'You Lowlanders live lives of such violence,' the strange half-breed woman remarked. 'Cheerwell Maker, come to me.'

The sight of her filled Che with a nameless fear and she turned away, searching for somewhere . . .

It was quiet here in the farmhouse cellar, and she could almost believe there was no army camped above. A few tens of thousands of Wasp-kinden and their Auxillians, but she would hardly have guessed at their presence had she not been their prisoner.

On the morrow no doubt they would question her, torture her most likely, but she had all night to think about that, and 'all night' could last as long as she wished, this little moment of shadowed calm stretching out indefinitely.

It was a strange place to find sanctuary, but she could not fault it.

This will do, she decided, and then the door above opened, and a solitary figure was stepping down into the dark. She thought it was Totho, at first, as it should have been, but instead it was The jolt of recognition was physical this time. That same halfbreed, the woman Che had never met, and yet who seemed to be acquiring a grim inevitability.

'Cheerwell Maker, listen to me,' the woman started, but Che did not want to listen to her. There must be somewhere . . .

The Prowess Forum was well attended today some favourites were listed to fight and the connoisseurs of the amateur game were looking forward to some interesting matches. None of which will involve me, Che reflected, and the thought was rea.s.suring. I am nothing special here. n.o.body will trouble me. Eventually they would call upon her to fight, of course, and she would match swords with the clumsy nephew of some Collegium magnate, and she would lose, of course, and be mortified at letting her friends down. The thought now brought nothing more than a wry smile to her face: back when the trivial had mattered.

I will hold time still here. In the Prowess Forum, with her friends about her, and the stern Ant-kinden Master Kymon just stepping out into the circle, many months before he would end his life transfixed by a Vekken crossbow bolt.

She smiled, and took a seat on the lowest step of the tiered stone benches. How little she knew, how young she was! Whatever joy the future held, the hours took more than they gave, in the end.

'I have no idea where this is, now,' said a woman sitting beside her. For a moment Che felt a surge of outrage and horror: her, here? But the sensation was gone almost as soon as it had arrived, for she was home, here, ignorant and safe.

The halfbreed woman had stood up, and was gazing over at Che's fellow duellists. Her accent had been oddly familiar, Che decided.

'Excuse me, but are you a Commonwealer?' she asked timidly.

'I have that honour,' the woman replied. 'My name is Maure and you are Cheerwell Maker.'

Che blinked, fighting down a queasy feeling of discontinuity. 'Are you a friend of Salma's?' she asked. 'Salme Dien, that is.'

Maure's eyes flicked towards the elegant Dragonfly youth preparing to meet his opponent. 'Ah, no but I know of him.' She seemed sad about that, and Che had to forcibly prevent herself from remembering why that might be.

She realized she was desperate to make the woman go away, but at the same time she was meek Cheerwell Maker, who was always polite and had never really been hurt. She clung to that. It was all that was left between her and the storm.

'I am sent to be your guide, Cheerwell Maker,' Maure stated.

Che flinched from her. 'I don't know what you're talking about.'

'Oh, you do, you do. Ah, look, your friends are coming over to see you.'

Che cast desperate eyes over towards those familiar faces, and recoiled when she saw them. Somehow, while she had not been concentrating, something had slipped badly within the Prowess Forum. The audience had gone, and her friends . . . her friends . . .

Salma was dead, she saw, a sword wound splashing his front with red. Hard-faced Totho wore intricate armour of interlocking plates, overlaid by a grey surcoat showing an open gauntlet. Tynisa . . . Tynisa was gone.

Tynisa was gone, and was that not why Che was doing . . . whatever it was she had been doing when . . .

'No,' Che whispered. 'I'm home. I'm safe here. Go away.'

The halfbreed woman sighed, looking out over the fighting ring where the Master Armsman, long-dead Kymon, still stood. 'I understand this is a place of learning,' she remarked.

Che blinked at her. 'Yes, yes it is.'

'I would like to visit here, some day. Most necromancers are ignorant fools making a living from the hopes and dreams of others. They paw at the dead, enticing fallen friends and dead relatives out to perform like trained crickets, and they have no understanding. They just know what works and what does not, and never mind the why.'

'Magic?' Che said slowly. 'You're talking about magic.' The false Prowess Forum was falling away now, but the world seemed to be uncertain as to what to replace it with. 'But I don't . . . '

Believe in it . . . But before Maure's sharp gaze, she could no longer deceive herself. 'But you do not talk like a magician.'

