Forty-Two

With Che an increasingly stumbling weight in his arms, Thalric took in very little of their new companions. It was all he could do to keep up, pelting ahead into the dark, through the trees. Che’s wings flickered in and out as she tried to keep weight off her injured leg. He could feel her tense each time, gathering her waning strength, and after the second blur of wings he timed his bursts of speed to coincide with them, staying just on the heels of the fleeing Spider-kinden man ahead of him.

Abruptly he was alone, his escorts vanished like spectres. He skidded to a halt, Che crying out in pain, and someone tugged at his boot. He had a moment of fumbling Che’s weight, trying for a free hand, before he realized that there was a hollow here, excavated amongst the tree roots, where his guides had taken shelter.

He dropped obediently down, then was suddenly tumbling forwards as the hole turned out deeper than he had thought. His wings slowed him partially, then Che’s weight wrenched onwards, so he ended up on his knees, with the girl clinging to him.

For a moment all was dark, Che’s whimpering breath his whole world. Then he noticed a flicker of light, a familiar crackle that had him extending his palm into the dark, a single candle guttered into a wan glow. The Wasp who held it had just touched it to life with the slightest ember of his sting.

That Thalric recognized him instantly came as no surprise now. It seemed that the Commonweal formed a web of strange chances, of elaborately intertwined destinies. No wonder the superstitious bastards believe so many stupid things. But he could not hold to such a dismissive thought with a clear conscience any longer. He had witnessed too much of the wrong side of the world. Give me a month in a sane man’s town, with automotives on the streets and gaslight at night, and I’ll recognize all this as a bad dream.

‘Mordrec, isn’t it?’ he recalled wearily.

The other Wasp eyed him blankly for a moment, then cursed. ‘You . . . and the Beetle girl. Why not? Where are the others that were with you?’

‘Expected any moment,’ Thalric replied, although he felt a cold certainty that he would not see Varmen again.

‘We were just creeping out to take a look at the Salmae, see what the bitch had brought with her.’ Mordrec’s free hand was by his side, but Thalric sensed the threat implicit there. ‘And how come we found you setting fires and causing chaos?’

‘Because of her.’ Thalric nodded past the man’s shoulder. There was a whole cave nestling here, a rent in the earth left where the roots of some vast forest giant had withered and died. Towards the rear he could make out a huddle of figures lit by a further candle, a good ten feet away. Between the two lights, though barely touched by either, he could make out the figure of Tynisa.

When Mordrec noticed her there, and saw her expression, he stayed well clear of them, ducking off to one side, holding his candle out like a talisman.

Her blade was drawn, Thalric saw. He would almost have been disappointed otherwise.

‘What have you done to her?’ Tynisa hissed, the words he could have put in her mouth, given two guesses. He glanced pointedly at Che’s leg and saw, with a wince, that the arrow’s fletchings had snapped off at some point during their escape. ‘Yes, that’s right. Obviously I shot her myself. I’m that well known for my archery.’

Her narrow blade was lined up with his throat, the tip of it within his arm’s reach, but something about this woman had always brought out in him a need for bitter words, and he felt too tired to restrain himself.

‘I rescued her from the Salmae, who seized her for reasons I can’t guess at unless, as they’re hunting you, they wanted to use her as bait.’ He felt his Wasp temper slip its leash. ‘She says your father’s ghost sits on your shoulders like a cloak but, frankly, I don’t know. After my getting you out of Capitas after the war, bringing your sister halfway across the known world, and then snatching her from the Commonweal nobility, of fond memory, I don’t think even that bloody menace Tisamon would display quite such a level of ingratitude.’

He tensed as he said it, his wings and sting both at the ready, but the light of Mordrec’s candle caught an unexpected look on her face: stricken and lost.

