Then Maure hooked a hand about Che’s arm. ‘We cannot go yet. I have work to do.’
Che turned on her, and Tynisa could clearly see the balance of power — how the Beetle had become a vessel overflowing with it, ready to rain thunder on this halfbreed upstart — and how Maure, who had known magic all her life, was just a leaf on the wind before her.
I am thinking like the Inapt, Tynisa realized.
Yet the hand remained on Che’s arm, the channel for some revelation that Maure was willing Che to listen to, and a moment later the Beetle’s face practically disintegrated, all that fierce resolve falling away, and Che sagged, letting out a single ragged breath, and became the girl Tynisa recognized once again.
‘Of course. Do what you must. Do what you can.’ Che put a hand to her temple. Thalric stepped in, and for a moment she gestured him off as though she did not want to corrupt him with her touch. Then she was in his arms — and Tynisa turned away, supplanted and resentful, and mean-spirited for feeling so.
For more than an hour, Maure sat amongst the ruins in the centre of a circle she had made from the weapons of the fallen, her head bowed and unmoving, and doing who knew what. Tynisa, who could no longer deny that fragments of the dead might be pinned to the world — things of raw emotion, anger and loss — hoped that the woman could accomplish something here, and did not envy her the task.
She tried to approach Che, meanwhile, but the Beetle girl would barely speak to her, fighting battles inside her head, mumbling to herself in a rambling monologue that abruptly stilled whenever Tynisa approached.
At last Maure was done, standing up smoothly and kicking at the ring of swords and spears to disperse it. The Sarnesh gathered themselves and, one by one, their expedition reassembled.
Che was the last, and something of that proud, hard look was back on her face, despite her best efforts.
‘We must move now,’ she told them. ‘I can feel her.’ Seeing their blank looks she elaborated. ‘The Empress — she’s close.’
Argastos had come to Seda last night, walking in past the vigilant Pioneer sentry to stand before her fire.
She had not seen him, quite — no more than a troubling of the darkness — but she had known him as that same shade that had reached out to her aboard the airship.
Oh, bravely done, had come a voice formed from the sounds of the forest itself. You have pierced the walls they built about me. You are truly the one.
She had taken this in her stride. ‘So walk out and greet me, old man.’
Surely he must have been off balance after that, but the roiling shadow had communicated nothing save its continued presence.
‘You are a prisoner, or whatever’s left of you,’ she had told him. ‘Play the great lord all you like. There is power where you are now, but you are not its master. You need me to come and rescue you.’
Again just silence from the spectre. A faint grate of metal indicated Tisamon moving, and she knew his helm would be turned towards this intruder.
Then: Please. . faint as a breeze.
‘Does the great Argastos beg?’ she had demanded.
It has been so long. And, with that distant utterance, a wave of emotion had passed over her, far more eloquent than mere words: abandonment, loneliness, frustration, injustice. For a moment she had been rocked, the feelings riding on her own emotions to strike behind her defences. Then she had shaken them off.
‘Oh I am coming to you, never fear,’ she had replied sharply, ‘but how I deal with you, once I have emptied your treasury, will depend on how you approach me. Keep begging, old Moth. Get used to being on your knees. I may find a use for you but, if you try to manipulate me, to pry at my mind with such weak games, I will leave behind not even memories of you.’
He had vanished then, snapped back to the inner forest where he was penned, and she had found herself gazing about the fire at her companions, meeting their uneasy eyes and forcing them to look away. They had heard every word she had said.
Only old Gjegevey understood, she decided, but his expression was anything but reassuring.
However, she had opened the way, now. After battering so long at the forest’s defences, the blood sacrifice had unbarred the door. The day after, and they were at last on their way inwards, and all she had to worry about was. .
A thorn pricked in her mind, even as she thought it, and her eyes flicked wide.
Her!
‘Faster!’ she snapped. ‘Move faster!’ For her twin was approaching, that hateful Beetle girl. For a moment, even as the Pioneers ahead picked up their pace, Seda was torn: Turn back and catch them, ambush them between the trees? One shot, one sting, to rid me of my rival? But the girl had grown in power since Seda had cast her down in Khanaphes, and this time she had strong allies with her — a Weaponsmaster, magicians, not to mention whatever mundane warriors she had mustered, Sarnesh or Etheryen or both. And there was always the chance that, during the fighting the Beetle girl herself might just. . slip away.
She hears the call as I do, and if she gets there first, she might. .
‘Major Ostrec, rearguard with the Nethyen!’ Seda yelled. ‘Hurry, they are almost upon us!’
The Red Watch officer snapped out orders, falling back. The handful of Nethyen Mantids who had been ever more unwillingly accompanying her went with him gladly. Something their small minds understand at last. At a thought, Tisamon dropped behind as well to shield her.
The Beetle-kinden Pioneer dashed past her, snapbow halfway to his shoulder and face weirdly peaceful as he sought a target. At Seda’s side, Gjegevey was laboriously poling himself along with his staff.
‘Come on, old man,’ she urged, but she could see that he was doing his best. She grasped the haggard slave’s arm to encourage him. A curse on propriety. I am the Empress and I shall do as I like. ‘You’ve come with me this far,’ she told him. ‘You’ll see it through.’
He nodded raggedly, leaning on her as he let her drag him along.
Behind she heard the unmistakable sound of a snapbow, followed by the war cries of the Mantids.
One of the Sarnesh went down immediately, a bolt tearing through his mail. Tynisa doubled her speed, spotting shapes ahead. This time Che’s got it right. Rushing into a fight like this, with no clear picture of whom she fought or even where they were, reminded her of the Commonweal, when she still had been in thrall to her father’s ghost.
Oh, but those were fights, though. Before she had broken away from him, the pair of them had been something superhuman and undefeatable. And uncontrollable, too, possessed of a terrible, callous bloodlust, which was why she had declined that gift in the end. I will have to be enough on my own.
There were Mantis-kinden coming against her, she saw, and already the Sarnesh crossbows were loosing, their bolts springing between the trees. There was another crack — Amnon or someone shooting. She began hearing the sizzle of stingshot from both sides.
A fierce-faced woman of about her own age was suddenly lunging for her with a metal claw, spinning away from Tynisa’s instant parry to come back at her from the other side, twisting from her riposte at the same time. Tynisa conceded three steps, the very forest keeping her footing for her, even as it urged the Mantis on. Old bastard only wants its blood, doesn’t care whose. She snapped her arm out, drew a red line across the Mantis’s hip, then swayed back as the clawed gauntlet sliced past her eyes. The woman’s other arm came driving in, trying to jab her with those vicious forearm spines, but Tynisa batted it away with her off hand, then stepped past her assailant and tried to cut her throat on the way. She caught only air, and then they had parted, turning back against one another, the Mantis already trying to close the gap.