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The Shadow Box, of course, she interrupted her own musings. All this stems from the Shadow Box. Tisamon and the Empress and I, all linked.

. . . And Achaeos, too, but where is he? Why hasn’t his ghost really come to call? He was more closely linked to that box and its contents than I was.

Standing there by her hammock in the Lowlander embassy, her thoughts turned inexorably to Maure. She could . . . surely she could . . . She owed the halfbreed woman a great deal, and it was plain that Maure had suffered, in order to bring her from the depths of her own mind and back to the waking world. Can I ask this of her? No, I cannot.

But the thought did not go away.

In Khanaphes, the ancient world had almost destroyed her that first time. She had nearly drowned in a sea of half-understood hieroglyphs. Then the real world had intruded, sending her down into the catacombs beneath the city, where waited the Masters. There, for the first time, she had been forced to confront her new self. She had almost enslaved herself to the Masters, as an easy way to avoid taking responsibility for what she had become. In the end she had defied them, though, shamed them into doing what she wanted, been rid of the ghost that had been haunting her – Tisamon’s, not Achaeos’s – and then escaped with her life, and with her companions. With Thalric.

Since then, she had been trying to control what she was, but the dreams had got the better of her, till at last she had come to the notice of the Empress – my sister, they said – and been swatted by her like a fly.

But it had not been merely her intrusion that had so enraged the queen of all the Wasps; it had been that intangible kinship that meant that . . .

Whatever she forced out of the Masters, it came to me as well as to her. I have shared in her blessing, so what was it that Maure saw, when I awoke . . .?

Lying in the hammock later, probably she dreamt, but she had now gone so far into that other world that it was impossible to tell dream apart from just seeing. As if revelations had been backing up all the while she had been a prisoner of her own mind, now she was deluged. It was a wild flood at first, too fierce for comprehension, that buffeted and tumbled against her, filling all the land around her until she was at the centre of a vast ocean of foretelling, which stretched on all sides, beyond the horizon. Then the world became still, and she had silence for once, and for a moment she saw it all.

Too much, too much to hold on to, each insight displacing the next within her memory, those countless drops of understanding plunging through her mind and impossible to hold . . . but for that single moment it was all apparent, all clear to her, and she was something more than human with it, godlike in a godless land.

She was floating over Khanaphes seeing its dark, hidden heart beat sluggishly beneath her. Imperial soldiers were enforcing a curfew, the Empress’s airship gone already, as Ethmet and his ministers sat in the resounding unheard echo of the double coronation that the Masters had enacted. Praeda and Amnon were already sailed for Collegium.

In the desert of the Nem, the Wasp artificers furthered their plans, feeding into the great darkness all the terror and pain and fire of the future, all the pieces of their scheme laid out before her. Yet she could not understand it at all; an Apter mind was needed, and the Apt would never see as she saw now. It struck her that this must be how the Moth-kinden had felt on the eve of the revolution. Those ceaseless parsers of the future must have realized their world was about to end, and been unable to stop it, unable to even comprehend the disaster that was rapidly befalling them.

In the Empire’s capital, Seda had gathered her power about her, her servants and her generals. Che could see the manifest destiny of the Empire limning her like a golden halo, but Seda’s footsteps seeped blood, the blood of countless kinden. There was a hunger in her, a lust to consume and control. Had she been no more than a temporal empress then