Then she was slipping to one side, but only so she could draw him down over her, one hand working at his belt, and their lips never quite parting, no matter what contortions they went through. His killing hands remained firm on her, like another Imperial conquest.
There was a moment, the inevitable moment, Achaeos! as she contrasted the gentle touch of the Moth with Thalric’s fierce strength. And after that came the thought of what Stenwold would say if she took this last step, this final fall from grace. I can’t lie with Thalric. I can’t, not after all he’s done, no no no…
And he sensed the sudden tension, and she saw complete understanding appear in his face as she twisted her head away from him. It’s wrong, it’s wrong… The well-bred Collegium girl, Maker’s niece, the enemy of the Empire, all shouting that reproach at her.
To the pits with the lot of you. She’d had enough of being haunted by herself, and it had been a long time, and she wanted this. She almost lunged at Thalric, arms dragging him down towards her again, feeling all those walls of propriety and repression shatter like glass. The two of them now fighting out of their clothes as though they were being reborn, a new stage of life – clutching at each other in something as much relief and catharsis as it was desire.
Che awoke in the chill hours before dawn, her back pressed against his warm chest, aware of hearing quiet movement nearby. With a start she sat up, fumbling for her sword hilt, but it was only Maure poking at the embers, trying to leach a little more warmth from the corpse of their fire. Thalric woke up with a growl, glared at the world balefully, then turned over, wrapping himself in the cloak, that had previously covered them both. On the far side of the fire, Varmen was snoring with a beehive drone.
Maure added some kindling to the fire, with obvious pessimism, but soon there were a few brave flames venturing forth, and she had quickly nurtured a steady little blaze. Seeing Che’s eyes still fixed on her, she retreated over to Varmen’s side of the fire, raising an eyebrow. On that invitation, Che carefully got to her feet and followed her, leaving Thalric to sleep alone.
‘My mystical intuition tells me you have questions,’ Maure said, with a slight smile, which only broadened when Che could not help glancing down at Varmen.
‘Thank the world for Apt men, hmm?’ said the halfbreed.
Che frowned at her, caught unawares. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘No? But surely you do,’ Maure corrected her. ‘I mean men to whom everything we are and do, the very world we live in, is a fiction. You don’t see the advantage in that? No questions, no requests, none of the reverence that’s equal parts fear and distrust. I thought that’s why you were with him.’ One finger indicated Thalric’s supine form.
‘No, that’s… complicated,’ Che replied, but even as she spoke she was thinking, And yet perhaps she’s closer to it than I give her credit for. Oh, it’s frustrating, sometimes, that he cannot understand, but still… would he stay with me, if he did?
‘Complicated, you can keep,’ Maure declared. ‘I like men to be simple. I’ve rolled the lucky dice with this one.’
Che nodded companionably, and felt almost guilty when she threw down, ‘And your reasons for travelling with us, they’re just as simple, are they?’
Maure paused, and her expression was both hurt and guilty. ‘That was uncalled for.’
‘You’re making Thalric nervous, the pair of you, and I can see why. He’s had plenty of people try to put a knife in his back, and he’s right that Varmen should be heading back east by now, and you should be going… wherever it is that you go. So tell me.’
‘Varmen’s reasons I don’t know, but I can guess.’ Maure’s eyes were downcast now. ‘He has a ghost on his shoulder. No surprise, you’d think, but most Wasps I ever met see the world in a way that paints everything they do with the Empire’s colours. No guilt, you see, and guilt lets the ghosts in like nothing else does. But then you knew that.’
She now caught Che’s eye, and for a moment the Beetle girl could not answer.
‘And you?’ she challenged at last. ‘Don’t ask me to believe you came running after us to save you from the brigands you’re obviously familiar with, or to get inside Varmen’s mail. Help me to trust you, Maure.’
The halfbreed mystic looked away again, her good humour ebbing and leaving her vulnerable again. ‘Ghosts, Cheerwell Maker… do you know what ghosts are?’
‘They’re…’ They’re what happens to us after we die? But that can’t be right.
