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The promise that the meek will inherit the Earth is oft repeated. What is less known is that, in almost all of the instances where this sort of thing has happened, they rapidly cease to be meek.

Power Corrupts , by Ming the Merciful

Livira

“Ganar leading skeer armies?” Livira stared at Carlotte. “That’s all we have to deal with? We—as ghosts—just need to lay waste to armies of skeer, and then you’ll come with us?”

Carlotte nodded.

Yolanda and Leetar had come back through the ceiling of the great dining hall when it had become apparent that Livira and Carlotte weren’t following. They stood side by side now, the white child in her white wrappings as if ready to play the part of a ghost to its fullest, and the bedraggled princess, her finery stained and none too fragrant.

Livira shook her head slowly. “We can’t interfere. Yolanda just said you’ve already done too much damage. You’ve altered the course of this nation!”

“I mean…she doesn’t have to come with us.” Leetar eyed Carlotte from on high, as if she were still a lowly house-reader rather than queen of a nation with a huge statue of herself in the main square of the citadel. “If she’s happy being queen—”

“I’m not happy being queen!” Carlotte stamped her foot noiselessly and came forward, taking both Livira’s hands in her own. There had been a lot of touching, but Livira understood that her friend hadn’t been able to touch anything save her own flesh for years—and that was a lonely place to be. “I want to go back. More than anything—wait, there’s something to go back to, right? Not just a burned city and those damned sabbers?”

“Well—”

“It doesn’t matter.” Carlotte cut Livira off. “I want out. But I can’t just leave Chertal.” She squeezed Livira’s hands until the bones almost creaked. “He’s the only person I’ve spoken to the whole time I’ve been here. He’s nice. Nice-ish anyway. I mean, you don’t stay king for long if you’re Arpix-nice. Actually, he’s pretty cut-throat. But he’s been good to me.”

“But what can we do?” Leetar asked. “I mean, even if we could touch anything, a single skeer would chop all of us into pieces in no time at all.”

Livira had to agree. She didn’t like Leetar’s defeatism, but she was right. Livira lifted her gaze to Yolanda. The girl had been silent since passing her earlier judgement.

“We can’t leave her.” Yolanda’s pink gaze wandered Carlotte’s tattered dress disapprovingly. “It’s possible that the harm she’s done will be self-limiting. But if we leave her to continue disrupting things it will pass the limit and start a chain reaction. If it hasn’t already done so.”

“So, you’ll help me!” Carlotte flashed her old winning smile.

“Or force you to come,” Leetar said darkly.

“How are you expecting us to help?” Livira wanted to, but their options seemed limited…to…zero.

Carlotte nodded at Yolanda. “She’s got magic. I just saw her fly.”

“You can fly too,” Livira said. “There’s nothing to it. It’s just a matter of not falling.”

Carlotte gave her a doubting look. “And you’ve got magic too, Livira. Don’t say you haven’t. That assistant, the one who told me to jump into the pool that…took me to the wood between the worlds. You made that happen, somehow, I know you did.”

“I really don’t. And certainly nothing that will work here…” Livira faltered, seeing the hurt in her friend’s eyes. “Let’s go and look. Let’s watch these ganar and these skeer. We can do that. We’re made for that.”

“You think I haven’t tried?” Carlotte shook her head helplessly. “I’ve spent weeks trudging around in those damn woods. Got so lost! I’d have starved to death if I needed to eat. Oh, gods, you don’t have something to eat, do you? You wouldn’t believe how many cakes I’ve looked at!”

“You forget…” Livira looked down meaningfully and Carlotte followed her gaze, eyes widening at the empty space below their feet. “…we can fly!” And with that, Livira drew Carlotte further towards the ceiling, keeping tight hold of her hands.

They’d just reached Yolanda and Leetar among the rafters when the far door crashed open, and an out-of-breath king rushed in, shouting for Carlotte. Yolanda pulled Leetar on, vanishing through the plaster overhead.

“Come on,” Livira said quietly.

Carlotte resisted without seeming to know that she was, gazing down at the unsuspecting man as his guards followed him into the chamber. “It’s hard.”

Livira nodded, unwilling to just drag her friend away.

“It was chance that put us together,” Carlotte said. “I’d have been stuck with whoever could see me. Or gone slowly mad if nobody could.”

