The Scarab Path sota-5

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  'What can we do?' Amnon asked softly.

  'I don't know,' Totho said. 'I'd suggest surrender but, given the enemy, I don't think that's an option.'

  Later, Totho sat in the Iron Glove factora, listening to the sounds of his men packing up everything for their departure. Soon they would come for the crate he was sitting on, down here in the cellar. For now it provided a quiet place to think: about Amnon and about Che, and about what Che had said.

  What if …? It was a poisonous game. It was a game for weak people who would rather not live with the decisions they had made, or who had made no decisions at all and had found a bad end by following the river's flow.

  I have always made my own decisions. It seemed a fragile thing to be proud of but he clung to it. His past was like a string of beads, each representing a point where he could have chosen otherwise. Should I have stayed with Stenwold and Che rather than running away? That begged the question of 'What if Salma had gone to Tark alone, without Totho's help?' and it was unanswerable at this remove. But if I had stayed, I would have done something I would regret. I would have killed Achaeos, or else got myself killed. I could not have borne the two of them together.

  The next bead was, 'What if I had not saved Salma, by selling myself to the Empire?' Salma would be dead, no what-ifs about it. But then Salma had died anyway, on some bloody battlefield. So it became just another choice he had made and that he would have to take responsibility for. Which led to Che's question of whether he could simply have taken off the shackles and fled.

  It has always been so easy for Che, so clear-cut. He did not have the words to explain to her how he had found a place for himself under the black and gold flag, at the side of the maverick Colonel-Auxillian. There was nowhere in the world that was home to me, until I met Drephos. He could not pretend ignorance of her likely reaction to all he had done. He had done it, in fact, to try to exorcize himself from her influence. Che, his nagging conscience, his residual sense of right and wrong, just a gnat in the face of Drephos's comforting philosophy of technological advance.

  But, even then, I helped. Another straw to cling to. He had saved Che from the interrogators once more, and alone this time, without any killer Mantis or Mynan resistance to help him. He had passed the snapbow plans to the Lowlands, arming Stenwold and his allies with the fruits of Totho's own invention. He had liberated Szar.

  He had liberated Szar. In doing so, he had saved the Mynan resistance, created the Three-city Alliance. He had remade the map. He, Totho, the halfbreed.

  Yet she hated him for it. Even this great Right had become a wrong. And if I had killed them all with a blade, like Tisamon? Would that be right, then? It was the means, the coldly efficient means, that so horrified the woman. He could eviscerate as many Wasps as he wanted on the battlefield, but woe betide him if he preferred to use his brain.

  We use whatever tools are given to us. I am no great warrior, but is that what she'd prefer? To have me dead alongside Salma, sword in hand?

  Perhaps that was indeed what she would prefer. A dead Totho of unstained character would be easier for her to file away and forget.

  He heard boots on the steps leading to the cellar, and Corcoran peered down at him. 'Sir,' the Solarnese man enquired, 'how's it going down here?'

  'How's the ship?' Totho asked him from his seat on the remaining crate.

  'Every bolt tightened, ready to go, sir,' Corcoran reported, taking the last few steps down. 'The lads are wondering when we're moving out. Those Scorpions won't wait for ever before kicking this place in like an egg.'

  'We should leave here,' Totho said.

  Corcoran regarded him dubiously. 'Well yes, sir, that was the idea.'

  'What will happen to the city, after we're gone?' asked Totho.

  Corcoran stared at him. 'Same thing as if we were still here. It's not as though it was ever going to be much of a market for us. Come on, chief, give us the word. We'll leadshot their gate down, if they won't open up for us.'

  Totho rested his head in his heads. 'Corcoran …'

  'Sir?'

  'Are we doing the right thing, do you think?'

  'By leaving? Absolutely. Staying about would be a bloody stupid thing to do, sir.' The Solarnese was beginning to sound unnerved.

  'But it would be the right thing,' Totho murmured, almost to himself. 'That's how she'd see it.'

