‘We’re just passing through,’ Che had said urgently.
‘You and your Wasp.’
‘Thalric, Kymene,’ Che had told her, searching the woman’s hard face for any clues to his fate. For a moment there was nothing, and Che was abruptly sure that they had killed him. For that sliver of a second, the pain had been shocking, utterly unexpected.
‘I recognized him,’ Kymene had admitted reluctantly, and even that had provided no reassurance. How it must grieve her, to be beholden to a Wasp-kinden. ‘I’ve signed the orders to release both of you.’ The words were virtually spat out. ‘Cheerwell Maker, what do you want?’
There must have been some hurt and betrayal in Che’s face that got past Kymene’s armour, however, for the woman’s expression had shifted, a little ashamed perhaps, and a little defensive. ‘Maker, I’ve been all morning trying to keep this city together, to balance the warmongers and the cowards in the Consensus – if our government deserves to call itself that! – and then your name falls into my lap, you and your cursed Wasp both, and what am I to make of it? The last two times that man came here, he brought down the government. Is he going to make it a third?’
Che had almost laughed at that, save that Kymene was being so deadly serious. ‘We’re heading west.’ She was conscious of the Mynan woman burning to be elsewhere, anywhere else perhaps. ‘Heading into the Commonweal. I was hoping for your help in crossing the border.’
New suspicion had then clouded Kymene’s face instantly, but it had drained away to leave an expression that Che had become tiresomely familiar with: someone’s contempt at her naivety. ‘The Commonweal? You’re going west out of the Alliance?’
That name was new enough to feature only on the most recent maps. Three former slave-cities, Myna, Szar and Maynes, had broken together away from the Empire after two decades of subjugation, and were fighting to hold on to their independence even as the Empire regained its old strength and ambitions. Che had assumed the Mynans must have plenty in common with the Commonwealers, whose conquered principalities must also have rid themselves of Imperial rule: the Alliance’s combined uprising had cut them off from direct contact with the Empire. Nothing in Kymene’s face had suggested that was the case.
Do they fear that the Dragonfly-kinden will invade them, now? Do they trust nobody?
‘The border?’ she had repeated hesitantly.
‘There’s little can be done about that,’ the Mynan woman had told her. ‘Alliance relations with them are… strained. The border is patrolled on both sides, travellers are not being let through. If you wish to risk the crossing, I can give you papers to get past our troops, but as for the Principalities… I will not be able to assist you.’ For a moment her face had remained nothing but stern: the Maid of Myna, the woman who had unified the resistance and freed her city. Then came the tiniest twitch, an acknowledgement of old times. ‘But if you’re asking about crossing borders with goods or people, you know where to ask as well as I do.’
Freed from the cells, their first look at the streets of free Myna had not been inspiring. Life under the Imperial boot had taught harsh lessons to the Mynan people, which would not soon be unlearned. There were plenty of weapons on display, and soldiers drilling with sword and crossbow, and even a few of the new snapbows that had made such an impact during the war. The red and black flag of Myna was displayed everywhere, as though people were afraid it might be taken away from them again. Non-Mynans were regarded on a sliding scale of suspicion. The Ant-kinden of Maynes and the Bees of Szar were tolerated, as they represented Myna’s neighbours in its Three-State Alliance. Others, like Che, were treated coldly, as though every one of them was suspected of being a Rekef infiltrator. Thalric had resorted to a hooded cloak, but was still stopped several times by guards, to be searched, questioned and insulted. The papers Kymene had provided were pored over, creased, frowned at. The Mynans would take a long time to grow easy with their new freedom, and Che only hoped that such time would be granted to them.
Since their release they had found their own lodgings in the city. Thalric’s gold had sufficed to get them a room, but it was a dwindling resource that they needed to save for other tasks, and so this single chamber, this one bed, was all they felt able to afford.
Sleeping beside Thalric was a strange experience. Achaeos had slept quiet and still, breathing so softly she could hardly tell he was there. Thalric seemed to take up all available space, and in the darkest pit of the night he would twitch and start, pursued by all the bad dreams that his varied career had gifted him with.
Sleeping beside him was all that had happened, so far. Twice now they had come close to something else but, like a ship’s master suddenly seeing hidden rocks, she had steered away from it. She was a little scared of him, and feared what his effect on her would be. And then there was Achaeos, poor dead Achaeos, whose ghost she had been trying to exorcise ever since his death during the war. The revelation that the spectre that had formerly tormented her had not been his at all had not driven away that host of memories. The greater part of her felt that she was teetering over of an abyss of guilt, and that to give in to Thalric’s wishes would be to fall.
And the rest of her, a minority vote, wanted to jump just so she could be rid of this burden of propriety that was tying her in knots. Would Achaeos truly have wanted me to be chained to his corpse for ever?
The obvious riposte to that was: Achaeos would not under any circumstances have ever wanted to see me with Thalric.
They hit the streets early, leaning into those ubiquitous hostile stares as though into inclement weather. They managed to get a street away from the boarding house before the first guard stopped them for their papers. Looking into the man’s face, Che had a sudden revelation: not hatred, not loathing, not a lust for vengeance, but fear. The man now staring at Kymene’s signature was of Che’s own age. He had never known his city be free, until the uprising a few years back. It must seem that the least breath of air could snatch it away from him.
The guard had turned away, his initial interest subsiding into mere dislike, and in that instant Che had stumbled, leaning for support against Thalric, conscious of a ripple passing through the people around her, as they shrank away from her as though she had the plague.
‘Che, what…?’ Thalric had been asking, but she had only stared: bright sunlight, not Myna’s overcast skies; a beating heat she recognized. And the stone walls inscribed with legion upon legion of tiny carvings, spilling a thousand years of history across every surface…
Khanaphes.
And for a moment there had been a Beetle woman staring at her from amid the Mynan crowd, clad in Khanaphir peasant dress but with a Collegiate face. Praeda…?
And Thalric was virtually shaking her, as the crowd ebbed back from them, and there were guards approaching, so they would be arrested again, or worse, if she did not…
‘I’m fine.’ She felt anything but fine, though. Each night she woke to find shards of her dreams scattered about her like broken glass. Ever since Khanaphes, where she had been changed. Ever since awaking into the presence of the Masters. She had gone to that city because the war – and Achaeos’s death – had robbed her of her Aptitude, stripped from her the mechanical inheritance of her people, and thrown her into a world of magic she had never entirely believed in. In Khanaphes she had begun to understand, however, and the ancient, callous Masters had taught her more. But more doors had been opened than she knew how to close: her mind was leaking visions every night, fleeting and unremembered, just bright but receding shards inside her mind as she awoke. But this… never before in daylight, not like this.
She never remembered those dreams, save for one thing: they were dreams of Khanaphes.