'Thank you,' the halfbreed said drily. 'I was trained in Tsolshevy, amongst the Woodlouse-kinden. Some experiment of theirs, I was. They treat their magicians like scientists and their artificers like mystics, there, and perhaps they know more about either than most do because of that. They taught me necromancy, and I understand it like nothing else.' She patted the stone beside her companionably, the bank of seats that somehow had survived the dissolution going on around them. Lacking alternatives, Che sat.

Maure leant back, propping herself on her elbows. 'Any quack will tell you about ghosts haunting battlefields,' she continued, 'old buildings, ruins, deathbeds; about ghosts that linger where their living selves were murdered; ghosts within the weapons that slew them, or that their hands had once wielded; ghosts in treasured objects, or attached to grieving relatives, or simply hanging in the ether like a goggling fish waiting for someone of my profession to cast down a hook. That is not all, however. Few enough know it, but a ghost may also end up haunting the insides of her own head, retreating into memories driven away from the world and fearing to return. There are many kinds of haunting.'

'But that's not haunting,' Che objected. 'That's madness.'

'Perhaps that is why the Inapt kinden have, in my experience, a better understanding of what madness truly is,' Maure murmured. 'The time has come to move on, Che.' She rose abruptly, catching hold of Che's hand and pulling her up. Behind her there was a bright light eating away at the misty world.

'No,' Che said again.

'What are you afraid of?'

I'm not afraid, I'm really not, I just want to go home home where there's nothing to fear . . .

'Her,' She finally confessed. The word was wrenched out unwillingly.

Maure stared at her for a long moment. 'A magician has practised on you, to make you fear her so,' she understood at last. 'She has stamped herself into your mind as a thing of terror. Cheerwell, if you hide for ever, then you will die. Your body will die and you will haunt your own corpse until it is food for worms and beyond. Come with me.'

'No, don't make me, please.'

'Cheerwell'

'I don't want to face her. I can't.' Che was shaking now as the memories began to slide back into place, like great weights of fragmented rock, and at the heart of them was her. 'You don't understand who she is.'

'That I don't,' Maure admitted. 'So let us face her together.'

She still clasped Che's hand, but in that moment it did not seem to matter. The blazing radiance was half the world already. Maure had held her still long enough for time to catch up with her.

Go, said a voice in her ear, and she thought it might have been Salma, but with just the one word to work on, she would never know.

She held tight to Maure's hand and walked into the light.

All at once, something stooped down on them, keening its rage. Che looked up to see Seda, wings afire, Wasp Art making her hands glow like coals.

'I told you!' the apparition screeched. 'Back where you belong, Beetle! Back beneath your stone!'

A wave of flame washed over them, and Che heard Maure scream, her hand ripped abruptly from the woman's grip. For a moment the fear of this thing not even the Empress herself, but a mere phantasm she had left behind was paralysing.

Then, from somewhere came the words that had been spoken by the Masters of Khanaphes. A final piece of memory shaken loose, which Seda had been at pains to conceal from her.

Whatever it was that you demanded from them, they gave it to me as well. We are sisters, in this, if in nothing else. And Che reached out, and swatted the screaming thing into dust, nothing but the echo of another woman's voice fading inside her head.

Che awoke.

It was not a gentle waking, either. She jackknifed up, jerking sideways off the pallet she was lying on, her stomach cramping viciously. She was aware of a certain amount of shouting from nearby, but in those first few moments it was all she could do to suck breath into her lungs.

The sequence of dream images remained with her, that thread of beads she had made of her life. A ghost, she told me? In that convulsive moment, Che wondered whether she really had come back from the dead.

Then there were arms about her, and at first she tried to fight them, but she heard a voice speaking her name over and over, and relaxed. She remembered everything just then, the real and the imagined and the far-seen, all in order and neatly labelled, memories like specimens stored in a College master's cupboard.

'Che, do you know where you are?' It was Thalric, of course. 'Do you know who I am?'

She forced out a little laugh, at that, her racked body already becoming easier. 'Oh, yes, to be sure. I'm not likely to forget you, Thalric, for any number of reasons. And, of course, I know . . .' She frowned, staring about her. 'Come to think of it, where am I?'

She sensed a tension going out of him, one that had been held in check through iron discipline, but was no less great for all that. 'You're back.'

'It looks that way.'

He still had not let her go, but she decided she could live with that for now, saying only, 'Back where, precisely?'

'Suon Ren, this,' said another voice, and she only placed it as she looked upon its owner's face. It was Varmen, their guide, and still with them as far as Suon Ren, apparently.

'Then . . .' For a moment she was going to ask about Tynisa, but then someone groaned another woman and Che stared round. 'You . . .'

