The Scarab Path

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Then die like an Imperial Wasp soldier, not like a Flykinden coward!’ Thalric spat at him.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ Osgan said hollowly. ‘You didn’t see.’

  Thalric opened his mouth to make some harsh comment, but the Mantids had stopped humming.

  Someone else had entered the clearing.

  As she walked into the village, Che barely saw the Mantis-kinden. The guttering, flickering grey fire of Achaeos was all that was worthy of her attention. Then her mind broadened to include the wicker idol and her mind was briefly racked with memories and images, some that she owned and some that were alien to her. This is the thing that Tynisa would never speak of. She saw it with Inapt eyes, and she saw it running with death, quivering with a thousand years of adoration and sacrifice. It spoke of skulls to her, it leered blood, so that she flinched back from it even as the ghost surged forward.

  Then she saw the Mantids, brought into sharp focus as their leader pointed towards her. It was a Mantis woman standing before the idol, and Che did not notice the two Wasp prisoners before her, only that old woman silhouetted before the empty effigy’s power.

  ‘The land has been generous to us today!’ the old Mantis cried out. ‘Take her and bring her here!’

  A dozen of the Mantis-kinden were instantly in motion, falling on Che with expressionless faces, with hungry eyes. She raised her hands to ward them off, and the old woman suddenly screamed.

  Inches from laying hands on her, they stopped. She saw their reserve crack, surprise and shock taking hold, expressions not native to Mantis faces. They were looking back to see their leader on her knees, covering her face. Before her was Achaeos’s blurred ghost.

  The Mantis warriors could not see it, Che realized, but their leader could. Despite everything she had been through, the revelation hit her like a hammer blow. Che dropped to her own knees, staring at the old woman. The Mantis leader –priestess? the unfamiliar word came into her mind – was scrabbling at the muddy, bone-littered ground in front of the idol, trying to claw some distance between herself and the shuddering grey stain in the air. Her eyes were wide.

  Give me your power.

  Che heard the imperious command, and she thought of the old saying, Servants of the Green, Masters of the Grey, and how the Moth-kinden had always commanded, and the Mantids obeyed.

  The old woman was well clear of the idol now, and the ghost flowed into its vacant frame, its trailing edges boiling and dissolving into the surrounding air.

  ‘Che?’ said someone, and she blinked down from the supernatural to the mundane to see Thalric and his comrade staring up at her.

  What can he think? But she was too far removed from any world that Thalric might know. He would only see the Mantis-kinden backing off from her as though she was on fire, as though she was sacred. She held out a hand to him, and somewhere in the gesture it turned from an offer of help to a plea for it. She felt the world swimming, her eyes drawn relentlessly back to the ghost of Achaeos hanging within the idol as though it was caught on the bars.

  Thalric and Osgan were crawling towards her, trying to avoid notice. The Mantids had no time for them any more. They watched only their leader and she watched Achaeos.

  Within the prison of the idol, the grey smudge waxed and grew, forming shapes – hands, features. Che waited for him, waited to recognize those blank eyes, the sharp features. I set you free, she thought. Please, be free.

  It was not working. The ghost billowed and surged within the prison of the canes, but she could see that this was not enough. She heard that same harsh voice again, this time almost spitting the words. Is this all? How many years and how many deaths have led to this? Has all your duty and reverence and labour been to give birth only to this nothing?

  The old woman wailed, hiding her head, and if there were words there, Che could not catch them. The other Mantis-kinden were slipping away into the trees and the water, as if unwilling to witness the torment of their leader.

  You wretched wasters of power! the ghost continued. You traitors to your past! There is nothing here, nothing! Betrayers of your kinden and your heritage! There was no trace in that raging voice of the man she had once known, and Che thought, He is going mad, tied to me, tied to this world. I do not know him any more.

  The tirade continued, showing no sign that it might ever stop, and Che wanted to rush forward, to shout into the face of the idol that he should stop it, that it was doing no good – but she managed one step only. The sheer fury that rippled through the ghost’s substance was too much for her. She had not known that he was capable of it. Perhaps it had taken death to bring it out of him.

