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If he will not take me over the Ridge, she determined, I shall trust to my Art to make the climb.

‘Who lives here?’ she asked him.

‘Fugitives, refugees,’ he grunted, stomping off towards the shabby little strew of buildings, and making her hurry to keep up with him.

‘But it’s not the Imperial Commonweal above here, is it?’

The look he sent her was almost amused. ‘More things in life to run away from than the Black and Gold, girl.’

She thought about that, seeing the ragged folk of the Hitch creep out to stare at her and Allanbridge, at the sagging balloon of the Windlass. Her first thought was: Criminals, then? She had mixed with criminals before – thieves, smugglers, black marketeers. A crooked trading post here between Lowlands and Commonweal, unannounced and half hidden, made a certain sort of sense. Wouldn’t it look grander, though, if there was money to be made here? she considered, but then Jerez had been a mud-hole too, for all the double-dealing and the villainy . . .

But enough of Jerez. She was not yet ready to think of Jerez.

. . . imagining her hand on the sword’s hilt, surely she had felt the indescribable satisfaction of driving it in? She had never liked the man, never . . .

She stopped, fists clenched, looking down until she was master of her expression again, forcing that image from her mind, driving it back into the darkness it had arisen from. Was that a flutter of grey cloth at the edge of her vision, the hem of a Moth-kinden robe?

Allanbridge glanced back for her, but she was already catching up.

And there are other reasons to flee the Commonweal, she told herself, desperate to move her imagination on. Their sense of duty, their responsibilities, that drive them to such madness, some surely must fail and seek to escape from the demands of their fellows.

She stopped walking then, ending up a step behind Allanbridge and to his left, as though she were his bodyguard or a foreman’s clerk.

The people of the Hitch that had assembled to receive them numbered perhaps a score. At least half were Grasshopper-kinden, tall and lean and sallow, with hollow cheeks and high foreheads and bare feet. There were a half-dozen Dragonflies as well, looking just as impoverished. They were as golden-skinned and slender as Salma had been, but if these were fallen nobility, they had fallen very far indeed. There was a Roach-kinden couple, white-haired and stooped, and looming over them all was a single gigantic Mole Cricket woman.

Tynisa had encountered a couple of that giant kinden since the war, both of them Imperial deserters and both of them male. They had been half again as tall as a tall man, enormously broad at the shoulder, massive of arm, with skin like obsidian, and in manner quiet and wary, although that might simply have been the escaped slave in them. This apparition before her was something again. The woman stood surely a foot taller than those two men she remembered, and her body fell in enormous curves – of shoulders, breasts, belly and thighs – so that beneath her brown woollen robe she looked like a melting idol shaped from mud. She had a riotous flow of silver hair and her face, many-chinned and broad, was beaming at Allanbridge with rapacious cheer.

‘Why, it’s my favourite Lowlander!’ she boomed, loud enough that Tynisa feared for the solidity of the cliffs above them.

‘Ma Leyd,’ Allanbridge named her, making a brief bow. ‘Always a pleasure.’

‘This man’s a friend,’ Ma Leyd assured her followers, who were clustered about her colossal waist like children.

‘He’s the one with the trade boat?’ one of the Grasshoppers piped up.

‘You see it there,’ Ma Leyd replied cheerily, pointing out the Windlass with a finger not much smaller than Tynisa’s wrist. ‘You’re on your way up to Siriell’s Town, Master Allanbridge?’

‘If so advised,’ the Beetle confirmed.

‘Then I’ll have some freight for you on your return,’ she promised him. ‘For now, come inside. Come talk, come drink.’ The Mole Cricket’s eyes flicked towards Tynisa. ‘Got yourself a wife there, Jons?’

‘Not likely,’ Allanbridge assured