Livira had always suspected that, in matters of romance, destiny’s role was overstated. Most of the magic was in how any two vaguely suited people could discover the wonder of each other if given space and time. Would she have fallen for a different canith if they had been there in Evar’s place? One of his brothers perhaps? She would never know. Accepting that truth both took away some of the enchantment in love, the romance-book type of magic, and added a different kind of wonder in its place, one that perhaps made you a better person.

“I can’t just abandon him,” Carlotte said.

“I know.”

Carlotte met her gaze. “How could you? You’ve never been in love. You said it wasn’t like that with Meelan…” Carlotte had always been a little cruel, or more careless perhaps than cruel, but the results were the same. Now she caught herself, as if years of semi-solitude had made her listen more carefully to her own words. “Sorry…I didn’t mean—” She broke off, staring into Livira’s eyes. “Do you know? You seem different…How long has it been for you?”

Livira managed a half-smile. “Not so long. But I really did meet someone in the library. I’ll tell you later. But now we really do have to…” Below them King Chertal, who had been marching to the opposite door, paused and lifted his face to examine the shadow-haunted rafters. “…go!”

A moment later they were through the roof and speeding towards a cloudless sky.

Carlotte’s shrieks mixed delight and terror as Livira hauled her higher and higher. The citadel dwindled beneath their heels, rapidly becoming a patchwork of rooftops which in turn shrunk into some incomprehensible toy. The ground over which they flew started to look more like a map than an actual place. It would, Livira thought, be very easy to lose one’s humanity making decisions from such an altitude. She wondered if the gods felt the same way as they pushed their pieces across the playing board. Did they forget the blood and suffering way down there, too small to see? Or was that what made them gods in the first place? The ability to see both the biggest and smallest picture at the same time?

Livira pulled up level with Yolanda. Leetar remained unwilling to fly by herself, but the contact she maintained with Yolanda was light compared to the death grip Carlotte had on Livira, both arms wrapped about her neck so tight that she was almost choking.

“This is great,” Carlotte said breathlessly after a final shriek. “But I can’t even see my house…and it’s a palace! How can we spot skeer from up here?”

“We saw what might be their tracks in the forest. We can follow those and see what we find. The trail looked fresh.”

“When did you become a tracker, Livira Page?” Carlotte asked, still hanging on for grim death.

“It’s a corridor of destruction wide enough for an army,” Livira said. “They just break or push down any tree that gets in their way.”

“That does sound like skeer…”

Finding their way back to their point of arrival proved too great a task of navigation: one patch of a great forest looked very much like another. Instead, they flew low enough to see any likely signs of passage, whilst retaining sufficient height and speed to inspect many square miles each hour.

On discovering one of the trails, it was Carlotte who divined the direction of skeer travel by noting the lie of the trampled vegetation. They followed it, immune to the heat and humidity, untroubled by the legions of midges or by mosquitoes that were sized more like small birds than insects and looked capable of draining a whole armful of blood. A smaller track joined theirs and later their track joined a bigger one, like tributaries converging to form an ever-larger river. It also put Livira in mind of the near-invisible paths that spread from any bone-ant nest, along which the ants would drag victims as large as a rat and as heavy as a human femur.

“It doesn’t quite feel real, does it?” Carlotte asked, back at ground level, having insisted on walking.

“It’s a bit like what the Mechanism does,” Livira said. “As if the whole world were a book and we were just turning the page to reach the part we want. If it weren’t for people like Chertal and Celcha I’d think that’s all it was. An illustrated history—painted with such vivid colours that it fools the eye.”

“Celcha?”

“A ganar who saw me dancing with Evar over the city. But not our city. I mean, it’s in the same place, but this was a thousand—”

“Evar?” Carlotte stopped walking. “Dancing!”

“The point is that she could see me too.” Livira continued to glide forward, her toes inches above the flattened vegetation.

“WHO IS EVAR?”

Livira turned to face Carlotte, while still moving forward with Yolanda and Leetar flanking her. “He’s…” It felt strange to say it out loud. Especially in the depths of a huge forest that would be ancient dust by the time she was born. She and Carlotte had been close, bound tighter still by their love of gossip. It felt like only yesterday Livira had ushered her into the pool to escape the canith. But also like two centuries ago. Time stretched between them in all manner of ways as Carlotte began to dwindle into the distance, still refusing to follow.

“I love him,” Livira said simply, suddenly unsure if she’d ever said that before, especially to Evar.

