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Amnon still held his sword to hand. ‘If you believe that I have come begging for pardon, you are mistaken,’ he stated. ‘If you intend threatening me with the law of Khanaphes for defying my banishment, then you have forgotten who I am. These children will not suffice.’ He looked directly into the faces of Ethmet’s guards. ‘They will not even stand against me.’

‘No, no.’ Ethmet’s voice, that had quieted angry crowds in its time, emerged weak enough that Praeda had to lean closer to hear it. ‘I just came to . . . to see you. An old friend . . .’

Amnon frowned suspiciously. ‘You seem to like your new friends well enough to have no need of old ones. We saw you bow the knee.’

‘Amnon, you do not understand.’ The old man’s voice cracked on the last word and, suddenly shaking, his legs gave way. One of his men lunged forward to catch him, and guide him over to a stone bench. To her embarrassment, Praeda saw tears on Ethmet’s withered cheeks.

‘The Masters,’ he got out. ‘The Masters . . .’

‘There are no Masters,’ Amnon said firmly. He put a lot of conviction into those words, and indeed Praeda had talked with him repeatedly about the archaic beliefs of the Khanaphir. Most of the time, Amnon came across as quite the rationalist Beetle-kinden, interested in machinery and progress and better ways of doing things. She knew him well, though, and there were times when his mind still played host to the superstitions of his upbringing.

‘You are wrong!’ Ethmet hissed. ‘You saw them sweep the Scorpions from the city, at the last.’

‘At the last?’ Amnon demanded hotly. ‘Old man, you had better hope that there are no Masters, for if there are, what manner of creature are they to let their servants suffer so, to see so many of their people die, to see their own army defeated, if all along they possessed such power?’

Amnon obviously expected Ethmet to rally at this, to curse him for his blasphemy, but the old man’s shoulders kept shaking, and his words were momentarily lost as he fought to control himself.

‘I believe in the Masters,’ Ethmet forced out at last, ‘and I believe I have always done their will as best I could. But it is for me as a man hearing the echo of a voice from distant rooms, so perhaps I have not always understood. Perhaps, sometimes, I thought I heard them when they were silent, or they spoke and I did not listen. But . . . I believe in the Masters now. They are awake. They speak, and if I myself can hear only the faintest whisper of their words, she hears them clear, whether she knows it or not. Oh, I knelt, Amnon. I knelt because the Masters told us to, all of us. It was only the echo of an echo, but I have never heard them clearer. I could not have kept a straight leg if I had wished to. She is here because of the Masters, Amnon. She means more to the Masters than do I and all my ancestors together for five hundred years.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Amnon admitted. He glanced at Praeda, who put a hand on his arm, trying to comfort him.

Ethmet was crying quietly again. ‘We have served them all this time. We have done what we thought the Masters . . . the Masters . . . what they wanted. We have failed them. We have grown away from them, from generation to generation. We are not fit tools for them, and so they reach out to others: first that Collegium girl, and now the Empress of all the Wasps. Even these foreigners are more beloved of the Masters than we are.’

Amnon and Praeda exchanged uncomfortable looks, on seeing the First Minister of the Khanaphir so comprehensively undone. In Praeda’s mind, though, a phrase resurfaced. ‘That Collegium girl’ . . . Che?

That morning, in her mirror, she had seemed to see another face. She was Seda the First, Empress of the Wasps, a countenance revered and reproduced across the Empire, and yet, for a moment, her pale, fine features had been overlaid by those of a Beetle woman, of all things: a serious-looking girl of close to her own age. Seda had locked eyes with that phantom until it had faded.

It was not the first time, either. She knew the same face from fragmentary