The Scarab Path sota-5

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  'Oh, I've seen the path they're on,' Thalric said bitterly, and Che saw the great woman roll her eyes, that this savage would not be silent in front of his betters. Thalric was driven by fear and aggression, though, and would not be stilled. 'I've seen them try to struggle on with the simplest of machines, knowing nothing of mechanics, metallurgy, modern farming. We've all seen where that has left them, for even Khanaphes can't hold back the march of time.'

  She stared at him and he blanched, baring his teeth, but no more words emerged.

  'Now-' Elysiath began, but Che took a deep breath and interrupted her.

  'Do you … Do you know there's a war out there?'

  There was a moment's pause when it seemed that Che might be struck down just for such an interruption, then Lirielle replied dismissively, 'Wars come and go. We, who have seen so many, cannot mark them all.'

  'No, there is a war right now. The Scorpions have come against your city.' Che saw their derision and pressed forward. 'They have broken through your walls! When we came down here, they were at the river. By now they may even have driven your people out into the wastes.'

  The Masters exchanged amused glances. 'Our city is proof against what the rabble of the desert can bring against it,' sneered the man. 'Our people shall become stronger for the testing.'

  Che stared at them in disbelief. 'Your people are praying to you,' she said. 'It's like nothing I've ever seen anywhere else. The homeless crowd the streets and call to you to save them. You have slept too deeply.'

  There was enough passion in her voice, just enough evidence of pain and truth, that their mockery dried up slowly, like the landscape of their memories.

  'Such nonsense,' said Elysiath finally, 'but let us witness this prodigy. Watch with us if you will, and you shall see your fears dispelled.'

  Forty-Three

  When the Iteration blew, it sprayed debris as high as the bridge and beyond, showering it with shards of twisted metal and fragments of wood. They pattered down across the stones, on attacker and defender alike. The thunderous explosion forced the two combating sides apart, halted even the frenzied activity of the archers. Totho broke from the line and rushed over to the bridge's north parapet, peering down at the ship's ruin below. His heart lurched. Oh, I've done it now. The pride of the Iron Glove's tiny fleet had been destroyed in some backwater, in a war it had no business taking part in. Drephos would be …

  Drephos would be interested, if Totho ever got to pass the news back to him. Drephos would see the whole expensive business as a field test, and order someone to work on an improved design. In fact, Drephos would not be remotely upset. The thought of that reaction, shorn of all emotion, washed clean of the blood of Corcoran and his crew, made Totho feel even worse.

  Then the Scorpions let out a great roar of triumph and came for them again, made newly bold and fierce by their artillerists' victory. Amnon began shouting for solidarity, and then the charge caught them, denting their line so deeply that Amnon almost skidded off the low rampart and fell back onto the bridge. The Scorpions almost had them then and there, by sheer weight of numbers, for, in the packed crush at the centre, there was precious little room for axe or spear. The Khanaphir resorted to their short swords to hack at their enemies, while the Scorpions used the savage claws their Art had given them.

  Meyr loomed behind the lines, reaching past the Khanaphir with his mailed hands, heedless of the blows any Scorpions aimed at him. He caught them up at random, plucked them from their places and hurled them back into the mass of their fellows. It was blind, brutal work. Amnon's backplate was against Meyr's breastplate, and that was the only thing stopping him being forced to give ground.

  There was a high, keening cry and Mantis-kinden began dropping among the Scorpion throng. Having discarded their bows, some now wielded knives of stone or chitin, while others relied only on their barbed forearms. It was enough for them, as they plunged into the enemy like strong swimmers and began to kill. Moving with a dazzling economy of effort, they sought out the edge of every piece of armour, aiming for throats and eyes. They were swift, almost dancing across the face of the enemy host where, slender and deadly, they spent themselves on behalf of the city that had conquered them long ago, buying time and room with their blood.

  The Scorpions could not match them for speed, but their numbers were inescapable, and their strength enough to kill with a single blow. Totho could track the whirlpools of the Mantids' passing amid the surging sea of enemy, and could track each Marsh-kinden death by their sudden stilling. Soon only a few of them remained, cutting a path of death through the tight-packed Scorpions, then only one. Teuthete herself lived still, and slew, the two inextricably linked in her Mantis mind. By then the Khanaphir line was solid again, though perilously thin, and Amnon was calling her. With a sudden leap she joined him back in the lines, her arms drenched in blood to the shoulders. She was smiling, ablaze with madness.

  Totho joined them, climbing to a higher position at one end of the line where he could take a clearer shot. The Scorpions had fallen back a few paces, shields linked again to ward off the archers, but this time they were not going away. There would be no retreating for them now, not until the breach was won. They could smell victory as close as their next breath.

  Moments. We have just moments.

  'Be ready with the ropes!' Amnon shouted.

  It took Totho a moment to recall what he meant, that the stacks of loose stone on either side of the bridge were to serve as a defence and a trap.

  The Scorpions struck the Khanaphir shield-wall with a single metal sound. They were fighting mad now, heedless of the archers' arrows striking down at them. They howled and foamed and battered against shields, splitting and cracking them with axe-blows or the solid strikes of halberds. They ran on to the Khanaphir spears and yet kept running, dragging the weapons from their wielders' hands. It was down to close-in sword work again in moments.

  Totho loosed and loosed his snapbow, reloading and recharging as fast as his shaking hands could manage. I could do this in the dark, now. I could do it in my sleep. My hands know the drill off by heart. His mind just watched numbly, seeing the Khanaphir line edge slowly back, anchored at either end by the higher stone of the barricade, in the centre by Amnon, his dark armour awash with the blood of his enemies, backed by the whirling, murderous Teuthete and Meyr's bludgeoning reach and strength. Each time the Mole Cricket lashed out it seemed he held some new weapon. He took up whatever the enemy had left him, laying about him with halberds and axes whose shafts splintered and broke after a few swings, with swords whose blades he bent and shattered under the force of his striking. The centre was holding now, but the line bowing to either side. It would only take one breach for them to lose everything.