‘He wants to kill you,’ she whispered, and it seemed that she lowered her sword only by great effort of will. ‘He doesn’t remember gratitude. He doesn’t remember his friends even, or barely, but he remembers his honour, and the Mantis way – and his enemies. Keep clear of me, Thalric. I don’t know if I can stop him. I couldn’t before . . .’

‘Before what?’ he asked, suspiciously.

‘You killed their prince.’

Both of them looked down at Che, now almost forgotten.

‘We killed him, both of us,’ Tynisa confirmed. ‘I don’t know where I end and Tisamon starts. You were right, Che, and your magician was right, too, and now . . . I missed my chance, and it’s too late.’

‘Not yet. Not quite.’

They started, all of them, and Mordrec swore fiercely as Maure dropped down into the cave with a flurry of wings.

I remember his face, Tynisa considered. In stories she had heard of berserking warriors from the Bad Old Days – after the fit left them they would recall nothing of what they had done. The climax of a dozen Mantis tragedies was when the hero discovers too late whose blood is on her blade. That would be a mercy, Tynisa decided. Let their fabled heroes weep and gnash their teeth. Remembering is worse than finding out second-hand. She recalled Alain’s expression as he had looked back and seen her there, the faintest shadow of guilt quickly brushed away, to be replaced by an all-too-ready smile. It was an invitation for her to forgive his dalliance, born from his confidence that he would talk her round, and that the world would continue dancing to his tune. He had mistaken her, though. He had thought that she was lovestruck, enamoured of him. He had never realized that she had loved him only for the image of his dead brother. Later, after the hunt, after Tisamon had lodged inside her like a poisoned arrow, she had not loved him at all. She had claimed him, made his approval the justification for her every bloody act, and he had used her, his mother had used her, and both of them had thought of her as a tame beast.

The Butterfly-kinden girl had read Tynisa better than Alain ever did. As soon as he was no longer pinning her down, she had fled in a flurry of golden wings, holding her ripped garments to her. By then Alain was dead.

‘Do it. Make it go away,’ she instructed.

‘It’s not so easy, but if you really wish the ghost gone, that is half the battle,’ Maure replied.

The brigands had spent an entire day without discovery, Dal Arche keeping them inside the hollow beneath the trees, while the scouts of the Salmae ranged far beyond them. That night they had crept out and made best time heading north, all the better to baffle the trackers. Out of the woods, across a stretch of open ground, and then into the decaying remains of a small village, barely a half-dozen houses, most with only three walls still standing at best. The flimsy-looking Commonweal architecture was surprisingly durable, however, and where the outer walls had fallen away, panels decaying and overgrown, the inner rooms often still stood, and the slanted roofs remained more intact than not.

The Salmae search had already progressed further east, and Dal reckoned they had at least a day to catch their breath before the hunters realized they had been tricked. He was already hidden away with Soul Je and Mordrec, plotting their next move, working out the next cover between here and the border.

Che, Tynisa and Maure had chosen one ramshackle hut as their own. After dressing her wound as best she could, Che had sent Thalric to keep watch on their doubtful allies. Maure’s exorcism would not be helped by a Wasp-kinden sceptic tutting over her shoulder.

‘We must draw him out first,’ Maure explained. ‘When we attempted this before, he simply sat there in your mind like a beetle beneath a stone. With your help, though, we can startle him out, to where you can confront him and cut the bonds that hold him to you.’

Tynisa glanced around them. ‘Che, you believe . . .?’

The Beetle girl nodded soberly.

‘But the College, Collegium, your people . . . everything they taught us when we were growing up . . .’ Tynisa’s whisper was almost pleading. ‘The world can’t be like this? Can’t I just be simply mad?’

Che took her sister’s hands, which were shaking. ‘Do you trust me?’ Despite her wound, despite everything, she seemed now more solid and grounded than even Stenwold had been, an anchor of stability.

‘I have no one else to trust,’ Tynisa said, in a small, scared voice. ‘Do it. Do it now before I change my mind.’

