All three of them, Che thought hollowly. I woke up all three.
She reached for her sword, forgetting that the last blade she had held had been the Vekken's own, which he must have reclaimed by long habit the moment he awoke. The Antkinden was not focused on either her or Thalric, but staring past them, at the Masters – the towering shapes of Elysiath and her two companions. Following his gaze, Thalric looked back also, and Che found it incredible that neither man had even noticed the metal bulk of Garmoth Atennar, who had been right before their eyes, the body of Marger almost at his feet. They stand so still, like statues indeed, she thought. And I see better in these dark places and…
And I am Inapt now, and so I am of their world.
Thalric swore softly, so she knew that he could see them, the risen Masters. 'What…?' he got out hoarsely.
'Words spoken in these halls leave long echoes,' said Elysiath. 'You do not believe in us, O savage. We are long dead, so you say, if we ever existed.'
'You can't be the Masters,' Thalric sounded dazed.
'Who else are they going to be?' Che demanded.
'But it's impossible, not without half the city knowing that you have – what? – some underground colony here, where you eat what? And drink what? And keep your numbers up over – how long has it been since the Masters were supposed to have ruled Khanaphes?' He was shaking his head wildly in disbelief.
'We still rule,' boomed Garmoth Atennar, and Thalric and the Ant whirled round, separating him from the gloom for the first time as more than just statuary.
'Dead,' stammered Thalric. 'The Masters are dead.' Che put her arms around him, but he continued, 'How long since the Masters were supposed to have walked the streets above?'
'This shall be nine years,' said the man beside Elysiath, 'and forty years. And nine hundred years.'
Che felt Thalric twist in her arms, struggling to his knees. 'Then it cannot be. To have a colony, unseen, unknown, for generation after generation beneath their feet, not even if just the Ministers knew.'
They were smiling now, all of them. Elysiath Neptellian even laughed. It was a resonant, inhuman sound that reminded Che of the stone bells the Moth-kinden sometimes used in their rituals.
'Speak not to us, O savage, of your generations. We are the Masters of Khanaphes, and we have always been so. When we turned away from the sun to seek our rest down here, it was these eyes that looked back one last time, and no other's.'
Thalric stared at her dumbly, plainly not prepared to take up the argument against such invincible assurance, but Che spoke up, as politely as a young student petitioning some great College scholar. 'You can't be nine hundred years old?'
'I am older, and I am not so old, by my kinden's reckoning.' The perfect mouth curved more sharply. 'There is none left living now who raised the first stones of Khanaphes and taught the Beetle-kinden to think, but those were active times, so we could not sleep then so long as we have since. Still, I remember when I walked our dominion as a queen, and they cast flowers before my feet and turned their faces from me, lest their gaze sully my beauty.'
'Madness,' whispered Thalric, but tears had sprung into Che's eyes at the mere tone of the woman's voice, the ancient longings and memories it contained.
'Still he does not believe. Like all savages, they have minds able to clutch only small pieces of the world held close, blind to the greater whole,' said the man at Elysiath's shoulder. 'But she believes. She has comprehended our glorious city, and seen how there is a missing piece at its heart. She knows now that the missing piece is before her.'
'Yes,' Che breathed. Despite the magnitude of what had been said, she found no doubt remaining within herself at all. Khanaphes had been a city that did not make sense. Only by the addition of some such presence as this could it be made whole. 'But how?' she asked. 'How has it come to this end?'
'This is no end,' Garmoth Atennar rumbled from behind her. 'We merely wait and sleep. We shall arise once more, when our city is ready.'
The absolute certainty in his voice struck a false chord in Che. For the first time she doubted them: not their belief in themselves, but the extent of what they knew. 'I don't understand,' she said. 'Help me understand.'
She thought they would not respond, but the woman who had been combing her hair stood up, stretching luxuriously. 'We shall tell her.'
'Must we?' queried the man. 'I tire of it all.'
'We shall tell her,' said the woman with the comb, firmly. 'Child, I am Lirielle Denethetra, Lady of the Amber Moon, Speaker of Peace, Whose Word Brings Low the Great.' She intoned the litany of her titles with profound meaning, shrouding each with the shadows of a history that Che could never know of. 'Open your mind, little one.'
'I… don't know how.' Che said awkwardly. 'I am no magician.' She was aware of Thalric close by her, Accius further away, sword still in hand. When she thought of them, she felt embarrassed by their disbelief, but in the presence of the Masters she found she thought of them less and less.
'It is open as a window,' said the man.
'Then we shall tell you of the cataclysm and doom that came to Khanaphes, and that lies over her still,' said Lirielle Denethetra. 'The tale begins before even we ourselves remember, many thousands of years before the founding of our city, or any city.'
Colours began to rise in Che's mind, swirling and dancing, accumulating into hazy images, viewed as through warped glass. She saw a landscape unrecognizable, green and forested. She saw great plains where beetles grazed between the spires of soaring anthills. She saw no walls, no evidence of the hand of man. She saw other beasts, monstrous things with hair, horrible to behold, that she had never seen the like of in all her waking life.
The voice of Elysiath continued in her mind, saying: 'Such was the world before even we had arisen to walk in it. So stood the world when the Pact was made and the Art was born, but the world was new formed, and not set in its ways.'
'There was a great catastrophe, in the spring of time,' Lirielle's voice now took over. 'We have peered back, and divined as best we could, yet know not the cause. Perhaps there was no other cause, save for the mysterious slow workings of the earth, which moved and fell, and made the lands we know today.' The images in Che's mind blurred and shifted. She had a sense of a great sliding and slumping, a shuddering that seemed to rend apart the entire world. She saw whole lands fall into the sea, then the sea roll back to steal even more of the earth. She saw plains riven in two, the higher broken from the lower by a great sheer cliff. Is that the Lowlands I see? The Commonweal and the Barrier Ridge?
'And the people were sore afraid,' Elysiath told her. 'Small wonder that only those tribes who might truly influence the world must step forth to take mastery of it. Mere crafting and making would not suffice, in order to live through those terrible times. So we would come into our estate, and so, later, would come the others in their distant lands. Still, none were so great as we.'
'All long ago and before even our time, and it was long before we came to understand it,' added the unnamed man. 'But it was to dominate our world nonetheless. This is later, though, much later.' There was a city now being built, Che saw in her mind. The people were stocky and brown, like her. At first there was merely a small town on the banks of a river, the dense forest surrounding it being cut back for farmland. Then she saw stone walls raised. There were suggestions of battles with the denizens of the forest, and those of the plains beyond. She saw her kinfolk victorious, and saw great figures standing at their head, pale and slow but mighty in their sorcery. 'These come from my great-grandfather, these scenes – before my own time. Your people had not yet gone east to serve the Moths. There is no Pathis, no Solarno. The Spider-kinden live in caves and fight each other for scraps.'