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
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