And she did. In fact she had to lean on him while her legs recovered. Meanwhile she told him everything: about the Wasp attack, the possible fate of Che. ‘How strong a flier are you?’

Nero considered. ‘Not strong enough to get out that far,’ he admitted. ‘Not my strong suit, is flight.’

‘And you’re wounded too.’

‘A scratch.’

‘You were lucky to get away with just that.’

‘You know the old Art – our kinden’s trick with danger,’ he told her, and she did. Even as the assassin had drawn back his blade, Nero must have sensed it and known to flick himself out of the way. He was clearly only annoyed that the blade should have cut as deeply as it had. ‘I can look after myself. Che, on the other hand-’

‘I know, and I did my best,’ she said, more heatedly than she had meant.

‘No criticisms. If you want me with you whenever you go out, though-’

‘Can you fly a machine, at least?,’ she interrupted. ‘I’ll need another pilot. From what I saw, the Stormcry’s beyond fixing, and I don’t want to head out there in something that can’t fight off the Wasps off if they attack again.’

‘Yes… the Wasps,’ replied Nero flatly.

‘What is it?’

‘I’m sure Domina Genissa will tell you.’

Everything hurt, as Che woke up. She was aware of that before she opened her eyes or paid any heed to what was going on around her. Everything hurt: her head, her back, her legs, her arms. Her left hand hurt particularly, but it was just a louder voice at the back of a clamouring crowd.

Her mind searched for explanations and she was reminded of one fateful night when she and Totho and Salma, and some girl that Salma had been wooing, had set out on an all-night drinking session. The following morning had hurt about as much as this one.

She had been in the fixed-wing, she recalled… the Wasps had been attacking her. She remembered the steam engine exploding behind her, the wood of the flier catching alight, the poor Stormcry burning. A piece of the fragmenting engine casing had struck the back of her head, after it spent most of its force on the panel it had burst through.

The machine had been dying fast, falling towards the island below. In a mad access of energy, half-dazed and working on automatic, she had torn off her harness and thrust herself out of the cockpit, flaring her wings into being to catch the air.

She had not considered the speed the flier was going, so she had been caught by the wind instantly, buffeted along the entire length of the Stormcry’s anguished hull, seared by the erupting flames and choking in smoke, and then she had been falling end-over-end towards the island, her wings still flickering in and out of sight, catching her for a moment each time and then vanishing, unable to bear the strain. She had fallen thus in fits and starts.

She now opened her eyes.

She was caught in a tree. That was what struck her most. She was wedged in the crook of a tree, which probably accounted for much of the pain. There was smoke in the air, and she was afraid that she knew what that meant. As a Beetle girl properly brought up, what she felt about that was guilt. She had gone and broken their fixed-wing and she hoped that Taki and the Destiavels would not be too angry with her, but there hadn’t seemed much option at the time.

Around the tree that she was snagged in were several others similar, and beyond those, even more trees and the faint suggestion of a grey stone edifice uphill from her. She recalled her view of the island from the air as forested, quite densely. Ideally she should now get herself either to the wreck of the Stormcry or somewhere else where a rescuer might spot her from the air. The ruin that she had seen capping the island would be the most obvious place to head for.

Of course the Wasps might also be looking for her. They could already be searching the island, so she would have to be careful. First, though, she would have to get herself out of this tree.

As she shifted, the branch supporting her gave way almost immediately, which solved that particular problem. Her wings caught her this time, and she landed heavily on the forest floor, but without any further apparent damage.

She stood up, wincing, and began trudging towards the sight of stone through the trees. It was her only landmark, everything else being quite foreign to her. The trees were of a type she had never seen before and she had no idea what else might exist here. It was not an island large enough to support some huge monster, she decided – then she decided that the huge monster might like to go off and swim and eat fish, and therefore could be very big indeed.

She tried to creep forward silently but the forest betrayed her at every step. She was just not physically built for such furtiveness. In the end, between the shifting carpet of leaves and the increasing gradient, she had to barge forward as best she could, and who cared about the noise she made? Then she found herself facing grey stonework.

A building, indeed, but now most definitely a ruin. Catching her breath, one hand on the tumbled stone of a wall, the scholar rose within her. Old, very old, she realized, for there was probably as much of it hidden beneath moss and drifted leaves and soil as there was still exposed. It put her in mind of a fallen tower she had seen some ten miles north of Collegium, beside the Sarnesh rail-line. The architectural style was subtly different, but the age-born devastation very similar. That other tower had been a ruin before the revolution, six centuries ago and more. This building could be just as old, long undisturbed and decaying on this island.

She moved on, trying to get an idea of the original scale. This had been a single building, not a community, and quite expansive, but with a curious outline that only made sense when she matched it with the contours of the hilltop. The stones were large and she thought she detected carving on some of them, but now blurred out of all meaning. Of course she knew nothing of the history of this part of the world, though this did not look like Spider-kinden work, either current or past. More like the style of the Moth architects who had first planned the city that later became Collegium, or built that ancient tower lying to the north of it. Not the work of Moth-kinden hands, exactly, but of a people who had once shared some skills and thoughts with them, before coming to this far-flung place to build, and then to die.

That thought rang a stangely familiar chord in her. Something Achaeos had once said…

She perched on a stone, looking around her. It was certainly a melancholy place. Without evidence, she was convinced that these stones had not succumbed to time alone. If she closed her eyes she could almost feel the ghost of the building as it had once been, invisible now but somehow tangible. One symbol had been repeated often enough on these scattered stones that even the legions of time had not quite defaced it, and it spoke to her from ancient pages and from dissenting histories of how the world had been.

She had been around Achaeos too long.

When she opened her eyes again, she was not alone.

A lean, russet-haired man in a tunic of metal scales, crossed with baldrics loaded with throwing knives, was now leaning against a man-high section of broken wall. His features were so kinless, without reference, that it was the knives she recognised first.

‘I know who you are. You’re Cesta,’ Che declared, because Taki had told her all about this man, or at least those scattered and damning facts that Taki really knew. There was a strange dread within Che now, because she had more sources to draw on than just Taki’s hostile recollections. Knowledge was now coming to her, piece after piece falling neatly into place. ‘How did you get here?’

‘I suppose it would be grand to say that I was waiting for you, all along,’ he replied in his colourless voice. ‘In fact I happened to be on Old Scol, three islands down the chain, when I saw the smoke. A meeting as fortuitous as our last, perhaps?’