The Scarab Path sota-5

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  There was a regularity to some of it, a distinctiveness to the angles. Something leapt inside him. Ahead of them was something that was not grown naturally, but built. But what? Where in the wastes are we? The question was swiftly followed by, It doesn't matter. We have no other compass point. Thalric lurched up, slinging an arm around Osgan to haul the man to his feet.

  'Go,' he urged, and cast himself off into the water, his wings surging instinctively to half-carry him, with Osgan a weight at the end of his arm. It was all too slow, he realized at once. They were too exposed. He gave his wings their full rein, ignoring Osgan's protest as his unwounded arm was almost wrenched out of its socket. Between the trees, Thalric spotted crude huts, barely more than platforms raised above the water and roofed with leaves. He saw movement too, spreading out to either side of them. They had been noticed.

  'Khanaphes!' Thalric shouted out. 'Khanaphes!' hoping it would be enough to save them.

  An arrow danced past him from behind, a hurried shot surely. He did not turn, continued towing Osgan through the water, knowing only from the man's curses that he was still alive. He had a brief glimpse of a silvery-skinned Mantis woman with bowstring drawn back, the arrow loosed instantly. There was no sound from behind, but from her very expression Thalric knew she had found her target.

  He dragged Osgan on to a mud bank. They were sprawled at the edge of the village, no more than a cluster of spindly shacks gathered about a mound of higher ground cleared of vegetation. Knowing that nothing he could do now would matter, Thalric collapsed onto his back, feeling his muscles burn in protest. Osgan was wheezing and choking beside him, shuddering like a dying thing, but somehow still alive. He had sprouted no new arrows since, and Thalric could only hope that the assassins had not survived their clash with the Marsh's own killers.

  He sensed movement nearby and pushed himself up on to his elbow. The Mantis-kinden were approaching, arrows nocked to their bows and spears levelled. These Marsh people were smaller than the Lowlander kinden that Thalric was familiar with, but they had the same poise, the same angular grace. Their faces had the same insular hostility, too. He held up a closed fist to them. 'We are friends — we are guests of the city of Khanaphes.'

  They had formed a ragged horseshoe around the two Wasps, leaving open the path leading to the village. One of them, a woman looking older than the rest, jabbed her head in that direction, and Thalric let out a great sigh and struggled to his knees.

  'Come on,' he told Osgan, but the man would not move.

  'Can't …' he whined. 'No further …'

  Two of the Mantids were there instantly, catching him by the arms and lifting him up, ignoring his screams as the sudden movement tore at his wound. Thalric pushed one of them aside, moving to catch Osgan. Then he was very still.

  Osgan swayed, still supported by one of the Mantids, almost clinging to him. His injured arm was held tight to his chest, the bindings newly bloody. Thalric felt the tiny pinpoint of sharp pain that had come to rest under his jaw, assuming at first it was a spearhead, then knowing it for an arrow-point. He took a good moment, in lieu of any fatal attempt at action, to study their rescuers.

  These were not the shaven-headed servants who had been poling the fishing boats up and down the river to Amnon's tune. They were not clad as Khanaphir menials, merely a little hide and chitin and fish-scale to cover their modesty. Their long hair was pale, bound back with rings of bone and amber.

  'We are not your enemies,' Thalric said carefully. In his mind the sands of the archer's strength were running out. She must soon either take the arrow away, or loose it. 'We mean you no harm. Return us to Khanaphes and you shall be rewarded.'

  Osgan gave a bark of pain, dragged without warning towards the village. Thalric twitched, poised on the point of the arrow and knowing that there were enough of them to make an end of him whichever way he turned. Without warning the archer took a step away, the point still unwavering. Thalric followed Osgan's halting progress, conscious that every arrowhead and spear was aimed at him. Ahead, Osgan gave out a horrified cry.

  The mound of earth that the village was strung around was not empty, not quite. They had erected something there, that Thalric had not registered before, his first glance letting the crude canework merge into the struts and poles of the surrounding village. He blinked, trying to identify what it was. Osgan was struggling now, shrieking for them to let him go, but three of them continued propelling him towards it effortlessly.

  It's a statue, Thalric realized, a statue reworked to the locals' resources. Just as they had not a coin's-worth of metal in their possession, even their weapons being made of bone and wood, so there was no stone to their statue, just a lattice of canes lashed together into a shape that seemed abstract at first. Until he stood directly before it, and the shifting angles and planes of it suddenly made a picture.

  It was a mantis, an openwork sketch of a mantis rendered in three dimensions, its killing arms raised high above them. The chamber of its body was large enough to fit a man, and Thalric knew this because the bones of the last occupant were still inside, buzzing with flies and dripping with a few lingering maggots. Osgan was still kicking vainly and crying out, and Thalric knew that somehow this thing, this idol, had become Tisamon in his mind, that what he was fighting against was more within his own head than outside it.

  'What is this?' Thalric demanded, his throat suddenly dry. 'Do you kill the guests of the city so close to its walls?' The Khanaphes card was the only one he had to play, but he had put it on the table three times now without eliciting any interest. Now, at last, an old Mantis woman stepped between him and the idol. Uncomfortably close, she rested one forearm on his shoulder, so he felt her fighting spines dig slightly into his neck.

  'You are ignorant,' she said, and it took him a moment to unpick her accent. 'You are from far away and know nothing.'

  'I know that they will send people to look for me — that my absence will stir the city up, and my own people as well.'

  'Do not threaten us on our sacred ground,' she warned him, voice still soft but the spines jabbing him briefly. 'The city shall not come here, and you were hunted here by other foreign hands. There shall be no search to find your bones. We have made our pact with the Masters: any that cross this far are ours. It is our right.'

  Another bloody thing the locals could have told us: that their tame servants have murderous relatives just a short walk away!

  'I will fight,' Thalric said. His understanding of even the Lowlander Mantis-kinden was limited, so he had little to work with. 'Let me fight for our freedom. Choose your best, if you will.'

  The old woman smirked. 'Your death shall not be at our hands, foreigner. Your blood shall be drunk by the earth, and by the avatar. Your comrade first, though. We must shed his blood while he still has it.'

  They were opening up the wicker casing of the effigy. Osgan had collapsed, all his limbs drawn in, shuddering and lost to his own terrors. And perhaps that's a mercy. Thalric made a sudden lunge back from the woman, feeling the barbs of her arm gash his flesh. He tried to put a hand out towards her, with some wild idea of holding her hostage, but someone struck him with a spear-shaft behind his knees as another glanced from the back of his head. He joined Osgan on the ground, reeling. Around them, the Mantis-kinden had begun a soft humming, barely audible save that they were all doing it, a slow tune, but a gradually building one.

  'Osgan,' Thalric said, hunching closer. 'Osgan, snap out of it!'

  The former quartermaster gave a great gasp, staring upwards at the latticed idol above them. 'We're going to die,' he said.

  '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. T
he 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.