The Scarab Path sota-5

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  'Remarkable customs,' Berjek said, returning inside himself, giving every impression of being the muddled academic missing the point of everything he had just witnessed. In his wake, Che was now left with only one person on the balcony beside herself.

  'Help me,' Petri Coggen implored her, as she stood there in her nightshirt, hands clutching each other before her. 'Please, Che, before it's too late.'

  It had not occurred to her that the First Minister of Khanaphes would be waiting for her. Of course, he made a great show of finishing up business first. When she stepped into the great hall of the Scriptora, with its traitor fountain playing its serenade to the Aptitude of its creators, she found him at the far end, giving quick instructions to a clutch of clerks. Even as Che approached him, though, the menials began to disappear, bowing backwards off into oblivion, leaving Ethmet to turn and beam at her politely. She knew, then, that he had been here for this reason only: to meet with her.

  'O Beautiful Foreigner, O Ambassador,' he said to her, 'what favour may the city of Khanaphes enact for you?'

  'I need to speak with you,' she said. She had resolved to be blunt, because she needed answers both for herself and for Collegium.

  'Of course. Nothing would be of more pleasure,' he assured her. 'Would it displease you if I pass about my duties as we speak?' If he had been a younger man, and of another city, she might have accused him of mockery. The Khanaphir could revile you to your face, though, and you would never know it for sure.

  'We would need privacy, I think,' she said. He was already turning away, pottering off into the next room, so she was forced to follow.

  'Ah, well, there are only servants to hear us, and they know their duty is to keep their ears close about them,' Ethmet said absently. He plays the part of the avuncular old man so well.

  The room he had passed into gave her a moment's pause. It was a library, she guessed, or perhaps just some grand office of government. The circular floor was picked out in an intricate mosaic design devoid of meaning, and the walls were lined with wooden racks, criss-crossing diagonal beams that reached up to the high windows visible far above Che's head. Steps on either side led to balconies for access to the higher shelves and, when they entered, there were at least two score clerks removing scrolls, filing them, or amending and updating them. Within a minute of Ethmet's entrance, and without any signal that Che could discern, they had all carefully rolled up their work and departed from the room. Each one's manner suggested merely that they had been about to do so in any case, and that Ethmet's entry had not swayed them in the least. A moment later, as the shuffling of sandals receded, Che and Ethmet were left alone in the echoing room.

  'You wished, I believe, to have words with me?' the old man enquired. He was standing at the nearest desk, a simple slab of stone with some half-furled scrolls resting upon it.

  Che seized her courage in both hands, determined to crack the First Minister's shell. 'What happened to the scholar, Kadro?' she asked.

  Ethmet did not even blink. 'We have been unable to locate him, I am sorry to say.'

  Che gritted her teeth. 'It has been … suggested to me that he may have been asking awkward questions, that the Ministers of Khanaphes may not have approved of his researches.'

  Ethmet's smile remained distantly polite. 'I understand only that your compatriot was given to asking his questions, impolitic or not, in unwise places. He was seen much in the Marsh Alcaia, even out in the desert, where the writ of the Khanaphir Dominion runs regrettably thin. In seeking such company it would seem most likely that the manner of his researches, and not the subject of them, proved the cause of his difficulties.' He gathered up some of the scrolls and made his patient way towards a flight of steps.

  'You're telling me that you gave no orders …' Che trailed off. In the face of such denial, such a wall of denial, what can I say?

  'None at all. Why should we?' Ethmet replied, taking the stairs one at a time. Even in those few words, Che had the absolute certainty that he was lying. I can prove nothing, but Petri is right. She was becoming used to intuitions that arrived without logic, with nothing but an assurance of their own truth.

  She followed him up the steps, trying to formulate the words that might trip him up, expose the man behind the mask. Then he remarked, as blandly as ever, 'I understand that you have succumbed to the vice of Profanity.'

  She stopped, as thoroughly thrown as she had ever been, ice coursing through her veins. This trap has sprung the wrong way. Ethmet was not even looking at her, carefully filing the scrolls, one by one.

