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‘Where now?’ she hissed.

‘Come dawn, we shall work our way back to the river,’ he told her. ‘If we see a ship, we shall warn them of the Wasps, and with luck they shall carry us to the stone town.’

‘To Porta Rabi, yes,’ she agreed. ‘And what about until dawn?’

She did not find out what his reply might have been, because that same voice above suddenly cried out, ‘I see them! Get the lamp on them!’

The swamp was abruptly on fire, or that was how it felt. A white light sheared over everything and, had Praeda been looking in that direction, it would have blinded her. The source was a mirrored lantern mounted on the shoulder of one of the Wasp fliers, the sort of device used by explorers heading underground. Its bearer hung well back, but the blazing light made stark silhouettes of his two companions, who were even now advancing. Praeda understood immediately how they had managed to follow a trail at night, for one of them was a Fly cradling a cut-down snapbow.

Amnon rushed at them with a bellow, drawing their attention. Praeda saw the Wasp’s sting flash off his breastplate, but then the snapbow spoke again, and punched Amnon off his feet. She shouted incoherently, lifting her weapon and pressing the trigger without even considering whether she had remembered to reload it. Plainly her hands had attended to that task without her recalling, for her shot slapped the closer Wasp off his feet, without a cry, and then she and the Fly were both busy trying to reload ahead of the other, while the lamp-man came rushing in clumsily under the offset weight of the lantern.

And then the light went out, as Praeda heard the glass break. Absolute darkness descended, but her hands kept following the motions: slotting a new bolt into place and winding up the pressure in the battery.

She wanted to call out to Amnon, but that would give the Fly something to aim at. She strained her ears above the monotonous sounds of the swamp, willing her eyes to reaccustom themselves to the night, take advantage of that sliver of moon.

She could make out a little more now, the faint glimmer of water against the deeper darkness of the plants, but of course the Fly’s eyes would be so much better than hers.

She heard his quiet sound of satisfaction at reacquiring her position, and she loosed in that direction at once, feeling certain that she had missed and that she might as well have shot blind.

There came a grunt not quite from the direction she had aimed her bolt towards, and she stared wide-eyed, trying to make sense of the shadow play before her with the unreliable assistance of the moon. At last it came to her that the shape over there must be the Fly, and the straight shaft protruding from it was therefore . . . an arrow.

‘Be very still,’ Amnon’s voice reached her, sounding pained. ‘They are all around us.’

Despite the grim news her heart leapt to hear him. ‘You were shot,’ she reproached him.

‘When the Iron Glove make armour, they make it well. The bolt pierced enough to draw blood, but the metal slowed it down,’ he murmured back. ‘Now be quiet and let me speak to them.’

She had absolutely no sense of there being marsh-kinden around them, those slender Mantis-kinden that called the Jamail delta their home. There could be ten or a thousand of them, silent and invisible, and she would never know for sure.

‘You know me,’ she heard Amnon announce. ‘You are bound by the old covenants. Let us pass.’

Praeda strained her eyes, trying to make out the swift, small forms of the Mantis-kinden. It was all too easy to imagine their flint-tipped spears, their arrowheads of poisoned bone.

‘We know you,’ came a woman’s voice. ‘You are Amnon, who was First Soldier, but you are exiled.’

Praeda had known Amnon long enough, now, to sense his stance even in the faint moonlight. He had been ready to prove himself to these people in some savage trial, or to bluff his way back into their good graces, or to threaten the wrath of the Masters of Khanaphes. What he plainly had not expected was that they should