But not strong enough. Even with all this, with not a man or woman among them holding back, the ritual was failing.
It is too late, Achaeos thought. Perhaps a hundred years ago, this could have been accomplished, perhaps even fifty, but we are too late. Magic had died, year on year, giving place and ground before the monsters of artifice and engineering, fading from the minds of the Lowlands until only those like the Skryres of Tharn even believed in it still. And belief was all, in the final analysis.
We are too late. A little longer and those who scoffed at magic’s existence would be proved right. Even with Che’s borrowed strength, Achaeos could not force the ritual to happen. The tightness in his chest was only increasing, and there were constant stabs of pain inside his head as though men were fighting a war within his skull. All around him the other ritualists had started swaying, faces gaunt with exhaustion.
He took the power that Che had lent him, took it with his mind, with both hands, and in a last desperate cry he hurled his voice out away from Tharn, across the Lowlands, and cried, Help us!
It was intended to be his final act before acknowledging defeat, before letting the pain that was clawing at him drag him down at last.
But it was not.
We will help you, little novice.
The words were the dry rattle of old leaves across stone – and he had heard them before.
‘No!’ he started, speaking aloud, not that any of the others truly heard. Something chuckled in his mind.
We will help you. We are bound, you to us, and us to you. The Shadow Box is open, and for a moment we may stretch our limbs. He saw the limbs in his mind, and they were spined, thorned, many-jointed, not remotely human.
‘I do not…’ He did not want their help but he had opened the door to them, and in they came. He felt their approach as though he watched a storm scud over the sky towards him, coming all the way from the dark, rotten vaults of the Darakyon to Tharn. It was power that had lain in wait for a fool like him for five centuries, from the very cusp of the time that magic had begun to die.
Pure, ancient power. Evil power. Power of terrible, twisted might. It came to the mountain-top at Tharn like a crippled giant, tortured and raging, and it fell on them like a hammer.
Achaeos screamed. He was not the only one. At least one of the others fell within the instant, face gone dead white, pale eyes filled with blood. Achaeos tried to let go. but he was held up like a marionette dangling from the Darakyon’s broken fingers. He burnt. The vitriol of their power seared through him, and now he could not even scream.
The ritual exploded. There was a thunderclap of utter silence, a second’s stunned pause, and they all felt the tide of their blighted magic force itself down into the mountain.
Within Tharn all the lamps, all the torches or lanterns, went out at once.
The screams came soon after, the screams of fighting men in utter terror, engulfed by a wave of invisible force they could not fight. It opened their minds. It found where their fears came from, and it released them, each man becoming the victim of his own beasts. The Wasp-kinden, and many of their Moth subjects also, went mad.
Some fell on one another, hands crackling with the loosing of their stings, mouths foaming, tearing with nails and teeth. Some just died, seizing up and stopping like broken machines. Most fled, crashing into walls and doorways, and into each other: fighting through the pitchy tunnels and hallways, trying to find the open sky. Those that found it cast themselves out, and some of them flew and others fell…
And Achaeos, with the whole might of this horror pouring through him, now unstoppable, felt something catch inside him. Such a small thing, but his next breath seemed intolerably hard to draw, and his wound was abruptly open again and bleeding, and something lanced through his mind, a pain so acute that it came almost as a relief, blotting everything else out.
And a falling away. And a darkness that even Moth eyes could not penetrate.
Che had been screaming for some time now, contracted into a ball, knees up to her chin. She could not hear Kymene or the Mynans demanding to know what was wrong with her, talking about Wasp secret weapons. She could only hear the spiteful, hate-filled voices of the Darakyon as they exalted in their first act of revenge for 500 years.
She felt it through Achaeos. He was in her mind and so were they. She could not hear Kymene or the others. She would not unbend as their chirurgeons tried to wrestle her upright. She just screamed and screamed.
And stopped.
They dropped her, then, but she was already stumbling to gain her feet. Without warning, her sword was in her hand.
Her mouth was open, but no words came, only a small, hurt noise as she felt Achaeos suddenly not there.
‘Che… what…?’ Kymene had her blade drawn too, as all of the Mynans surrounding her did. The air around Che seemed to boil and shimmer with darkness.
‘Gone,’ Che finally got out. She was shaking uncontrollably. Where a moment before she had been so full, now there was a void inside her that had to be fed.
‘Che…’ Kymene started again, but a wail was building up inside the Beetle girl, a dreadful drawn-out keening sound of loss, loss and rage.
She was possessed. The fire of the Darakyon was still all about her. The world suddenly felt too small to her, too small to be penned in where she was. Achaeos was gone, taking some vital part of herself with him. She had felt him fall away from her into the cold hands of the dead Mantis people, and she could not bear that. She could not live with it.
Her wail became a scream, and before they could stop her she was over the barricade, charging the Wasps at the palace gates with her sword held high.
History would not remember her for it. History would remember Kymene instead, for, as Che made her charge, the Mynan leader followed after her from pure instinct. She had only been aware of a comrade in trouble, had been surely reaching for Che’s shoulder to drag her back, but the Beetle girl had a surprising turn of speed.
And after Kymene came the Mynans. Chyses barked out his orders, seeing the rallying point for their whole revolution about to throw herself on to the lances of the Wasps… and suddenly there was a whole rush of Mynan warriors behind Kymene, and the Wasps braced their spears and thrust their hands forward to loose their stings. Few of them chose the Beetle girl in the fore as their target, yet enough of them to kill Che five times over.
And then, before they could loose, the tide hit them. Not the tide of the enemy that was just rushing within their range, but the fear. All about the Beetle-kinden girl at the point of the Mynan charge, the air was abruptly seething, writhing. She was surrounded by a host of half-seen figures: Mantis-kinden with claws and spears, fearful winged insects with killing arms, a leaning, arching train of thorns that tore up the ground towards them. The echo of the Darakyon had come to Myna, but the echo was quite enough.
To the Mynans it seemed that the Wasps at the palace gate simply broke. Some fled inside, some hurled themselves into the air. None of them held long enough for Che and Kymene to reach them. A moment later and the Mynans were into the palace, where the real fighting began.