  'I …' she began, her heart hammering. She waited for the guards to suddenly spring out from their hiding places, but guards there were none, just herself and the old man within the big, echoing chamber.

  'We make it a crime,' Ethmet continued, still at his deliberate filing, and she thought, The First Minister does not do a clerk's job. He has brought me up here for some reason.

  'I … I know,' she stammered. 'What …What will you …?'

  'Do not fear.' He looked at her directly then. 'It is a law that is enforced only against those who are not … worthy.'

  'I do not understand.' And she genuinely did not understand. He was waiting for her, testing her.

  'Word has reached us, O Foreigner, of you and your unusual heritage.'

  'They thought I was of the blood of …' She could not bring herself to say it, but he completed the thought for her.

  'Of the Masters. But you are not.' He was at the balcony rail now, hands resting on the carved stone. 'But you are special nevertheless, or so we have been led to believe. Not for many ages has Khanaphes welcomed one like you. The eating of Fir is a practice not forbidden, but restricted. Through Fir do those of us bearing the blood hear the voice of the Masters.'

  She gaped at him. 'But you don't mean … you mean that … the Ministers? You?'

  'The sin of Profanity is profane only when committed by the unrighteous who seek to steal that which is given freely to those who deserve it.'

  She clenched her fists, utterly lost now. 'Tell me what you're talking about,' she urged him. 'Just tell me … tell me something plainly, please.' She had joined him at the balcony's edge, but his gaze did not even flick towards her.

  'You know,' he said. 'Am I plain enough in that?'

  'But I don't-' She stopped and, at last, followed his gaze down to the tiled floor of the chamber. After a moment she said, 'Oh.'

  The mosaic, the tiles of sepia and black and grey, swam before her eyes, and she felt Ethmet take her arm to keep her from simply pitching over the rail. What had been an abstract arabesque down below was suddenly recognizable, stylized but familiar. The floor was a map.

  Khanaphes lay at the centre, she now saw plainly, but the extent of the map was large, the world stretching away on every side. She found the Sunroad Sea, and from that guessed at north, seeing nothing of the Empire, no Capitas, none of the centres of Imperial Power. But that city is where Myna stands today, and that other one for Maynes. Her eyes were drawn westwards: Darakyon was a living Mantis Hold, and west of that lay Tharn, but no Helleron. There were other cities marked, whose names she could not guess at, of kinden that perhaps she had never heard of. The edge of the Commonweal was picked out in a glorious detail beyond her own people's modern knowledge of it. She followed the unfamiliar lines of what should have been a familiar land. There was a coastal city there that she knew must be marked 'Pathis', for the name 'Collegium' was only five hundred years old. This map was from an age that made close cousins of the Wasp Empire and her own home city — and infant cousins at that. A map that had been scuffed by the feet of Khanaphir clerks for …

  'How long?' she asked.

  'I cannot say, save to say that the Scriptora was not young, when the Masters ordained that a map of their world should be placed within.' Ethmet's voice was soft and sad. 'O Honoured Foreigner, you see it plain, do you not?'

  'I do,' she said. This was not a map as she had once been used to, drawn from th
e precise cartography of grids and measurements that the Collegium mapmakers taught. There was no regular scale down there, and the lands around the Jamail river were shown disproportionately large, but it all fell into place before her eyes. It gave up its secrets with barely a struggle.

  'I have never seen it,' Ethmet whispered.

  She could not drag her eyes from the map. 'What do you mean?'

  'I know it as a map, for our older records speak of it as such, but I am not so blessed as you. I have a touch of the blood of the Masters — in truth, enough to pursue my duties as my fathers have done before me — but you are truly blessed.'

  She turned to him at last, tearing her gaze away from the inlaid patterns. 'But the Masters are gone, aren't they? That pyramid out there is their tomb, their monument. That's what I …' Had anyone actually told her that? 'That's what I always thought …'

  'Oh, it is indeed their tomb,' he whispered, and suddenly he stood uncomfortably close. 'But they are not dead. They shall walk their city once more, and in time they shall call for you — and you shall go to meet them.'

