Skrill’s kitbag was already strapped on her back, a position it never left save when she was using it as a lumpy pillow. She pelted past him even as he and Totho were collecting their gear, and they ran after her, knowing it was vain to try to catch up.

The Wasp armies had yet to invest the city of Tark in siege. But for us the war has already started.

He remembered his talk with Aagen, the Wasp artificer whose information had originally sent him south to Tark – the same who had been given the Butterfly dancer named Grief in Chains and then released her with the name Aagen’s Joy. Salma had now killed another Wasp, his first since then. There had been no hesitation at the time. After all, the man had been trying to kill him.

And yes, the Wasp had been another human being with all a man’s hopes and aspirations, and now snuffed out by eighteen inches of steel. But also, there had been enough Dragonfly dead during the Twelve-Year War to make the numbers now massed outside Tark pale into insignificance. Amongst them, his own father and three cousins, including his favourite, Felipe Daless. Not just kinden but kin: blood that called out for a levelling of the scales; three principalities of the Dragonfly Commonweal that groaned under the boot of the Empire.

He hardened his heart. There would be more blood spilled before the end of this, and some of it could easily be his own.

Skrill had stopped ahead, waiting for them. Totho blundered up to her.

‘And how did they find us?’ he demanded.

‘Scouts, Beetle-boy. What do you think they were doing?’

‘They followed you.’

‘You take them words back, or we’re lookin’ to have a disagreement right here,’ she said hotly. ‘Nobody asked you to link with us.’

Totho swallowed whatever words he had been going to utter and, after a moment’s thought, said, ‘Well it’s just as well I did, or you’d have been spitted right back there. What do you think of that?’

‘Will the pair of you be quiet?’ Salma grumbled without much hope.

‘I was playing with him,’ Skrill said. ‘I was-’ Suddenly she fell silent, turning away from Totho with her hand plucking an arrow from her quiver.

‘Put the bow down! Put the swords down! Put the crossbow down!’ barked a voice from somewhere within the grass. There was an uncertain pause, and then a bolt spat out of a nearby thicket, ploughing the earth at Totho’s feet. Even as they watched men began emerging in a crescent formation in front of them, swathed in cloaks of woven grass and reeds, but all with crossbows levelled. For a moment Salma thought it was the Wasps that had them, but they were Ants – Tarkesh Ants – with their pale faces smeared with dirt and green dye. Beneath the cloaks they wore armour of boiled leather and darkened metal.

‘Weapons down!’ shouted their leader. ‘Or I shoot the lad with the crossbow. This is your last chance.’

Totho dropped the bow quickly enough, and his sword as well. Salma did the same, trying to gauge his chances of taking to the air. He counted ten Ants in all, and they would be in each other’s minds. The least wrong move and they all would see it. Salma did not rate his chances of dodging so many bolts.

Skrill gave a hiss of annoyance and placed her bow on the ground, replacing the arrow in her quiver.

‘What in blazes have we here?’ the Ant officer asked, aloud for their benefit. ‘A bag of halfbreeds, it would seem.’

Salma could only guess at the silent thoughts going meanwhile between him and his men.

‘We’re not with that army out there,’ he said hastily. ‘In fact, we’re from Collegium.’

‘I can’t see a crew like yours fitting in anywhere outside a freakshow,’ the Ant officer replied levelly. ‘But what you are right now, lad, is prisoners. You come along with me, and anyone who does any tricks gets a bolt up the arse, and no mistake. There’re folk in the city just waiting to speak to folk like you.’

‘We’re not your enemies,’ Salma tried again. He tried a smile, but the officer was having none of it.

‘You might be all sorts, lad, but I think you’re spies looking to get inside the city. Looks like you got your wish too, doesn’t it, although not in the way you might prefer.’

The Prowess Forum had never seen the like. This was no formal event, no meeting of teams from the duelling league, and yet the backsides of the onlookers were packed all the way up the stone steps that rose in tiers at every wall. The aficionados of the duel were crammed in shoulder to shoulder, from College masters through the ranks of students and professional bladesmen to the children who followed their favourites with the fanatical loyalty of Ants to their city.

The fighters stood ready in the circle, which had been scuffed by a hundred hundred feet in the past. Neither participant was new to it. They had faced each other before, and there was nothing the crowd liked better than a rematch of champions. The Master of Ceremonies, the old Ant-kinden Kymon of Kes, had tried to start the duel three times, but the crowd was refusing to quieten down for him.

To one side stood the acknowledged champion of the Prowess Forum. He was Mantis-kinden, as the very best of the best always were. They were born with blade-skill in their blood: it was the Ancestor Art of their nation. They came to the College sporadically, one or two in every year. When they fought they inevitably claimed the prize, and then mostly they left. Piraeus of Nethyon had stayed on, however, preferring the life of a champion of Collegium to anything his homeland might offer. He made his living in private duel and by hiring out his skills to any duelling house so desperate for victory as to show the bad form of buying in a champion. Nor had he been short of offers this last year, for winning had ousted taking part as the fashionable thing. Now many magnates of Collegium kept duelling teams to further their prestige.

But the crowd were here to see more than a haughty Mantis-kinden win yet another bout. Enough of them had gathered there to see his opponent. The less charitable said that they wanted to see her before some stroke dealt by Piraeus ruined her, for he was a misogynist at the best of times, and this match… The Mantis-kinden saved their utmost barbs of loathing for one target. Why they hated the Spider-kinden quite so much was lost in time, but they did, and they never forgot a grievance.

Like most Spider-kinden, she was beautiful. She was also unusual in that she was a daughter of Collegium, not some arrogant foreigner. The name on the lips of the crowd as she entered was ‘Tynisa’. Properly she was Tynisa Maker, but she was so obviously none of the old man’s blood that just the one name sufficed.

Piraeus was tall and lean, his face chiselled with distaste. The bruises he had given Tynisa when they had last met had healed, and it was obvious he was ready to gift her with another set. She was shorter than he and slighter, an eyecatching young woman with her fair hair bound into a looped braid and her green eyes dancing.

There was something in the way she stood that told the best of them this was going to be a new kind of contest. She did not stand like a Prowess duellist or like a Spider-kinden. In her time away from the city she had learned something new.

She had learned who she was and what blood ran in her veins, but only Tynisa and two spectators there knew it.

Kymon called for silence once more, striking the two practice swords together in a dull clatter of bronze-covered wood.

‘I shall not ask again!’ he bellowed. ‘Silence now, or this match shall not take place!’

At long last the crowd quieted, under threat of its entertainment being removed. Kymon nodded heavily and passed the swords out. They were, in the hands of these fighters, graceless things. Those two were meant for swords more slender and crafted of true steel.