It was the halfbreed, her guide from the inner recesses of her own past, where Seda's might had banished her. The woman was lying on her side on the floor, and perhaps had lost consciousness for a moment, but now she was shaking her head, clambering up on to hands and knees. 'Ah,' she began, to n.o.body in particular, and then, 'You have a great line in enemies, Cheerwell Maker. The Empress of the Wasps, no less.'

Che felt Thalric instantly go still and tense, and Varmen's eyes almost popped from his head at the unwelcome revelation. She decided that she herself would have to be the one to put a brave face on it. 'Well, the Spider-kinden say always judge people by their enemies, so I must be doing well in life, don't you think?'

The woman Maure gave a choked laugh, and looked up at her. The laugh died, and she flinched back from Che, as though she saw her own death revealed in the Beetle woman's face . . . No, as though she sees something about my brow, or above my head.

This reaction was gone in an instant, covered up so well that Che would never have known, had she not seen. 'What is it?' she asked, knowing already that the other woman would simply shake her head and disown the whole thing.

'Nothing, there's nothing.' Maure sat up straight, looking haggard and drawn. 'It's no easy road, that's all, and I wasn't expecting . . . her to be waiting at the end of it. Since when is the Empress of all the Wasps a magician? What's the world coming to.'

Varmen looked faintly embarra.s.sed at this suggestion, but Che glanced back and noticed Thalric's expression was unhappy and thoughtful. He knows. Despite all the Apt.i.tude in the world, he knows it, too.

'You have my thanks,' she said simply to the halfbreed woman. For a moment it seemed that Maure would not accept the grat.i.tude, but then she acknowledged Che's words with a twitch of one hand. Che remembered the wretched Gra.s.shopper mystic in Myna. These pleasantries have power, amongst the Inapt.

'Ah,' Maure murmured again, stretching a hand out to Varmen and waiting until he shuffled over to pull her to her feet. She brushed herself down meticulously, flicking her uneven fringe back in place, tugging at her clothes in what was obviously a little ritual for her own mental wellbeing. 'They'll tell you, the Commonwealers, how talking to ghosts, speaking to the dead, is a natural thing: that it's all part of a well-rounded life to honour your ancestors face to face, to bid a posthumous farewell to your peers and your relatives.' The smile she directed at them was tight-lipped. 'Mantis-kinden, they're even worse, you know? They worship death, practically. Spend all their living days hoping to die, so long as they die well. The best necromancers are always the Mantis-kinden.' She took a deep breath. 'You know what, though? Prince Felipe has the right idea, even if it took losing a dozen battles and a hundred friends just to educate him. Death's a miserable b.l.o.o.d.y business, and only a fool would go poking at it. Why else d'you think all the necromancers in those stories are after eternal life: they've seen just what death's like.'

The silence following this remark was only broken when Varmen commented, 'Why do it, then?'

'I'm good at it, Wasp-kinden,' she told him.

'So I was good with wood, when I was young. Doesn't mean I had to become a carpenter,' the big Wasp grumbled.

Maure smiled at him, but Che saw how the expression only just covered over the cracks in this woman's life. 'That's because, if you give up being a carpenter, the wood doesn't come hunting you down, demanding that you hammer some nails in.'

Twenty-Eight.

Che did not hang up the dreamcatcher that same night. It was not that she wished thus to avoid her dreams, more she had accepted that there was no getting away from them, not any more. She had fought her newly Inapt nature at first, then she had tried to master it, as though in Khanaphes she might find some secret that would let her put the ancient world and all its magic back in the box . . .

The Shadow Box, of course, she interrupted her own musings. All this stems from the Shadow Box. Tisamon and the Empress and I, all linked.

. . . And Achaeos, too, but where is he? Why hasn't his ghost really come to call? He was more closely linked to that box and its contents than I was.

Standing there by her hammock in the Lowlander emba.s.sy, her thoughts turned inexorably to Maure. She could . . . surely she could . . . She owed the halfbreed woman a great deal, and it was plain that Maure had suffered, in order to bring her from the depths of her own mind and back to the waking world. Can I ask this of her? No, I cannot.

But the thought did not go away.

In Khanaphes, the ancient world had almost destroyed her that first time. She had nearly drowned in a sea of half-understood hieroglyphs. Then the real world had intruded, sending her down into the catacombs beneath the city, where waited the Masters. There, for the first time, she had been forced to confront her new self. She had almost enslaved herself to the Masters, as an easy way to avoid taking responsibility for what she had become. In the end she had defied them, though, shamed them into doing what she wanted, been rid of the ghost that had been haunting her Tisamon's, not Achaeos's and then escaped with her life, and with her companions. With Thalric.

