This is what he felt, she had reflected at the time, remembering how Achaeos had always been so uncomfortable with modern transport. She had assumed that was just because he was new to it, then.
She remembered staggering towards the stern, clinging to the rail, where the concerned expression of Jons Allanbridge had wavered through her view, a meaningless image. She had stared at the engine, the blur of the propeller, and felt a chasm gape beneath her. It was wrong – worse, it was meaningless. She had stared at all that pointless metal, its inexorable convolutions, its parts and pipes and moving things, and she had felt as though she was falling.
The white elegance of the College was straight ahead of her now. The library's great gates were still closed and barred, this early, so she went to the side door and knocked and knocked, until a peevish voice responded from within, announcing, 'It's not locked.'
Che drew a deep breath and knocked again. 'It's not locked!' called out the librarian, thoroughly irritated now. 'Either come in or go away.'
She stared at the handle, feeling tears prickle at the corners of her eyes. Her memory told her that this was simple but her body had no path for it, her mind no connection. She rattled with the metal ring, but the door would not move. She could not understand the process. It made no sense to her. In her final moments, while touching Achaeos's mind as a channel for the Darakyon, something fundamental had been ripped out of her.
At last someone came to the door and yanked it open. The librarian was a stern old woman, her face devoid of sympathy. 'What do you want?' she demanded.
'I want to come in,' Che replied in a tiny voice, fighting the urge to weep in frustration.
It would have been worse if there had never been Tynisa. Che had grown up with her as though they were sisters: Stenwold's clumsy niece and Tisamon's halfbreed bastard – although neither had known Tynisa's heritage at the time: Tynisa, who was graceful and beautiful and accomplished in every field save one. So it was that Stenwold had made alterations to his house, and given his servant special instructions about the doors and the locks. That servant had died in the Imperial siege, though, and the new man was taking a while to learn. It was not surprising, for the instructions were baffling to him and Che could hardly blame the man for forgetting. At least Stenwold was used to the idea; he could pretend he understood.
Walking through the streets of Collegium, she was nevertheless a cripple. She looked up at the slowly manoeuvring airship and felt that it should fall on her. It was too great; it could not stay up. The sounds of the trains, which had lulled her to sleep ever since she first came to Collegium, were now like the cries of strange and frightening beasts.
Yet she had spent years learning mechanics, basic artificing, forces and levers, power and pressure. Now it was as if she had spent all that time learning how to walk through walls or turn lead into gold. She could clearly remember being able to do it once, but not how. The logic had deserted her and she had become like him. She had lost her birthright, the basic tools that made the modern world comprehensible. She had become Inapt, unable to use – to even comprehend – all the machines and the mechanisms that her people loved so much. She was crippled in her mind and nobody would ever understand. There was a division between the races of her world: those who could, those who could not. Che had fallen on the wrong side of it and she could not get back.
It was worse now because of Tynisa. Of all the people in the world, Che could have spoken to Tynisa about it. Tynisa would have understood, would have helped her. Tynisa was gone, though, to Stenwold's fury. Che had not understood, at first, why Stenwold had reacted so angrily.
I drove her away.
And it was true. Not anything Che had done but the simple fact of her. In the end Tynisa had not been able to look at the sight of mourning Che without recalling whose blade had lanced Achaeos, whose hand had inflicted the wound that eventually killed him. Che did not blame her. Of course, Che did not blame her, but that did not matter. Tynisa had lived through the violent death of her father and come home to find herself a murderess. She had stayed as long as she could bear it, growing less and less at home in this city she had dwelt in all her life, unable to talk to Che, grieving a dead father, nursing a killer's conscience for all that Che tried to reach out to her. At the last she had fled Collegium. She had gone, and not one of Stenwold's agents could discover where.
Stenwold's rage, Che finally understood, had been over the undoing of twenty years of civilized education, over all the care and time he had spent in making Tynisa the product of Collegium's morality. In the end she had shown herself her true father's daughter. She had gone off, Stenwold felt sure, to lose herself in fighting and blood – chasing her own death just as Tisamon always had done.
Hooray, Che thought. Hooray for those of us who won the war.
*
The vast stacks of the library normally absorbed her. The Beetle-kinden claimed this to be the single greatest collection of the written word anywhere in the world. The Moths scoffed at them for this boast but nobody had performed a count. There were texts and scrolls here that dated back to before the revolution, to a period when the city bore a different name. They kept them in cellars whose dim lighting offered no impediment to Che. She had been searching for months, now, trying to find a cure to her affliction, a way of helping Achaeos's wretched shade.
All of a sudden she found she could not face it, not today. The thought of poring over more ancient scrolls that she could barely understand, of another day's fruitless delving into an incompletely rendered past, was more than she could bear. She searched her mind for the reason for this change, and found there Stenwold's offer of the previous night. At the time she had not cared, but something had lodged there, waiting for the morning light.
'Khanaphes,' she said slowly to herself, and it was as if the word created a distant echo in her mind. Ancient histories, old Moth texts: the city name would barely be found in any writings that post-dated the revolution, but if the diligent student dug deep into the writings of the old, Inapt powers, that name glowed like a jewel, ancient even to those antique scribes.
She needed to talk, but who could she talk to about Khanaphes? Two dozen bemused students had turned up for the aviation lecture: Beetle-kinden, Ant and Fly youths, all wanting to be pilot-artificers – aviators as the new word went. They were without a teacher. So far all they had were some scribbled notes left on the chalkboard, instructing them to fold flying machines out of paper. This was now what Che discovered.
She knew where to look, as the avionics students did not, yet, though it took her a fight with her courage to cross town to the new airfield and enter the hangar. The shapes there, the winged things arranged in their untidy horseshoe pattern, looked only predatory. The air was filled with the sounds of metal and cursing artificers. It was a sharp reminder of her former self that she could have done without. She had encountered this and beaten it before. Had she wanted she could have shut herself away and never had to deal further with her affliction, but that was not her way: she was still Beetle-kinden, and Beetles endured. They were tough, both within and without.
'Taki!' she shouted, whereupon the little Fly-kinden pilot looked up, delighted.
'That,' she said, 'is the first time in five days that someone's addressed me properly, instead of "Miss Schola". I should never have told them my full name, honestly.'
She was looking well. Taki had also been crippled by the war, but in her case the damage had been made good by artifice. Her beloved Esca Volenti had been destroyed over Solarno, but here she was fine-tuning the Esca Magni. It was the perfect fusion of Solarnese know-how, Collegiate industry and Taki's prodigious skills as a pilot. She claimed it as the most agile flying machine in the known world. The boast had been put to the test and so far never proved false.