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Thalric plainly had not expected this from the look he gave her, but she pressed on valiantly. ‘I would like to speak to a . . .’ She could not form the word magician before the old Scorpion’s pragmatic stare. Thalric might just understand, after all they had been through together in Khanaphes, but Hokiak? ‘Somewhere in Myna there must be someone . . . a fortune teller, or a mystic, perhaps . . .’

But Hokiak’s expression was not encouraging. ‘Plenty of those where you’re headed, maybe, but in Myna?’

‘Do you have anyone Inapt working for you?’ Che pressed, ignoring Thalric’s doubting expression.

Hokiak made an exasperated face, a feat in itself. He had one of his people run off, to return a moment later with a cadaverous old Spider-kinden in tow. Che recognized the man as Hokiak’s business partner.

‘Gryllis,’ the Scorpion said, sounding embarrassed to even be asking this, ‘you know any fortune tellers or quacksalvers or anything like that in this city?’ A thought obviously struck him. ‘Wasn’t there that deserter . . . what was her name, Wheezer?’

‘Uie Se,’ Gryllis pronounced it carefully, and Che reflected that there would be plenty more names like that to be found in the Commonweal. ‘She’s clinging on.’

Hokiak gave him a sidelong look. ‘You don’t ever go have your fortune told, do you?’

‘Old Claw, when you get to our age, money spent on a seer would be money wasted,’ Gryllis replied drily. ‘Who wants to know about Uie Se, then?’

‘I do.’ Che interrupted. ‘Thalric, can you wait here for the guide? I won’t be long.’

‘So long as you know what you’re doing,’ Thalric cautioned her. ‘And so long as this guide of yours,’ he added to Hokiak, ‘won’t run a mile if they see a Wasp.’

‘Oh, I don’t reckon there’s a chance of that,’ the Scorpion replied, obviously finding the idea amusing.

Hokiak’s opinion of seers and magicians was sufficiently low that even he threw in this Mynan fortune teller’s whereabouts for free. Che learned also that the mystic had been one of the Auxillian troops the Empire had used to keep the peace in Myna during the occupation, that the woman had aided the resistance and then deserted once the Wasps were driven out.

It was an indictment of the current Mynan paranoia that all the risks Uie Se had taken on behalf of the locals had resulted in bare tolerance of her presence, rather than any true acceptance. She lived in a single room, in a house that had plainly belonged to a well-off family some time before the occupation, but was now falling to pieces a day at a time. The room itself was grimy, and the partitioning of the house’s interior had left the seer with a bare sliver of window, so that inside it was so dark that only by Art or magic could one see anything at all.

Che, whose understanding of magic was in its infancy, fell back on her Art, exchanging the darkness for a palette of greys. Uie Se, she saw, was a tall, lean and angular woman, a Grasshopper-kinden as all the other Mynan Auxillians had been. Her hair was kept long and tied back, and she wore a simple and much-darned smock reaching down to her bony knees.

The seer was staring at her bleakly. ‘You’ve come to the wrong room, Beetle,’ she said, her voice dry and hollow, and tried to close the door again. ‘Don’t bother me.’

‘Wait,’ Che said hurriedly. ‘I need your help.’

‘There’s nothing I can do for such as you.’ Abandoning her attempt to close the door, Uie Se turned and shambled back to sit down on a filthy straw mattress.

‘I have money.’ Meaning yet more of Thalric’s, and she suspected he would not approve, but her need was great.

‘Oh, then come in,’ said the Grasshopper, with a loose-jointed gesture, and Che realized that the woman was drunk. ‘Buy me a chair, so you can sit on it. What do you want, Beetle? Are you a scholar come to record stories of a vanished age? I will talk. I will talk all you want.’

Maybe this was a waste of time. ‘I want to talk about dreams.’

Uie Se was abruptly more still. ‘You have aspirations for the future, rich lady?