It took me long enough, but I suppose your Moth there must have helped to persuade you. Sometimes being credulous can be an advantage. If you decide to go after Scylis, little Moth, I would suggest you take care. When he came limping in after catching your arrow, he was not pleased with you at all. If I had provoked Scylis’s enmity I would not get within arm’s reach of anyone else, ever again.’ He smiled until Tisamon shifted slightly, the metal of his claw scraping on the tabletop, and the smile instantly went sour.

‘So Scylis will have passed the box once he got to Helleron?’ Che clarified.

Gaved nodded. ‘That was the original plan.’

‘Then the plan failed,’ Achaeos informed them, ‘for the Shadow Box did not go to Helleron,’ He unrolled a somewhat tattered map across the table. Stenwold studied it but could see little there: the colours and shapes made no real match to places and lands that were familiar to him. It was an old map, he knew, prepared by Achaeos’s own kinden when this city was still theirs. Just as Achaeos could not grasp how to fire a crossbow or turn a key in a lock, so Stenwold could not decipher the way the Moths represented distance and places on a page.

‘I have charted the course of this Scylis, or whoever holds the box,’ Achaeos explained, although of his audience only Tisamon could follow his markings. ‘Not to Helleron, in fact, but some severe detour. A detour north and then east, here to Lake Limnia.’

‘Jerez,’ Gaved said instantly.

‘You know it?’

‘I’ve done good business there,’ the Wasp hunter replied. ‘That’s Skater-kinden land: marsh and swamp, bandit and smuggler country. Imperial writ runs thin there and so that’s where the fugitives go, hoping to get into the Commonweal, or even escape over the northern borders.’

‘So tell me,’ Achaeos said, ‘why take the box there? Nobody would go into the Empire just to get out again. Scylis could have gone straight north from here and found a pass into the Commonweal.’