If he will not take me over the Ridge, she determined, I shall trust to my Art to make the climb.

‘Who lives here?’ she asked him.

‘Fugitives, refugees,’ he grunted, stomping off towards the shabby little strew of buildings, and making her hurry to keep up with him.

‘But it’s not the Imperial Commonweal above here, is it?’

The look he sent her was almost amused. ‘More things in life to run away from than the Black and Gold, girl.’

She thought about that, seeing the ragged folk of the Hitch creep out to stare at her and Allanbridge, at the sagging balloon of the Windlass. Her first thought was: Criminals, then? She had mixed with criminals before – thieves, smugglers, black marketeers. A crooked trading post here between Lowlands and Commonweal, unannounced and half hidden, made a certain sort of sense. Wouldn’t it look grander, though, if there was money to be made here? she considered, but then Jerez had been a mud-hole too, for all the double-dealing and the villainy…

But enough of Jerez. She was not yet ready to think of Jerez.

… imagining her hand on the sword’s hilt, surely she had felt the indescribable satisfaction of driving it in? She had never liked the man, never…

She stopped, fists clenched, looking down until she was master of her expression again, forcing that image from her mind, driving it back into the darkness it had arisen from. Was that a flutter of grey cloth at the edge of her vision, the hem of a Moth-kinden robe?

Allanbridge glanced back for her, but she was already catching up.

And there are other reasons to flee the Commonweal, she told herself, desperate to move her imagination on. Their sense of duty, their responsibilities, that drive them to such madness, some surely must fail and seek to escape from the demands of their fellows.