The Scarab Path

Forty-Two

The interrogation room was filled with the sound of engines, the hiss of the steam boiler below and the whine and rumble of the tools above her. She could barely hear one word in three of the careful conversation that Thalric was holding with the engineer, Aagen. It was some convoluted piece of Wasp politics involving the governor and the Butterfly-kinden Grief in Chains. She strained her ears to catch it, since any information would be useful.

Thalric had now finished, telling Aagen, 'Now, dispatch it straight,' and the engineer left them swiftly. She felt the straps taut about her wrists and ankles. The mechanical drills and blades vibrated on their extending arms, spread above her like the limbs of a spider. Thalric had gone to the levers and was regarding them cautiously. She realized that he was not artificer enough to know how to turn the device off.

'The one at the end!' she shouted out to him. 'The red band!'

He turned to regard her, with a slight smile on his face. His hand found another lever and pulled it, in a brutal, brief motion, and the tool assembly dropped three feet, until it hovered right above her.

'Thalric!' she yelled, and he headed over, still smiling. One of his hands brushed against the surgical tools laid out beside her, and as it came away he was holding a narrow blade.

'Thalric, listen to me!' she said quickly. 'I'll talk. I'll tell you. Please …'

'The time for that has passed,' he said. 'I thought you understood as much. You cannot claim that I have not given you sufficient opportunity to speak voluntarily.' The light glinted on the scalpel blade as he dipped it to caress her cheek. 'Fortunate, really, that your kinden are not such a comely people. I had cause to interrogate a Spider once, and they have so much more to lose.' There was a dreadful reasonableness in his voice and expression that was more terrifying than outright anger could ever be. She felt her breath catch and shudder as sheer terror started building inside her. Don't cut me. Please, don't cut me.

'Thalric, listen to me. You don't want to do this. Not when you can just … just ask. Just ask and I'll say. You might … you might have a use for me later. For me whole. Please …'

'There is an economy of information, in the intelligencer's trade,' he told her, reaching up and bringing down a mechanical separator on its jointed arm. 'Information freely given is debased coinage. How can it be trusted, after all? However, when I have excruciated you until you beg and scream and plead, until you would betray everything and anything you have ever loved for a moment's cessation of pain, then you shall give me information of purest gold. There is a point when everyone, be they ever so strong or wilful or honour-bound, crosses over into the realm of pure honesty. We shall find where your point lies. Similarly with your future service, when I have put my mark upon you in sufficient detail, the very memory of it shall keep you loyal, for you will know in full what shall await you if you betray me. You are right-handed, are you not? I shall start with your left hand.'

She stared at him in horrified fascination. 'Please …'

His smile only broadened, becoming sharp as the blade he held. He touched the point to the back of her hand, holding her fingers flat.

He cut. The pain was short, sharp, almost lost in her bucking, twitching reaction to it. A shallow incision, but now he lowered the separator towards it, inserting the cold spars of the device between the lips of the wound, and then jabbing down. She screamed for real this time, though it was nothing more than preparation, sliding the machine's fingers between the bones of her hand. There was a delicate clockwork motor contained in the fist of it, and he wound it carefully so that she could hear its contented ticking.

She felt the slightest pressure affecting the bones of her hand. Amid the welter of pain, it meant little to her, but the prongs of the separator would slowly grind their way apart whilst Thalric worked on other parts of her — or even left the room entirely. It would torture her by infinitesimal degrees, all by its mindless self.

She was babbling by then, trying to tell him all sorts of things, about Stenwold, about Collegium, about anything she could imagine the Empire might be interested in. There was a sickness welling inside her, above and beyond the pain. She had not realized, before this moment, just how weak she had always been.

'Now,' said Thalric, ignoring her rush of words entirely, 'nature has gifted you with two eyes. One might almost think this was so that the loss of one would serve as an irresistible inducement to cooperate, lest you face the loss of the other.'

He brought the scalpel up and cleaned it meticulously, as though the intrusion of her own blood might cause her some infection. The pressure against the bones of her hand was noticeably intensifying. She clenched her teeth vainly against it.

His smile as he brought the razor-edge of the blade towards her face was fond, almost doting. She jerked her head back, shrieking at him, twisting as he pulled a strap tight across her forehead to hold her still.

'Now,' he said.

The interrogation room was filled with the sound of engines, the hiss of the the steam boiler below and the whine and rumble of the tools above her. She could barely hear one word in three of the careful conversation that Thalric was holding with the engineer, Aagen. It was some convoluted piece of Wasp politics involving the governor and the Butterfly-kinden Grief in Chains. She strained her ears to catch it. Any information would be useful.