  Twenty-Five

  'There's post waiting with your lunch, sir.'

  Totho nodded absently, brushing past the man. He was in a poor mood. He had spent a restless night thinking towards some way of reclaiming Che, but reaching no conclusions. He only hoped that Amnon was having better luck with his chosen Collegiate woman.

  Of course he is, the little voice inside Totho — the one he had been born with, that had started speaking to him as soon as he had been old enough to realize what he was — piped up again. Amnon was big, handsome, charismatic. He would not need to do much to get the woman to notice him. Life had been kind to Amnon. Totho doubted the big man had ever had to work too hard at getting anything.

  I have had to work, though. It felt bitter. Even in Collegium, which prided itself on its industry, the dream was to become rich enough not to have to work. That dream was inherited from the past, when Beetles had worked and Moth-kinden had spent their time in idleness, living off the sweat of their slaves. The dream was further honed by the effortless lives of the Spider-kinden Aristoi, who had nothing better to do in life than intrigue against one another. Whereas I have had to work for everything. Delivered to an orphanage by unknown parents, tinkering with mechanisms from the age of five, competing against dozens of others for a College place that would have been his for the asking, if only he had been some rich magnate's son. Yes, he had worked: to get where he was now, he had not only got his hands dirty, he had steeped them in blood to the elbows.

  I rearmed the world, equipped it in my own image. I destroyed an army. I halted the Empire, drove them out of Szar. But he did not like to think of Szar. He was not yet ready for that. If I had been some magnate's son, I would have needed to do nothing, to secure my future. To come this far I have had to wade hip-deep in bad choices and bad deeds. And still she turns away from me.

  Lunch was set out for him, but he spared it barely a look. There were some sealed documents beside it, and a roll of cloth tape — and a Fly-kinden man. 'You're post, are you?' He raised an eyebrow.

  'Tirado,' the man confirmed. 'Message from Factor Meyr, your eyes only.'

  'Well, get out until I've finished eating,' Totho snapped, deciding that cocky Fly-kinden annoyed him. Some of them seemed to think that rules and authority didn't apply to them. The Fly looked put out, but he stepped down from the table and flitted out through the door. Totho sat down, pushing the food away despite his recent words. The papers were all manifests, he could look those over later. He broke each seal, to be sure, then laid them to one side.

  The tape was another matter, a little spark of daylight showing through the clouds that were on his mind. He reached into his pouch and took out one of the Iron Glove's newest artifacts. It was hand-sized, and looked mostly like a very small drum with a winding handle, as though someone had decided that even a drum was too complex to learn to play, and had therefore invented an automatic one. Where the handle joined the drum there was a spidery little arrangement of teeth and tiny pins.

  Totho took the reel of cloth, a woven strip barely an inch across. It was an ugly piece of work, the threads jumbled together without pattern, looking like some clothier's reject remnant. With the utmost care, he fed the end of it into the teeth of the machine until it caught. He then wound it through a few inches, listening carefully. The sound that echoed from the drum was almost too faint to hear. Patiently, Totho fiddled with it, turning the clamps to increase the space inside the drum itself. In this small exercise of his skill, he had forgotten about Che or Amnon, or all the rest of it. The intricacy of the device itself consumed him.

  He wound the cloth back, and then began winding it forwards again, letting the delicate pins brush against the rugged fabric, and their vibrations carry down to the drum itself. Into the room, small and distant-sounding, came a voice.

  It was a voice Totho knew well, after two years' association and more. It was the voice of the senior partner of the Iron Glove, and the man after whom the entire enterprise was named.

  'Hello, Totho,' said the scratchy tones.

