'Best if it looks that way,' Stenwold muttered darkly. 'I'm not thinking about Broiler now, but about the Imperial ambassador.'

Drillen blinked at him blankly.

Stenwold looked unhappy as he continued. 'Think about it: Stenwold, implacable enemy of the Empire, entering into secret negotiations that will send agents to a city that is not so very far from the Empire's southern border.'

'The war's over.'

'The war isn't currently active. Both the Empire and I understand the distinction.'

Drillen shrugged. 'Whatever you want. You're in charge. It's your expedition.' She was still in mourning, but mourning was difficult for her.

In Collegium the official colour of mourning was grey. True, it was not customary any more for widows and grieving family to parade around the city in drab vestments for tendays, or even just days, but for funerals at least, grey was the order of the day.

For Cheerwell Maker, though, grey was his colour, therefore a life colour, the colour of her happiness, in the same way that black and gold had become colours of death. She could not make grey the colour of her mourning because that would be a negation of his life.

In the end she had tracked down a Moth-kinden, a pallid trader from Dorax, and not left him alone until he had explained the customs of his people. For the Moths, the concept of colour seldom entered their lives, since they lived in a midnight world where they could see perfectly without need for sunlight or spectrum. For death, though, they made an exception. For shed blood, they took on the hue of blood. She learned how Mantids did the same, dressing their honoured dead in scarlet, and then entrusting them to the red, red flames. The Moths, who had been the Mantis-kinden's masters since time immemorial, had become infected by such superstitions.

And red was the colour of the Mynan resistance, their emblem of red arrows on a black background proclaiming their impossible triumph over the Empire. And Myna had been where he had died, for her, though he had been so many miles away.