‘Having you on my ship all the way? Some consolation. You know they’ll dock me my fee for this?’

‘Take it up with your Domina. Take it up with your guild,’ she suggested. ‘Just don’t take it up with me, for I don’t rightly care that much, Sieur.’

He scowled at her, four times her weight and almost three feet taller, and she armed with nothing but a knife because a pilot carried no more weight than need dictated. She just smiled at him, though, to let him know all the trouble he’d be in if he started down that course, and he stamped away to shout at his crew.

They were mostly Soldier Beetle-kinden too, that odd halfway house between Ants and Beetles, neither of whom had much influence in these parts. She knew Solarno was a strange kind of city – in fact all the cities of the Exalsee were strange. Those kinden who had lived here since long ago, since the Age of Lore, were not natural city-builders. Some of them did not even know how to work metal. Instead, a peculiar crop of exiles and visitors from the north and the west and the east had come shouldering the original natives aside to found a scattering of communities about the shores of this vast and glittering lake.

She finally tugged the buckle of her chitin helm loose. Passengers, she recalled the master just mentioning. If she was going to be ferried home at a snail’s pace by this tramp steamer then she could at least seek out better company than the master himself.

There was blood on Che’s blade. From a mortal wound that she had inflicted? Impossible to be sure, but she doubted it. Her recollection of the sequence of events aboard ship was at best cloudy. She had decided that she did not like fighting very much.

That decision had come after watching a battle, an actual battle. She had read accounts of battles before, of course, but those came in two distinct flavours. The traditional romances painted them in vivid colours where great heroes reared up, surrounded by their foes, and slew tens on tens, or were slain heroically while holding a bridge or a pass just long enough for their fellows to prepare a defence. The second flavour was found in the history books, dry as chalk dust, stating how ‘Garael with her five hundred met the superior forces of Corion of Kes by laying ambush at the pass, triumphing by guile and surprise though losing most of her followers to the fray’.

No mention, in either case, was made of all the blood. She had seen enough of that by now, both as she had performed her little best to assist the field surgeons, and then later when she was led along the rails, through that appalling litter of the dead and dying, with Wasp soldiers stalking amid them and finishing off those that still lived in a soldier’s final mercy.

Cheerwell Maker, known mostly as Che, shuddered, and continued cleaning her blade. The pirates had outnumbered the crew by two to one and so she had brought her resisting sword from its sheath and cut and slashed, drawing its edge across arms and legs, thrusting its point into any part of the enemy that presented itself. The routine moves had come naturally enough, just like in those hours spent practising in the Prowess Forum. She had, in that brief moment, put her thoughts aside like a true swordswoman was supposed to.

Now she stood shaking slightly as one of the crew began to mop at the deck, swabbing the blood from it. Another man was heaving the bodies of slain pirates overboard, only five of them and one shot in the back. The dead crewmen were wrapped in canvas, gone from crew to silent passengers in a sharp moment.

‘Well, damn me but look at her,’ said her companion, moving up beside her. He had fled to the top of the wheelhouse once the pirates had attacked, but had taken a few shots with his bow from that vantage point. He was Fly-kinden, but a particularly unsavoury specimen of one, bald and coarse-featured and dressed in dark tunic and cloak like a stage-play assassin. Now he was staring at the approaching pilot whose aerobatics had apparently defeated the pirates’ fliers.

The pilot was a female Fly even smaller than himself, clad in an all-in-one garment of waxed cloth strapped across with various belts and bandoliers. She seemed very young, with a round, tanned face and smiling eyes, and Che envied the light way she moved across the deck.

There were other passengers aboard, but only one had come up on deck to help them fight. He was a tall, severe-looking Spider-kinden man, who gave the pilot a little nod of acknowledgement as she approached.

‘So,’ he said, with a bitter smile. ‘The Destiavel, is it?’

‘My ever generous-hearted employers, Sieur,’ the pilot confirmed, grinning at him. ‘And you are Sieur Miyalis of the Praevrael Concord, unless I mistake a face. Your cargo still safe in the lower hold, is it? A shame for you if they’d been taken by pirates. Not so much shame for them, though. A slave in Princep Exilla or a slave in Solarno, I see no difference.’

The Spider-kinden slaver narrowed his eyes. ‘Then I advise you not to meddle in the trade, little pilot,’ he snarled, and stalked away.

‘Superb,’ the Fly pilot said vaguely, before gazing brightly at Che. ‘Let’s see if I can piss you off too, just as quickly.’ She took a second look at the woman she was talking to. ‘You’re a foreigner – in fact you both are, by your dress.’ She pulled the chitin helmet from her head, unleashing an improbable cascade of chestnut hair. There came a low whistle from beside Che and the pilot fixed the bald man with an arch stare. ‘What’s wrong, Sieur? Is it your daughters I remind you of, or your grand-daughters?’

‘Nice, very nice,’ he replied sourly. ‘Well, lady aviatrix, my name is Nero, the artist.’ Che caught the moment’s pause as Nero recalled just how far they now were from his usual haunts where his reputation might carry some weight. ‘And this is Cheerwell Maker, a scholar of Collegium.’

‘Collygum?’ the pilot echoed, mangling the name somewhat. ‘Spider Satrapy, is that?’

‘Not within the Spiderlands at all, Madam Destiavel,’ Che informed her, whereupon the pilot looked suddenly interested.

‘You don’t say? Look, I’m not Destiavel – they’re just the house that pay my way so I can afford to keep my Esca Volenti in the air. The name’s Taki, and you’re well met. If you’ll tell me more about where you come from, I’ll stand you a drink on the Perambula when we touch land. Maybe even find you a place to stay. I take it you’re on business?’

‘Of a sort,’ Che admitted, conscious of how suspicious she sounded. Of course, their current business was not the sort to be discussed with just any stranger, but this Taki seemed their best chance of finding their feet quickly in Solarno, about which Che knew almost nothing.

‘How comes you’ve got a boy’s name then, Miss Taki?’ Nero asked, still looking a little stung by her earlier comment. It was true though, Che decided: he was old enough to be the girl’s father.

‘Well, old man, strictly speaking it’s te Schola Taki-Amre, but most people lose interest by the time I get through all that.’ She grinned, and Che had to admit that she was really very pretty.

‘Te Schola, is it?’ Nero replied, clearly nettled. ‘Well if it’s noble blood, I can’t compete with that.’

She looked at him strangely, and then grinned once more. ‘Sieur, such a name’s no rarity in Solarno. As for you, why, surely you can’t merely be known as “Nero” in whatever port you hail from? That would seem just dreadful.’ Her grin seemed to feed off his scowl. ‘When they came to Solarno, the ladies and lords of the Spider-kinden brought with them the chiefs of their servants to provide for them but, as we tell it, they had left their homes in more of a hurry than was wise, and so the chiefs were the only ones who made the journey. My grandmother assures me that we were all little ladies and lords of our own people back then, and only came with our own mistresses out of love. Take that how you will.’ Taki now leant on the rail, looking north to where a distant shadow on the horizon must surely be the coast of the Exalsee.