  'Hello, Dariandrephos,' Totho replied, even though there was nobody there to hear him. A sense of wonder still came to him, although they had been using these similophone tapes for two months now. It was the secret of the Iron Glove. Only he and Drephos possessed the drum-like similophone ears, and so far Drephos had the one weaver, the machine that took the sound of his voice and wove it into cloth. He was working, however, on a model that was portable.

  The winding handle carried the tape further, projecting Drephos's voice, dry and tendays old, into the factora in Khanaphes. Totho was careful to keep his speed steady, so as to pitch the man's voice right. When the first similophone tape had been heard, he had been left in stitches, making Drephos squeak and drawl as he tried to match the pace.

  'First,' came the tiny voice, 'you should know that the Empire has made some advances in retroengineering the Solarnese-style aeromotives that we sold them. I understand that they will be in a position to upgrade their Spearflight models within the next two months, at this rate. Our new design of rotary piercer has exceeded expectations to the extent that I am uncomfortable with allowing them onto the market without consideration, and I would value your input when you return, which I trust will be shortly. Matters with the Empire are likely to reach a head soon, one way or another.

  'Less importantly, our fourth factory assembled and test-fired the first greatshotter design yesterday. The results were remarkable, but the damage to the prototype was such that it required complete disassembly: the barrel integrity does not stand up to the pressures generated. I am loath to look for new materials right now, but aviation steel, in the thickness required, does not offer the absorbent flexibility …'

  Totho let the details wash over him, considering each, letting them settle in his mind. This was the important thing. In such a wash of technical minutiae he felt happy, as he always had, and such imprecise calculations as the affections of Cheerwell Maker could be temporarily shunted aside. At this late age, in this foreign land, he had found for himself a surrogate father. Oh, Dariandrephos was a monster, for certain: he had no conscience, no humanity, no regard whatsoever for any who could not contribute to the world of artifice. He would destroy Khanaphes without a thought if he needed to, because he considered the city a waste of stone and wood and flesh. Drephos was all these things, but he was a man whose priorities struck a chord in his protege — and he valued Totho. For the sake of Totho's artificing Drephos indulged him like a spoilt child, even when Totho's preoccupations went beyond the older halfbreed's comprehension.

  The tape kept ravelling on, and Totho leant back in his chair and listened to it as though it was music: the pinnacle of artificing used to bring to him the furthest advances in artifice. It was how life should always work, and so seldom did. And if he missed any of it, or wanted to hear it all again, then he could do so. He could recoil the tap
e and wind it through again and again. Drephos's words, anybody's words, need never be lost. The Iron Glove had found a way to cheat time and death.

  We should take one to Collegium, record some of Stenwold's speeches …

  At last the report came to its close, leaving Totho smiling slightly, still, at the ingenuity of it. Belatedly he remembered the Fly-kinden, now kept waiting for an hour or more. With a scowl, Totho called him in. Tirado had obviously been reminded about being a good Iron Glove employee in the interim, because he saluted properly this time.

  'What's happened to Meyr?' Totho demanded.

  'Nothing when I left, but that's a state of affairs not likely to continue,' Tirado reported. He handed over Meyr's wrapped slate. Totho was still slouching easily as he started to read but, after only a few words, he sat bolt upright and started paying real attention.

  It was late in the day when she finally broke away from the Scriptora.

  She had expected the guards, after what Ethmet had said. She had expected to be thrown into the cells to await the Masters' pleasure — a pleasure that would surely see her rot before it was made manifest. She had come to believe that the Masters' bloodlines might still echo within Khanaphes, in men like Ethmet or women like the Mother, but not their voices or footsteps. That was the fiction that the city was built on — and that perhaps Ethmet even believed — that the Masters would one day come forth again and take up the reins. It was a foundation that was concrete as long as it was believed, that would be shifting sand the moment it was doubted.

  He had shown her the book, which had made all the difference. She was becoming used to sharing her life with the miraculous, but the book made the miraculous commonplace. Ethmet had taken her to a small room in the Scriptora where stonemasons were working. They were carving out the hieroglyphs that infested Khanaphes like indecipherable locusts, and they had for reference a book.