Heirs of the Blade_ Shadows of the Apt_ Book Seven - Adiran Tchaikovsky [240]
Way above them, and yet so close, was the Imperial box, a cloth-walled chamber where cowered a crowned young Wasp who could only be the Emperor, Alvdan the Second. Beside him Che saw the unforgettable face of Seda, who would become Empress in his stead. She was not yet the imperious sorceress that Che had locked horns with, though. The aura of power that Che expected was absent, had yet to touch her. The girl was staring at the approaching pair with an expression of fascination and fear, but her fear was not for her own life, or at least not at the hands of Tisamon. There was a thread extending from her, invisible yet apparent to Che, that touched on a dark-robed man seated on the far side of the Emperor, a pinch-faced, emaciated old creature who held in his hands an ornate knot of wood that Che knew at once, though she had never seen it.
For this was the heart of it all. This was the Shadow Box, born from the failure of a twisted and terrible ritual, the soul of the blighted Forest Darakyon and the prison of a thousand Mantis-kinden warriors and magicians over five long centuries. Achaeos had nearly died in failing to secure this box, and here was the man into whose hands it had come. Gazing upon it, Che was struck by the sheer dark power of the object, and it was a power she recognized, as she might know a poison the second time she tasted it.
Felise was dead now, Tisamon still trying to battle his way onwards, but the Wasps threw themselves upon him in a storm of blood and vengeance. The Emperor gripped the arms of his throne, staring at the Mantis Weaponsmaster in terror. The withered old man, the Mosquito-kinden, invoked the Shadow Box, and Che saw a hideous creature flower in the Emperor’s shadow: a twisted hybrid of insect and woman and briar thorn. The Emperor died without ever knowing it, and his stolen power flowed into the box, and into the hands of the robed magician.
There was another thread, which led away from the arena, and even by thinking of it her viewpoint pulled away so that she now saw the events around Tisamon as though lit by one candle, whilst another candle sprang up in the great night to show her a gathering of Moth-kinden atop a mountain. Tharn, she knew, and Achaeos was there, injured and weak, but charging a ritual to drive out the Wasp-kinden invaders from the Moths’ halls. She knew it, knew it well, because here, as she watched, he reached out for strength, and here was her younger self to lend it. Another thread.
The Darakyon answered Achaeos’s call and she remembered, all too well, that bleak and icy grip in her mind as it seized on them both. Her younger self was screaming now, in Myna all those miles away, as the Moth ritual rose to a bitter, wrenching climax.
And in Capitas, at the same arena, Tisamon broke away from the pack and struck down not the Emperor, who was already dead, but the magician who clutched the soul of the Darakyon. That bloody metal claw drove down and shattered the Shadow Box, and killed its bearer, and the great knot that was the Darakyon was abruptly undone, ebbing from the world. Achaeos was dead by now, the strain of enacting the ritual more than his body could bear, and Che’s younger image had gone mad, charging towards the Wasp lines, and never knowing that the spectres of the Darakyon were at her back, ready to engage in their last battle before the world was rid of them for ever.
Or not quite all, and not quite for ever. Che reached out and held the world still, examining the net that linked them all, seeing each thread glitter as though dipped in diamond. Here the line from the dying magician to Seda, a conduit for the last of his power; here from Achaeos to Che and through him to the collapsing Darakyon. Here . . .
I see it now.
Here to Tisamon. Here the Wasps killed him, but his blade had