Part 24 (1/2)

'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 splas.h.i.+ng 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.