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 the 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.'
Angved remained carefully silent after that.
Hrathen chuckled. 'Just teach them to destroy,' he said. 'Teach them to break walls with the leadshotters, to break men with the crossbows. Then we will take them to Khanaphes and simplify the maps — one less city in the world.'
'Why, though?' Angved asked. 'What's the point? Why does the Empire want Khanaphes gone?'
'Think like the Scorpions,' Hrathen told him, not unkindly. 'We do it because we can.'
Hrathen sou
ght out Angved the next morning, finding him not at the leadshotters, amidst the noise and the smoke and the curses, but hidden away beneath a lean-to of chitin over wood. The engineer was cooking something, or at least heating something in a small pan.
'Not deserting your post, is it?' Hrathen asked, looming. Angved looked up at him, unalarmed.
'At the moment we're just working on speed, Captain, seeing if these brutes can manage faster than a shot every twenty minutes. They already know what they're doing, but they lose focus so quickly.' The engineer shrugged. 'My lads out there can shout at them without me needing to strain my throat, so I decided to do a little investigating.'
'Really?' Hrathen knelt by him. 'Beyond your brief, isn't it?'
'Engineers and Slave Corps both, we think for ourselves,' Angved replied, meeting Hrathen's small, yellow eyes. 'This rock-oil of theirs, they use it just for lighting, yes?'
'What else is there?' Hrathen asked. The engineer smiled at that.
'It's a slow-burning stable mineral oil, sir. That's useful for engineering, and there are pools of it all over, probably entire lakes of it underground. Would they trade it, do you think? For more weapons?'
'I don't see why not. Like you say, there's no shortage of the stuff.' Hrathen, no artificer, shrugged the idea off. 'Are they going to be ready?'
'It's up to them, now. I'm keeping the artillery under my thumb, but the crossbows are already out there — the warriors we taught are teaching the others, as best they can. It's not difficult, to point a crossbow. That's why we like them.'
Hrathen nodded, standing up straight. It had been like watching a slow-building rockslide, seeing the Scorpions take to the crossbows. The weapons were old Imperial Auxillian standard issue kit, second-hand and almost obsolete, but for the Many of Nem they had been a revolution.
Jakal had ordered her two advisers to examine them first. The old man, with his fetishes and charms of cogs and gears, had climbed all over them, muttering to himself, testing the action on the weapons, thrumming the strings with his thumb-claw. He had reported that they were good, a worthy armament for the Host of the Nem. Next, the young man, wearing a cloak of clattering chitin shards, had walked round the wagons with his eyes closed, trailing one hand near them. He had then announced that the land believed it was well time for the city of Khanaphes to be broken open like an egg.
Scorpion-kinden made bad archers, and Hrathen knew it well. It was their claws, arching over forefinger and thumb, that got in the way, snagging or even severing a bowstring as the arrow was loosed. Those few of the locals who still preferred the bow had cut notches into their claws to hook the string with, but they were poor shots even so. Most reverted to throwing axes, spears and javelins.
The big, pincered hands of the Scorpion-kinden could manage a crossbow, though. They were still slightly clumsy with it, but they were strong enough to re-cock their weapons without the bracing and ratcheting the makers had intended. Once the crossbow was loaded they could pull a trigger as well as anyone. Eyes that had learned to foresee the flight of a spear could adjust to the swift shiver of a crossbow quarrel. There were hundreds of them, now busy eating through the stock of bolts that Hrathen had brought with him. Hundreds more were crafting new quarrels, with more and more confidence, out of chitin and wood and pillaged metal. There were not enough crossbows to go round, but about half the Scorpions were unable to use them anyway, crippled by their Inapt heritage. These would become the shock troops, the warriors of the traditional way, using greatsword and halberd and double-handed axe. There was a new fighting nobility emerging, though, and it brandished a crossbow.
We have brought a revolution, Hrathen reflected, and was slightly awed by the thought. The population of Gemrar had doubled in the last tenday, was set to double again. Allied tribes had been summoned out of the mid-desert, eager to have their part in the destruction of their age-old foe.
'Why do your people hate Khanaphes so?' he had asked Jakal once.
'Of-the-Empire, you try so hard to be Of-the-Scorpion, but you will never succeed,' she had replied, with a cruel smile. 'So we are told that our ancestors fought with theirs when this land was yet green, when these broken cities still thrived. So we are told that, of all the peoples in their Dominion, only we did not bow the knee to their Masters. So we are told all of this. What other reason do we need but that we can, and that they are there?'
'Jakal means to leave in a tenday,' he told Angved now. 'Enough time?'
'We can practise on the road, when we camp,' the engineer said. 'They'll be rough but they'll be ready, as we say.'
'Good.' Hrathen passed his eyes over the camp, not quite looking and yet finding. He saw the dark armour of a small knot of men and women. A stab of annoyance pricked him. We should do something about them sooner, rather than later, he thought.