  They heard a heavy, slow tread above them. Meyr the Mole Cricket was negotiating the steps.

  'Here you both are,' the big man said, the gloom of the cellar no barrier to his sight. 'What's this?'

  'Meyr,' Totho said, standing, 'do you think we should leave?'

  The Mole Cricket was now halfway down the stairs, hunching forward, yet with his back and shoulders still brushing the cellar ceiling. 'I think we should,' he said carefully, but in a tone that invited further comment.

  'And what do you yourself want to do?' Totho asked him.

  'My people are slow to anger,' Meyr said ponderously. 'We lack the fire to make us proper fighters. Still.' He let the word sit there for a moment. 'Still, I would very much like to kill some Scorpions and Wasps. Very much so.'

  And is that right? Is it right that Meyr blames himself for the death of Faighl and the others, and now wants vengeance? How good the Wasps are at teaching us their own motivations.

  'Come on, now,' said Corcoran nervously, looking from one to the other.

  'Send a message to the Iteration,' Totho decided, 'and tell them to stand ready. Corcoran, go yourself, have them load the smallshotters and warm the engines over.'

  'Because we're going?' the Solarnese said, without much hope.

  'Have every fighting man armed and armoured by dawn tomorrow. Meyr, you're in charge of that.'

  'Right,' the Mole Cricket rumbled.

  'I have a conversation with Amnon to finish — and one he's not going to like,' Totho explained. 'When I get back, I want to see every Iron Glove man ready for war.'

  He found Amnon up on the walls, of course. The Scorpion leadshotters had been idly throwing shot at the stones, or over them and into the city. Totho took a moment, on gaining the battlement, to spy out a leadshotter crew with his glass and assess their technique. The Scorpions themselves were the very essence of brutality, but he could pick out Wasp-kinden overseeing them and the savages were swifter and more practised than he would have thought.

  The First Soldier was leaning on the ramparts, staring out at the enemy that he could not defeat. He glanced at Totho, then looked back at the great ramshackle chaos of the Scorpion camp.

  'Come to say your farewells?' he asked. 'I shall have the Estuarine Gate lowered for you.'

  'Not just yet,' Totho told him.

  'Oh?' Amnon turned, barely flinching as another solitary leadshotter spoke thunder, the shot whistling high over the city.

  'I have an answer,' Totho said. 'The only answer that I can give you on how to defend your city from the Many of Nem. It's not an answer that the Ministers would approve of, and I doubt you'll like it much either, but it's an answer.'

  'Speak,' Amnon said, bracing himself for it.

  'The Scorpions out there are not an army; they are a huge mob of thugs. A proper army has supply lines, logistics. This lot are living directly off the land, and that cannot support them long. They need a quick victory, so it follows that if you delay them long enough, perhaps two tendays at the utmost, they will not be able to sustain their attack.'

  'I had thought as much.'

  'Exactly. You don't need to be a tactician to see it,' Totho agreed. 'But they'll burst through these walls tomorrow or the day after. No doubt of it. You've probably already noticed a few cracks, where they've struck home.' Totho could see the truth of that in Amnon's eyes. 'So the wall will not hold, and they can keep knocking holes in it. If you put men in the breach, they can knock holes in them too. And their infantry is well suited to taking advantage of a breach, I think: fast-moving, hard-hitting. They're not men for standing in line and taking a charge,
but men for breaking through shield-walls and pushing forward. So, the wall ceases to be a defensive asset very quickly. In fact, once they've taken the wall, it becomes a disadvantage. Their crossbowmen will soon make full use of the elevation.'

  Amnon nodded, taking it all in. 'So,' he asked, 'what is your answer? How do we save our city, even for a short while?'

  'Abandon the western half of it,' Totho said, expecting a strong reaction. In truth, he half expected Amnon to throw him off the wall. Instead the big Beetle just twitched, as he had when the leadshotter had loosed a moment before.