Hold on-

Thalric had finished, telling Aagen, 'Now dispatch it straight,' and the engineer left them swiftly. She felt the straps taut about her wrists and ankles. No, wait a moment… The mechanical drills and blades vibrated on their arms, spread above her like the limbs of a spider. Thalric had gone over to the levers and was regarding them cautiously. She realized that he was not artificer enough to know how to turn the device off.

'The one at the end!' she shouted out to him. 'The red band!'

He turned to regard her — Haven't I been here before? — and there was a slight smile on his face. His hand found another lever and pulled it, in a brutal, brief motion, and the tool assembly dropped three feet until it hovered right above her.

'Thalric!' she yelled. His tongue touched his lips, wetting them, as he regarded her, eyes flicking to the tool assembly, spoiled for choice. When they rested on her again they were blank white, like milk.

'The interrogator is in an admirable position amongst all trades,' he said to her, one hand coming to touch her cheek lightly. 'There are so very many tools he may employ, and no restraints on him whatsoever. So long as he can turn out his goods, meaning information, he is very much left to his own devices.' His hands found the collar of her tunic and, in a single savage motion, he ripped it down the front all the way to the waist.

This is wrong — Wrong, of course it's wrong — I've been here before. This is the room in Myna …

She was feeling a bizarre doubling in her mind, of image over image. Thalric, with his blank Moth eyes, was trailing his hand across her breasts, whilst the other reached up for some tool of torture. Part of her was reacting with fear and revulsion, terrified of the pain and shame, but on another level she was watching everything as though from behind a pane of glass — or some clever Spider mirror that served as a window from one side. But this isn't the way it happened the first time. This isn't the way it happened last time.

First time? Last time?

How many times?

'Now,' said Thalric …

The interrogation room was filled with the sound of engines, the hiss of the steam boiler below and the whine and rumble of the tools above her. Wasn't I just here …? She could barely hear one word in three of the careful conversation that Thalric was having with the engineer, Aagen. But Aagen just left … It was some convoluted piece of Wasp politics involving the governor and the Butterfly-kinden Grief in Chains. She strained her ears to catch it. Any information would be useful.

Thalric had finished, telling Aagen, 'Now, dispatch it straight,' and the engineer left them swiftly. There was something wrong with Thalric's face. It was pallid, greying, changing. He was slighter than she remembered.

She felt the straps taut about her wrists and ankles. The mechanical drills and blades vibrated on their arms, spread above her like the limbs of a spider. Thalric had gone to the levers and was regarding them cautiously. She realized that he was not artificer enough to know how to turn the device off. And neither am I for that matter. So why do I say:

'The one at the end!' she shouted out to him. 'The red band!'

He turned to regard her, and his face rent her more than the knives could ever do: the pointed, grey-skinned visage of a Moth she had once known. His hand found another lever and pulled it, in a brutal, brief motion, and the tool assembly dropped three feet until it hovered right above her.

'The true interrogator,' he informed her, 'can extend a moment into a lifetime. He can stretch time as easily as flesh, denying the subject any chance of escape …'

'Achaeos?' Wrong, all wrong. I know it's wrong. I've been here before, and before that, and before that, and …

He reached up for the tools and she felt cracks all around her, her mind fragmenting into lens after distorting lens, one beyond the other, reaching further and further out. She stared up at the machinery above her. I don't know how this works. I don't remember how it works. I only remember that I once remembered.

And Achaeos could never know.

I dreamt this. This is my dream, one of many. What did he say?

What did he say in my dream?

That I was doing this to myself …

That I was …

That I was using him to torture myself.

That I was …

She opened her eyes.

From the steady lamps of that remembered cell in Myna to the dancing bluish flames of the tombs beneath Khanaphes: Che blinked, aware that she was lying awkwardly on one arm, and for a moment unsure where she was. She registered some cool, damp place where the stone beneath her was gluey with slime.

Now she remembered, the pieces falling into her head out of order: the Wasps, the halls, the carvings, the sarcophagi.

The Masters of Khanaphes.

She sat up suddenly, becoming aware of her surroundings. The vaulted halls seemed to lean in on her, each alcove hosting its own stone memorial.

Thalric …? But he was there. They all were. Strewn around her were three bodies, not dead but not sleeping either. Their eyes were open but unseeing, and they twitched and kicked in the grip of whatever memory or thought was tormenting them. Thalric kept pulling his hands in as though avoiding something, his expression racked and unrecognizable. The other Wasp's fingers flexed over and over as though he was in the midst of loosing his sting. Accius of Vek had an expression only of concentration, moving not at all save for the shivers that pulsed through his muscles. And what is he here for? What is his part in all this?

