The Vekken was looking at him without expression, except for a tiny wince of pain each time the automotive jolted. The studied loathing still evident in his eyes presaged the future. Three 'Khanaphes,' said Master Jodry Drillen and, although it was twelve years since the man had been a teacher at the College, Stenwold still heard in his head the squeak of chalk on slate.

'Khanaphes, indeed,' he murmured. The two of them had appropriated one of the smaller conference rooms at the Amphiophos. Nearby, the Assembly, the great elected mob that governed and failed to govern Collegium in equal measures, had only recently finished sitting.

'Something must be done.' Master Drillen was a great, fat Beetle-kinden man a few years Stenwold's senior. He had exchanged academia for politics years ago and never looked back, his influence and waist expanding in tandem as though by some demonstrable formula of statesmanship. At the moment he wore a little greying goatee beard in the Spider style, which Stenwold thought looked ridiculous but was apparently all the fashion.

Stenwold shrugged. 'The city of Khanaphes is a living, breathing city, rather than something consigned to the histories of the Inapt. That's no great surprise, is it? After all, the Moths left us with only the scraps from their table, academically speaking. No wonder, five centuries on, we're still rediscovering things that they have known all along. As for what you can mean with your "Something must be done" then it's simply one more field of study for the College geographers, unless you're now proposing going to war to wipe it off the map. It has been only recently added by the cartographers. The paint is probably still wet.' It was now two tendays after the incident at the mill, and Stenwold was feeling, at least, a bit more rested. Any good humour these days seemed to be fleeting, so he made any use of it he could.