Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [157]
The halfbreed woman had stood up, and was gazing over at Che’s fellow duellists. Her accent had been oddly familiar, Che decided.
‘Excuse me, but are you a Commonwealer?’ she asked timidly.
‘I have that honour,’ the woman replied. ‘My name is Maure and you are Cheerwell Maker.’
Che blinked, fighting down a queasy feeling of discontinuity. ‘Are you a friend of Salma’s?’ she asked. ‘Salme Dien, that is.’
Maure’s eyes flicked towards the elegant Dragonfly youth preparing to meet his opponent. ‘Ah, no – but I know of him.’ She seemed sad about that, and Che had to forcibly prevent herself from remembering why that might be.
She realized she was desperate to make the woman go away, but at the same time she was meek Cheerwell Maker, who was always polite and had never really been hurt. She clung to that. It was all that was left between her and the storm.
‘I am sent to be your guide, Cheerwell Maker,’ Maure stated.
Che flinched from her. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘Oh, you do, you do. Ah, look, your friends are coming over to see you.’
Che cast desperate eyes over towards those familiar faces, and recoiled when she saw them. Somehow, while she had not been concentrating, something had slipped badly within the Prowess Forum. The audience had gone, and her friends . . . her friends . . .
Salma was dead, she saw, a sword wound splashing his front with red. Hard-faced Totho wore intricate armour of interlocking plates, overlaid by a grey surcoat showing an open gauntlet. Tynisa . . . Tynisa was gone.
Tynisa was gone, and was that not why Che was doing . . . whatever it was she had been doing when . . .
‘No,’ Che whispered. ‘I’m home. I’m safe here. Go away.’
The halfbreed woman sighed, looking out over the fighting ring where the Master Armsman, long-dead Kymon, still stood. ‘I understand this is a place of learning,’ she remarked.
Che blinked at her. ‘Yes, yes it is.’
‘I would like to visit here, some day. Most necromancers are ignorant fools making a living from the hopes and dreams of others. They paw at the dead, enticing fallen friends and dead relatives out to perform like trained crickets, and they have no understanding. They just know what works and what does not, and never mind the why.’
‘Magic?’ Che said slowly. ‘You’re talking about magic.’ The false Prowess Forum was falling away now, but the world seemed to be uncertain as to what to replace it with. ‘But I don’t . . . ‘
Believe in it . . . But before Maure’s sharp gaze, she could no longer deceive herself. ‘But you do not talk like a magician.’
‘Thank you,’ the halfbreed said drily. ‘I was trained in Tsolshevy, amongst the Woodlouse-kinden. Some experiment of theirs, I was. They treat their magicians like scientists and their artificers like mystics, there, and perhaps they know more about either than most do because of that. They taught me necromancy, and I understand it like nothing else.’ She patted the stone beside her companionably, the bank of seats that somehow had survived the dissolution going on around them. Lacking alternatives, Che sat.
Maure leant back, propping herself on her elbows. ‘Any quack will tell you about ghosts haunting battlefields,’ she continued, ‘old buildings, ruins, deathbeds; about ghosts that linger where their living selves were murdered; ghosts within the weapons that slew them, or that their hands had once wielded; ghosts in treasured objects, or attached to grieving relatives, or simply hanging in the ether like a goggling fish waiting for someone of my profession to cast down a hook. That is not all, however. Few enough know it, but a ghost may also end up haunting the insides of her own head, retreating into memories – driven away from the world and fearing to return. There are many kinds of haunting.’
‘But that’s not haunting,’ Che objected. ‘That’s madness.’
‘Perhaps that is why the Inapt kinden have, in my experience, a better understanding of