She reached a hand out to Thalric, hoping he might wake, but his skin crawled under her touch. I must have been like this but a moment ago, with my mind sent back to the rack in Myna. What horrors would a Rekef spymaster's memory hold? Felice's children? Surely he relives his murder of her children.

She belatedly became aware that she was being watched, that the three twitching bodies were not her only company. Then she remembered, and her heart skipped and lurched as she looked round.

She was there, looking as though she had been standing there for hours, waiting for Che to wake — and as though she could stand there for a hundred years if need be. There was a patience about her that would wear down stone. Elysiath Neptellian, Lady of the Bright Water, She whose Word Breaks all Bonds, Princess of the Thousand, the risen denizen of her own tomb. Her gravity and presence made Che feel as though she should kneel, that the mere existence of this woman was sufficient to make a slave of her. She fought off the feeling angrily, and noticed the faintest movement of the woman's mouth. It was not a smile, for a smile on that face would have been fearsome, but perhaps an iota of approval.

Che hauled herself to her feet, still barely reaching above the woman's waist, then realized that Elysiath Neptellian was not alone. Another gigantic figure had emerged from the gloom, and now walked ponderously to stand at her shoulder. He was a thick-waisted man with a fleshy face that spoke of all manner of terrible deeds, and no guilt at all. A second woman now sat on her own plinth, combing her hair in slow, careful strokes, while ignoring Che utterly. Their hair was magnificent, waves of blue-black that gleamed in the undersea light. Both the women wore it down to the waist, cascading in slow ripples down their backs and, like the men, they were clad in little more than a few folds of cloth. Had they been Beetle-kinden, they would have been fat, had they been any other kinden they would have been grotesque, but they carried their bodies with an absolute assurance, without admitting the possibility of ugliness or awkwardness or shame. They were beautiful, all three, and it was something that partook of their bodies and those cruel faces, but that went far beyond. They were royalty, by their very nature, and Che was the lowest of commoners.

She heard steps behind her, quiet but slow, and the apparition she saw, when she turned, sent her two stumbling steps away from it, almost falling over Thalric. His name surfaced in her mind irresistibly: Garmoth Atennar, Lord of the Fourth House, whose Bounty Exceeds all Expectations, Greatest of Warriors, had woken. He had donned the mail that had sat waiting on his throne through the ages. Armour plates of gleaming green-black and gold slid one over the other, boasting the meticulous craftsmanship of decades. The dark clasp of the open helm framed the pale features of a dead king. He stared down at her with a distant amusement, as she herself might have looked at some small animal meandering lost through the rooms of her home.

She tried to speak, but her voice betrayed her, cracking to a mere whisper in the face of them. She finally forced it out, hearing her words tremble. 'You are the Masters of Khanaphes.'

'We are some,' said Elysiath. 'Those that have awoken.' The man's hand rested on her shoulder, while the other woman continued to comb her hair, oblivious. 'You are not one of our slaves, though.' Her eyes regarded Che with arch humour. 'Some few are summoned to us, through some trace of old blood that they carry, or else through their own misplaced curiosity, but you have been called from far places.'

'I … did not come because I was called,' Che got out.

'That is what many believe.'

There was a sudden gasp from Thalric, lying at her feet, in reaction to some particular stab of torment in his mind. 'What is happening to them?' Che asked. 'What are you doing to them?'

'Testing them.' Garmoth Atennar's voice rang deep and hollow as the halls they stood in. 'A test which they shall doubtless fail, as so many do. A test which you have passed, for which you may give thanks and rejoice.'

Che glanced back towards him. In his colossal mail, he was even more frightening and less approachable than the others. There was a sword girded at his belt that must have stood eight feet from point to pommel. 'Please,' she said, crouching by Thalric, 'he will go mad.'

'It is likely,' said Elysiath indifferently. 'Soon it will be certain. That is what awaits those who fail.'

'Will you not …?' Che's voice trailed off. Of course they will not. Why should they? We are as the smallest insects to them.

'We will not stir ourselves to release them from their bonds,' Elysiath told her. 'We will not prevent you from doing so, if you can.'

'Me?' Che demanded, astonishment lending her courage. 'What can I do?'

The huge woman made a face. 'Well, then, perhaps you can do nothing.'

'This is … magic.' Despite everything it was still hard to say it. 'This is something I know nothing about. There's nothing I can do for them!'

Elysiath glanced at the man by her shoulder, who was looking bored. 'No doubt it is as you say,' she said dismissively.

'But …' Che looked down at Thalric, locked into his own bespoke nightmare. 'I can't …' Something inside her was telling her to look, though. Achaeos, help me now, she thought, reaching out. And then: You've ridden me all the way here from Khanaphes. I went up the pyramid because you were there. I've taken you everywhere you wanted, until I looked like a madwoman. Come on, now!

