‘I’ll pass them on,’ Fivetide said, crushing his drinking bulb and flicking it casually at a passing servant. ‘Come now,’ he said, taking the human by the hand again. ‘Let’s to table; my stomach’s as empty as a coward’s bowels before battle.’

‘No no no, you have to flick it, like this, you stupid human, or the scratchounds’ll get it. Watch . . .’

Affronter formal dinners were held round a collection of giant circular tables anything up to fifteen metres across, each of which looked down into a bait-pit where animal fights took place between and during courses.

In the old days, at banquets held by the military and within the higher reaches of Affront society, contests between groups of captured aliens had been a particular and reasonably regular highlight, despite the fact that mounting such fights was often hideously expensive and fraught with technical complications due to the different chemistries and pressures involved. (Not to mention frequently presenting a very real danger to the observing dinner guests; who could forget the ghastly explosion at the Deepscars’ table five back in ’334, when every single guest had met a messy but honourable end due to the explosion of a highly pressurised bait-pit domed to simulate the atmosphere of a gas-giant?) Indeed, amongst the people who really mattered it was one of the most frequently voiced objections to the Affront’s membership of the informal association of other space-faring species that having to be nice to other, lesser species - rather than giving the brutes a chance to prove their mettle against the glorious force of Affront arms - had resulted in a distinct dulling of the average society dinner.

Still, on really special occasions these days the fights would be between two Affronters with a dispute of a suitably dishonourable nature, or between criminals. Such contests usually required that the protagonists be hobbled, tied together, and armed with sliver-knives scarcely more substantial than hat pins, thus ensuring that the fights didn’t end too quickly. Genar-Hofoen had never been invited to one of those and didn’t expect he ever would be; it wasn’t the sort of thing one let an alien witness, and besides, the competition for seats was scarcely less ferocious than the spectacle everyone desired to witness.

For this dinner - held to commemorate the eighteen hundred and eighty-fifth anniversary of the Affront’s first decent space-battle against enemies worthy of the name - the entertainment was arranged to bear some relationship to the dishes being served, so that the first fish course was accompanied by the partial flooding of the pit with ethane and the introduction into it of specially bred fighting fish. Fivetide took great pleasure in describing to the human the unique nature of the fish, which were equipped with mouth parts so specialised the fish could not feed normally and had to be raised leeching vital fluids from another type of fish bred specially to fit into their jaws.