“I need all the details!” Carlotte was at her elbow in an eye-blink.

“I think we’re getting there.” Leetar raised her arm to point ahead.

Something could be seen above the treetops, an irregular black-and-green something, like a mountain, but not a mountain.

“No guards,” Yolanda observed. “Their confidence is alarming.”

The way ahead did appear to have no eyes on it. But from what Livira knew about the skeer, only the suicidal would seek them out for violence. She still had trouble fitting into her head the idea that it was the ganar who bred the skeer. The small, inoffensive ganar—who had lived as slaves beneath the cities of men and canith alike—had first come down to invade the world, throwing their slave-bred skeer armies at unsuspecting towns and cities…Or was it first? Were they in turn answering some older insult? It didn’t matter. As Yute had said: it was a cycle. A cycle that ground lives into dust and sucked worlds dry.

As they drew closer, the track they had been following widened from a river to a delta and ahead of them lay square miles deforested not by the axe or saw but by bludgeoning force. The mountain revealed itself as a misshapen pyramid of some black substance—perhaps metal—smooth but complex. It had been there for a long time, judging by the vines hanging from its projections in waterfalls, and the full-grown trees that had managed to find footing in some of the larger hollows.

“A ganar night-ship?” Livira wondered. It seemed impossible that it had travelled from Attamast, sailing the black space above the sky, but equally impossible that it could have been constructed so deep in the forest without the knowledge of the surrounding kingdoms.

Yolanda seemed unimpressed, though the child rarely showed emotion of any kind. She led the way out into the cleared space without pausing to gawp at the great structure in its midst. The others had to hurry after her to catch up.

Livira swallowed the words of caution her tongue had tried to give voice to. Nobody would see them. They were in no danger. That was the point of the exercise. They could be reading a book about this place for all the harm it could do them or they might do it.

As they crossed the rutted soil and pulverised, long-dead remains of perhaps a million trees, the distance to the night-ship closed far more slowly than Livira had anticipated.

“It’s bigger than the citadel,” Carlotte breathed. She looked at Livira despairingly. “There’s no hope for Chertal…”

Livira stretched her mouth into what she hoped was a sympathetic line. From what she remembered, there weren’t even ruins visible on the Arthran Plateau in their day. She knew it was more important to Carlotte whether the city fell to ruin within months or centuries than it was to her. Even so, a brief wander through the streets, and a short time within the palace, had made the place far more real to her than just some dead empire noted in the histories. If she could, Livira would help Carlotte’s king, though she couldn’t see how that was possible.

“Over there!” Carlotte pointed.

A skeer column was emerging from the forest to the west, along an established trail. Dozens, scores, hundreds. A river of the insectoid warriors, marching so close to each other that they resembled a single vast multi-legged organism.

Yolanda led the way towards the newcomers. Livira found herself in reluctant second place, filled with sudden doubts concerning her invisibility. Even if she hadn’t seen the destruction the skeer were capable of, some primal instinct warned her to keep her distance, telling her that any distance where she could still see the things was too small and should be enlarged by sprinting away.

“You’re sure they can’t see us?” Leetar gave voice to Livira’s concern. Even Carlotte, who had been seen by nobody but her king for years now, looked worried.

Closer up, the dull thunder of heavy feet spearing the earth and driving on made conversation impossible. Livira tried to imagine the mass of skeer coming at an army of men. Their momentum seemed unstoppable.

“HOW CA—” Livira’s shout fell away as within the space of two heartbeats the entire column came to a halt. “…can…”

The question went unfinished. Two hundred skeer heads turned her way. The half a dozen black eyes each insectoid possessed seemed to sweep across her. Three skeer at the front broke from the pack, their lustrous white armour plates gleaming, the dark edging and the veins, that looked black even in the library light, showing a deep, rich blue in the fierceness of the sun.

Slowly, tilting their heads in an almost human gesture, the three began to advance towards Livira and her companions, as if searching for something they couldn’t quite focus on. Without warning, they broke into a flat charge, and with a single scream shared between them, Carlotte and Leetar fled.

Livira, frozen in the moment, discovered with predictably poor timing the sudden inability to move which so often afflicts prey beneath the claws of predators. She had died to such creatures before. Her near-indestructible assistant body had been bludgeoned into pieces. And standing there, paralysed by primal terror, she knew with utter conviction that ghost or no ghost, the creatures were mere moments from reducing her to bloody ribbons.