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The Scriptora was dark save for one window picked out by the dim glow of a rush-light, some diligent clerk labouring into the night. Even should he look up from his calligraphy, she trusted in her skills to cloud his eyes. These Khanaphir were but Beetle-kinden, chained by their Aptitude, and yet without any of the material advantages their cousins elsewhere enjoyed.

That is because the Masters do not desire them to change, the thought came to her, and she knew it to be true. The lurking power that dwells beneath this city has influence yet.

At the centre of the square fronting the Scriptora stood that squat, stepped pyramid with its flat top, about which stood an irregular placement of statues in white stone. They were not Beetle-kinden, nor Wasp nor any other race that Seda had known, and they were carved to be twice the height of normal men and women, giants looking over the city with a proprietorial eye.

And there they are. They were but stone, but Seda felt an echo there in their cold, disdainful likenesses, their distant beauty. They are the Masters, whom I must now seek out. Her dreams recurred to her: the darkness below, the pale forms striding through it. It was as though she had made this journey before. Even as she ascended the pyramid’s steps, she knew that there would be a shaft at its apex, ringed and guarded by those statues. That was the path. It was the only path.

She took the steps carefully, wondering partway whether the city had been this silent for long or whether, as her imagination fancied, she had stilled all other sound by her ascent. Some part of her felt that, on reaching the top, she should somehow become of equal stature with the great stone forms, and ready to take her place amongst them, but instead they dwarfed her, which made her feel angry.

Gjegevey took longer to join her, struggling over each step. At the last he stopped and doubled over, and she let him catch his breath while she stared up at the stars.

‘The most ancient tales of my, ah, people,’ the Woodlouse slave got out, ‘said that we were taught our earliest crafts by this vanished kinden, that our letters, our philosophy, all have their seed in the learning brought to us in the elder times by those who had been Masters here, and left Khanaphes to travel and teach the savage lesser kinden elsewhere.’ He smiled sardonically. ‘Of course, I am reminded of the, hmm, Spider-kinden, who will have you believe that without them the sun would fall from the sky – and they’ll convince you of it, too, if you let them. There is no story ever told that can be separated from the interests of the teller.’

‘You urge caution, then?’ Seda asked him.

‘My Empress, if to urge caution would help, then we would not be here. But . . . if they should stand before you in the majesty and grandeur of ten thousand years, do not forget, mn, all you are, and all you have achieved. There are many kinds of greatness in the world.’

For a long time she regarded him with a solemn scrutiny that would have made any other subject tremble and sweat, but he knew that a smile would appear eventually.

‘I shall not forget,’ she promised. ‘Now, we shall descend and then, if I have a destiny, I shall find it here in that darkness, or not at all.’

Che awoke, staring upwards into pitch darkness, her Art nevertheless picking out the spider in its circular web.

What was the ruler of the Wasp-kinden doing in that ancient city? And why did Che’s mind send her there every night that her dreams were lucid enough to remember?

And when I was there myself, walking beneath Khanaphes and seeing what I saw, was the Empress seeing me the same way as I see her now?

She had no control over this strange link with the Wasp Empress. It was part of the great magical world that she had been thrust into, vast and trackless and hostile, and yet it had become her new home.

The thought came to her, not for the first time, that there were magicians aplenty in the Commonweal. If anyone could help her understand this new life, then surely some Dragonfly mystic would spare