‘Right.’ Maure clapped her hands, businesslike, then hurried out of their wretched little hut to harangue the bandits. ‘I need candles – all the candles you have. Incense, herbs. Just lay it all out. Serious ghost business! Don’t make me put a curse on you. No stinting!’ She would not take no for an answer, would not give up, and, although the Wasps stared at her as if she was mad, the bulk of the brigands were Inapt and obviously took her extremely seriously. Within a few minutes she returned with a surprising haul, and began sorting through it, trying to duplicate all the artefacts of ritual that she had left behind at Leose.

She first set out all the candles she had been able to scavenge, almost twenty stubs of varying sizes, and then had the Wasp Mordrec light them through his Art, which he seemed able to focus and control more than most of his kinden. In place of her firefly lamps, the little flames attracted dozens of insects that wheeled and circled about the tiny flames, before giving themselves to the pyre in brief, crackling sacrifice. Maure drew her circle in flour commandeered from some brigand’s provisions, and marked out symbols in splashes of liquor, those same Khanaphes pictograms that she herself could not read. She had sorted through what meagre herbs, medicines and spices Dal Arche’s people had donated, burning some, mixing others, in a ferocious magical improvisation, and doing everything she could with the makeshift tools at hand. Che watched it all but, more than that, she felt – understanding how Maure experimented to bring the circle to the right pitch of preparedness; until she could name the very moment when the necromancer had succeeded, that moment when the correct taste and strength of power had arisen, harsh, at the back of her throat.

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.

And in Khanaphes the Masters had rid her of her parasitic companion, and thus set Tisamon free to roam the world. And, naturally, he had sought out his daughter, fulfilling his unfinished task: to mould her in his own image, with all the doomed tragedy that must imply.

She could sense Tynisa alongside her, forced to witness again the death of her father and her own inability to save him. Maure was close too, and Che felt the necromancer’s frustration that this tableau had not drawn the ghost out into the open. Che understood it, though, as only a sister could. Despite her determination to be rid of Tisamon’s shade, Tynisa held tight to him still.

A further shock is needed, she firmly resolved, and knew what it should be. She smothered a brief stab of guilt as she reached for Tynisa’s memories once again. With her sister’s mind at her disposal, she knew that she must see one image, one moment, whether it would aid in their efforts against Tisamon or not. I have to know.

The interior of the shack was wretched, walls and ceiling leaning and bulging at odd angles as its slipshod construction surrendered, by degrees, to the constant damp. The room was crowded, some of its occupants on their feet, others strewn across the floor, struck senseless the moment the Shadow Box had been opened. The artefact’s dark, twisting influence was everywhere, like the smell of rotting meat. Che took a deep breath before identifying the players: on the floor lay Tisamon, Tynisa and the Spider girl Sef, while Achaeos, her lover, sat hunched over with the Shadow Box clutched in his hands. She saw now how he had tried to pry into its secrets, but instead it had drawn him into itself, along with all those around him.

Staring down at the bodies were two Wasp-kinden – Thalric and Gaved, both utterly bewildered by what had happened. Their Inapt minds had been ignored by the Shadow Box, leaving them unaffected, and at the same time they could not see the cloaked figure that walked between them. It was another Mosquito-kinden, a pale, cadaverous woman dressed in trailing robes, now stepping invisibly past the Wasps and taking the Shadow Box neatly from Achaeos’s unfeeling hands. Then the shadowy figure had touched Tynisa, and the Spider girl was waking up even as the thief retreated.

Awake but not herself: her face was blank, her eyes staring blindly. The two Wasps started and stared at her, as she stood over Achaeos with her sword in her hand.

Che sensed her sister’s mind kicking away from that moment, and understood that these were memories that Tynisa had never known she had. That moment had always been a blank for her, the Mosquito-kinden’s magic raising a barrier she had not been able to penetrate. Now she saw herself clear as day, in that filthy hut in Jerez, and she waited for the terrible stroke to descend, for the blade to lance Achaeos through.