  'Have your soldiers go house to house, instructing everyone to evacuate the western city. Have them take every single boat to ferry people across the river, and then paddle back for more. Have them cross the bridge in their hundreds. Have them carry only what is easily to hand, and primarily whatever footstuffs they can cart. Everyone. Everyone moves east, across the river. Because the river becomes your defensive wall, Amnon, and the leadshotters cannot tear it down. There is only one bridge, and we take every single boat to the eastern bank. Barricade the bridge where I shall show you, and put your best men there to hold it, with archers on the east bank, ready to pick off any makeshift thing they do try and send over. That's the answer: let the river hold them off.'

  'You know what you are asking me to do, how many people must be moved,' Amnon said. And then: 'The Masters would not approve.'

  'I have no other answer for you,' Totho told him.

  Amnon gazed out again at the sprawling host. 'I will give the orders,' he confirmed quietly.

  Totho only realized then that he had not expected this man to take his suggestion. Am I become a tactician now? Am I a warleader? And in the shadow of those thoughts followed another one: Would that find favour with her?

  'For the men holding the bridge, it will be hard,' Amnon said slowly.

  'Put up as much of a barricade as you can. Funnel them in until a small number of your best men can stand them off,' Totho said. 'Those men will face repeated charges, crossbows, Wasp stings. They must be your best. If the Scorpions manage to force the bridge we will never hold them.'

  Amnon nodded. 'I myself shall stand on the bridge,' he said simply. 'I shall ask for volunteers from my Guard to stand with me.'

  Totho felt the ground lurch beneath him: no leadshot, not Amnon hurling him down, but the vertigo of his own next words getting to him. 'I shall stand beside you.'

  Amnon clapped a hand to his shoulder, sending him staggering. Totho saw the degree of emotion in the man's eyes. Ah, but it is the right thing to do. She would say so, too, were she here.

  'I shall give orders for the evacuation,' Amnon said. 'We shall start right away. By the morning we shall not be finished, but we shall at least have what time the walls shall buy us.'

  'There are other ways of buying a little time,' Totho said. The thought was heavy on him, loaded as it was with memories of the last time, but he persevered. 'A night attack on the engines may disrupt them, buy us a few hours. If you have those available who can make the attempt.'

  Amnon nodded fiercely and beckoned one of his men over.

  'Get me Teuthete,' he ordered. 'Then bring me all my officers.'

  Thirty-Three

  Her name was Teuthete. The word she used to define herself was 'Chosen'. The title was woven through with history: the long and complex interactions and accords between her people and the Masters of Khanaphes.

  She was slender, five feet and a half tall at most, far shorter than any of her distant western kin. Her skin was silvery grey, like light shining on silty water. She wore the armour of her people: a breastplate, shoulder and leg-guards of wicker and wood woven together tightly, interlaced with sinews and tightly plaited cords of hair: enough to turn a sword-stroke or snarl an arrow. Her own hair would have been white, except that she had ceremonially re-shaved her scalp before this mission. That was the mark of her servitude, her calling.

  Being Chosen was not just about being in service to the city, for she was something more than the levies of their army or the followers of their hunts. She was hostage for the freedom of her people, for the continuance of their ancient ways. Her personal loyalty bound her people to the city, and protected them from the wrath of the Masters. Such wrath had not been felt since time out of mind, but it was remembered nevertheless. They had warred with the Khanaphir, in that very distant past. The Marsh people had fought with all their skill and stealth, and their diminishing numbers, until the Masters had offered them a truce. A truce of servitude but not slavery, for Mantis-kinden could never abide slavery. With their backs to the wall they found other names for it and called it loyalty.

  And now Khanaphes itself looked to be facing its last days. Teuthete was no fool: she had read Amnon's face even as he delivered to her the word of the Masters, or what was left of that word once it had passed through him. Amnon did not seem frightened. She reckoned the man did not quite know what fear was. He had been severed from hope, though. This was not a man who looked forward to the next dawn.

