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She took a deep breath. All her life she had used her skills sparingly, as she had been taught. A Moth Skryre or some such grand magician would think of the practice as accumulating power, but she had been taught that she was accruing credit with the world, especially with the world of the dead. Every spirit she helped to its destination, every ancestor who could share a few posthumous words with a descendant, every legacy passed on, it all added up; and though the coins were small, yet she had a lot of them by now. She was not powerful, as magicians measured themselves, but she had a deep well to draw on, now that she needed it.

Setting a ghost to haunt someone was an old necromancer’s trick, both risky and difficult and seldom worth the effort. Each person had their own weaknesses, each vengeful spirit its own small remit. Such skills would be little use in confronting the numbers that Thalric and Varmen now went to confront.

But they had provided her with the answer, of course. Thalric’s plan was better than he knew.

She took a deep breath. None of the mummery of before, involving candles and circles. She did not want to pacify these ghosts, and indeed she was not sure that calm was even in their nature. She wanted them fighting mad.

They would be drawn from the minds of the Salmae’s followers, from each and every one, either from personal experience or from second-hand fear brought on by the stories they would have heard.

She closed her eyes and concentrated upon the black and gold.

Thalric and Varmen: representatives of the Rekef and the invincible Imperial army, those spectres that had poisoned the Commonweal over twelve years of bloody warfare, that had left fearful ghosts in every mind: that had even replaced blood-drinking Mosquitos as the terrors invoked to caution children with. Terrors that any moment could march back across the border to continue their slaughter. Terrors of the machine-handed, the disciplined, the cruel, slavers and butchers, rapists and child-killers.

The ghost she raised and sent to follow Thalric and Varmen was the nightmare that troubled the sleep of the entire Commonweal. The two Wasps themselves would never know, never see, but they were trailed by a wake of black and gold shades with flaming hands and red swords.

The Salmae’s warband had entered dense forest now, following the recaptured trail of the fugitives. Under such cover, Thalric’s party had been able to move far closer than they could while pursuing the Salmae through hilly open countryside. Now he hoped to use the same cover to get within sting range before he was spotted. There must be sentries, he knew, for nobody was fool enough to hunt brigands through woodland without setting plenty of watchmen. Still, he was already within sight of the camp’s edge, a chaotic gathering of tents spread out in a maze of canvas between the trees, and he was just beginning to think that he should have left Varmen behind. It seemed entirely possible he could sneak into this place, find Che, and get her out again, all on his own.

Then a scout dropped from the branches above, her bow already bent back. Thalric could not see the woman’s expression, but he was sure she was next to laughing at him: just one man come to storm half a hundred of the Commonweal’s finest. He tensed himself to dive aside behind a tree, his hands warming to sting. Then Varmen caught up with him.

The archer swung the arrow towards the newcomer and then recoiled away, her back rebounding from a tree trunk and her arrow skipping off one of Varmen’s pauldrons. She tried to shout something, but for a moment nothing emerged but jabber, the terrified stutter of a warning as she fumbled frantically for another arrow. The flash from Thalric’s outstretched palm struck her down, and then the two were moving again.

Just the two of them, because Thalric knew that there was only himself and Varmen in this raiding party. But as he rushed past the first tent, it seemed that the forest all around was