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Varmen cocked an uninterested eyebrow in their direction, then burrowed into his bedroll and turned over. He had already demonstrated a soldier’s ability to find sleep at a moment’s notice.

Che opened her mouth, but suddenly found the words hard to come by. Dreams? Thalric will care nothing for dreams. That was not what stopped her being candid with him, though. Some deeper prohibition was at work, one that she could not entirely identify. ‘I was thinking about the Empress,’ she said, hoping this half-truth would be enough for him.

Thalric’s face darkened, as well it might. Of course, he had been Imperial Regent for a brief space of time, an acceptable male face that Empress Seda had stood behind while she consolidated her power: someone to appease the traditionalists amongst her subjects who recoiled from the idea of being led by a woman. By the time Thalric had jumped ship yet again, however, the Empress Seda was firmly ensconced, combining charisma, ability and the support of the Rekef in an unshakeable combination.

On the back of that history, Thalric’s reluctant, ‘Why?’ was hardly surprising.

‘Because we are alike, she and I,’ Che reminded him.

‘You are not alike.’

‘You know what I mean,’ she pressed.

He glanced at Varmen, who appeared dead to the world, and then leant close to her, keeping his voice low. ‘So you have lost your Aptitude,’ he told her, as though she might any day now rediscover it on the road. ‘So the Empress has the same . . . condition. Believe me, you are not alike in any other way.’ He did not voice his reasons, because she already knew them, but perhaps also because to give voice to them would be to somehow invite Seda’s attention – for all that Thalric was Apt and did not believe in such things.

Because of the blood, Che thought. He had told her, when they had been trapped in the tombs: how the Empress lived off the blood of others, mostly slaves. It was as if she had become, in her own body, a personification of the Empire’s own creed of rapacious conquest. By Thalric’s account, the Empress Seda drank and bathed in the spilt lives of others.

And draws power from them, came the thought to Che then. It seemed perfectly obvious to her that it was so, that such behaviour was not simply the excess of an absolute ruler whose Empire overflowed with expendable human property. When Che tried to examine her certainty regarding this, she could find no train of logic in it, and yet she knew it to be true. The blood itself is power. It is an old and evil magic.

‘The old fortress at Solamen, or whatever the ’Wealers used to call it,’ Thalric enquired, ‘is that back in use now?’

‘Surely,’ Varmen replied. ‘Crammed full of Principality troops, more of ’em every month, seems like. Now, you said you had pass papers for the Three-city soldiers, that right?’

‘Signed by the head of the Consensus, no less,’ Che agreed.

‘Makes it easier not to have to dodge them,’ their guide allowed. ‘In that case, if you’re happy they’re good, let’s call in with the locals.’

An hour after that and they were being escorted through an armed camp amid Mynan soldiers in their black and red armour, and a small detachment of Szaren Bees who seemed to be engineers. Che caught the outlines of some manner of siege artillery but, in her present state of Inaptitude, she was unable to identify what kind.

‘They seem to be a little anxious about something,’ she remarked to her companions.

‘Oh, you’ll see the reason soon enough,’ Varmen assured her. ‘I reckon they’ve got cause. Don’t blame ’em at all, me.’

The Mynan in charge of the camp studied their papers lengthily enough for Che to begin wondering if Kymene had not betrayed them by some hidden message. Eventually the man reluctantly agreed that they could pass through, although he was clearly suspicious of anyone who might want to. He herded them out of his camp immediately afterwards, as if worried that they would be stealing secrets or counting the number of his soldiers.

‘Friendly folk around these parts,’ was all Varmen would say about that.

Solamen, which had been called