Responding to an unspoken thought, Lyrus came forward with a tray of wine decanted into Spider-made glass goblets. The Beetle and the Queen both took one and, before Lyrus could snatch the tray back, the Spider servant had helped herself as well. Acting every bit the contemptuous Sarnesh faced with foreign impudence, he returned to the window drape and set down the tray.

‘Master Maker, this is no good,’ the Queen said. The Beetle made a show of eyeing the wine in surprise, but this touch of humour vanished into the ether. The Queen’s face remained stern.

‘It is a complex situation, your Majesty,’ Maker admitted. ‘I am sure, with time-’

‘What time do you think we have?’ the Queen cut him off. ‘How long now, before the war is upon us? This matter of these weapons, these snapbows, dominates us. You can afford to procrastinate no longer.’

The Beetle grimaced, glancing sideways at his servants. The Spider stood there looking enviably relaxed, the Fly-kinden shuffling nervously.

‘I will not send my soldiers to their deaths simply because you and your scholars do not believe we can be trusted with… this thing.’ The Queen gestured at the slender weapon in the Beetle’s hands. ‘Make your choice, Master Maker, and make it now, for your time is up.’

Quite, thought Lyrus and, though he would have liked to see the Collegium man squirm a little more, it was clear that his own cue was fast approaching. He reached into the drapery, grasping the stock of the crossbow. It was already loaded with a full magazine containing a dozen bolts. He had earlier tested the action, and it was as smooth and powerful as he could wish.

‘Which would your Majesty rather have?’ Maker was saying. ‘The snapbow or the Ancient League? The snap-bow or the cooperation of the Kessen? That is the choice you are making.’

Lyrus’s Fly-kinden associates were waiting outside the unbarred windows, ready to burst in at the first sound of affray. Lyrus brought up the crossbow in a smooth and practised motion, and loosed.

The Queen of Sarn’s lips moved to speak, and Sperra shrieked like a madwoman and dived at her. Stenwold, with reflexes he had not known he possessed, threw himself after her, seeing only that his single chance for a grand alliance was about to be inexplicably sabotaged.

The crossbow bolt lanced his thigh, right up to the fletching, the tip of it piercing Sperra’s foot. They both cried out and then were both falling on top of the Queen, who had a sword half-drawn, her eyes wide with shock. Her two guards drew simultaneously, running forward, and the shutters above them slammed open. All in that same moment.

The two Fly-kinden who hurtled in from above were wrapped up in dark cloth. One held a long dagger, dropping down on to the Queen and her assailants; the other simply flung out his hand and one of the Ant guards reeled backwards with a blade in his throat.

Lyrus recocked and loosed the crossbow again and again. As the second guard moved in, he let the man reach down to haul Stenwold off the Queen, let the man jab at the Beetle with his sword, running a shallow line across his ribs, and then he shot the guard in the face. Lyrus himself would be the only remaining Sarnesh witness now, and he knew the guards had called for aid but had relayed crucially false facts about who was attacking. The Queen herself had not realized the source of the betrayal. The foreigners are attacking the Queen! Lyrus cried out into the ether. Protect the Queen from these foreign assassins!

Stenwold fell to the floor beside the dead guard, still unable to work out what was going on. Sperra was shouting something, crouching by the Queen, and then a Fly-kinden dropped on her, dagger raised. Even as Sperra saw him, and fell helplessly to the floor with her hands raised in feeble defence, Arianna had lunged forward, catching the Fly in the side with a blade Stenwold had not known she was carrying. The Fly assassin fell back, and she went with him, tumbling on to the floor as a crossbow bolt sped past them.

The crossbowman! Stenwold looked around wildly, before seeing a Sarnesh Ant armed with the weapon standing at the far end of the room. It was only the bolt in his thigh that convinced him the man was an enemy.

The main door was flung open, and more soldiers were pushing their way in, their swords drawn. The first man took a bolt in the chest, punching its way through his armour, and he fell back into the rest.

Stenwold found his hands tightening about the snapbow he had brought with him. Fighting the pain in his leg, he reached into his belt pouch, where he had some nailbow bolts intended for demonstrating the weapon. With trembling hands he now slotted one into the snapbow’s breach.

Sperra was covered in blood, he noticed, and a crossbow bolt had pierced the Queen’s body, just below her breast, and was quivering with the rhythm of her breathing. Sperra was trying desperately to get the woman’s armour off to reach the wound, then flinched back as a narrow blade flicked past her to dig itself into the floor.

Stenwold raised the snapbow and loosed. It was clear the Fly killer did not possess the same Art that Sperra did, because he did not see the bolt until it had plucked him from the air, spinning him end over end to crash off one wall and drop to the floor.

Arianna had meanwhile killed the other assassin, but now she was backing off frantically, with Sarnesh soldiers running towards her. Stenwold, hands already fumbling a second bolt into place, shouted for them to stop. The Spider had dropped her knife, had her empty hands raised, when the first soldier simply clubbed her down with the pommel of his sword. Another, tight-faced, ripped Sperra away from the Queen and himself knelt down beside the wounded woman.

Stenwold turned to see the crossbowman level his weapon at the Queen again. He wore the faint smile of a man who might not survive the moment, but who would still win the game.

Stenwold loosed just before the other did, seeing the bolt strike him not in the chest as he had aimed for, but in the shoulder, upsetting the man’s aim so that the crossbow quarrel went wide.

Someone grabbed Stenwold by the collar and hauled him roughly to his feet, racking him with pain. He looked up into the face of a Sarnesh soldier, and started to say that the crossbowman must be stopped.

He saw only a blur of movement as the man’s mailed fist struck him square on the nose, knocking him cold with professional ease.

Stenwold came to slowly and reluctantly. Each further part of his body he became aware of made him regret his recovery. His head hurt abominably, his nose especially, though the pain in his back he attributed to the bare wooden boards they had laid him on. The crossbow-wound in his leg was just a dull ache by comparison, though his ribs burnt from that seemingly trifling flesh wound.

On further discovery he found that the surface beneath him was a bed. It might simply have been the Ant-kinden idea of especial luxury, but this was more likely the kind of hospitality they extended to all of their prisoners. This room he was confined in was definitely a cell.

There was a wan light filtering in through a very high-up window, or a window that seemed high relative to himself. The cell was shaped like a circular shaft, and he had the uneasy feeling that the window was actually at ground level, and that his prison was sunk deep in the earth.

He sat up and groaned both at the pain and the sudden rush of memories. Following the assassination attempt, in the confusion, the soldiers had just struck out at all of them. His current residence suggested that confusion was ongoing.

Surely they can’t think that we had anything to do with it?

But what would the Ant soldiers have witnessed, after all? Their Queen badly injured, two of her guards slain, a rabble of foreigners running amok. The Sarnesh with the crossbow – the Sarnesh traitor! – could have subsequently told them anything.