They were traders, he understood — the only traders who had dared to come into the Nem to deal with the Scorpions, men and women in dark leathers or dark metal, and with that defiant open gauntlet emblazoned on their tabards.
'Since when do you tolerate merchants?' he had asked Jakal.
'Since they show us they are strong,' she had replied. 'Is Of-the-Empire jealous?' He knew she was leading him on, and part of him knew that he was letting her. She was drawing a reaction from him, and it would eventually lead to a coupling or a blood-letting. He was uncomfortably aware that the choice would be hers.
'Strong?' he asked, but then she had pointed out to him the Iron Glove's chief factor in the Nem, and he had understood. Scorpion-kinden were powerful, standing half a foot or more over the Wasps, but in the midst of the Iron Glove people stood a Mole Cricket, watching his minions distribute swords and metal ingots. Now Hrathen could see the same giant walking with impunity amongst the Scorpions, overseeing business.
Yes, we will have to deal with you, slave. There were three Mole-Cricket enclaves in Imperial hands, their populations decreasing, generation to generation, as the Empire siphoned off their menfolk for work in the mines or for the army. That prodigious strength and stamina, and their way with rock and earth, was too useful to conserve. The Empire spent it all too lavishly.
The huge creature noticed Hrathen's interest and strode over, putting him under its shadow. A runaway slave, Hrathen decided, or an Auxillian deserter. How else would a Mole Cricket come to be here? The Iron Glove had a lot to answer for.
'You wish to make a purchase, Captain?' it rumbled. It had a name, and its name was Meyr.
Hrathen stared up at the creature. The bastard must be eleven feet tall, he reckoned. Meyr wore a vast hauberk of leather with metal plates sewn into it, and an axe the size of an ordinary man was thrust through his broad leather belt. His monstrous hands had great square nails that looked every bit the equal of a Scorpion's claws. Certainly, Meyr was the face of the Iron Glove as far as the Scorpion-kinden were concerned, big enough and strong enough to protect his people from their depredations.
I'll deal with you, soon, Hrathen promised himself, but he said nothing, just ignoring the creature and walking away.
Instead he went to find the officer of the Light Airborne that he had brought with him. The man was packed ready to go, along with half a dozen of his men. Their leader was a hollow-cheeked type, his receding hair cropped close. His mouth crooked up on one side into a dry little half-smile, as though enjoying some small joke that only he was privy to. As he was the ranking Rekef officer here, Hrathen thought that might be true. His name was Sulvec and he was obviously Rekef Inlander to the core, for Hrathen knew enough to recognize a man who had given himself over heart and mind to the service.
'Not forgotten anything?' Hrathen asked him, realizing that if his own task was intended to be a suicide mission, then Sulvec would be his executioner. He wanted to show the man he was not afraid. Scorpion thinking, since Wasp-kinden tread carefully where the Rekef are. The fact that half of Sulvec's men were staying with Hrathen's party had not escaped him. He was plainly not trusted, but that was hardl
y news.
'We'll depart presently.' Sulvec's fragment of smile made its inevitable appearance: it signalled disdain for everything Hrathen was or could be. 'Don't be too long in coming, Captain.'
'Scorpion-kinden move fast,' Hrathen told him. 'Make sure we don't outstrip you.'
'Hm.' A slight noise was the response, all the humour the man would voice. 'We'll liaise with you when you arrive with your thousands, Captain.'
Hrathen just nodded, and in the next moment the seven Rekef men were airborne, streaking across the sky towards distant Khanaphes with a speed born of well-practised Art, and Hrathen had no idea what their orders were, for implementation once they arrived in Khanaphes.
And if they are to betray me? Do they plan to win the Khanaphir by betraying the Many of Nem? He considered the possibility coldly. Then they do not understand what the Scorpion-kinden are capable of, he decided, and left it at that.
With Hrathen gone, the Mole Cricket-kinden called Meyr took stock. He had a dozen people here: enough, when allied to his strength, to dissuade the Scorpions from precipitate action. The Scorpions would trade whenever there was reason not to steal or take. The Iron Glove turned up with small shipments, always promising more in the next, each visit a tentative link in the mercantile chain. Meyr was a cautious man like most of his kind and, given a free choice, he would not want to be the Iron Glove ambassador to the Nem. He paid his debts, though. Totho had taken him in when he had been fleeing the Empire, and Meyr had been a slave long enough that working for a living, to another man's orders, had become second nature. He might hate it in himself, but he could not deny it.
'We're going to have trouble soon,' he said softly. His second-in-command, a Solarnese woman named Faighl, was nodding. She was a tough, compact woman, a mercenary out of Chasme for more than a decade before signing on with the new-formed Glove. She had already killed two Scorpions who assumed that her size meant weakness rather than a killing speed. Now they gave her space at their fires and drank with her.
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