‘Then don’t leave, just stay here. Stay in the city and wait,’ Salma said. ‘You don’t need to go tonight.’

‘It makes no difference, because I’d still be in the same position. Anyway I don’t think you’ll be coming back here afterwards.’

‘You can’t think I’d just grab Grief and abandon you here.’

‘No,’ Totho said, ‘that isn’t what I think at all.’

‘Then…’ Salma thought about it. ‘Oh, I see.’

‘This is a fool’s mission, and these Ants are fools. They didn’t understand a word of what you said, or what I said. They have no concept of an enemy that is so much stronger than they are. Their mission tonight will not succeed.’

‘I thought in Collegium they didn’t believe in destiny.’

‘We believe in the odds, Salma,’ Totho said, ‘and I do not believe that we will win, tonight. I really do not believe that we will survive.’ He sounded distant, almost trancelike.

‘Well if you believe that,’ Salma told him, ‘then the question is back on the table. Why are you coming with me? Or is that why? Is that it?’

‘I do not have that courage, or that cowardice, whatever it is,’ Totho said, ‘to turn the blade upon myself. But I have… nothing left, Salma. I have nothing left. And so I’ll let the Wasps do it instead, if it’s all right with you. And if I can help you out, or even help the bloody ignorant Tarkesh, then that’s good too. But I am turning into something strange that I do not like. And so I think it best that I go with you tonight, and best of all if I do not return.’

Salma had no reply for that, trying to see through the clouds hanging about this man to the student he had once known. Totho had always been gloomy, it was true. He had always been shielding his halfbreed nature against the world – and then there had been his infatuation with Che, which had not helped. Tark had been the forge, though, that had taken the decent ingredients of the man and botched them into something flawed and strangely made.

We can win, tonight, Salma told himself. His own race were slow to admit to the impossible, and the histories of the Commonweal were rife with accounts of one man standing off a hundred, of bridges held by a mere handful, of one assassination bringing down an army or a principality.

We can win, he thought again, trying to convince himself, but in that moment he felt very far from home and the things he knew, surrounded by hard stone and jagged metal, and afraid.

‘So how do we get outside the walls without the Wasps spotting us?’ Salma asked.

Their leader was Basila, who had interrogated him when he first came to Tark, and then bedded him shortly afterwards. Now she was attired in dark cloth over metal-reinforced leathers, hooded and with a scarf ready to cover her lower face. Both her blade and her exposed skin were blacked.

‘Do you think the Wasp-kinden are the only people who have ideas?’ she asked contemptuously. ‘We are ready for this possibility.’

Salma had accepted an arming jacket from them, and a better-balanced sword, but they had no bows in the whole of the city. For Totho they had found artificers’ leathers and another repeating crossbow, not as fine as Scuto’s had been, but a serviceable machine nonetheless.

‘Follow, and you will see.’ Basila led the way, and the two of them fell in with her dozen Ant soldiers all clad as she was. Skrill hopped along at the back, her arm still bound up, looking nervous.

‘Listen, Your Highness,’ she said. ‘I ain’t sure about this.’

‘Just get to Stenwold,’ Totho insisted. ‘Tell him what’s going on.’

‘And what if the Wasps see me?’

‘Then run,’ Salma said. ‘I’ve seen how you run. You’ve a turn of speed a horse would envy. Wasps tire fast once in the air, most of them. So run and keep running, and hope.’

‘Hope,’ she echoed, without much of it in her voice.

They entered one of the city barracks, and almost immediately were heading underground, down into rounded tunnels that the insect colony must have dug under Tarkesh orders.

Nero and Parops had been there to see them off, like a mismatched pair of mourners. Parops had just clasped Salma’s hand and wished him luck. There had been little enough hope in his eyes either.

Underground, Salma had no way of keeping track of where they were heading. The Ants seemed to be finding their way simply by touch, for it was so dark that even his keen eyes could make nothing of it. Often they heard the scratchings and skitterings of insects as they scurried out of their way ahead.

‘Here,’ Basila’s voice came to him, and Salma knew they had stopped when he ran into the back of the man preceding him.

A lantern glowed into life, the dimmest of faint glows. There were two Ant-kinden waiting for them there who had probably even been guiding Basila in with their minds’ voices. They carried shovels, and Salma now saw that the tunnel ceiling had a shaft dug into it, with metal bars serving for handholds.

‘We have these radiating in every direction from the city,’ Basila told him. ‘The Wasps have no watch near this one, yet it is close enough to their camp to strike there before we are seen. The Wasps have little light beyond their camp, and we know they do not see well in the dark, no more than we do. These men and I, we have stayed in darkness below the ground since the plan was conceived, making our eyes fitter for this moment.’

One of the Ant engineers was now crawling up the shaft, legs straddling the gap at a painful-looking angle. He began to dig up at the earth above, showering dirt down on them.

‘The earth left is shored up, enough to bear the weight of a man,’ Basila told them, ‘but we will be digging through in minutes. Then we begin.’

She and her team bore their swords, together with little crossbows that were double-strung to give them the power of a normal bow whilst being small enough to shoot one-handed. They had little wheel-locks set above the handle to tension the sprung steel arms.

The Ants waited in silence as the engineer above them dug towards the surface. Totho and Salma exchanged glances, but at this stage neither had anything to say.

Then the lamp was extinguished, and Salma realized the man digging above them must be nearly through. He put a hand to his sword, made sure it was loose enough in its scabbard.

There was a final rattle of earth and the engineer came back down, and went past them with his colleague and, without a word, off into the dark tunnels. Basila was ascending already, hand over hand in a perfect rhythm that all her team picked up, each man climbing with his hands almost under the boots of the man before, and yet not one slip, not one hand trodden on, until they were all above and it was time for Salma and Totho to follow them with far less assurance.

Basila looked between them. ‘From now on,’ she instructed in a low voice, ‘there is no more speaking. I will hear nothing from you, nor you from me. Watch what we do and follow it. No more than that.’

They nodded. Salma drew his sword, painted with weaponblack, and Totho put a magazine into the top of his repeating crossbow. Skrill clasped both of them on the shoulder, a weak gesture intended for what comfort it could give, and then she was off into the night, swathed in her cloak, following the long road to Collegium.

The Wasp camp was lit by picket lamps, a ring of them, twenty yards out from its furthest-flung tent and spaced widely. There were some sentries standing a little in front of them, mere silhouettes to the approaching raiders, and yet others who patrolled along the whole perimeter. Beyond the lamps, after an interval stretch of clear ground, the tents of the camp itself started. Now it was dark there was little activity within.

Grief in Chains is somewhere in one of those tents. Or ‘Aagen’s Joy’, as she had last called herself. Something twisted sourly inside him at that thought.