Meanwhile, at every stop made by 1,000 buses crisscrossing Boulder City, other concealed detachments of ant troops alighted and slipped undetected into the streets. By midday, some 1 million soldier ants, representing 100 divisions of the Imperial Formican Army, had infiltrated every corner of Boulder City and planted mine-grains on every type of flammable surface. Millions of mine-grains speckled Boulder City’s government offices, marketplaces, schools, libraries and residential buildings, each one set to ignite at two o’clock that afternoon.

A little later that morning, in the imperial palace, the Saurian emperor Urus was woken from his sleep by the return of several officers from the failed attempt on the Ivory Citadel. The emperor had been up all night, wining and dining some governors from Laurasia, and hadn’t got to bed until the early hours. When he heard from the officers that not only was General Ixta dead but that half of the Imperial Saurian Army had been killed along with him, his first reaction was that he was being fed a fantastic cock-and-bull story. He was seized with an uncontrollable rage and was about to order that the good-for-nothing jokers be court-martialled, when something happened that opened his eyes to the threat posed by the ants.

It was the commander of the palace guard who alerted him. He was standing next to the emperor’s bed, shaking and yelling out in alarm as he gripped a piece of cloth in his claws.

‘You idiot,’ Urus roared at him, ‘what are you doing with my pillowcase?’ Today, it seemed, he was surrounded by numbskulls and numpties, and he was tempted to have them all put to death.

‘Your… Your Majesty, I just discovered this. Look…’ The commander held up the pillowcase in front of Urus’s face. Strings of small holes had been chewed through the fabric – a message, left by soldier ants who had infiltrated his chambers while he slept:

We can take your life at any time!

As Urus stared at the bed linen, a chill ran through him. This was not the sort of pillow talk he was accustomed to. He glanced about the room as though he’d seen a ghost. The other dinosaurs present hurriedly stooped and scoped the ground, but they could find no trace of the ants. The words on the pillowcase were the only evidence they could see.

There was more, however; it was just that the dinosaurs didn’t have the eyesight for it. The ants had laid in excess of 1,000 mine-grains throughout the emperor’s bedchamber. The yellow pellets, which were invisible to the dinosaurs’ naked eye, had been threaded into the mosquito netting, scattered around the feet of the bed, the sofa and the opulent wooden furniture, and stuffed between the mountainous stacks of documents. Formic acid was slowly eating away the surfaces of these incendiary devices, and like the million-odd other mines planted across Boulder City, their ignition time had been set for two o’clock.