They set off shortly after, following a path that was little more than an animal track. They were barely a quarter mile from Suon Ren’s outskirts, though, when someone was calling them back. Glancing behind them, Che saw a figure swathed in a dark cloak hurrying to catch up.
‘It’s the world’s least subtle assassin,’ Varmen murmured, mirroring Che’s thoughts so closely that she could not suppress a bark of laughter.
‘It’s Maure,’ Thalric observed, ‘the . . . healer.’ It would be a desperate day indeed before the word ‘necromancer’ passed the Wasp’s lips willingly.
With that, there was no choice but to wait for the halfbreed to catch up. She stopped a little short of them, glancing from Wasp to Wasp, but looking mostly at Che.
‘What do you want?’ Thalric asked, a little harshly.
‘You just happen to be going the way I was heading,’ she told them, still hovering at that awkward distance, neither with them nor apart from them.
‘And what way’s that?’
‘Away from Suon Ren’s a good start,’ she told them. ‘Or you may not have noticed how I wasn’t exactly loved there, hmm? Got thrown out by that boot-faced seneschal on his master’s orders, first time round, and next thing I know is the prince’s soldiers are dragging me back, so I can look at you, lady.’ The nod she gave Che seemed overly respectful, endowing Che with the sort of gravitas that a great prince like Felipe Shah should own. ‘Now you’re well again, there’s no welcome for me here.’
‘So there’s a wide world,’ Thalric told her. ‘What do you want from us?’
‘Well, much as I love the thrill of travelling these roads on my own, what with the threat of robbery and rape to keep life interesting, I thought I might try walking in your shadows for at least a while.’
Thalric was opening his mouth to issue some fresh objection, but Varmen quickly said, ‘Let her come. Why not?’ And, in the moment before Varmen was reminded by Thalric that he had no vote in this issue, Che was saying, ‘Enough.’
They all listened to her. That was the frightening thing.
‘Maure,’ she said simply, ‘I owe you a great deal, and if Suon Ren has no gratitude, then don’t think we’ll repeat that failing. Travel with us if you wish. You’re welcome.’
Again she felt that these words carried more weight to them than the simple meanings she was used to. It was as though she was now some great queen whose merest nod or favour carried unthinkable importance. Maure seemed relieved, but at the same time in no great hurry to come closer. ‘That is all, is it?’ Che pressed her. ‘Safety in numbers?’
‘Oh, of course,’ Maure said, and the lie was obvious, but Che let it pass.
Twenty-Nine
In the end, Che let Maure choose their path through Rhael Province, by roads that the woman had obviously travelled before. They made a point of keeping under tree cover whenever they could, and it was clear that the halfbreed was deliberately avoiding settlements along the way.
‘You don’t like doing business with brigands, then?’ Che had asked her.
‘I do business with anyone, if I have to. Brigands pay better than princes, and they pay in advance. I thought you wanted to get to Elas Mar as quickly as possible, though, so best to avoid the locals. They’re a curious lot, and might ask pointed questions.’
Che found herself still convalescing, lacking something of her customary Beetle stamina, which left her trailing behind whilst Varmen strode on ahead, his beetle ambling at his heels. Thalric, however, kept pace with her, which she found by turns comforting and annoying. She was not used to being indulged as an invalid.
After a while, she stopped paying much attention even to Thalric, because the long trek was wearing her down. She cut a walking stick to lean on, and still she laboured her way at the rear, so that Maure and Varmen were perpetually having to stop and wait for her. A shame no northbound barges are expected any time soon.
Towards the end of the first day she glanced up from her plodding feet, for the first time in a while, and saw the halfbreed necromancer leaning in towards Varmen, talking closely, and then the big Wasp’s head cocked back as he laughed at something she had said. Maure had never seemed much of a humorist to Che, but then the woman’s reaction towards her had been curious from the start. Plainly, with others she felt able to let go a little more.
‘Look.’ She managed a gesture towards them, for Thalric’s sake.
‘I see it.’ His tone of voice was not approving.
‘Surely you’re not . . .’ Che caught her breath, ‘still toeing that line of Imperial dogma? Superior races and all?’
