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She tried another attack, putting her sword through a half-dozen feints and lunges, keeping him at its far end, and herself out of his reach. In her arm, her side, her face, the pain seemed to grow and grow. His metal claw had become a thing of horror, a torture implement. I don’t want to be hurt. I don’t want to die.

He let her stave him off for a little while, demonstrating a parrying style that moved his arm faster than she could flick the tip of her blade.

I am going to lose. The small voice was growing louder within her.

Dal Arche watched, and he knew enough to see how the fight was going. Everyone else was watching, too – all save one. Someone tugged at his elbow urgently.

‘Dal, we have to go.’

He dragged his eyes away from the contest to see the Spider, Avaris, hopping anxiously from one foot to another.

‘Dal, it’s the plan, remember. We leg it now, maybe some of us get clear, come on!’

He glanced back at the duel, saw the pair separate again, another flash of red on the girl’s body. I owe her nothing, not even enough to watch her die. She’s not one of mine.

But he realized, with sour reluctance, that somehow she was, even though it was she who had got them into this mess. She was his champion, after all. He was a peasant woodsman gone to the bad, but in this moment he owed her something of that feudal loyalty that princes never quite seemed to grant to their underlings.

‘We’re going nowhere,’ he growled.

‘What? Dal!’ Avaris hissed, and then, when the brigand chief rounded on him, he bared his teeth in a rictus of desperation. ‘I want to live, Dal. Don’t do this.’

However that loyalty to his followers cut both ways, and Dal sagged and nodded, feeling off balance, and unfamiliar to himself. ‘Those that want to, go now, creep off, but no sudden moves. The Beetle girl and her Wasp are staying, no doubt, and so am I. Maybe they won’t notice those that leave, if some of us stick around.’

He turned his eyes back to the fight, hands clenching and unclenching on his bow, hearing the careful, wretched sounds of his people taking their chances. Someone stepped up to his elbow, though, and he glanced sideways to find Soul Je nodding to him.

‘Go and take your chances,’ Dal advised, but the Grasshopper shook his head.

‘Mordrec, then?’ Dal asked.

‘Right behind you, Dala. Don’t feel up to running, anyway.’

At that he did glance around. As he had known, the Beetle girl and her escort had remained, and their magician too, though she seemed perilously close to flight.

‘A man can die in worse company, it’s true,’ he decided, clapping Soul Je on the shoulder, and settled down to watch the conclusion of the duel.

He saw the Beetle girl shift, coming half to her feet before the Wasp dragged her back down.

‘Look at them,’ Thalric snapped, his eyes not on the fight but on the Salmae’s followers. ‘See how many of them? And if you break the rules and interfere, why not them?’ And then, perhaps in answer to some stubborn expression on the girl’s face, ‘And if you interfere by . . . other means, do you think they’d not know? They must have some two-stripe conjuror amongst them, if I’m to credit any of it.’

And Che sagged in his grip, but her eyes had never left the antagonists.

Tynisa backed and backed again, keeping Isendter away from her, but he simply walked into her reach, unhurried, careful and inexorable. When she tried to use this against him, to pin him at the far extent of her sword’s length, he slipped by her guard like water, and his claw was already ready for more blood. Her little wounds were beginning to work at her as a pack, snagging at her every time she moved, trying to drag her down. Inside she was fighting a similarly losing battle with her fear. She had never realized just how bitterly she wanted to keep on living, for a tenday, a single day, an hour more. How terrible it was to have already seen her last dawn.

She worked up some alchemy to transmute that fear to anger, and her next strike almost caught him off balance, breaking the rhythm that she had let