Since then, she had been trying to control what she was, but the dreams had got the better of her, till at last she had come to the notice of the Empress my sister, they said and been swatted by her like a fly.

But it had not been merely her intrusion that had so enraged the queen of all the Wasps; it had been that intangible kinship that meant that . . .

Whatever she forced out of the Masters, it came to me as well as to her. I have shared in her blessing, so what was it that Maure saw, when I awoke . . .?

Lying in the hammock later, probably she dreamt, but she had now gone so far into that other world that it was impossible to tell dream apart from just seeing. As if revelations had been backing up all the while she had been a prisoner of her own mind, now she was deluged. It was a wild flood at first, too fierce for comprehension, that buffeted and tumbled against her, filling all the land around her until she was at the centre of a vast ocean of foretelling, which stretched on all sides, beyond the horizon. Then the world became still, and she had silence for once, and for a moment she saw it all.

Too much, too much to hold on to, each insight displacing the next within her memory, those countless drops of understanding plunging through her mind and impossible to hold . . . but for that single moment it was all apparent, all clear to her, and she was something more than human with it, G.o.dlike in a G.o.dless land.

She was floating over Khanaphes seeing its dark, hidden heart beat sluggishly beneath her. Imperial soldiers were enforcing a curfew, the Empress's airship gone already, as Ethmet and his ministers sat in the resounding unheard echo of the double coronation that the Masters had enacted. Praeda and Amnon were already sailed for Collegium.

In the desert of the Nem, the Wasp artificers furthered their plans, feeding into the great darkness all the terror and pain and fire of the future, all the pieces of their scheme laid out before her. Yet she could not understand it at all; an Apter mind was needed, and the Apt would never see as she saw now. It struck her that this must be how the Moth-kinden had felt on the eve of the revolution. Those ceaseless pa.r.s.ers of the future must have realized their world was about to end, and been unable to stop it, unable to even comprehend the disaster that was rapidly befalling them.

In the Empire's capital, Seda had gathered her power about her, her servants and her generals. Che could see the manifest destiny of the Empire limning her like a golden halo, but Seda's footsteps seeped blood, the blood of countless kinden. There was a hunger in her, a l.u.s.t to consume and control. Had she been no more than a temporal empress then she would have been considered a terror to the world. She was crowned, though, as Che was crowned, and her ambitions could no longer restrict themselves to mere land and slaves, for there was a new hunger in her that would never be sated. But why now those dark Mantis forests, and a gateway of rotting wood? From whence came those twisting, devouring forms that writhed, shackled in the earth beneath? In that dislocated instant it seemed as if the whole world became merely the skin covering some darker place, locked away out of sight and yet never quite gone . . .

For a moment, Che saw it all, the entire map of it, a prescient dream such as any Moth-kinden skryre would have wept at, and experiencing the full horror of what might happen stole her breath away.

But when she woke, after midnight, it was only with fragments like shards of ice melting, the sheer enormity of the vision defeating her, and all it left her with was a sense of dread and an aftertaste of the Empress's hunger.

I am running out of time, she told herself, I am here for a reason. When she slept again, her mind was focused not on the grand tapestry but on the threads, and there she saw Tynisa.

She let the rapier carry her forward, its needle point penetrating the chest of the Gra.s.shopper-kinden before her, then whipping out again at her command, before flashing behind her without her even having to turn and look. She felt the slightest resistance as it carved into another enemy, and she exulted briefly in the sheer purity of the sensation. A spear was heading her way, its wielder scarcely seeming relevant. Her blade caught the shaft, bound around it in a circular motion that put her within the spearman's reach, her point darting inside his guard until it had lanced him under the armpit.

For a moment she seemed clear of it all, unthreatened and alone in the midst of the skirmish, although Telse Orian's people were still hard-pressed on every side.

Aerial scouts had reported a band of brigands lurking in the woods here, perhaps a score of them. Orian had set out with half as many again, a handful of n.o.bles and Mercers backed by an unruly levy of Gra.s.shopper peasants. The bandits had antic.i.p.ated them, though, and then had come the ambush. The Salmae forces were outnumbered two to one, and many of the brigands carried bows, whilst of Orian's party only the n.o.bles were archers. The latter were better shots than the brigands, for sure, but numbers still counted. About half the panicking peasant levy had been scythed down, and several of the horses killed, before the ambushers had finally broken cover and attacked.

Those who met Tynisa regretted it, albeit briefly.

She had seen the ambush for what it was straight away. She had heard her father's voice in her ear, felt him guide her eyes: they would be concealed here and here, and the main body of them there. She had said nothing to the others, feeling a need for blood building up in her. Let them come.