Abruptly Che realized that she did not want to see this, after all. She knew what the outcome would be: Achaeos would receive a wound that would nearly kill him, and the strain of it would prove the death of him during the Moth-kinden ritual later on. Seeing him fragile and helpless, she tried to pull herself away, but the moment she felt doubt, her control of the vision escaped her, and she was held – as unwilling a witness as Tynisa – watching as the same moment played itself out.

And still Tynisa stood there with sword out, and Gaved and Thalric were questioning her, demanding answers. Her hand was shaking.

She fights the geas imposed on her, Maure’s thought came. She could have killed them all by now.

Then, with a hopeless, graceless motion, Tynisa lashed out with her blade, lancing Achaeos through. But even Che could see that her stroke had gone awry, her blade and her arm conspiring to spoil her aim.

There was more then, Tynisa fighting with the two Wasps, but Che felt a great shudder, and the image was abruptly fragmenting. She became aware of her own body through the pain in her leg, which had been mounting up in her absence.

‘You told me,’ she heard Tynisa gasp, and then opened her eyes. The Spider girl was already on her feet, her blade drawn again, and for a horrible moment Che thought history might repeat itself. It was not Maure or Che that Tynisa was confronting, though.

In the air before her hung a shape pale and indistinct, a spiderweb of lines that resembled something like a man – but a man transfigured, his body writhing with briars, his skin rippling with chitin. Only the face remained untouched by the taint of the Darakyon.

Tisamon.

Tynisa was staring at this tattered spectre, and Che had no word for the expression on the girl’s face.

‘In Jerez, after Achaeos . . . I tried to throw my sword away . . .’ the Spider girl got out. Whatever emotion had hold of her was shaking her with all its force. ‘But you told me then that I had been the victim of magic, and that the sword did its best to stay my hand. You told me that, then, but I had forgotten.’

The ghost made some almost dismissive gesture, but Tynisa’s face was abruptly twisted into a snarl.

‘You told me that, then, and I didn’t believe you, and I thought I must have had some reason to do it, because in Collegium there is no magic and people do not stab their friends without purpose,’ she spat out. ‘But here in the Commonweal, after you came to me, you had me believe that I stabbed him because he was an enemy – that he had earned his death, and that I should rejoice in his blood. All these things you whispered to me, telling me to feel no guilt but to be satisfied at the downfall of a foe. Where is the man who comforted me, and told me I was bewitched, and that even my blade had fought against the deed? Why not tell me that, and lead me away from . . .’ and her voice broke momentarily, ‘from doing it all again!’

Mantis-kinden know no guilt. Che heard the voice as if it was a whisper of leaves.

‘You did!’ Tynisa snapped. ‘It made you human, that regret, but where is it now? Where is the man who was Stenwold’s friend, and who loved my mother?’ Her jaw clenched, and Che thought she had finished, but then she shrieked out, loud enough for everyone among the ruins to hear, ‘Where is my father?’

The movements of the ghost tried to claim that title, but its voice was too faint to hear. Instead, it was Maure who answered her anguished cry.

‘This is but some part of him that has clung on,’ the magician explained sadly. ‘Some handful of shards of him, mere fragments of the man that once was. Ghosts are just broken pieces of us. The hard slivers of him stand before you, with nothing to sheathe their sharp edges. This is the Mantis, not the man.’

A fragile calm touched Tynisa and she let her hands fall to her sides, pointedly no longer resting one on her sword grip. ‘You made me kill Alain, and without you . . . perhaps I would not have been so hasty. I will not say he was a good man, and he was certainly not his brother, but I became a murderer in truth when I shed his blood.’

Tisamon’s shade made an angry gesture, and Che faintly heard, You are above their laws and morality.

‘Stenwold would disagree,’ Tynisa replied, and the mention of that name seemed to strike the ghost like a blow, making it ripple and shudder. And then she said, ‘I cast you out.’

