"He described them coming up from the swamplands, landing in the square and shrieking at the men, trying to make words. But they could never learn language, you see. They were always too hungry. They know what they are."

Bellis caught Uther Doul’s eye. She was aware, suddenly, that he respected her. "They know. Once in a while they can stop themselves, when their bellies are full and their minds clear for a few days or hours, and they know what it is they do, how they live. They’re as intelligent as you or me, but they grow up too distracted by starvation to speak, and then once every few months, for a handful of days they can concentrate, they try to learn.

"But they don’t have the males’ mouthparts, obviously, so they can’t make the same sounds. It’s only the most inexperienced, the youngest, who try to mimic the anophelii men. With their proboscises retracted, their mouths are much more like ours." She saw that he understood.

"Their voices sound like ours," she went on softly. "They’ve never heard language they could mimic before. Full as she was, without language but conscious that she was without it, it must have made her quite giddy to hear us all conversing, in sounds that she herself could make. That’s why she came for that man. She was trying to talk to him."

"It’s a strange sword," she said a little later.

He hesitated for a tiny moment (the first time, Bellis realized, she had ever seen him uncertain) then drew it with his right hand, held it out for her to see.

Three little buds of metal seemed embedded in the heel of his right hand, connected to the veinlike mass of wires under his sleeve, running down his side to a little pack on his belt. The handle of the sword was padded in leather or skin, but a patch was bare metal, which the nodes in his flesh touched when he held the sword.

The blade was not, as Bellis had supposed, stained metal.

"May I touch it?"

Doul nodded. She tapped the flat of the blade with a fingernail. It sounded dull and unresonant.

"It’s ceramic," he said. "More like china than iron."

The edges of the sword did not have the matte sheen of a sharpened blade. They were the same featureless white as the flat (a white stained fractionally yellow, like teeth or ivory).

"It’ll cut deeper than bone," Doul said quietly in that melodious voice. "This is not a ceramic you’ve seen or used before. It won’t bend or give-it has no flex-but nor is it brittle. And it’s strong."

"How strong?"

Uther looked at her, and she felt his respect again. Something inside her responded.

"Diamond," he said. He sheathed his blade (with another exquisite, instantaneous motion).