'How?' she asked.
'We need only lend it a little strength,' Lirielle explained. 'It is too weak to exist apart from you now, therefore it leans on you like a sick man. We shall help it to stand alone, then it will be about its business and you shall be rid of it.'
'But what if I am its business?' Che demanded.
Lirielle's expression suggested that this entire conversation was now boring her. She went back to combing her hair.
Che could feel the ghost hovering close, invisible to her but still present. She recalled the Marsh, suddenly: its dragging her towards the Mantis icon, and its shrieking denunciation of the Marsh people, how they had let the old ways lapse so far. Power: it was looking for magic, and why else if not to free itself? She should have considered more that he might want to be free from her, as much as she wanted to be free from him.
She did want to be free from him.
'Please,' she said, 'do it.'
'Che…' Thalric was reaching out, but she shook him off.
'Do it,' she said again, grasping her courage with both hands.
Elysiath sighed. 'You are so impatient, with your mayfly lives,' she said. 'See, it is being accomplished even while you demand it.'
She waved one languid hand, and all eyes followed the gesture.
There was something boiling and building in the air, grey and formless, writhing and knotting. Motes of substance seemed to be drawn to it, flocking through the dim air. It turned and twisted like a worm, as flecks of dusty powder fell into its substance. Slowly it was growing a form, evolving from a blur into something that had limbs, a head, the shape of a man.
'Is there…?' Thalric was squinting, as if trying to make out something he could not quite see. In another place, Che was sure, any number of ghosts would pass him by, but here, where the darkness was layered with centuries, one on top of another in an unbroken chain, the magic was getting even to him.
She thought she saw bones and organs as the apparition formed. It was still colourless, washed-out, still a shadow, a mere reflection in a dark glass. She found that she now feared to set eyes on him. What would he look like after a year in the void? Would it be Achaeos living she saw, or Achaeos dead?
Thalric made a choking sound, and she knew he must now see it, or see something. His lips drew back in a grimace, his hands spreading open to fight. Behind him the Vekken stood expressionless and she could not know what he saw.
'Is that…?' Thalric said. 'What am I seeing? Isn't that…?'
'Yes,' she confirmed, and looked back at the ghost, which was near complete, now – and discovered that it was not.
They had lent it enough of their strength, like a thimble filled from the ocean, for it to become recognizable, and more of it was being filled out even as she watched. She now recognized the tall, lean frame, and those sharp features that were, in their cold arrogance, a match for the Masters themselves. He did not wear the slave's garb they had dressed him in to die, but instead his arming jacket, its green and gold bleached grey. The sleeves were slit up to his elbows to give play to the spines of his arms. Even the sword-and-circle brooch that he had cast aside now glinted from his breast again.
'Tisamon,' Che gasped. 'But… no! This is the wrong one. This isn't him!'
'Little child, what you see is all the ghost there is. No other clings to you,' the man beside Elysiath declared, plainly amused. 'Are you so particular?'
'But…' she protested, and the Mantis's haughty features turned to regard her. 'I don't understand.'
'We see in your past a great convergence of ritual,' the man continued, sounding bored again. 'A magical nexus to which you and he were linked. When he died, you were touching him in some way.'
'But where is Achaeos?' she asked, but she already knew the answer. Gone. Gone beyond, and utterly. Whilst this vicious, martial creature had clung on within her mind, her lover had been like a candle flame suddenly snuffed. The dream-Achaeos had told her, You do this to yourself. She had used his memory as a rod and imagined that it was his hand that beat her with it.
'Oh.' She sat down suddenly. The spectral Mantis was staring at them, each one in turn. His eyes lingered long enough on Thalric to make the man tense.
'What do you seek, spirit?' Elysiath asked him. 'What holds you here still?'
Tisamon's pale lips moved, the words seeming to come from a great distance. Where is my daughter?
'Go seek her,' Elysiath said without interest. 'She is no concern of ours.'
Where is she? demanded the Mantis's bleak, far-off voice.
'You are parted from the Beetle-kinden,' the man told him. 'If you cannot scent your child, free as you are now, then you shall never find her.'
Tisamon's greyed eyes flashed briefly. Che thought it was resentment, but then she read it as triumph.
She is among the Dragonflies, the Mantis stated. Far north and west of here.
'Go seek her,' Elysiath said again. 'We give you leave.'
Che thought of Tynisa, her near-sister, and daughter of this dead man. She thought of what directions Tynisa's life might turn under this ghost's influence, how it had already turned when he was alive. 'Tisamon,' she protested. 'No…'
The angular features stared down at her. Stenwold's niece, he identified her, as though he had not been riding inside her mind these many months. She needs me. With that, he was stalking away, growing less distinct with distance. She thought she detected half-glimpsed shapes about him, the shadows of a shadow, that were those of briars and thorns.
She looked up at the Masters, whose kinden she realized she must know, from fragmentary legends, folk tales, ancient fictions. She had assumed she would feel hollow with the ghost's departure, whosoever's it had been. She also thought she would feel relieved. In truth she felt neither.
'What now?' she asked them. 'What will you do with us?' She stood up again, and this time Thalric stood alongside her, with fingers spread, and the Vekken too. Sword clutched tight in his hand, the Ant was staring at the armoured slopes of Garmoth Atennar.
'They are less than chaff to us,' said Elysiath, 'but you are the grain. In our dreams we have called and, when you came, we awoke for you. For you alone we have broken our long sojourn. We have much to offer you. We give you a chance to share in the rule of the Masters of Khanaphes.'
Che swallowed, feeling very keenly the ancient weight of the dark halls about her and, even more so, the ageless power of the Masters themselves, who were older even than the stones of their living tomb. There are things here I would never learn in all my days spent at the Great College, she thought. There are things that even Moths could not teach me…
'Your rule?' Thalric interrupted sharply, though his voice shook. 'What rule is that? What do you rule, save this hole in the ground?'
'Though our dominion has diminished, do not think we no longer rule our beloved city,' Elysiath reproached him. 'Though we no longer walk its streets, do not think our dreams no longer guide our Ministers. Do not assume we have taken no pains to keep our people on the true path.'
'Oh, I've seen the path they're on,' Thalric said bitterly, and Che saw the great woman roll her eyes, that this savage would not be silent in front of his betters. Thalric was driven by fear and aggression, though, and would not be stilled. 'I've seen them try to struggle on with the simplest of machines, knowing nothing of mechanics, metallurgy, modern farming. We've all seen where that has left them, for even Khanaphes can't hold back the march of time.'
She stared at him and he blanched, baring his teeth, but no more words emerged.
'Now-' Elysiath began, but Che took a deep breath and interrupted her.
'Do you… Do you know there's a war out there?'
There was a moment's pause when it seemed that Che might be struck down just for such an interruption, then Lirielle replied dismissively, 'Wars come and go. We, who have seen so many, cannot mark them all.'