‘Che, I don’t know why either of them is still with us. Allow me my suspicions, and I’ll let you remain trusting as a newborn, and we’ll agree to differ.’
She glanced at him, and could not suppress a tired smile. ‘Looking after me, is it?’
‘Someone has to. I’m only surprised I’ve not had to rescue you from something over the last few days.’ His tone, delivering acerbic banter calculated to hide whatever deeper feelings were hidden there, reminded her irresistibly of their time in Khanaphes together, first as ambassadors and then as fugitives.
‘I don’t know what I’d do without you,’ she said, trying to put a smile into it, but the words came out as far too solemn, and he gave no reply.
That night, after an argument over how hidden they should remain, Varmen stubbornly set a fire, albeit low down in a dip between trees. The pantries of Suon Ren had come up with some peculiar travelling provisions: a spiced hotchpotch of seeds, nuts, shreds of meat and dried fruit that could be eaten dry or cooked up into a kind of stew. It was filling, but promised to become dull eating after a while.
‘Honey would set this off well,’ Che opined, between heavily chewed mouthfuls. ‘They don’t seem to like it much around here, though.’
‘It was one of the commodities the army shipped in by the ton, during the war,’ Thalric agreed. ‘That and good wine, since Commonweal drink is an acquired taste.’
‘I’m sure you managed to acquire it.’ The simple act of eating was wearing her out, and she glanced up to offer her half-finished bowl around, but found Varmen and Maure were both missing.
‘Where are . . .?’ she started, but, on registering Thalric’s look, she abruptly understood. ‘That was quick work.’ She felt a sudden and irrational stab of envy that such casual liaisons had never been something open to her: raised as she was in Collegium, city of propriety, under the guidance of a respectable public figure and, besides, when had she ever even had the opportunity?
Of course, Tynisa had never let Stenwold’s high station stop her enjoying herself . . .
You are not here for that, anyway, she told herself. You have a higher purpose. If she closed her eyes, she could feel the faint thorn-point that was the spectre of Tisamon, penetrating Tynisa’s mind like a wound that could only suppurate with time. It seemed very far off, and she seemed altogether too weak a vessel to provide any great aid to her wayward sister.
The night was cold, and Che felt very alone just then, so when Thalric put his arms about her, she gave herself up to his embrace, leaning into his chest, feeling his chin butt gently against the back of her head. His hands rested across her stomach, and she felt a little shiver at the thought of their killing power, the Art that slept within them. Reclining against him, his arms seemed to form a barrier keeping the world at bay. His very Apt ignorance was a shield, and she felt that she would not dream whilst he held her. Some part of him would stand sentry, and burn down any dreadful revelations that tried to ambush her.
His breath was at her ear, and so it was simple enough to tilt her head back and find his mouth with her own, expecting him to start with surprise, but the pointed absence of Varmen and Maure must have led his thoughts along the same path, for he kissed her hungrily in return. A moment later, and his hands were moving up to cup her breasts, brashly at first but hesitant just before they came to rest, a fulcrum moment when he was plainly un
sure whether she had meant to allow him so much.
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 other fire and its owners. In the end, Che was the only one amongst them advocating anything other than confrontation, so she gave in with bad grace.
After a little preparation, they set off in that direction, knowing that their opposite numbers had been given ample time to prepare.
Che, Maure and Thalric proceeded first, approaching the campfire as obviously as they could, finding just two men there, neither of them locals, and with three horses tied nearby. One was a squat Scorpion-kinden, and a loaded crossbow lay beside him as he ostentatiously burned a hunk of bread in the flames. The other was a solid-looking Wasp-kinden man with dark hair, who was watching their approach bright-eyed.
‘I swear I’m meeting more Wasps here in the Commonweal than I ever did in the Empire,’ Che murmured.
Thalric stopped within range of their firelight, having counted the horses, and Maure leant in to say to him, ‘The third is in the trees to your right. He has a bow.’
He nodded, then announced, ‘We seem to be neighbours for this night, so perhaps it would make sense if we shared the same fire.’ They had already discussed this, and it seemed marginally safer to have their opposite numbers where they could see them, rather than out in the dark planning who-knew-what.
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