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It was the halfbreed, her guide from the inner recesses of her own past, where Seda’s might had banished her. The woman was lying on her side on the floor, and perhaps had lost consciousness for a moment, but now she was shaking her head, clambering up on to hands and knees. ‘Ah,’ she began, to nobody in particular, and then, ‘You have a great line in enemies, Cheerwell Maker. The Empress of the Wasps, no less.’

Che felt Thalric instantly go still and tense, and Varmen’s eyes almost popped from his head at the unwelcome revelation. She decided that she herself would have to be the one to put a brave face on it. ‘Well, the Spider-kinden say always judge people by their enemies, so I must be doing well in life, don’t you think?’

The woman – Maure – gave a choked laugh, and looked up at her. The laugh died, and she flinched back from Che, as though she saw her own death revealed in the Beetle woman’s face . . . No, as though she sees something about my brow, or above my head.

This reaction was gone in an instant, covered up so well that Che would never have known, had she not seen. ‘What is it?’ she asked, knowing already that the other woman would simply shake her head and disown the whole thing.

‘Nothing, there’s nothing.’ Maure sat up straight, looking haggard and drawn. ‘It’s no easy road, that’s all, and I wasn’t expecting . . . her to be waiting at the end of it. Since when is the Empress of all the Wasps a magician? What’s the world coming to.’

Varmen looked faintly embarrassed at this suggestion, but Che glanced back and noticed Thalric’s expression was unhappy and thoughtful. He knows. Despite all the Aptitude in the world, he knows it, too.

‘You have my thanks,’ she said simply to the halfbreed woman. For a moment it seemed that Maure would not accept the gratitude, but then she acknowledged Che’s words with a twitch of one hand. Che remembered the wretched Grasshopper mystic in Myna. These pleasantries have power, amongst the Inapt.

‘Ah,’ Maure murmured again, stretching a hand out to Varmen and waiting until he shuffled over to pull her to her feet. She brushed herself down meticulously, flicking her uneven fringe back in place, tugging at her clothes in what was obviously a little ritual for her own mental wellbeing. ‘They’ll tell you, the Commonwealers, how talking to ghosts, speaking to the dead, is a natural thing: that it’s all part of a well-rounded life to honour your ancestors face to face, to bid a posthumous farewell to your peers and your relatives.’ The smile she directed at them was tight-lipped. ‘Mantis-kinden, they’re even worse, you know? They worship death, practically. Spend all their living days hoping to die, so long as they die well. The best necromancers are always the Mantis-kinden.’ She took a deep breath. ‘You know what, though? Prince Felipe has the right idea, even if it took losing a dozen battles and a hundred friends just to educate him. Death’s a miserable bloody business, and only a fool would go poking at it. Why else d’you think all the necromancers in those stories are after eternal life: they’ve seen just what death’s like.’

The silence following this remark was only broken when Varmen commented, ‘Why do it, then?’

‘I’m good at it, Wasp-kinden,’ she told him.

‘So I was good with wood, when I was young. Doesn’t mean I had to become a carpenter,’ the big Wasp grumbled.

Maure smiled at him, but Che saw how the expression only just covered over the cracks in this woman’s life. ‘That’s because, if you give up being a carpenter, the wood doesn’t come hunting you down, demanding that you hammer some nails in.’

Twenty-Eight

Che did not hang up the dreamcatcher that same night. It was not that she wished thus to avoid her dreams, more she had accepted that there was no getting away from them, not any more. She had fought her newly Inapt nature at first, then she had tried to master it, as though in Khanaphes she might find some secret that would let her put the ancient world and all its magic