She felt the presence then, the ghostly half-sense of another being that had plagued her since the war. What do you want? she asked it. Just to torment me? Did I escape the nightmare only because I carry my own around with me?

You torture yourself with me. Not her words, but his, remembered from her dream. She twisted uncomfortably.

Help me now, she told him. If you could ever help me, help me now.

She sensed his reaction, his violent disagreement. This man is an enemy!

He is a Wasp, not an enemy, she insisted, but she knew he must surely resent Thalric for the feelings she had discovered towards the man. All at once, and spurred by that thought, her patience vanished.

To the pits with you, then. In her mind she did not now see the grey-skinned man that she had loved, just the brooding, bitter, shouting stain on the air that seemed to be all that was left of him. The better parts, the parts that had held her affection, were clearly gone to his grave.

There was a net about Thalric, and she caught hold of it and tore it asunder. Afterwards she could find no words, no language, to account for what she had done. She had simply done it, taken the magic and tugged until it snapped.

It must have been very weak, she thought, But then these victims are Apt, and the weakest of magics can bind the mind that does not credit it. It was weak enough that I could claw my way out from the inside.

Thalric gasped, kicked out, hands flailing at the sticky ground.

'Calm,' she told him. 'It's Che, Thalric. I'm with you.'

He recoiled from her a moment, and she thought that he had gone mad indeed. Then he clutched at her arm and something of his own character returned to his face.

'Che …' he began, seeking out her face.

'Thalric!' a voice cried out in utter fury. Che looked to see the other Wasp, Marger, up on his knees, his face twisted in fear and rage. 'Thalric!' he screamed again, throwing one arm towards the two of them, palm outwards. He was too far to restrain, and Thalric just stared at him, still half-numb.

There was a flash of metal, swift enough for Che to think it must be some new form of magic, and Marger's hand was gone, the wrist a moment late in spraying them with his blood. Marger let out a hoarse, horrified yell, eyes bulging as he brought the stump close to them, unable to accept what he was seeing. Then Accius struck a second time, running him cleanly through the throat and then whipping the blade free.

All three of them, Che thought hollowly. I woke up all three.

She reached for her sword, forgetting that the last blade she had held had been the Vekken's own, which he must have reclaimed by long habit the moment he awoke. The Antkinden was not focused on either her or Thalric, but staring past them, at the Masters — the towering shapes of Elysiath and her two companions. Following his gaze, Thalric looked back also, and Che found it incredible that neither man had even noticed the metal bulk of Garmoth Atennar, who had been right before their eyes, the body of Marger almost at his feet. They stand so still, like statues indeed, she thought. And I see better in these dark places and …

And I am Inapt now, and so I am of their world.

Thalric swore softly, so she knew that he could see them, the risen Masters. 'What …?' he got out hoarsely.

'Words spoken in these halls leave long echoes,' said Elysiath. 'You do not believe in us, O savage. We are long dead, so you say, if we ever existed.'

'You can't be the Masters,' Thalric sounded dazed.

'Who else are they going to be?' Che demanded.

'But it's impossible, not without half the city knowing that you have — what? — some underground colony here, where you eat what? And drink what? And keep your numbers up over — how long has it been since the Masters were supposed to have ruled Khanaphes?' He was shaking his head wildly in disbelief.

'We still rule,' boomed Garmoth Atennar, and Thalric and the Ant whirled round, separating him from the gloom for the first time as more than just statuary.

'Dead,' stammered Thalric. 'The Masters are dead.' Che put her arms around him, but he continued, 'How long since the Masters were supposed to have walked the streets above?'

'This shall be nine years,' said the man beside Elysiath, 'and forty years. And nine hundred years.'

Che felt Thalric twist in her arms, struggling to his knees. 'Then it cannot be. To have a colony, unseen, unknown, for generation after generation beneath their feet, not even if just the Ministers knew.'

They were smiling now, all of them. Elysiath Neptellian even laughed. It was a resonant, inhuman sound that reminded Che of the stone bells the Moth-kinden sometimes used in their rituals.

'Speak not to us, O savage, of your generations. We are the Masters of Khanaphes, and we have always been so. When we turned away from the sun to seek our rest down here, it was these eyes that looked back one last time, and no other's.'

Thalric stared at her dumbly, plainly not prepared to take up the argument against such invincible assurance, but Che spoke up, as politely as a young student petitioning some great College scholar. 'You can't be nine hundred years old?'

'I am older, and I am not so old, by my kinden's reckoning.' The perfect mouth curved more sharply. 'There is none left living now who raised the first stones of Khanaphes and taught the Beetle-kinden to think, but those were active times, so we could not sleep then so long as we have since. Still, I remember when I walked our dominion as a queen, and they cast flowers before my feet and turned their faces from me, lest their gaze sully my beauty.'

