Tynisa had watched it all blankly, but now at last Maure turned to her. ‘Kneel,’ she said. ‘Kneel, for we are ready.’
Grimacing, Tynisa did as she was asked, acutely conscious of her sword as she tilted it to keep the scabbard-tip from scraping the floor. Che had knelt as well, then winced and thought better of it, so ended up sitting awkwardly with her injured leg straight out in front of her.
‘We will now go into your mind, we three,’ Maure announced. ‘We will take you somewhere that your ghost cannot bear to be.’ Her long face, with all its diverse heritage, looked drawn and lean. ‘You will not relish that place either, but you must seize on to it, as if it were a thorn.’
‘You mean a nettle,’ Che said automatically. ‘Nettles don’t hurt if you grasp them, but thorns still do.’ For a moment she was again the pedantic student that Tynisa remembered from the Great College.
Maure stared at her. ‘If I may continue?’ she asked, and Che nodded apologetically. ‘Close your eyes, please,’ the magician requested, ‘both of you. We are going to travel back a little way. I know enough about you, Tynisa, to find my path. Che has told me of the hooks your life is hung from, so we will go to see something of worth, I think. Che, you have wished to see this too, and there are answers here for you. Simply concentrate on my voice, nothing more. Eyes closed, and listen…’
Sitting in that oddly peaceful ruin, with the bandits sufficiently involved in their own business not to intrude, Che felt oddly at rest, almost on the point of dozing. A moment later she jerked her head, sure she had missed some of Maure’s intonation. The woman kept repeating the same few phrases, changing the order but never altering her tone. The day was clear and still, though, and sunlight shafted through the cracks in the roof. This was surely no suitable time for magic, let alone necromancy.
And yet closing her eyes allowed her a darkness that even her Art could not penetrate, and the droning cycle of Maure’s words seemed to throw layers and layers of distance between her and the rest of the world, as though she was receding in a direction she had no precise word for.
And, unable to stop herself, she opened her eyes – or they were opened for her.
By opening them, she let in a wall of sound. For a moment she could make no sense of the images, but the heaving, roaring bellow all around her seemed to take and shake her until her teeth rattled. There were surely a thousand Wasp-kinden all around, in tiered seats arranged in a huge ellipse about a pit of sand. She knew enough to recognize it as a blood-fighting arena, but she’d had no idea that they could be so large.
Her attention was already being shepherded though, to a knot of fighting at the lip of the pit. For a moment the movement there was so swift and brutal that she could not make it out, but then she felt Tynisa invisibly with her, felt her sister’s horror as she attempted to squirm away from the sight, and she knew.
Tisamon and his lover, the Dragonfly Felise Mienn, were fighting. Dozens of Wasp soldiers descended on them, throwing themselves in the way of the avenging pair, dying on their blades. For a moment Che could not see why the Wasps did not simply stand off and use their stings, but then she absorbed the greater picture and she understood. Tisamon and Felise were not simply shedding random blood: they had a goal in mind.
Way above them, and yet so close, was the Imperial box, a cloth-walled chamber where cowered a crowned young Wasp who could only be the Emperor, Alvdan the Second. Beside him Che saw the unforgettable face of Seda, who would become Empress in his stead. She was not yet the imperious sorceress that Che had locked horns with, though. The aura of power that Che expected was absent, had yet to touch her. The girl was staring at the approaching pair with an expression of fascination and fear, but her fear was not for her own life, or at least not at the hands of Tisamon. There was a thread extending from her, invisible yet apparent to Che, that touched on a dark-robed man seated on the far side of the Emperor, a pinch-faced, emaciated old creature who held in his hands an ornate knot of wood that Che knew at once, though she had never seen it.
For this was the heart of it all. This was the Shadow Box, born from the failure of a twisted and terrible ritual, the soul of the blighted Forest Darakyon and the prison of a thousand Mantis-kinden warriors and magicians over five long centuries. Achaeos had nearly died in failing to secure this box, and here was the man into whose hands it had come. Gazing upon it, Che was struck by the sheer dark power of the object, and it was a power she recognized, as she might know a poison the second time she tasted it.
Felise was dead now, Tisamon still trying to battle his way onwards, but the Wasps threw themselves upon him in a storm of blood and vengeance. The Emperor gripped the arms of his throne, staring at the Mantis Weaponsmaster in terror. The withered old man, the Mosquito-kinden, invoked the Shadow Box, and Che saw a hideous creature flower in the Emperor’s shadow: a twisted hybrid of insect and woman and briar thorn. The Emperor died without ever knowing it, and his stolen power flowed into the box, and into the hands of the robed magician.
There was another thread, which led away from the arena, and even by thinking of it her viewpoint pulled away so that she now saw the events around Tisamon as though lit by one candle, whilst another candle sprang up in the great night to show her a gathering of Moth-kinden atop a mountain. Tharn, she knew, and Achaeos was there, injured and weak, but charging a ritual to drive out the Wasp-kinden invaders from the Moths’ halls. She knew it, knew it well, because here, as she watched, he reached out for strength, and here was her younger self to lend it. Another thread.
The Darakyon answered Achaeos’s call and she remembered, all too well, that bleak and icy grip in her mind as it seized on them both. Her younger self was screaming now, in Myna all those miles away, as the Moth ritual rose to a bitter, wrenching climax.
And in Capitas, at the same arena, Tisamon broke away from the pack and struck down not the Emperor, who was already dead, but the magician who clutched the soul of the Darakyon. That bloody metal claw drove down and shattered the Shadow Box, and killed its bearer, and the great knot that was the Darakyon was abruptly undone, ebbing from the world. Achaeos was dead by now, the strain of enacting the ritual more than his body could bear, and Che’s younger image had gone mad, charging towards the Wasp lines, and never knowing that the spectres of the Darakyon were at her back, ready to engage in their last battle before the world was rid of them for ever.
Or not quite all, and not quite for ever. Che reached out and held the world still, examining the net that linked them all, seeing each thread glitter as though dipped in diamond. Here the line from the dying magician to Seda, a conduit for the last of his power; here from Achaeos to Che and through him to the collapsing Darakyon. Here…
I see it now.
Here to Tisamon. Here the Wasps killed him, but his blade had cut into the heart of the Darakyon, and his spirit was now held within the knot. As the forest’s ghosts were drawn away from the world, he went with them – but there was yet one thread that he could use to drag his way back into the world.
Che finally noticed Tynisa in the dead magician’s shadow, chained and bound like a plaything, nothing but a spectator to her father’s death. No thread touched her, though, and Tisamon’s ghost re-entered the world by a more tortuous route by far. But, of course, Che had already known that, for she herself had been linked to the Darakyon, and she saw now, in crystal detail, how Tisamon’s ghost had crept into her own mind: the spectre that had haunted her in Collegium and Khanaphes, and that she had wrongly believed to be Achaeos’s tortured, bitter spirit.