‘I didn’t even get close to the camp because they got a thousand men on sentry duty, or that’s like it looked to me. A whole ring of them, and earthworks, palisade, even little lookie-outie towers. And the sky! Don’t even get me started. If you was thinkin’ about just swanning in with those wings of yours you best put that candle right out. They got men circlin’ and circlin’ like flies on a tenday-dead corpse. They plainly reckon the Ants’ll give ’em grief – and why not? I would, if I was runnin’ things at Tark Hall.’

‘Ants are too straight for that, aren’t they?’ Totho asked. ‘I thought they’d just line up and fight.’

‘Don’t believe it, Beetle-boy,’ she told him. ‘Ants’ll play the dirty tricks same as anyone. They do war, Beetlie, and war means day and night work. Nobody ever won a war just by fighting fair.’

‘Don’t call me that,’ Totho said, for the nicknames she used were starting to gall him. ‘I’m no more a Beetle than you are a… a whatever it is you are, or aren’t.’

‘Am I a Beetle? No. Is His Lordship a Beetle? No. Then you get to be Beetle-boy unless we can get a better Beetle than you,’ she told him without sympathy.

‘Will the pair of you be-’ Salma had started to hiss, and then the Wasps were in sight, skimming at just a man’s height and touching the tops of the sword-grass as they came. In that same moment they had clearly spotted the three spies.

There were half a dozen of them, light airborne out merely on a scouting mission, but Wasps were a pugnacious lot and never ones to shirk a fight. Their leader shouted an order and two of them broke off, arrowing back towards their camp. The others sped towards Salma with swords drawn and palms outstretched to unleash their energy stings.

Skrill shot one straight off, leaping up with her sudden speed and loosing an arrow that split the second oncomer’s eye. The Wasp flier recoiled in the air and then dropped from sight amidst the tall grass.