  It would be easy enough for the Marsh people to withdraw now, to step into the mists and shadows of their murky realm and wait until it was over. The Many of Nem were not equipped to hunt Mantids through the waterways, and if they tried it, they would regret it and then die of it, in short order. Teuthete's people were not directly threatened, and the descending rod would strike only the backs of their age-old taskmasters. The mission they had given her, given her people, was a death waiting to happen. It seemed to her that they would none of them see their villages again.

  She had thought — and the thought shocked her — of turning away from the Khanaphir in their time of need. It was only a thought, though. To act upon it would be to break an oath her people had sworn generation after generation, and that she herself had sworn as their proxy, as their Chosen. The sense of honour that bound her would have been entirely understood by her kin in the distant Lowlands, whose existence she did not even guess at.

  She had a score of her people with her, as many as she dared take. They were all Marsh hunters, skilled in the ways of silence, blessed by their Art to strike fast, to step unseen. They padded wordless out of the Marsh on the west side of the river, with the walls of the city standing bravely to their right, the festering camp of the enemy directly ahead of them. It was three hours before dawn, those longest hours when sentries slumbered and it seemed the night would never end.

  They carried their bows made from layers of different woods and sinews bound together with fish glue, curved and recurved so that, when unstrung, they coiled forward like worms. The Mantids would hold one end down with a foot, bracing their entire bodies, wrestling the rebellious strength of those composite materials until they had turned them inside-out, then secured them with ten-times interwoven hair and imprisoned all that straining power within a bow that looked small enough to be a child's toy. Their arrows normally had heads of stone or bone; the best of them were tipped with the hard, sharp chelicera of a certain water spider, and were lethal with venom. They had spears, too: long, flexible weapons headed like their arrows. They had the flexing spines that sprang from their forearms. There was not a piece of metal on any of them, and they were barefoot. The Scorpion thousands, equipped with their halberds and armour, their greatswords and axes and usurped Imperial weapons, awaited them.

  The sentries were sporadic, loose, inattentive. There were even gaps where several had deserted their posts. Teuthete found one, though, staring directly out towards the Marsh. She crept close enough to see clearly the man's narrow eyes, trusting to her Art to hide her. She nocked an arrow tipped with a spider's fang. The first blood must always be shed properly. To stint on that now would be to curse their mission.

  She drew the bow back slowly, with incremental motions of her arm, her shoulder, her entire frame taking the strain of it. Another Scorpion was passing by, weaving slightly, already drunk on looted beer. She waited, untiring, until he was gone.

  Then she loosed. Th
e arrow was gone from her bow, had lanced through the man's eye, without seeming to cover the brief distance between. Instantly she and her fellows were on the body, and had hauled his heavy corpse off into the night.

  She took out her best knife, its blade a serrated razor of stone. The others of her party gathered around reverently. Before a hunt of this importance, these things must be done. There were rites that must be observed.

  She cut the dead man's armour free and opened him up, spilling as much of his blood as she could on to the earth. Dabbling her hands in the gore, she anointed her fellows one by one, placing a handprint in steaming red on each forehead, the fingers of it curling over each shaved skull.

  'Now let us hunt,' she said, and they surged into the Scorpion camp, at a fast rush that was not running, but a silent, ghostly charge.

  Amnon had explained to her what they must do, and she had not completely understood, other than that at the camp's heart there were some great iron weapons that the Khanaphir feared. Amnon's foreign creature had tried to tell her how best to disable them, but his words had shattered on the shield of Teuthete's Inaptitude, and she had not grasped them. In his frustration the foreigner had offered to come with them, but Amnon had dissuaded him in time. No outsider could hunt alongside her people and live to tell of it.

  The Scorpions remained oblivious as Teuthete's hunters passed between their tents. Most of them slept but there were plenty still wandering about in the dark, laughing, fighting, drinking. However stealthy they were, the Mantids were not invisible, not quite, so it was inevitable that they would be spotted eventually. Meanwhile, they continued soundlessly, deeper into the camp, relying on their speed to take them close to where they needed to be.