‘What,’ Scuto said pointedly, ‘were you saving it for?’

On their arrival, Che’s first view of Sarn had been of a city split by the line of the rail track. As the automotive pulled in to the depot it had seemed to her that somehow – by Achaeos’s magic perhaps – there were two cities, as close as a shadow to each other, but each blind to its neighbour.

To the right was Sarn, the Ant city-state comprised of low, spartan buildings, pale stone and flat roofs without decoration. The people there moved briskly but without haste, and they did not stop to speak to one another or gather to converse. Everyone knew precisely where they were going. Soldiers were on hand to watch the automotive and make sure, she suspected, that only native Sarnesh alighted through the right-hand doors. Everything looked clean and orderly and the streets of the city ran at precise angles to one another, all in the shadow of the city wall.

To the left lay the foreigners’ quarter, which presented a totally different world. To start with, its limits had begun outside the walls, with stalls, wagons and tents extending a hundred yards down the road that ran alongside the rail track. Inside the walls, it fairly bustled. Even the depot’s goods yard had suffered a hundred encroachments, with market stalls pitched ready to ambush the unwary visitor, peddlers and hawkers and dozens of kinds of traders converging or waiting or looking out for each other. There were a lot of Beetle-kinden amongst them, mostly Collegium-grown and many even College-educated: merchants and artificers and scholars all mingling, clasping hands, making animated conversation with frequent gestures, as though to compensate for the quiet world just across the track. There were others, too, especially Fly-kinden – dozens of them, from ostentatiously well-dressed merchants to grubby peddlers of trinkets, their eyes keen for a loose purse or dropped coin. There were also some from breeds not commonly found within the Lowlands: a Commonweal Dragonfly mercenary in piecemeal armour of glittering hues and a long-faced Grasshopper in College-styled robes discoursing with two Beetle scholars. Spiders, she saw, though not so many as Collegium regularly knew, and small wonder, for she had never seen so many Mantis-kinden in one place in her life. Some were in bands, lounging about and watched carefully by the guard. Many went singly, at the shoulder of some wealthy foreigner or other as a tactful and tacit warning to thieves and rivals. With their strongholds of Nethyon and Etheryon just north of Sarn, a lot of Mantis-kinden young bloods came down here looking for excitement, hiring themselves out as mercenaries or bodyguards.

The Sarnesh were to be found in the foreigners’ quarter as well, of course. She had expected their armoured men and women patrolling through the throng and keeping a careful eye on exposed weapons and their owners. She was struck, though, by the many brown-skinned Ant-kinden, robed or dressed in simple tunics, doing patient business with their visitors, or simply walking through the crowd, taking a vicarious interest in all the bustle that was going on within their walls.

Scuto had found them a taverna going under the sign of the Sworded Book, which suggested that its owner, past or present, had been a duellist at the Prowess Forum. Certainly it was decked out in Collegium style, with a great clock perched over the bar in imitation of the Forum itself. Now Che sat at a window and watched the foreign-quarter marketplace, a bizarre halfbreed venue that seemed wrenchingly close to home and yet completely distant. Meanwhile, only three streets away, the Sarnesh proper continued to hold their normal silent communion with one another.

‘I’ve never really visited an Ant city before,’ she admitted. ‘It’s not at all what I expected.’

Sperra, virtually sitting in her shadow, snorted. ‘This isn’t just any Ant city. Sarn’s different. I’ve been in Tark and Kes before and it wasn’t fun.’

‘But they have their foreign quarters too,’ Che recalled from her studies.

‘They do, only there’re guards watching every wretched thing you do, waiting for you to take a step out of line, and nobody talks any more than they have to, so’s to be like the locals. And if you’re Fly-kinden like me, you’re on double guard, because if something goes wrong and they don’t know who did it, they just hang the first person they don’t like, and they always assume it’s us. And, ah! The slaves. There are slaves everywhere, and what their masters overlook, the slaves’ll spot. And you just know they’ll tell their owners, because the Ants don’t have any use for slack slaves.’

Che grimaced. However bad Ant-kinden masters might be, a severity surely bred of frugality and efficiency, she had herself become a slave to the Empire, and she was willing to wager that was worse. ‘Your kinden don’t keep slaves – do you?’ she enquired. The Fly-kinden fielded no armies, nor had any great repute as artificers, scholars or social reformers. They tended to slip off the edge of the College curriculum.

‘Oh they’d tell you that in Egel or Merro,’ Sperra said disdainfully. ‘But don’t you believe them. It’s all about the money – families owing other families. And if your family can’t settle what’s due, they’ll sell you. Indenture, it’s called, only basically it’s slavery.’

‘Was that what happened to you?’

‘Would have done,’ the Fly replied, ‘only I was smart enough to skip out. Everyone thinks it’s so homey to be one of my kinden: all family and sticking together and everyone mucking in, all rosy cheeks and cheeky banter. If it’s so wonderful, why do you think so many of us are living anywhere but home?’

The two of them silently watched the ebb and flow of Sarnesh business for a little while, until Sperra added, ‘But here, I could like it here. No slaves here in Sarn, and out-landers seem to get a fair deal.’

‘If you’d come here three generations back, it would have been just like Tark and Kes,’ Che observed, and instantly saw that Sperra did not know what she meant. ‘It’s all down to a man called Jons Pathawl. A reformer.’

‘Never heard of him,’ Sperra said. ‘What did he do?’

‘He came to Sarn from the College and started preaching about freedom and equality and all that.’

The Fly stared at her. ‘You’re telling me that one man just talking did all this? And they didn’t lock him up or anything?’

‘Actually they did lock him up, and he was going to be hanged as a warning to other outspoken scholars. He had a band of followers, though, and they made a bid to free him. In the process they got in the way of Vekken assassins come to wipe out the whole Royal Court prior to one of their wars. So, as a mark of thanks, the Queen and her court agreed to listen to what Pathawl had to say. That was what changed everything. He must have been a very persuasive speaker. Still, look at Sarn now. There’s more money here than in any of the other city-states, and instead of a force of slaves who are a liability as soon as things get hot, you’ve got a resident population of experts and advisers who will fight to defend what they view now as their home. Plus, Sarn gets all the best of the Collegium scholars after Helleron’s had its pick.’

Achaeos slipped into the taverna at that point, sitting down at their table with a quick glance towards the door.

‘I have made contact,’ he began.

‘With the – the Arcanum?’

He nodded, his expression suggesting that it was a name best not spoken openly. ‘We can speak to them. I have a name now. A place to go.’

‘You want me to come?’

‘I have thought about it. To them I will be only an intermediary. A Moth bringing the word of Collegium will seem wrong, to them. It is best that you speak for Stenwold.’

The ‘place to go’ turned out to be a tall-roofed house almost beside the wall of the city, just where the foreign quarter met the river. Sarn had no inferior districts as such, and Che understood the appeal to foreigners of doing business where the Ant militia was always tough on robbery and double-dealing. Even so, the place that Achaeos had found stood in the murkiest district that the city had to offer.