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staff. ‘If you truly thought I was Rekef you’d not be so free with me.’ He had said it before,
and it was the unconscious stress he put on ‘Rekef’, that sudden passion, that had decided the others about his allegiance.
    ‘I see Lorchis isn’t in his seat by the corner yet,’ Breighl observed, changing the subject as naturally as he could. ‘And no sign of Raedhed either.’
    A fresh bottle came, not brandy but local sweet wine, and they got to discussing their peers, presences and absences and speculation, trading gems of information that spies in other cities would
have had to shadow and lurk and burgle for and still end up with nothing more reliable at the end of it.
    The Empire was out there, a formless shadow on the northern horizon, a vast storm-front that could head south at any time. There were Aristoi families, just the far side of the Exalsee, that had
designs on Solarno, and probably on the wider world. There were Ants whose only plan for defending their sovereignty was the systematic beating down of their neighbours. There was a Beetle
spymaster who had readied himself so much for the next Wasp attack that he might just end up precipitating it. Laszlo knew it, and everyone in the Taverna te Remi knew it.
    But Liss was sneaking him a grin, even though she was hanging on to te Riel’s arm. Her expression seemed to say that she was forced to pander to the Imperial, with his ready money and his
arrogant manner, but they both knew who she would rather be touching.
    The spring was warm, the promised summer hotter. The prospect of war, always alluded to but never spoken of outright, seemed a long way away just now.
    She had left on te Riel’s arm that day, but two days later towards nightfall she dropped into Laszlo’s lodgings, where he was keeping a desultory eye on the civic
hangars. Letters of introduction from some Fly aviatrix in Collegium had secured Laszlo a small third-storey room within sight of the city’s upper classes, and this place was more than most
foreign agents could have boasted. Besides, small and high up only meant that it was perfect for a Fly-kinden.
    ‘I can’t stay,’ she warned him, even as she flitted in through his window. He was lying on his side, stripped to the waist in the evening’s muggy heat, trying to balance
his telescope so that it would support itself while he looked through it.
    ‘Top-secret orders come through at last?’ he asked her drily.
    ‘Breighl wants me to go to the theatre with him.’
    ‘You’d rather have orders?’
    ‘Wouldn’t you?’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘And I’m not suggesting that Painful feels that way about you, but some orders , hm? From whoever you really work
for?’
    Laszlo shrugged. ‘Nice just to take stock, sometimes.’
    She had been poised in the open window all this time, and now she darted over to the bed, landing demurely beside him. Laszlo was lean and strong, for a Fly, having spent much of his life
wrestling with sails and lines, and she put a hand on his arm with a mischievous expression. ‘Stories, stories,’ she murmured, for it was his bad arm, the one he had broken, and the
mottling of injury was still to be seen.
    ‘You’ve seen mine, do I get to see yours?’ he asked her gamely.
    A snort was all that got him, and a change of subject. ‘Anything to drink? If I’m going to sit through three hours of Spider opera, I need a lining to my stomach. Brain, too,
probably.’
    He had a bucket of water in the lee of the window, where the sun never quite chased the shadows away, and the bottle he extracted from it was still cool. He was quite aware that this was not
what Stenwold Maker had sent him here for, and that a proper spy would probably know all sorts of ways to seduce te Liss and get her talking. He could only imagine te Riel trying and – in his
mind’s eye – abjectly failing. With Laszlo himself, however, she seemed more than willing to be seduced, and by unspoken accord neither of