  ‘Che, we have to go,’ said Thalric, sounding distant, and she knew from his tone that this was not the first time he had said it. He was barely audible over the ghost’s rantings, but of course he could hear none of that. Only Che herself and the Mantis woman could. But I am not the only one, and I am not insane, and this is real. Something in her, some echo of her past, wailed that this was all impossible, but she found in herself an acceptance that the world was made of these things, that the world worked by such means. It was clear to her now, in the way that the workings of a crossbow or a lock would never again be.

  ‘We must go,’ she agreed, and turned to find Thalric holding up his friend, who was pale and shaking. He met Che’s eyes: two harrowed gazes, each with its load of untranslatable grief. Then she too put an arm around Osgan, keeping clear of the crude bandages, and the two of them helped guide him off into the swamp towards the river. The going was hard enough to limit any further words until the boats found them and they became separated once again.

  Twenty-Three

  They sat in silence in their room within the Collegiate embassy, one standing by the window, the other one by the door: Accius and Malius, the Vekken ambassadors.

  They had been invited to join the hunt, of course: they had ignored the invitation. Instead this had seemed to them a golden opportunity for a little quiet, some space to think without the Collegiates crowding them with their constant noise.

  We have watched for long enough, Malius decided. The King would expect some action from us by now.

  The King does not know the conditions here, Accius thought darkly.

  We are merely being distracted. No doubt that is the intent.

  Agreed. Accius watched Khanaphir servants outside as they tended the gardens of the Place of Honoured Foreigners. This city is irrelevant.

  Primitive, agreed Malius. There is no advantage to be secured for Collegium here. Even ten thousand Khanaphir soldiers could not stand for more than a moment against aVekken army. Bows and spears! In the voice of the mind, derision was so much purer and more satisfying.

  So why are they here? Accius posed the riddle they had been slowly pondering for days.

  Their scholars are almost certainly nothing more than that, Malius admitted reluctantly. They may have other standing orders that have yet to come into effect, but we have witnessed nothing about them to suggest that their claims hide anything more devious.

  They are the typical irrelevant chaff with which Collegium always hides its true purpose, Accius agreed. Which purpose—

  Which purpose is therefore embodied in the person of their ambassador. No doubt we were intended to watch the academics, or the city itself – the Collegiate contempt for the abilities of others, once again. Malius loaded the thought with particular emotion. It was their one pastime, really, this disparagement of their enemies. It enlivened the silence, and it even made the noise more bearable.

  Her movements have been mysterious. She has been evading scrutiny and she has been impossible to track, Accius thought. She has an agenda that even her foolish compatriots do not realize. She is the real reason they are here, and they can look at all the stones and rocks they want. That much is clear.

  That much is clear, Malius echoed. And we must now unearth her purpose. It is obviously something more than we had thought.

  The King was
wise to send us on this mission.

  Indeed. We have seen where she visits most, who she associates with.

  And that skirmish in the courtyard, Accius recalled. How swift she was to disarm it, and then spending so long speaking to the Wasp.

  It is clear they have come here, so far from the Lowlands, because it is a neutral city where arrangements can be made.

  They both paused then. Their joint conclusion, inexorable, was sufficiently dire for neither to wish it voiced. At last it was Malius who finished the thought.

  Collegium has no stomach for another war, therefore they seek an alliance with the Wasp Empire.

  Neither needed to state the obvious consequence of that. Where else could the combined eyes of such an alliance turn, save to Vek?

  We must prevent this, at all costs, Accius decided. We must create disharmony between our enemies.

  There is only one way, Malius concluded for him. Their secrecy shall be their undoing. We must kill both ambassadors. For the glory of Vek.

