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She was so lost in this recollection that she almost failed to notice how the footsteps had not left the room. Maxin was standing at the doorway, and she knew he was looking back towards her.

A few hammering heartbeats before he moved again. He was coming back. But it hadn’t been like this. He had gone off about his bloody-handed business, she recalled. But now he had changed his mind? Not for General Maxin the restricting bonds of history. This time he would guarantee his new Emperor’s eternal reign by killing the only remaining threat to his power.

She was already screaming when he reached the bed, screaming as he dragged her out from under it, pushing her back towards the window with a hand about her throat. He was older now, with lines of cruelty and ambition written across his face which were the wages of eight years of service to the man he had made Emperor. He was just how she remembered him.

In the centre of the storm of terror wheeling about inside her head there remained one constant point, and she struggled for it like a swimmer in deep water. Just how I remember you? But if you will be that man, then let us renew our old acquaintance, Maxin.

With a great effort, she cast off her eight-year-old self enough to find the fabric of the dream around her and wrench at it, using strength without finesse. Give me visions, will you? Then I shall have some of my own.

The face of Maxin twisted and leered before her, and his grip was tight about her throat. With a fierce lunge of her will, she conjured hands on his shoulders, dragging him off her. In a moment she had squirmed from his grasp, watching the hated Rekef general hauled away by the two protectors that she had conjured from her own mind and pressed into service. Only one of them had been present for the real Maxin’s death, but it pleased her to have the two of them side by side: Thalric, her regent, and Brugan, her new Lord General of the Rekef.

For a moment she found herself fighting back and forth for control, sensing the dream world all around her try to suborn her new agents, to make the two newcomers a part of the same nightmare. But they were new, and reacting to the new was most definitely not the strong point of Khanaphes.

Thalric had arched General Maxin over with a knee in the small of the man’s back, thrusting his arms outwards so that Maxin could not sting. She saw Brugan’s knife glint just as it had when the real Maxin had met his end.

‘Hold,’ she commanded, because if this was to be her dream, she would rip all the joy she could from it. She approached the straining Maxin, with her palm held out, watching him physically diminish, from ogre to a wretched old man weeping for mercy.

She took a deep breath and summoned her Art, and then her hand was blazing, again and again, the bolts of golden fire striking Maxin over and over, searing and crisping the flesh of his face, smashing its way into his skull.

She recognized another trap here: she could become just as lost in hollow triumphs as she could in terrors. So, instead, she turned away, banished it all from her mind and faced her unseen audience.

Are you satisfied? she asked the invisible watchers, and stepped out from the dream.

Che had a moment of clarity then, because she had been there herself: not with Maxin and the knife, but experiencing a horror that was personal to her. She had broken away from it, just as the Wasp Empress had done, which must mean . . .

And now she saw that well-remembered hall, high-ceilinged, with its pillars sculpted into surreal abominations blending the human and the insect. Braziers of blue-green fire leapt and guttered and, where Che herself had stood not so long ago, there was a single figure: Seda, supreme ruler of the Wasps.

An old man was curled up at her feet, and she knelt beside him, laying a hand on his shoulder and speaking softly until he twitched and cried out, as he escaped from whatever personal torment he also had been suffering. As with Che before her, Seda rescued her companion from the nightmares of the Masters