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By Root 1736 0

had apparently read her mind. ‘Nobody knows what happens to us when we pass on – the vital spark that animates our crude flesh. Perhaps we are merely gone, after all. Or perhaps we fly back to rejoin our ideal, thus Beetles to the essence of beetle-ness and so on, although that begs the question of what happens to someone like me. Perhaps there is another world, yet, a metamorphosis into something splendid, out of this coarse life. Some Woodlouse-kinden even believe we may simply be born once again. But we don’t know, and that’s not what ghosts are. Ghosts are . . . it’s as if we were a nymph or larva all our lives, and in our dying moments, we hardened our skins, made of ourselves a chrysalis, and then . . . the spark of us, the thing that made us live, flies free somewhere else, but something’s left behind that still has our shape, our nature. It fractured, when the life burst forth and flew away, and most of the time that’s all there is left, just shards of the husk blown by the wind, but some deaths – horrible deaths, terrible deaths, deaths cutting short unfulfilled lives, deaths of magicians especially – those can leave a husk behind that is still them, or part of them, some fragment or aspect of their being that still possesses urges and needs. They can be spoken with, and bound to service even, and they can haunt others, or objects, places. Broken things, they are, most often, but still recognizable as who they once were. Even the smaller fragments may contain some ounce of self, some emotion – a hate, a love.’

Che shivered at that suggestion. ‘But that still doesn’t explain—’

‘It’s not the actual requests I mind,’ Maure spoke over her. ‘Trawling for someone’s dead husband, or someone’s lost child, there’s a science to that – and I almost enjoy it. But all the rest of the time . . . all the rest of the time it’s just hearing the whispers, the fragmentary voices, the odds and ends of memory, the wasted splinters of other people’s lives. The world is full of the husks of the dead, and they all talk to me, and I can’t blot them out.’

Che just watched her now, waiting to hear more.

‘They went quiet when you woke up, though,’ Maure whispered, trying to find her smile again. ‘I can’t hear a single one of the wretched, abandoned bastards. A whole ghost, well, that’s different. I reckon it wouldn’t be so in awe of you. But the chaff, all that disintegrating chaff, you brush it away because of what they gave you – what they gave to you and her.’

Che felt her hand rise to touch her forehead, without knowing why until she realized that Maure’s gaze had led her there.

‘What do you see?’ she demanded, but the woman merely shook her head and would not say.

For a long while they sat in silence, during which Thalric turned over twice, threatening to wake again. Maure mustered a shamefaced grin, but it convinced neither of them. At last she said, ‘Ask your question.’

‘I was haunted,’ Che told her. ‘The ghost . . . I thought it was the ghost of my lover, but it wasn’t. It was a Mantis-kinden I had once known, and the Masters of Khanaphes cut him from me and set him loose in the world. And now he’s poisoning my sister, and I have to stop him, and . . .’

Maure nodded. ‘Ask it,’ she urged.

‘My lover, he died . . .’ Che said, realizing how she was stating the obvious, yet surprised to find the pain so raw and immediate, after so much time and distance. ‘He . . . I was with him, in a way, but I never had the chance to speak to him, to say goodbye, to say . . .’ She clenched her fists. ‘Would you . . . could you . . .?’

Maure’s grin failed, and she was now nodding grimly. ‘I could hardly refuse a request from someone like you, now, could I? But let that wait until we reach Elas Mar, at least. Let me find some place there that I can fortify and protect. Let me . . . let me have this journey without ghosts, Cheerwell Maker.’

‘Call me Che.’ The Beetle reached out and put a hand on the necromancer’s arm. Then Varmen’s snoring ceased, and the Wasp was stretching, yawning. And Che backed off as Maure sat down again beside him.

Four