'Madness,' whispered Thalric, but tears had sprung into Che's eyes at the mere tone of the woman's voice, the ancient longings and memories it contained.

'Still he does not believe. Like all savages, they have minds able to clutch only small pieces of the world held close, blind to the greater whole,' said the man at Elysiath's shoulder. 'But she believes. She has comprehended our glorious city, and seen how there is a missing piece at its heart. She knows now that the missing piece is before her.'

'Yes,' Che breathed. Despite the magnitude of what had been said, she found no doubt remaining within herself at all. Khanaphes had been a city that did not make sense. Only by the addition of some such presence as this could it be made whole. 'But how?' she asked. 'How has it come to this end?'

'This is no end,' Garmoth Atennar rumbled from behind her. 'We merely wait and sleep. We shall arise once more, when our city is ready.'

The absolute certainty in his voice struck a false chord in Che. For the first time she doubted them: not their belief in themselves, but the extent of what they knew. 'I don't understand,' she said. 'Help me understand.'

She thought they would not respond, but the woman who had been combing her hair stood up, stretching luxuriously. 'We shall tell her.'

'Must we?' queried the man. 'I tire of it all.'

'We shall tell her,' said the woman with the comb, firmly. 'Child, I am Lirielle Denethetra, Lady of the Amber Moon, Speaker of Peace, Whose Word Brings Low the Great.' She intoned the litany of her titles with profound meaning, shrouding each with the shadows of a history that Che could never know of. 'Open your mind, little one.'

'I … don't know how.' Che said awkwardly. 'I am no magician.' She was aware of Thalric close by her, Accius further away, sword still in hand. When she thought of them, she felt embarrassed by their disbelief, but in the presence of the Masters she found she thought of them less and less.

'It is open as a window,' said the man.

'Then we shall tell you of the cataclysm and doom that came to Khanaphes, and that lies over her still,' said Lirielle Denethetra. 'The tale begins before even we ourselves remember, many thousands of years before the founding of our city, or any city.'

Colours began to rise in Che's mind, swirling and dancing, accumulating into hazy images, viewed as through warped glass. She saw a landscape unrecognizable, green and forested. She saw great plains where beetles grazed between the spires of soaring anthills. She saw no walls, no evidence of the hand of man. She saw other beasts, monstrous things with hair, horrible to behold, that she had never seen the like of in all her waking life.

The voice of Elysiath continued in her mind, saying: 'Such was the world before even we had arisen to walk in it. So stood the world when the Pact was made and the Art was born, but the world was new formed, and not set in its ways.'

'There was a great catastrophe, in the spring of time,' Lirielle's voice now took over. 'We have peered back, and divined as best we could, yet know not the cause. Perhaps there was no other cause, save for the mysterious slow workings of the earth, which moved and fell, and made the lands we know today.' The images in Che's mind blurred and shifted. She had a sense of a great sliding and slumping, a shuddering that seemed to rend apart the entire world. She saw whole lands fall into the sea, then the sea roll back to steal even more of the earth. She saw plains riven in two, the higher broken from the lower by a great sheer cliff. Is that the Lowlands I see? The Commonweal and the Barrier Ridge?

'And the people were sore afraid,' Elysiath told her. 'Small wonder that only those tribes who might truly influence the world must step forth to take mastery of it. Mere crafting and making would not suffice, in order to live through those terrible times. So we would come into our estate, and so, later, would come the others in their distant lands. Still, none were so great as we.'

'All long ago and before even our time, and it was long before we came to understand it,' added the unnamed man. 'But it was to dominate our world nonetheless. This is later, though, much later.' There was a city now being built, Che saw in her mind. The people were stocky and brown, like her. At first there was merely a small town on the banks of a river, the dense forest surrounding it being cut back for farmland. Then she saw stone walls raised. There were suggestions of battles with the denizens of the forest, and those of the plains beyond. She saw her kinfolk victorious, and saw great figures standing at their head, pale and slow but mighty in their sorcery. 'These come from my great-grandfather, these scenes — before my own time. Your people had not yet gone east to serve the Moths. There is no Pathis, no Solarno. The Spider-kinden live in caves and fight each other for scraps.'

Too much, too much, thought Che, but they were merciless in imparting their knowledge, and she was sure that, for every word said, ten thousand remained silent. She was being given only the gloss, a thin veneer of a deep history that she sensed yawning like an abyss at her feet.

