‘And it won’t do me any good to ask who’s so interested in me that they employed you that time, either?’ Che said. If she had been feeling less battered, less lost, then she would have left her next words unsaid. ‘I’m told you’re only good for one thing – killing.’

‘More than that. I am not a killer. I am an assassin,’ he said with bleak pride, and the final piece fell, click, into place, and she knew. Not a halfbreed at all, this one, nothing so commonplace.

I must be wrong. But she was not wrong. The sudden knowledge was as certain as it was mysterious. It was as though the stones themselves had told her, whispering it in her ear. Oh, Achaeos, you taught me too much. Yet it was some instinct of her own that had made the connection, knitting the tangled snarls of Moth-kinden history to give a name to his unplaceable features in this fallen stronghold.

‘More than that,’ she echoed, ‘what if I said that I know what you are, and whose hands originally raised these stones?’

She had expected some arrogant sneering, but his entire face fell as slack as if she had stabbed him. He seemed utterly confounded.

‘And how,’ he asked, ‘do you know that?’

‘I am a scholar, a historian,’ she said. ‘And what my own people do not teach me, the Moth-kinden do.’ It had been a fraught time for them, setting her own histories against Achaeos’s, until they had hammered out some view of the world they could both live with. Learning had been part of her life for so long she could not have stood by and let him dismiss it all, whilst his kinden were all scholars, with their own secret lore and traditions that were not used to competition. It had not been the prejudice nor the physical differences, but the sheer clash of knowledges that had been the hardest thing to resolve. His rotes of ancient wars and grievances that her kinden had known nothing of, the lists of his people’s enemies, and a certain symbol – that jagged, angry mark – recorded for bitter posterity in Achaeos’s people’s archives.

‘Moth-kinden?’ he said tiredly. ‘So what tale do they tell?’

‘That long, long ago there existed a clever, bloody-handed people skilled in stealth and deception, disguise and death.’ She recounted the story as Achaeos had told it to her. ‘That this people pitted themselves against the Moth-kinden’s rule of the Lowlands, and turned their knives on the Skryres, who were the Moths’ leaders. But they failed, and they were smashed, their entire people driven away and scattered, hunted down and wiped out, save for some few who fled into the Spiderlands and were never seen again. Or is this not the true story?’

‘It will do.’ His earlier manner, that of the calm and inscrutable killer, had not recovered. ‘I may be the last of them for, aside from my father, I have seen no others of my kin. They did a fine job of dispersing us.’

‘Then you are a halfbreed?’

‘If we tended towards halfbreeds, we would have become diluted beyond all measure, gone beyond even history’s ken, but we breed true, the children born into the kinden of one parent or the other. We dwindle from generation to generation, but we cling on. Or perhaps only I, now. The last dregs of the Assassin Bug-kinden standing in the ruins of their last hall.’

‘Here?’

‘Our monastery once. But your story is incomplete, for the Spider-kinden could still not tolerate us – we who were violent and sly beyond even their ways – and so they came here to the last stronghold of my race, and slaughtered all they found with the help of their slave-soldiers. But some few must have escaped, as I myself am proof of. We are a stubborn stain on the world, one that will not wash out just yet.’

‘And… are you going to…?’ She clenched her fists. ‘Are you going to kill me?’

His sardonic look returned. ‘Are you yet dead? Then you may take the answer as no, for now.’

She put a hand out to him. ‘If I know you, you should know me. I’m Cheerwell Maker from Collegium.’

‘Yes, you are.’ He clasped her wrist in that same warrior’s affectation she had seen Tisamon use. ‘And you’re tougher than you look. And you’re here to fight the Wasps.’

‘To warn people about the Wasps.’

‘That may no longer be necessary,’ Cesta said.

‘Tell me, whose side are you on?’

‘That is one thing I can never tell you, because I have no side save my own and that of whoever pays me.’

‘And if the Wasps conquer Solarno?’

He shrugged, as if blithely unconcerned. ‘And do the Wasps have no need for a killer? Or else those that oppose them? Or I shall go to Princep Exilla – and if that falls there are lands more southerly still. My kind has passed from this world, Bella Cheerwell Maker. With the exception of yourself, and of the Moth-kinden who forget nothing, the world has forgotten us. Besides, we were always good at passing unnoticed. Even within the Spiderlands, no finger shall point at me and cry out what I am.’

‘So you don’t care,’ she said, disappointed. ‘You’re just a killer after all.’

‘Perhaps not even that. I am a shadow that the sun has not, for some reason, dispelled yet. I have sired no children. If I am truly the last, let my kind die with me. I would not wish my cursed blood on any other.’

‘And with your gifts you will do nothing?’

‘Do you mean to recruit me, Bella Cheerwell Maker?’

‘And if I do?’ She knew she was over-bold and put a hand to her mouth, too late to stop the words.

‘You have not the gold to buy me,’ he said softly. ‘Besides, why should I take up arms in your cause? I am no idealist to jump to another’s drum.’

‘Then you must leave Solarno and the Exalsee,’ she warned him, without force, her tired conviction coming from bitter experience. ‘You must go south or east of here, and then keep running, Master Cesta. The Wasps have need of killers but they’ll bring their own, Rekef-branded. I had a word with a Wasp, not so long ago, who tried to make a living as a freelance within sight of the Empire’s borders, and he was not a happy man. The Empire beats a loud drum. You will have to run a long way not to hear it.’

His lips twitched, but he offered no come-back, standing there in the wreckage of his inheritance. A moment later they heard the distant sound of a flier’s engine, far off over the Exalsee, and Che jumped up but then hesitated. Wasps? Or Taki come back for me?

‘Do you want me to find out who?’ Cesta asked her, reading her expression.

‘Why would you help me even in that?’

‘Nothing I have said means that I can’t like you,’ he told her. ‘I would kill you if I was hired for it, but it would still not mean that I cannot like you.’

With that he was gone into the trees, leaving her to work his last words out.

When it was clear that it was the Esca Volenti passing low over the island, Che expected Cesta to simply melt away into the forest, but he was content to stand out on the beach with her as she waved at the repassing orthopter. Taki threw the machine into a tight turn and brought it down for an impeccable water landing. Moments later Che heard the drone of another engine, and a much bulkier machine rumbled down to the water, still managing to touch its surface as gracefully as a falling leaf. She recognized it immediately as the big, armoured fixed-wing belonging to the Solarnese pilot called Scobraan.

Taki put her head up out of the cockpit and was about to call over, when she spotted the assassin. For a second she had nothing to say but then she had hopped out and flitted from the Esca’s wing onto the beach.

‘What in the pits are you doing here?’ she asked the killer, sounding none too friendly.

Cesta’s smile was cold. ‘I’m sorry, Bella te Schola Taki-Amre,’ he said smoothly. ‘Is this your island? Am I not welcome on it?’

‘As far as I’m concerned you’re welcome nowhere near me,’ Taki told him. He might have been almost twice her height, and a feared assassin as well, but she muscled up to him as though she was going to lay him flat. ‘You leave Che alone, you hear me?’