wretched Grasshopper 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 bloody 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 embassy, 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, godlike in a godless 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 parsers 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 lust 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 Grasshopper-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 nobles and Mercers backed by an unruly levy of Grasshopper peasants. The bandits had anticipated 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 nobles 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
