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‘My true father would tell me I need nobody but myself.’

With my aid, you will never lose a battle, triumph in every fight!

‘You lie, spirit,’ Tynisa snapped. ‘I would triumph in every fight except the last, because you would drive me to some impossible conflict eventually, just to have me die as Mantis-kinden should. I cast you out. I cast you out. I deny you. You are not my father.’

Che held her breath, waiting and still waiting as the spectre shimmered and hung in the air. A disturbance was building up within it, and it writhed and twisted as though strung up on hooks. Her gaze sought out Maure, and found the magician pale and tense, as if awaiting an explosion.

Then, like an exhalation, it was gone, vanishing into infinite distance, yet without seeming to leave the walls of the decrepit hut they sat in, even as the very sunlight seemed to creep into the shade’s absence.

Maure let out a long, ragged breath. As the only one of them to know the risks intimately, she looked more relieved than Che cared to think about.

‘It’s done,’ she confirmed. ‘The shade is gone.’

‘Gone where?’ Tynisa asked, sounding shaky, but all Maure would say was, ‘Away.’

The Spider girl glanced at Che, tentatively probing her expression. ‘You saw it all? Tisamon? Achaeos?’

Che nodded tiredly. ‘I’ve never held Achaeos against you, Tynisa, nor has Stenwold, nor did Tisamon when he truly lived. The only one who ever did was you yourself. Do you at least accept that you’re not to blame for his death?’

Tynisa nodded. ‘I tried so hard not to believe in magic. I thought it was just a convenient excuse. You came a long way to tell me that, Che.’

‘Well of course I did,’ Che replied, almost offended. ‘We’re sisters, after all, despite everything. And you’ll be needed.’

Tynisa blinked. ‘I’ll . . . what?’

‘As we all will be needed.’

Tynisa and Maure were both staring at her now, but the words just fell from Che’s lips, her face slack and expressionless.

‘Falling leaves, red and brown and black and gold. A rain of burning machines over a city of the Apt. The darkness between trees. The Seal of the Worm is breaking.’

A beat of complete silence followed, as though the world outside their ruined hut had been utterly stilled. Then Che blinked at them and demanded, ‘What? Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Che, you said . . .’ Tynisa frowned. ‘I don’t understand what you just said.’

‘No?’ Maure asked. ‘The Moths call their magicians seers, and set them to sift the future for visions of what may come. Sometimes the visions arrive unasked. The Seal of the Worm, that’s what you said.’

‘Meaning what?’ Che asked, entirely thrown, but a man’s voice broke in, startling them all, Tynisa snatching for her sword.

‘The Seal of the Worm. That’s a bad old story.’ It was Soul Je, the Grasshopper-kinden brigand, crouching just outside the shattered doorway of their hut. Che guessed he had come to investigate the shouting of just a moment before.

‘Tell us,’ Che instructed him immediately, but the man shook his head.

‘Best not repeated. Old wars, old enemies banished to the depths, and let them long remain there. Besides, who knows the truth these days?’ He shrugged.

Che was frowning, her face screwed up in concentration. Something of the Moth lore . . . In trying to understand Achaeos she had read all that a Beetle might readily acquire, including mouldering histories that no other College hand had touched in centuries. ‘Worms . . . some old war?’ And what had happened at the end of that war? But, of course, Moth histories were opaque, dense with allegory. The Moths had fought off so many challengers in the Inapt world of the Days of Lore: all of them defeated, hunted down, destroyed wherever they could be found, or else . . . banished?

Sealed away . . . came the uncomfortable recollection.

She opened her mouth to question Soul Je again, but he shook his head, discouraging it. A moment later the Wasp Mordrec bundled past him.

‘We’ve spotted