression carefully blank. Amidst the scars, his one eye flicked back and forth over the few words it contained, looking for a way out.

‘Major?’ he began at last, and Thalric saw that, like so many in his position, he was a man who had forgotten, until this moment, what really frightened him.

‘Never underestimate the cowardice of a subject race,’ Thalric said, and Graf studied him cautiously.

‘I had not thought…’ Graf twisted in his chair. It was something Thalric had observed before, when underlings had sudden sight of the spectre of authority at his shoulder. Graf was a man who could, perhaps, have bested him, certainly a man who had no reason to believe he could not. Thalric was his superior, though. Most of all, Thalric was higher within the ranks of the Rekef. And, although it was Thalric’s plan as much as Graf’s, it was, here and now, the subordinate’s role to bear the blame.

‘We neither of us predicted it, because we are Wasps. This development is merely a result of the weakness of our enemies,’ said Thalric, growing tired, letting the other man off the hook. ‘Perhaps we should have foreseen, but the plan seemed sound enough to me when you first outlined it.’

Graf visibly relaxed into his seat as Thalric took the paper from him. It was advance word from a man he kept fee’d in the Amphiophos, where the Assembly met. This man was just a servant, but he saw everything that went on there.

‘Well, the endgame can be salvaged, even though we might look like fools for all the rest.’ It had seemed reasonable, for Stenwold was already no friend of the Assembly. He had dangerous ideas and he left his post too often to undertake private ventures. He associated with dangerous and unsavoury types, yet now he wanted to speak to the Assembly, and they wanted to make him wait, to consider the error of his ways. Graf and Thalric had wanted to drive a wedge between Stenwold and his peers, so that the wait might become an eternity, so that his voice might never be heard.

‘So what happens?’ Thalric asked disgustedly. ‘He is constantly seen, agitating, rousing up the students of the College, going to dubious places to speak the very words that have so riled their precious Assembly in the past. And would you not think that this disgraceful behaviour would sour matters further, that they would cast him from their ranks and have done with it? If this were a place with any decent rule of law the man would have been crucified as a troublemaker before now.’ He crumpled the piece of paper and threw it across the room.

‘Yet now they want to speak to him,’ he spat. ‘All his rabble-rousing has them quaking in their sandals. They’re desperate, now, to have him where they can see him, and if that means they must allow him his hearing then so be it. They’re too feeble or too frightened to take the beetle by the horns and have the wretch arrested.’

‘But at least they won’t be well disposed to him, when they meet,’ Graf suggested.

Thalric turned a hard gaze on him, ‘They won’t meet, Lieutenant. We’re going to see to that. Our final move is to happen now. Get word to Arianna straight away. Tonight would be best, and let’s hope that word of the Assembly’s decision won’t even have reached him. Then gather your men. I assume they’ve been briefed on who lives and who dies?’

‘Death for the Mantis and his daughter,’ confirmed Graf, ‘but Stenwold lives, if possible.’

‘And dies if not,’ Thalric completed. ‘And when he disappears or dies we’ll put the word around that the Assembly had him dealt with after all, and then see how badly his precious students take it.’

Arianna left Stenwold dozing on his back again, lulled asleep by her latest embrace. The house was quiet, and she washed and dressed swiftly, and left even as dawn was creeping up the skirts of the eastern sky.

The stalls of the markets were in place already, the earliest business of the day commencing. Arianna wandered through them casually until she was sure she was not being watched or followed.

Her feet then found the path into the richer district of the mercantile quarter, close to the white walls of the College itself. The shopfronts here were just being unshuttered, for the rich could afford to rise later and with more leisure. Most of those out on the street already would be servants, waiting for one place or the other to open its doors for business. She passed on.

On the next street she paused at the barber’s shop. The Fly-kinden who was giving the floor inside a final opening sweep was Hofi, of course, but he did not look at her, nor she at him. Her attention instead wandered over the placards he kept in his window. Anyone who wished could pay him a few coins to tell the world whatever they wanted announced. There were some goods reported for sale, goods similarly required. Rather more were personal valedictions, anonymous accolades for lovers, sly insults, even challenges. Her eyes skipped over them until she found her latest brief: a poem penned in a blocky hand, idolizing some woman named Marlia, but she recognized the key words in the first line and followed the stanzas down until she knew her new instructions.

So soon! Her heart lurched. She had been keeping the pot boiling so deftly. She could not think what had happened for Thalric to hasten the pace so violently. And tonight?

It just could not be done.

But of course it could be done. It would be easy enough. It would, in fact, pose no problems. Her instant reaction, though, was to kick away from it.

She had now been staring too long, and Hofi inside would note it. She turned and walked on, but stopped two shops down, peering through an iron grille at the jewellery behind it, yet seeing none of the gold or glitter. When she had been standing over Stenwold, her claws had been out ready to kill him, or at least she had told herself she was ready. Now her readiness would be put to the test, for now she had direct orders.

Direct orders and no luxury of choice. Of course she must do what she was told. She was Spider-kinden, so betrayal and double-dealing were in her blood. Stenwold Maker would not be the first to find her loyalty buckle beneath him just as he trusted his weight to it, nor the last either, no doubt. It was a game she once had played badly in Everis, but everyone was an expert out that way. In Collegium, amongst the plain and simple Beetle-kinden, she was superb at what she did.