The stingboxes themselves—metaclockwork engines of intricate and extraordinary khepri design—were attached to the officers’ belts, each the size of a small bag. Attached to each side was a long cord, thick wires swathed in metal coils, then insulating rubber, extendible more than twenty feet. About two feet from the end of each cord was a polished wooden handle, one of which each officer held in each hand. They used these to whirl the ends of the cords at terrible speed. Something glimmered almost invisibly. At the tip of each tendril, Isaac knew, was a vicious little metal prong, a weighted clutch of barbs and spikes. These tips varied. Some were solid, the best-made expanded like cruel flowers on impact. All were designed to fly heavy and true, to puncture armour and flesh, to grip without mercy inside torn flesh.

Derkhan had reached the table and was huddling by Lemuel. Isaac turned to grab more ammunition. In the moment of silence, Derkhan raised herself quickly on one knee and peered over the tip of the table, taking aim with her great pistol.

She pulled the trigger. At the same instant, one of the officers let fly with his stingbox.

Derkhan was a decent shot. Her ball flew into the viewing window of one of the militia shields, which she had judged its weak point. But she had underestimated the militia’s defences. The porthole cracked violently and spectacularly, whitened completely with shards of glassdust and a crack-lattice, but its structure was interlaced with copper wire, and it held. The militiaman staggered, then stood solid.

The officer with the stingbox moved like an expert.

He swung up his arms at the same moment in sweeping curves, flicking the little switches in the wooden handles that allowed the cords to slide through them, releasing them. The momentum of the twirling blades took them flying through the air in a flash of metallic grey.

Cord unravelled almost without friction from inside the stingbox, through the air and the wooden handles, slowing the blades hardly at all. Their curving flight was absolutely true. The jagged weights flew in a long, elliptical motion through the air, the curve shallowing rapidly as the cables attaching them to the stingbox extended.

The buds of sharpened steel smacked simultaneously into each side of Derkhan’s chest. She screamed and staggered, her teeth gritting as the pistol fell from her spasming fingers.

Instantly, the officer pressed the catch on his stingbox to release the pent-up clockwork within.

There was a sputtering whirr. The hidden coils of the motor began to unwind, twirling like a dynamo and generating waves of weird current. Derkhan danced and spasmed, agonized yells spurting out from behind her teeth. Little bursts of blue light exploded like whiplashes from her hair and fingers.