'We raised the first walls,' Elysiath said proudly. 'We first placed stone upon stone. We were the first of all the kinden of the world to know civilization.' Even as she spoke, so the city of Khanaphes took shape. But on what river? The marshes of the estuary segued into lush forest. The fields were green and bountiful beyond the dreams of the farmers Che had seen along the Jamail. Beyond the forests extended vast plains of grassland where the Khanaphir drove back the nomad tribes, to install their own horses and goats and aphids, to build their further towns. Did they move the city because of some horror? How could this be? They did not hear her questions, seeming absorbed in their own histories. 'So we grew great and greater,' Elysiath Neptellian affirmed. 'So the centuries passed by, of majesty and expansion. So our teachers walked the paths of the world, and we brought many kinden the benefits of our just rule. So we made colonies elsewhere, even as far east as the Land of the Lake. In that way we met others who had assumed the mantle of rulers, and we received their tribute and taught them much, for they had much to learn. We were attaining our full grandeur, the very heights of our power.'

'And yet all was not well,' said Lirielle sadly, and Che felt a cold wind of grief and loss wash over her. 'For, even as our power grew, the land itself was betraying us. That ancient sundering was still at work. Decade to decade, century to century, the land gave back less. The forests succumbed not to the axe but to time, the grasslands withered, rivers dried. The patterns of wind and weather had been broken all those ages before, and the land was still changing to catch up. Our greatest sorcerers looked into the past and the future and saw that, despite all we had built, our land would grow only drier and drier, until the plains became a barren desert littered with the skulls of our cities, until the forests had retreated back to the sheltered Alim, until only the loyal river Jamail traced a trail of green through the barren land.' Che saw it all evolve in her mind, the encroaching desolation. She saw the desert rise from the heart of the plains like a devouring monster. And what did the Lowlands look like, once? Was it once green, as well? And will it, too, become a desert?

'We spent many decades in debate over what might be done,' came the man's voice again. 'We put off the inevitable. Our dominion declined, became less and less, the borders shrinking until only our sacred city remained of it. We would not believe that all we had built must come to an end. It was bitter for us.' And Che felt the bitterness: his words resounded with it. 'We, who had been masters of the earth, were yet become victims of time. As the land became drier, we could not bear to remain. Our skins cracked under the sun, so we became things of the night, and then of the earth's depths. We knew we could no longer remain amongst our subjects.'

'Yet we would not abandon them.' Elysiath said. 'So we had them build this place, where we would sleep, and from which we could still work our magics: our great ritual that has been nine hundred years in the making and may last a thousand more for all we know. And we selected those that bore a trace of our blood, or those that were most open to us, and made them our chief servants, and their children, and their children's children, so that they would be able to preserve our ways, and not fall into evil. Even then, our servants were gradually drifting from away us, falling into the error that has now claimed almost all of their kind. Which is why we have some interest, little child, in you.'

'Me?' Che started. She felt Thalric move beside her, and realized that, for him, her voice was the only one to have spoken out loud. The rest — that incredible history — had been played out in her head alone. It is best that way. 'But I'm not of your blood, or the Ministers' blood, whatever you mean.'

Elysiath eyed her pityingly. 'Of course you are not. Do not make the mistake of our servants, who believe it is merely a bloodline that we value. No, it is the ability to hear our call, to hear the old ways. You are of more use to us than all the Ministers this last century has seen. You alone have been purified of the taint of recent years.'

She saw understanding of a sort in Thalric's face. I'm Inapt, yes. So what? But she did know what. It did not just mean she could no longer use a crossbow or turn a key in a lock. It meant that she saw the world differently. Her mind could stretch to different shapes.

'We called to you — as we call to all those with ears to hear. Some of them come to us as we lie dreaming. Few indeed pass our tests.'

A dark thought occurred to Che. 'Kadro,' she murmured, 'the Fly-kinden from Collegium, he went missing.'

'He was curious.' The man at Elysiath's shoulder nodded. 'He had begun to understand. So we called to him. We even met him at the pyramid's summit. Sometimes, when we awake, we miss the sky, even though it is only the stars of a cool night that we can endure.'

'He failed the tests,' stated Garmoth Atennar flatly, 'and his companion took her own life rather than attempt them.'

A shock of anger went through Che, and she took an involuntary step towards the armoured giant, though minuscule in the face of him. 'You killed them!'

'We?' He looked down on her with faint derision. 'We who have the power of life and death, and whose inescapable rule stretches from horizon to horizon?' She met his eyes then, but his stern face beat her down. There was no admission, in that expression, of any kinship or shared humanity. He was the Master, she a servant, the divisions of the world from before the revolution. She wanted to shout and rage at him, but that reaction would have been as incomprehensible to Garmoth Atennar as the Masters' history would be to Thalric. A Fly and a Beetle were dead, two scholars of the College and, to the immortal Masters, it was as though they had been no more than a beetle, a fly, crushed unknowingly underfoot.

