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‘Oh, she was here,’ the Grasshopper agreed, but said no more.

‘Come on,’ Thalric decided. ‘We can’t be far behind them, and we’ll move faster than their army.’

‘Why are you just standing here, old man?’ Maure asked softly. ‘Why linger by this body?’

He looked at her, and perhaps something about her told him what she was. ‘I knew him,’ he told her. ‘From my village, he was. Knew him all his life. He was never happy, him. He always said someone should take up a blade against the taxes and the nobles, and I was always telling him, “Life’s not that way.” There’s nothing a man like you or me can do, I’d say to him. Still, when men came from Rhael and offered him a blade, he took it, even so. Here’s a man that died of dreams. The arrow did him not half so much harm. But I won’t see him buried with the rest. I’ll keep with him here, and the least he deserves is his own hole in the ground, when all of this is done.’ They were philosophers, the Grasshopper-kinden, so Che had once heard. They might till the earth for their Dragonfly princes, but they were philosophers nonetheless.

Maure nodded thoughtfully, staring at the corpse. ‘Do you want to . . .? I could see if he . . .’ Words failed her, as so often on the subject of her profession, but the old man was already shaking his head.

‘Don’t know what I’d say to him now. Don’t think I could tell him why I wasn’t fighting on his side.’

As they moved on, following the path the army had clearly taken, Varmen commented, ‘He didn’t seem too impressed with your Spider lass.’

Che nodded unhappily.

‘With what rides her, I’m not surprised,’ Maure put in. ‘I’ve come across nothing like it. Mantis ghosts, yes, and all of them hungry for blood – but this one has power.’

‘It has the power of the Darakyon, or what’s left of it,’ Che murmured, too quietly for any of them to pick up. That was the conclusion she had come to, after all her visions and insights. All Maure’s talk of ghosts only highlighted how Tisamon’s shade had gone beyond the normal petty limits that such spirits were bound by. He and I and the Wasp Empress are all of us bound together by the Darakyon, somehow. She could not quite see the link, nor did she have all the pieces, but she was becoming more and more sure of it.

And now I have another reason to find Tynisa, for she actually saw Tisamon die – she saw Tisamon kill the Emperor, and surely the Emperor’s sister was nearby . . .

‘Maure,’ she asked, ‘would you visit my sister and try to drive away her ghost again?’

The necromancer shook her head vigorously, for her previous attempt had left her sweating and trembling. She had professed success in prying Tisamon’s hold off Tynisa’s mind, but only for a little while. ‘Not again,’ she insisted. ‘He would be ready for me now, and he’d kill me. Put me before the woman, and I will try my usual rituals and incantations, but only from within my own body, where I’m safer. In dreams I’d not give much for my chances, now he’s ready for me.’

The two Wasps exchanged glances, but by now they had given up attempting to understand the strange world that these women inhabited. For Thalric, it was enough that the Beetle girl was walking and talking. Anything else he could learn to live with.

I’d love to think that this halfbreed was just conning Che, he mused, and that at the end of it there would be demands for money or such, but . . . He remembered the Twelve-year War and all the mysticism that the Commonwealers had laid claim to, and which the invading Empire had laughed at. Well, I’m loath to admit it, but perhaps this old lore of theirs has a few teeth left to it – not enough to turn back an army but sufficient to drive a mad Spider-kinden even madder than she was.

And following on that thought: Better that the Empire had taken the Commonweal entirely and wiped out all this mind-rotting mysticism. Reason enough for the conquest had it been fake, but all the more reason if there is some truth behind it. He knew Che would not understand, but she had never