‘Cheerwell Maker, the niece of a previous guest of yours – or so I’m told,’ Thalric replied promptly. ‘Your Highness, I don’t know what’s wrong with her, but…’ The words would not come, perhaps because of Varmen’s solid Apt presence beside him. Felipe Shah did not assist him either, merely waited. Thalric gritted his teeth, feeling acutely embarrassed to even contemplate coming out with the words.
Khanaphes, he reminded himself. The tunnels, the Masters, all that inexplicable misadventure that we shared there. The Empress, for the world’s sake! The Empress, who drinks the blood of slaves and is. .. He shuddered. The Empress, whom Che spoke of, just before it happened. I do not believe, I cannot believe, but even so… ‘Something unnatural has happened to her,’ he got out, the word ‘magic’ faltering on his tongue. ‘She has been… attacked in some way.’ His expression, if he could have seen it, was mutely appealing, begging the Dragonfly to fill in the gaps without him having to be too explicit.
The prince’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. ‘Yes, she has,’ he admitted. ‘My seers have examined her, and they are… disturbed.’
‘Can you help? Or your… seers? Doctors… you must have doctors here, of any kind.’ There was an edge of desperation in Thalric’s voice that he could not prevent.
‘They say she has departed her body, and that she is now a ghost,’ Felipe Shah informed them.
Thalric felt Varmen shift beside him, his credulity strained to its limits. ‘A ghost…’ he managed. ‘But ghosts… I’ve never heard a ghost story where the person wasn’t… dead.’
‘Her body lives – for now. But her self has been cut from it, and cannot find its way back. Soon enough the body will die, and she will then be as you suggest.’
‘Help her,’ Thalric snapped. It sounded almost an order.
Instead of taking offence, Felipe lowered his gaze, considering. He gave a great sigh, as his shoulders sagged slightly. From behind him, the man Coren stepped forward.
‘My Prince, no. You know what the seers said, how this girl could pave the way for terrible things. Perhaps it would be best to let matters take their course.’
‘And if she is so terrible, will her ghost not be more terrible still?’ Felipe murmured. ‘There are enough ghosts clinging to me already, Coren, without adding one more. And she is Maker Stenwold’s niece, and there is a debt there.’ Abruptly he looked up again, meeting Thalric’s gaze. ‘My seers can do nothing, because they fear her, and their skills are of a different nature. To call her self back, you must find someone skilled in speaking to the ghosts of the fallen, for that is what she has become, whether her body still breathes or not.’
‘You are saying that you cannot help her, then,’ Thalric stated flatly.
‘I keep none about my court gifted at speaking with the dead,’ Felipe said softly. ‘I have no wish to hear such a clamour of voices, for there are too many I would recognize.’ His penetrating gaze fixed on the two Wasps, and Varmen shuffled uncomfortably. ‘Those who come to my door offering such services are turned away. Perhaps they do not go far. Coren,’ and his seneschal was at his elbow, ready for orders.
‘You know the woman I mean,’ Felipe instructed him. ‘Some tendays ago she came, and was refused entry. Unless you have grown slack, you will have a good idea of where she has gone.’
‘Peddling her trade about your villages, I think,’ Coren replied. ‘I was not sure… but you had never forbidden it.’
‘I would not deny to others whatever comfort the words of ghosts can bring,’ the prince told him philosophically. ‘Find the woman and bring her here.’
They had placed Che in another garden chamber, open to the sky, and also to the horizon on two sides. Seeing her laid out there, surrounded by spring flowers, Thalric felt a lurch of emotion inside of him. And they have sent for some kind of mystic undertaker. Is she
…? He could see her breast rise and fall with shallow breathing, but death seemed to hang about her, as though only waiting for the right moment.
The idea of placing her fate – and my fate! – into the hands of some raddled old hag, some morbid chanting charlatan, disgusted him. Have they no doctors? Part of him railed at it, but experiencing the inexplicable had made inroads enough into his mind that he did not truly believe mere medicine would carry the day: not the herbs and poultices of Commonwealer healers, nor good Imperial surgery.