'And me?' she asked.

'You have passed our tests,' Elysiath said. 'You have heard our call. From your distant home you sought us out, and now that challenge is behind you, and you stand before us as a supplicant. Now reveal what you would have of us.'

Che stared at them, and she was distantly aware of Thalric's murmur, 'Be very, very careful what you ask.' It was a needless warning. 'I was sent here by my uncle,' she said. 'As an ambassador.'

Elysiath laughed again. It was a beautiful sound, but cold as winter. 'You may have believed that once,' she said. 'Do you still?'

'I …' Che stopped, feeling the world around her totter. Do I? No, Stenwold sent me. There was … I had reasons to investigate an Inapt Beetle city …There is a perfectly rational explanation for my being here. But she found that she did not believe it, not standing before them now. And you, Achaeos, you lured me here, to this place. You have pulled my strings all the way, as well as tormenting my nights.

Achaeos, since you died you've not been the man I knew.

'I had a guide, to lead me here,' she confessed slowly. 'I … am haunted.'

'We see him,' Lirielle said. 'He stands at your shoulder. Have you come this far to be rid of him?'

To be rid of him? Her breath caught in her throat. This final confirmation that what afflicted her was more than just a madness crawling inside her brain sent a shock through her. More than that was her instinctive recoil from the offer. But it's Achaeos … She saw his lost, loved face again in her mind. My poor Achaeos. I can't just discard him like a cape. But then she thought of the ghost, not the man: that lurking, looming grey stain with its continuous demands.

'How?' she asked.

'We need only lend it a little strength,' Lirielle explained. 'It is too weak to exist apart from you now, therefore it leans on you like a sick man. We shall help it to stand alone, then it will be about its business and you shall be rid of it.'

'But what if I am its business?' Che demanded.

Lirielle's expression suggested that this entire conversation was now boring her. She went back to combing her hair.

Che could feel the ghost hovering close, invisible to her but still present. She recalled the Marsh, suddenly: its dragging her towards the Mantis icon, and its shrieking denunciation of the Marsh people, how they had let the old ways lapse so far. Power: it was looking for magic, and why else if not to free itself? She should have considered more that he might want to be free from her, as much as she wanted to be free from him.

She did want to be free from him.

'Please,' she said, 'do it.'

'Che …' Thalric was reaching out, but she shook him off.

'Do it,' she said again, grasping her courage with both hands.

Elysiath sighed. 'You are so impatient, with your mayfly lives,' she said. 'See, it is being accomplished even while you demand it.'

She waved one languid hand, and all eyes followed the gesture.

There was something boiling and building in the air, grey and formless, writhing and knotting. Motes of substance seemed to be drawn to it, flocking through the dim air. It turned and twisted like a worm, as flecks of dusty powder fell into its substance. Slowly it was growing a form, evolving from a blur into something that had limbs, a head, the shape of a man.

'Is there …?' Thalric was squinting, as if trying to make out something he could not quite see. In another place, Che was sure, any number of ghosts would pass him by, but here, where the darkness was layered with centuries, one on top of another in an unbroken chain, the magic was getting even to him.

She thought she saw bones and organs as the apparition formed. It was still colourless, washed-out, still a shadow, a mere reflection in a dark glass. She found that she now feared to set eyes on him. What would he look like after a year in the void? Would it be Achaeos living she saw, or Achaeos dead?

Thalric made a choking sound, and she knew he must now see it, or see something. His lips drew back in a grimace, his hands spreading open to fight. Behind him the Vekken stood expressionless and she could not know what he saw.

'Is that …?' Thalric said. 'What am I seeing? Isn't that …?'

'Yes,' she confirmed, and looked back at the ghost, which was near complete, now — and discovered that it was not.

They had lent it enough of their strength, like a thimble filled from the ocean, for it to become recognizable, and more of it was being filled out even as she watched. She now recognized the tall, lean frame, and those sharp features that were, in their cold arrogance, a match for the Masters themselves. He did not wear the slave's garb they had dressed him in to die, but instead his arming jacket, its green and gold bleached grey. The sleeves were slit up to his elbows to give play to the spines of his arms. Even the sword-and-circle brooch that he had cast aside now glinted from his breast again.

'Tisamon,' Che gasped. 'But … no! This is the wrong one. This isn't him!'

'Little child, what you see is all the ghost there is. No other clings to you,' the man beside Elysiath declared, plainly amused. 'Are you so particular?'

'But …' she protested, and the Mantis's haughty features turned to regard her. 'I don't understand.'