  Scorpion dens were seldom quiet places at night. The darkness was punctuated by the sounds of drinking, brawling, vendettas abruptly realized, the crash of pottery and the clash of steel, but when the explosion ripped across the night of the city-camp of Gemrar it was of a different order. The entire city was shocked into panicked motion instantly, Scorpions surging out naked or half-dressed, weapons in their hands, shouting at each other or rushing for the gap-toothed outer wall to confront the attack. Even Hrathen himself was momentarily disoriented. He felt the desert chill and in his mind he was back in the Dryclaw during the war, bellowing orders to the Slave Corps officers who had followed him into infamy. The Empire has found us, was his first thought, as he shrugged on his banded armour, took up his shortsword and stepped into the night. His eyes scanned the sky, looking for the Light Airborne or the square bulk of an Imperial heliopter.

  Then he remembered. This desert was the Nem, not its domesticated cousin. He was far from the Empire’s reach.

  ‘Report!’ he bellowed, hoping that one of his men was in earshot. Most of the Scorpions were still rushing outwards, roused to a single purpose by the thought of an assault on their capital. There was a counter-current, however, that was calling some of them somewhere within the city’s bounds. Hrathen joined the latter, sheathing his sword and tightening the buckles of his armour. Whenever the Scorpions got in his way he elbowed them aside, for all that they were bigger than he was. It was the only way.

  He smelled the smoke soon enough, the acrid bite of spent firepowder in his nostrils. Has some fool fired the magazine? But the resulting explosion would have been greater than that, and besides, they weren’t so easy to light, for the firepowder was packed in small charges, little metal-bound barrels not much bigger than a man’s fist. The Imperial engineers had made the stuff as safe as possible, if only because it would be them who would be standing next to it most of the time.

  He spotted the dark-and-light of an Imperial uniform up ahead. ‘Report!’ he shouted again, shouldering forward through the gawping crowd. Once he got clear of the scrum, the story was written plain ahead of him, although it took him a moment to take it in.

  Those ravages time had begun in one of the ruined buildings of Gemrar, an instant’s work had completed. What had previously been a sound enough shell of a building, a small dome-roofed structure with three intact walls, was now a broken eggshell, punched in upon itself, so flattened that very little of it still stood stone upon stone. Hrathen went close enough to see, in the bluish lamplight, what must have been at least three bodies lying torn apart within. He glanced back along the line of devastation, into the mouth of the leadshotter, still wisping smoke. Lieutenant Angved, the engineer, had arrived by now and, true to his trade, was inspecting the weapon for damage, heedless of the carnage nearby.

  There was a Scorpion standing near the device, Hrathen saw, who looked defiant, and pleased with himself. That was all Hrathen needed to see to complete the picture.

  ‘Where is the Warlord?’ he asked.

  ‘At your elbow, Of-the-Empire.’

  He had not sensed her, though she was standing very close. She wore only a long hide hauberk, but she had her spear to hand and her helm on. He felt those red eyes studying him coolly.

  ‘Do you regret giving us these weapons now, Of-the-Empire?’ she asked him. He amused her, Hrathen knew. He was Scorpion enough to touch on her world, but she found the Empire and its ways tedious, pointless. When in her company, he almost felt he agreed.

  ‘I am only glad that I have given you some enemies to turn them on,’ he told her. ‘A man has a right to use his strength. If his strength is in the mind, then so be it.’ He gestured at the siege weapon and its victims. ‘This is no business of mine.’

  ‘That he took your weapon, does that not anger you, O possessive Empire?’ Beneath the rim of the helm, she was smiling through her fangs.

  ‘It is yours, given to you and your people. If he took it from you, then the theft is yours to punish,’ Hrathen said, trying to match her grin. She put him off balance, and he knew it was because his Scorpion side – his rapacious father’s side – wanted her. She was no whore like the Empress, though, who ruled through others’ weakness. Jakal was strong and would seek only strength. She would yield herself to his strength, or else he would force her, or she would kill him. And now she drives me to the second of those, or perhaps the third.

  ‘So glib,’ she berated him. ‘You change your colours, Of-the-Empire, but the black-and yellow-stain lies ever underneath.’ She turned away suddenly, calling out, ‘Genraki!’

  The Scorpion that Hrathen had picked as the culprit came forward. He stopped a safe distance from Jakal, obviously not entirely sure of his own daring now.

