Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [158]
‘No,’ Che said again.
‘What are you afraid of?’
I’m not afraid, I’m really not, I just want to go home – home where there’s nothing to fear . . .
‘Her,’ She finally confessed. The word was wrenched out unwillingly.
Maure stared at her for a long moment. ‘A magician has practised on you, to make you fear her so,’ she understood at last. ‘She has stamped herself into your mind as a thing of terror. Cheerwell, if you hide for ever, then you will die. Your body will die and you will haunt your own corpse until it is food for worms and beyond. Come with me.’
‘No, don’t make me, please.’
‘Cheerwell––’
‘I don’t want to face her. I can’t.’ Che was shaking now as the memories began to slide back into place, like great weights of fragmented rock, and at the heart of them was her. ‘You don’t understand who she is.’
‘That I don’t,’ Maure admitted. ‘So let us face her together.’
She still clasped Che’s hand, but in that moment it did not seem to matter. The blazing radiance was half the world already. Maure had held her still long enough for time to catch up with her.
Go, said a voice in her ear, and she thought it might have been Salma, but with just the one word to work on, she would never know.
She held tight to Maure’s hand and walked into the light.
All at once, something stooped down on them, keening its rage. Che looked up to see Seda, wings afire, Wasp Art making her hands glow like coals.
‘I told you!’ the apparition screeched. ‘Back where you belong, Beetle! Back beneath your stone!’
A wave of flame washed over them, and Che heard Maure scream, her hand ripped abruptly from the woman’s grip. For a moment the fear of this thing – not even the Empress herself, but a mere phantasm she had left behind – was paralysing.
Then, from somewhere came the words that had been spoken by the Masters of Khanaphes. A final piece of memory shaken loose, which Seda had been at pains to conceal from her.
Whatever it was that you demanded from them, they gave it to me as well. We are sisters, in this, if in nothing else. And Che reached out, and swatted the screaming thing into dust, nothing but the echo of another woman’s voice fading inside her head.
Che awoke.
It was not a gentle waking, either. She jackknifed up, jerking sideways off the pallet she was lying on, her stomach cramping viciously. She was aware of a certain amount of shouting from nearby, but in those first few moments it was all she could do to suck breath into her lungs.
The sequence of dream images remained with her, that thread of beads she had made of her life. A ghost, she told me? In that convulsive moment, Che wondered whether she really had come back from the dead.
Then there were arms about her, and at first she tried to fight them, but she heard a voice speaking her name over and over, and relaxed. She remembered everything just then, the real and the imagined and the far-seen, all in order and neatly labelled, memories like specimens stored in a College master’s cupboard.
‘Che, do you know where you are?’ It was Thalric, of course. ‘Do you know who I am?’
She forced out a little laugh, at that, her racked body already becoming easier. ‘Oh, yes, to be sure. I’m not likely to forget you, Thalric, for any number of reasons. And, of course, I know . . .’ She frowned, staring about her. ‘Come to think of it, where am I?’
She sensed a tension going out of him, one that had been held in check through iron discipline, but was no less great for all that. ‘You’re back.’
‘It looks that way.’
He still had not let her go, but she decided she could live with that for now, saying only, ‘Back where, precisely?’
‘Suon Ren, this,’ said another voice, and she only placed it as she looked upon its owner’s face. It was Varmen, their guide, and still with them as far as Suon Ren, apparently.
‘Then . . .’ For a moment she was going to ask about Tynisa,