'We see in your past a great convergence of ritual,' the man continued, sounding bored again. 'A magical nexus to which you and he were linked. When he died, you were touching him in some way.'

'But where is Achaeos?' she asked, but she already knew the answer. Gone. Gone beyond, and utterly. Whilst this vicious, martial creature had clung on within her mind, her lover had been like a candle flame suddenly snuffed. The dream-Achaeos had told her, You do this to yourself. She had used his memory as a rod and imagined that it was his hand that beat her with it.

'Oh.' She sat down suddenly. The spectral Mantis was staring at them, each one in turn. His eyes lingered long enough on Thalric to make the man tense.

'What do you seek, spirit?' Elysiath asked him. 'What holds you here still?'

Tisamon's pale lips moved, the words seeming to come from a great distance. Where is my daughter?

'Go seek her,' Elysiath said without interest. 'She is no concern of ours.'

Where is she? demanded the Mantis's bleak, far-off voice.

'You are parted from the Beetle-kinden,' the man told him. 'If you cannot scent your child, free as you are now, then you shall never find her.'

Tisamon's greyed eyes flashed briefly. Che thought it was resentment, but then she read it as triumph.

She is among the Dragonflies, the Mantis stated. Far north and west of here.

'Go seek her,' Elysiath said again. 'We give you leave.'

Che thought of Tynisa, her near-sister, and daughter of this dead man. She thought of what directions Tynisa's life might turn under this ghost's influence, how it had already turned when he was alive. 'Tisamon,' she protested. 'No …'

The angular features stared down at her. Stenwold's niece, he identified her, as though he had not been riding inside her mind these many months. She needs me. With that, he was stalking away, growing less distinct with distance. She thought she detected half-glimpsed shapes about him, the shadows of a shadow, that were those of briars and thorns.

She looked up at the Masters, whose kinden she realized she must know, from fragmentary legends, folk tales, ancient fictions. She had assumed she would feel hollow with the ghost's departure, whosoever's it had been. She also thought she would feel relieved. In truth she felt neither.

'What now?' she asked them. 'What will you do with us?' She stood up again, and this time Thalric stood alongside her, with fingers spread, and the Vekken too. Sword clutched tight in his hand, the Ant was staring at the armoured slopes of Garmoth Atennar.

'They are less than chaff to us,' said Elysiath, 'but you are the grain. In our dreams we have called and, when you came, we awoke for you. For you alone we have broken our long sojourn. We have much to offer you. We give you a chance to share in the rule of the Masters of Khanaphes.'

Che swallowed, feeling very keenly the ancient weight of the dark halls about her and, even more so, the ageless power of the Masters themselves, who were older even than the stones of their living tomb. There are things here I would never learn in all my days spent at the Great College, she thought. There are things that even Moths could not teach me …

'Your rule?' Thalric interrupted sharply, though his voice shook. 'What rule is that? What do you rule, save this hole in the ground?'

'Though our dominion has diminished, do not think we no longer rule our beloved city,' Elysiath reproached him. 'Though we no longer walk its streets, do not think our dreams no longer guide our Ministers. Do not assume we have taken no pains to keep our people on the true path.'

'Oh, I've seen the path they're on,' Thalric said bitterly, and Che saw the great woman roll her eyes, that this savage would not be silent in front of his betters. Thalric was driven by fear and aggression, though, and would not be stilled. 'I've seen them try to struggle on with the simplest of machines, knowing nothing of mechanics, metallurgy, modern farming. We've all seen where that has left them, for even Khanaphes can't hold back the march of time.'

She stared at him and he blanched, baring his teeth, but no more words emerged.

'Now-' Elysiath began, but Che took a deep breath and interrupted her.

'Do you … Do you know there's a war out there?'

There was a moment's pause when it seemed that Che might be struck down just for such an interruption, then Lirielle replied dismissively, 'Wars come and go. We, who have seen so many, cannot mark them all.'

'No, there is a war right now. The Scorpions have come against your city.' Che saw their derision and pressed forward. 'They have broken through your walls! When we came down here, they were at the river. By now they may even have driven your people out into the wastes.'

The Masters exchanged amused glances. 'Our city is proof against what the rabble of the desert can bring against it,' sneered the man. 'Our people shall become stronger for the testing.'

Che stared at them in disbelief. 'Your people are praying to you,' she said. 'It's like nothing I've ever seen anywhere else. The homeless crowd the streets and call to you to save them. You have slept too deeply.'

There was enough passion in her voice, just enough evidence of pain and truth, that their mockery dried up slowly, like the landscape of their memories.

'Such nonsense,' said Elysiath finally, 'but let us witness this prodigy. Watch with us if you will, and you shall see your fears dispelled.'