Varmen joined him later. The big Wasp looked sober and thoughtful as he stripped his armour off again.
‘Not under threat any more? Or are the odds so bad that the armour wouldn’t help?’ Thalric needled him, needing something to take his mind off other things.
Varmen just shrugged. ‘I reckon your woman’s on her way – the ghost-talking one, I mean.’
Thalric nodded morosely. ‘If this doesn’t work…’
‘What, waving her arms around and talking to spirits and magic, not work? What are the odds on that?’ Varmen’s smile was weak. ‘Curse me, but I remember the last year of the war, you know? ’Wealer armies bunching up to defend Shon Fhor, and leaving all their civilians behind them, villages and towns full of them ripe for the Slave Corps
… We were first in, a couple of times. You’d find them on their knees around some sage or seer or magic- maker, begging their spirits to do something, to protect them from us. You’d find tens of them, hundreds even, singing and dancing and chanting, and then we’d walk in, us heavy-armour lads, and they’d go quiet one by one, then all of ’em. If we could see who their wizard-type was, orders were to shoot ’em dead. The rest would cave in soon enough after that. You could see it in their faces, like you’d just come and tilted their world on its side. And now nothing worked like they thought it should, poor bastards.’
‘And now we seem to need to tilt it back again,’ Thalric said wryly, just as Coren came marching in with a couple of his glittering soldiers, and also a woman.
In that moment, it was clear to Thalric that nobody had explained to the necromancer what she was being brought to Suon Ren for, and that the seneschal had not only copied but actually intensified his prince’s dislike of the breed. The expression on the woman’s face was that of a prisoner on her way to an execution, and seeing a pair of Wasp-kinden there did not change it.
She was not what Thalric had expected: not a crone, nor even a Dragonfly-kinden. She was considerably younger than he was, and her skin was a curious shade: pale underlain with lead-grey highlights, so that she herself looked half a corpse already. Her face was narrow, and her eyes held no irises at all, just pinpoint pupils amidst a pale field. She was a slender creature, dressed in a robe that had seen much darning, her dark hair streaked messily with white and hanging raggedly about her shoulders. There was an empty scabbard attached to her belt, for a short-bladed sword, and she clutched a travelling pack.
Thalric guessed that some conjoining of Moth, Roach and Mantis inheritance had led to this particular miscegenation. How many flavours of mystic nonsense am I getting, combined in this one woman? He awaited the inevitable outpouring of curses, benedictions and portentous threats that all these quacksalvers seemed to come out with.
Instead, the seneschal gave the woman a shove towards where Che was laid out, and she rounded on him as soon as she was out of arm’s reach.
‘What do you want, you bastard lackey? Selling me to the Empire, is it?’
‘Make her well,’ the Dragonfly ordered her. ‘The prince demands it.’
The necromancer looked rebellious. ‘The prince didn’t want my skills a few days ago. How about I tell him he can go -’
Coren’s hand went for his sword, but Thalric stepped forward pointedly, making them both flinch. ‘I’ll take it from here,’ he announced. The Dragonfly seneschal stared at him, blankly hostile, then turned on his heel and left, his men following him.
The halfbreed woman hugged her satchel and eyed the Wasps doubtfully. ‘So, what?’ she asked, sneaking a glance at Che. ‘She’s not dead. What am I supposed to do with someone who’s not dead?’
Thalric forbore to ask what she might have done with a corpse, had one been offered. ‘Examine her,’ he instructed. ‘They said you could help.’
‘They say a lot of things.’ The woman was already retreating. ‘This isn’t anything to do with me. I’m not the woman for it.’
Bitterness rose inside Thalric and he advanced on her angrily. ‘Is that what the mystics of the Commonweal have come to? You’re not even going to make a few passes in the air and then vomit out some ambiguous prediction? Come on, you might at least go through the motions, woman – or what’s a charlatan for?’ After just a few steps, he had backed her into a corner, trampling over Felipe’s flowers. ‘Because they claimed you could help,
