Adrian Tchaikovsky - Heirs of the Blade

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 splashing 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.

Whatever it was that you demanded from them, they gave it to me as well. We are sisters, in this, if in nothing else. And Che reached out, and swatted the screaming thing into dust, nothing but the echo of another woman’s voice fading inside her head.

Che awoke.

It was not a gentle waking, either. She jackknifed up, jerking sideways off the pallet she was lying on, her stomach cramping viciously. She was aware of a certain amount of shouting from nearby, but in those first few moments it was all she could do to suck breath into her lungs.

The sequence of dream images remained with her, that thread of beads she had made of her life. A ghost, she told me? In that convulsive moment, Che wondered whether she really had come back from the dead.

Then there were arms about her, and at first she tried to fight them, but she heard a voice speaking her name over and over, and relaxed. She remembered everything just then, the real and the imagined and the far-seen, all in order and neatly labelled, memories like specimens stored in a College master’s cupboard.

‘Che, do you know where you are?’ It was Thalric, of course. ‘Do you know who I am?’

She forced out a little laugh, at that, her racked body already becoming easier. ‘Oh, yes, to be sure. I’m not likely to forget you, Thalric, for any number of reasons. And, of course, I know…’ She frowned, staring about her. ‘Come to think of it, where am I?’

She sensed a tension going out of him, one that had been held in check through iron discipline, but was no less great for all that. ‘You’re back.’

‘It looks that way.’

He still had not let her go, but she decided she could live with that for now, saying only, ‘Back where, precisely?’

‘Suon Ren, this,’ said another voice, and she only placed it as she looked upon its owner’s face. It was Varmen, their guide, and still with them as far as Suon Ren, apparently.

‘Then…’ For a moment she was going to ask about Tynisa, but then someone groaned – another woman – and Che stared round. ‘You.. .’

It was the halfbreed, her guide from the inner recesses of her own past, where Seda’s might had banished her. The woman was lying on her side on the floor, and perhaps had lost consciousness for a moment, but now she was shaking her head, clambering up on to hands and knees. ‘Ah,’ she began, to nobody in particular, and then, ‘You have a great line in enemies, Cheerwell Maker. The Empress of the Wasps, no less.’