Maure had apparently read her mind. ‘Nobody knows what happens to us when we pass on – the vital spark that animates our crude flesh. Perhaps we are merely gone, after all. Or perhaps we fly back to rejoin our ideal, thus Beetles to the essence of beetle-ness and so on, although that begs the question of what happens to someone like me. Perhaps there is another world, yet, a metamorphosis into something splendid, out of this coarse life. Some Woodlouse-kinden even believe we may simply be born once again. But we don’t know, and that’s not what ghosts are. Ghosts are… it’s as if we were a nymph or larva all our lives, and in our dying moments, we hardened our skins, made of ourselves a chrysalis, and then… the spark of us, the thing that made us live, flies free somewhere else, but something’s left behind that still has our shape, our nature. It fractured, when the life burst forth and flew away, and most of the time that’s all there is left, just shards of the husk blown by the wind, but some deaths – horrible deaths, terrible deaths, deaths cutting short unfulfilled lives, deaths of magicians especially – those can leave a husk behind that is still them, or part of them, some fragment or aspect of their being that still possesses urges and needs. They can be spoken with, and bound to service even, and they can haunt others, or objects, places. Broken things, they are, most often, but still recognizable as who they once were. Even the smaller fragments may contain some ounce of self, some emotion – a hate, a love.’
Che shivered at that suggestion. ‘But that still doesn’t explain-’
‘It’s not the actual requests I mind,’ Maure spoke over her. ‘Trawling for someone’s dead husband, or someone’s lost child, there’s a science to that – and I almost enjoy it. But all the rest of the time… all the rest of the time it’s just hearing the whispers, the fragmentary voices, the odds and ends of memory, the wasted splinters of other people’s lives. The world is full of the husks of the dead, and they all talk to me, and I can’t blot them out.’
Che just watched her now, waiting to hear more.
‘They went quiet when you woke up, though,’ Maure whispered, trying to find her smile again. ‘I can’t hear a single one of the wretched, abandoned bastards. A whole ghost, well, that’s different. I reckon it wouldn’t be so in awe of you. But the chaff, all that disintegrating chaff, you brush it away because of what they gave you – what they gave to you and her.’
Che felt her hand rise to touch her forehead, without knowing why until she realized that Maure’s gaze had led her there.
‘What do you see?’ she demanded, but the woman merely shook her head and would not say.
For a long while they sat in silence, during which Thalric turned over twice, threatening to wake again. Maure mustered a shamefaced grin, but it convinced neither of them. At last she said, ‘Ask your question.’
‘I was haunted,’ Che told her. ‘The ghost… I thought it was the ghost of my lover, but it wasn’t. It was a Mantis-kinden I had once known, and the Masters of Khanaphes cut him from me and set him loose in the world. And now he’s poisoning my sister, and I have to stop him, and…’
Maure nodded. ‘Ask it,’ she urged.
‘My lover, he died…’ Che said, realizing how she was stating the obvious, yet surprised to find the pain so raw and immediate, after so much time and distance. ‘He… I was with him, in a way, but I never had the chance to speak to him, to say goodbye, to say.. .’ She clenched her fists. ‘Would you… could you…?’
Maure’s grin failed, and she was now nodding grimly. ‘I could hardly refuse a request from someone like you, now, could I? But let that wait until we reach Elas Mar, at least. Let me find some place there that I can fortify and protect. Let me… let me have this journey without ghosts, Cheerwell Maker.’
‘Call me Che.’ The Beetle reached out and put a hand on the necromancer’s arm. Then Varmen’s snoring ceased, and the Wasp was stretching, yawning. And Che backed off as Maure sat down again beside him.
Four nights later, they ran into the bandits.
It was so much a meeting of chance that it was almost embarrassing. Varmen laid a small fire, as on each night previously, but by the time he had it going they had all spotted another fire through the trees, a hundred yards away or so, and the makers of that fire had by now surely spotted theirs. There followed a hasty discussion about the virtues of fleeing further into the woods at night, of awaiting whatever might befall them, or of confronting the