  ‘You have long warred with the Friends of Hierkan,’ Jakal observed.

  Genraki merely nodded, keeping a hand close to the hatchet on his belt.

  ‘Are the Friends of Hierkan here to witness? Do they wish to match weapons with Genraki?’

  There were enough glances cast at the staved-in house for Hrathen to suspect that the man had done his work well.

  Jakal spread her arms, walking over to inspect the ruin of a ruin, stepping up on to cracked and tumbled stones, heedless of the bloody jumble beneath. ‘See these stones I stand on now?’ she addressed her people. ‘The walls of Khanaphes are made only of such stones.’

  They went absolutely silent, all of the watching Scorpions, and Hrathen found his heart catching in his chest at the sheer simplicity of it. How many challengers to her authority has she killed, how many conspiracies has she rooted out, that she leads them so deftly? He knew it was more than that, more than just the same brute force that prevailed in the Dryclaw. The Many of Nem had begun to recognize the true value of their leaders and their elders. They followed Jakal through respect and belief in her, and not only because she could put a spear through any one of them.

  But she could. The knowledge excited him, and he forced his thoughts back to business. I am Captain Hrathen of the Imperial Slave Corps, of the Rekef. His heritage, his despoiled blood, surged within him, testing the bounds of his duty.

  He found Angved still checking out the leadshotter. ‘Report,’ he said.

  ‘No damage that I can see.’

  ‘I don’t mean the machine.’

  The engineer looked up at him, and there was a tightness around his eyes. ‘I don’t know what to say, sir. It’s a four-man job to move and load this thing, yet apparently he did it on his own.’

  ‘A good student, then?’

  ‘Not my best, I would have said.’ Angved shook his head. ‘I can’t believe they’re going to let him get away with it.’

  ‘Look at what he’s accomplished,’ Hrathen pointed out. ‘He’s ended a feud, he’s proved himself strong and wily. Why should they punish Genraki when he’s exactly what they want?’

  Genraki himself was returning to them, with a couple of others following in his wake. ‘I shall return th
e machine, Lieutenant,’ he said to Angved, with a surprising deference. The engineer nodded, faking a smile, and the three Scorpion-kinden made light work of wheeling the leadshotter away.

  ‘They learn fast,’ Angved observed. ‘You were right on that, sir. They’re not disciplined, and it’s difficult to get a decent speed up, because they always want to watch the shots, see the damage and have a bit of a talk about it, but they’re strong and they’re tough. Make good Auxillians, is my report.’

  Hrathen nodded, wondering again if that was why they were here –and if not, what then? ‘But you’re not comfortable with them,’ he finished.

  ‘Permission to speak freely, sir?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Are you comfortable with them?’ Angved enquired. ‘I know it’s the fashion to call people like these savages, but with these people it’s true. It’s not that they’re stupid, it’s just … they have no rules. Shedding blood means nothing to them, either their own or anyone else’s. I can’t even understand how they survive from generation to generation. How do their children even live to full growth?’

  ‘You want to know?’

  ‘I want to understand, sir.’

  ‘When she’s close to term, the mother leaves the camp, goes off and fends for herself in the desert,’ Hrathen told him, remembering. ‘She stays there two, three years – a Scorpion child learns fast, grows fast. By then it can walk, run, fight with the other children. Then she comes back to the camp and gives the child to the tribe, and it has no mother or father from that day. They hold their children in common, and soon enough nobody recalls ancestry. No families, Angved – nothing to stand between the individual and the group.’

  ‘That sounds harsh, sir.’

  ‘Life is harsh. Life in the Dryclaw or the Nem is harsh. If a child was linked to its mother, it would become a weapon against her. Their best chance for survival is anonymity: it breeds strength, self-reliance.’ Hrathen smiled, and he saw Angved pale at the sight of those underslung tusks in a Wasp-kinden face. ‘It breeds a callous disregard for others, but think how much effort the Empire puts into teaching us something the Scorpions learn for free.’