Che, whose understanding of magic was in its infancy, fell back on her Art, exchanging the darkness for a palette of greys. Uie Se, she saw, was a tall, lean and angular woman, a Grasshopper-kinden as all the other Mynan Auxillians had been. Her hair was kept long and tied back, and she wore a simple and much-darned smock reaching down to her bony knees.
The seer was staring at her bleakly. ‘You’ve come to the wrong room, Beetle,’ she said, her voice dry and hollow, and tried to close the door again. ‘Don’t bother me.’
‘Wait,’ Che said hurriedly. ‘I need your help.’
‘There’s nothing I can do for such as you.’ Abandoning her attempt to close the door, Uie Se turned and shambled back to sit down on a filthy straw mattress.
‘I have money.’ Meaning yet more of Thalric’s, and she suspected he would not approve, but her need was great.
‘Oh, then come in,’ said the Grasshopper, with a loose-jointed gesture, and Che realized that the woman was drunk. ‘Buy me a chair, so you can sit on it. What do you want, Beetle? Are you a scholar come to record stories of a vanished age? I will talk. I will talk all you want.’
Maybe this was a waste of time. ‘I want to talk about dreams.’
Uie Se was abruptly more still. ‘You have aspirations for the future, rich lady?’
‘No, dreams. I am having dreams that I know are important, but they never stay with me. I know how important dreams are to seers and magicians, so there must be some techniques to help me recall them.’
The Grasshopper eyed her edgily. ‘You have money?’
‘Some.’
‘You are…’ The woman could not bring herself say it, but her fascination was that of someone observing some bizarre freak of nature.
‘Inapt, yes.’ Che could say the word with equanimity now. The admission no longer hurt as it once had. Spending time away from the eminently Apt city of Collegium had helped. No doubt Uie Se assumed she had been born different, a throwback amongst her own people, but of course most of Che’s life had been spent amongst the technical elite, trained in mechanics and artifice and dismissing all those old stories of magic as deluded Moth-kinden propaganda. Then Achaeos had entered her life and touched her with his very real magic, coming to find her when she was captured by her enemies, and then taking her to that ghastly, haunted Darakyon and forcing her to witness its hideous ghosts.
And when he had needed her, when his people had been trying to raise their ancient magic against the Wasps who had occupied their home, he had begged her for her strength, and she had somehow found the capacity within herself to give it. Their minds had touched, and she had funnelled her stoic Beetle endurance towards him, given him the extra reach so that he could cast his net further.
And his call had rung out from the mountain top above Tharn, where the ritual was being enacted, and the things of the Darakyon had heard and answered.
If some magician had offered Che the chance to forget the feel of those cold, ancient, twisted things inside her head, but taken as his price all her memories of Achaeos, she would have thought a long time about the proposal.
But the things had come when Achaeos called, charged him with strength, set the Moth-kinden ritual ablaze, terrorized the Wasps out of Tharn, driven them mad and set them against one another. And Achaeos, already badly wounded, dragged from his sickbed to join the Moth-kinden’s dark venture… Achaeos…
She had felt his life wink out amidst the cackling and rustling of the Darakyon things. She had felt him leave her.
‘Dreams,’ she repeated to the Grasshopper seer, and there was a tone to her voice, dead and angry at the same time, that made the woman shrink back.
‘Yes, yes.’ Uie Se scuttled into the further shadows of her room. ‘There are herbs. I have some. You shall know them by their smell. They have been used for ever as a net for dreams. There are talismans, and I shall ready one for you now, soon, soon, now. Only a moment, great lady. They shall be a spider’s web, yes, to catch your dreams, so that you may feast on them when you wake. You shall have your dreams.’
‘How much?’
‘No money, none,’ the wretched creature told her instantly. ‘No, no, no.’
‘How much?’ Che repeated. ‘Look, I will pay for your services. This is just… business.’ Something about her had so clearly rattled the Grasshopper, and she wondered if the rush of memories that had briefly overwhelmed her had bled out of her and into this woman’s head. From somewhere the words came: ‘I absolve and forgive, and will leave nothing behind me but footsteps.’
The seer paused, staring back over her shoulder, her hands stilled for a moment where they had been sifting through pots and jars by touch. ‘Thank you, great lady, thank you.’ The tension was abruptly gone from her.
What have I said, and why did it matter? Belatedly Che recalled from where she had pirated the words – a play, of all things: a Collegium play set back in the time before the revolution. Supposedly it had been adapted from an older Moth-kinden work, but updated for a modern audience.
But they must have kept some of the original, nonetheless. She would have to be careful with that kind of trick. She had the unwelcome feeling that certain words and phrases uttered by her, that would have been just wind before her change, carried a mystical weight now, whether she knew their import or not.
Uie Se had gathered together her herbs, and handed Che a pouch full of them. ‘You should steep them in water, let the water boil as you sleep. Do you keep to any of the Apt?’ she asked and, at Che’s nod, made a sour face. ‘They will complain, so ignore them. As for this,’ she held up a ring of twisted copper wire, ‘hang it near your bed – anywhere there are spiders smaller than your fingernail. Let one spin its web within it, and your dreams shall not escape.’
When Che returned to Hokiak’s Exchange, the guide had arrived and, to Che’s surprise, turned out to be another Wasp-kinden. He was a big, broad-shouldered specimen, decidedly bulkier than Thalric, with a heavy jaw and hair trimmed close to his skull, looking every bit the thug. Thalric and he had been sharing a jug of wine, though and, given Thalric’s history among his own kind, were clearly getting on remarkably well.
‘Cheerwell,’ he greeted her. ‘This is – Varmen. He’ll be guiding us over the border.’ A moment’s pause before the name told her that he had been about to assign this man a military rank, before checking himself.
Deserter, then, she guessed, rather than a lifelong mercenary. ‘You’re a smuggler, Master Varmen?’ she asked doubtfully.
The big Wasp shook his head. ‘Been back and forth a few times, riding escort mostly. Still, I know the best places.’
‘I’d have thought getting into the Commonweal was hard enough with one Wasp, let alone two,’ Che commented, sitting down and reaching for a wine-bowl.
Varmen grinned. ‘Not so hard, at that, but we’re talking about Principalities, anyway. Commonweal laws don’t hold there, you’ll see.’
Eleven
The ring of twisted copper wire dangled above her, suspended from a thornbush branch. The walls of Myna were behind them now, and they had made good time heading north-west before nightfall had caught them. They rode, which Che found easier than she had expected – easier even than the two Wasps seemed to, who had at least a little more experience than she did.
They had found a suitable hollow and had tethered their mounts, with Varmen using his sting to start a campfire, after a few explosive false starts. The man’s pack-beetle had its leash still tied to the pommel of his horse’s saddle, presumably so that they could get moving that much faster if need be. It was a ridiculously small creature, around the size of a Fly-kinden, and almost obscured under the heavy load of luggage that Varmen apparently felt compelled to travel with.