There was an utter silence after those words, and the twisted and changing face of the ghost remained still for a moment, then it rushed forward, to within inches of Tynisa’s face. Che heard it cry out, You need me!

‘My true father would tell me I need nobody but myself.’

With my aid, you will never lose a battle, triumph in every fight!

‘You lie, spirit,’ Tynisa snapped. ‘I would triumph in every fight except the last, because you would drive me to some impossible conflict eventually, just to have me die as Mantis-kinden should. I cast you out. I cast you out. I deny you. You are not my father.’

Che held her breath, waiting and still waiting as the spectre shimmered and hung in the air. A disturbance was building up within it, and it writhed and twisted as though strung up on hooks. Her gaze sought out Maure, and found the magician pale and tense, as if awaiting an explosion.

Then, like an exhalation, it was gone, vanishing into infinite distance, yet without seeming to leave the walls of the decrepit hut they sat in, even as the very sunlight seemed to creep into the shade’s absence.

Maure let out a long, ragged breath. As the only one of them to know the risks intimately, she looked more relieved than Che cared to think about.

‘It’s done,’ she confirmed. ‘The shade is gone.’

‘Gone where?’ Tynisa asked, sounding shaky, but all Maure would say was, ‘Away.’

The Spider girl glanced at Che, tentatively probing her expression. ‘You saw it all? Tisamon? Achaeos?’

Che nodded tiredly. ‘I’ve never held Achaeos against you, Tynisa, nor has Stenwold, nor did Tisamon when he truly lived. The only one who ever did was you yourself. Do you at least accept that you’re not to blame for his death?’

Tynisa nodded. ‘I tried so hard not to believe in magic. I thought it was just a convenient excuse. You came a long way to tell me that, Che.’

‘Well of course I did,’ Che replied, almost offended. ‘We’re sisters, after all, despite everything. And you’ll be needed.’

Tynisa blinked. ‘I’ll . . . what?’

‘As we all will be needed.’

Tynisa and Maure were both staring at her now, but the words just fell from Che’s lips, her face slack and expressionless.

‘Falling leaves, red and brown and black and gold. A rain of burning machines over a city of the Apt. The darkness between trees. The Seal of the Worm is breaking.’

A beat of complete silence followed, as though the world outside their ruined hut had been utterly stilled. Then Che blinked at them and demanded, ‘What? Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Che, you said . . .’ Tynisa frowned. ‘I don’t understand what you just said.’

‘No?’ Maure asked. ‘The Moths call their magicians seers, and set them to sift the future for visions of what may come. Sometimes the visions arrive unasked. The Seal of the Worm, that’s what you said.’

‘Meaning what?’ Che asked, entirely thrown, but a man’s voice broke in, startling them all, Tynisa snatching for her sword.

‘The Seal of the Worm. That’s a bad old story.’ It was Soul Je, the Grasshopper-kinden brigand, crouching just outside the shattered doorway of their hut. Che guessed he had come to investigate the shouting of just a moment before.

‘Tell us,’ Che instructed him immediately, but the man shook his head.

‘Best not repeated. Old wars, old enemies banished to the depths, and let them long remain there. Besides, who knows the truth these days?’ He shrugged.

Che was frowning, her face screwed up in concentration. Something of the Moth lore . . . In trying to understand Achaeos she had read all that a Beetle might readily acquire, including mouldering histories that no other College hand had touched in centuries. ‘Worms . . . some old war?’ And what had happened at the end of that war? But, of course, Moth histories were opaque, dense with allegory. The Moths had fought off so many challengers in the Inapt world of the Days of Lore: all of them defeated, hunted down, destroyed wherever they could be found, or else . . . banished?

Sealed away . . . came the uncomfortable recollection.

She opened her mouth to question Soul Je again, but he shook his head, discouraging it. A moment later the Wasp Mordrec bundled past him.

‘We’ve spotted their scouts! Time to move!’