  A crossbow bolt suddenly ricocheted off Totho's helm, snapping his head back, and he clutched at the stonework, while letting his vision clear. Another struck his pauldron, and flew off behind the lines. He turned his snapbow on the enemy archers, killing them through the shields that were supposed to protect them. They will remember this, he thought. If they are writing the last chapter of Khanaphir history, yet we are writing a chapter of theirs. They will remember all of this.

  'Archers back!' Amnon yelled, and he shouted it again and a third time before they would obey him. They dropped back from the barricades, and fled straight for Praeda's second line of defence: that huge maze of stone and wood that blocked the far end of the bridge.

  'Totho, ready with the ropes!' came Amnon's next order, his voice loud enough to be heard clear over the Scorpions' howling. Totho found himself obeying automatically, slinging his snapbow over his shoulder and dropping back to the taut cables with his sword drawn. Between the surfaces of stone the line of defenders still held tenuously, straining and bulging. If I cut now I'll crush them. He waited, sword raised, looking back towards them as their line fell apart.

  'Back!' Amnon shouted, and they tried, but the Scorpions would not let them go without further blood. A half-do
zen of the Royal Guard were able to hurl themselves clear. Most of the rest either stayed and died, or died trying to withdraw. Totho noticed Dariset, half a shattered shield still held high, try to jump away, but a Scorpion moved with her, lunging with claws outstretched. He drove one spiked hand into her chest, and she rammed her sword into the huge man's belly, so that the point jutted from his back.

  Scorpions were falling through the gaps in the line. There were moments, moments only to spare.

  'Now!' It was not Amnon's voice but Meyr's. The huge man staggered back, slapping a half-dozen Scorpions back into their comrades' halberds with one arm, while he hauled at Amnon with the other. For a moment the Scorpions occupied the breach, but they could not come through it. Teuthete was there, and she was killing them as they came. She had a Khanaphir sword in each hand, and the spikes of her arms were flexed wide, and every edge and point she had was busy taking blood. She was never still, a swift storm of needling death that could not hold them more than a few seconds longer, and yet was holding them nonetheless.

  'Now!' roared Meyr — and Totho hacked twice, and three times, then a leaping Scorpion slammed an axe into his back. The force of the blow drove him to his knees, though it twisted from his mail. He fell on the mauled rope and it snapped.

  The tons of stone were abruptly in motion for a thunderous second. Totho turned and caught the axeman across the face and the gut, even as the Scorpion turned to look at his fellows. The sound of the stones clashing together was like the end of the world. For many Scorpions it was just that.

  Meyr shouted something incoherent, then he and Amnon were killing the few Scorpions who had got through, as gripped by battle-rage as their enemies had ever been. Totho only had eyes for the slender figure now standing atop the tumbled wall of stones. Teuthete had leapt up there with Art-sped reflexes, even as the stone descended on her, and she stood there for a moment, proud and defiant, bloody with the demise of her enemies. The crossbow bolt found her as she stood, took her under the ribs with force enough to throw her from her perch. The fall robbed her of grace, and she was dead as she struck the bridge.

  After the pictures had faded, there was a great silence amongst the Masters of Khanaphes. Che put her hands to her head, feeling the world tilt about her. It had seemed so real. She had been there, right there on the bridge. She had been all over the city. Her mind's eye had been dragged wherever the Masters had wished, to the sacked western city, to the refugee-clogged streets of the east. The colours had been over-bright, burning like fever, running like paint, and yet it had all been so real.

  That was Totho, she thought numbly. Totho fighting, but why?

  'Che?' Thalric had his hands on her shoulders. 'Che, what happened?'

  'They're fighting,' she said, shaking. 'On the bridge. Couldn't you see?'

  'Che, there was nothing to see,' Thalric insisted. 'You just … you were just staring into the dark.' She saw blank incomprehension on his face, and a measure of the same on the normally expressionless Vekken behind him.

  'The city hangs in the balance,' she whispered. 'The Scorpions assault the bridge, and only a tiny few hold them off. It is the end for Khanaphes, it must be.'

  'This is a grave disappointment,' said Elysiath. 'Have our servants fallen so low that they will allow our enemies into the city?'

  'It does not seem possible,' agreed the man beside her, his tone unhurried, conversational. 'The vagabonds of the Nem should not have been able to pass the walls. That suggests treachery within.'

  'Our people have turned away from us while we slept,' Lirielle agreed. 'They flee rather than fight. They are no longer what they once were.'

  'How can you say that?' Che glared at them. 'They are dying for you right now!' Totho is dying. He could be dying even now.

  They looked at her patronizingly. 'They have indeed grown weak. How dare they abandon half the city,' Elysiath said sternly. 'They deserve all they get. They should have trusted in our walls.'

  Thalric laughed at them. The sound of his derision broke across their pontificating like a dash of water, shocking them with its irreverence.

  'Your walls?' he sneered. 'Your walls fell in a few brief hours to Imperial leadshotters.' The faces of the Masters remained quite composed, but Che could still detect the slight uncertainty in their eyes that showed they did not recognize the word.

  'Leadshotters,' Thalric repeated slowly. He had seen it in them too. 'Siege engines. Machines. Old relics of my own people, but great big magic to your poor citizens, because they've been living in the Bad Old Days for the last few centuries.' He took a deep breath and she felt his hands tighten on her shoulders. 'And, from what you've been saying, that's your fault. You've kept them back. You've kept them ignorant. You've kept them yours. '

  'How dare you speak to us thus, O Savage,' Elysiath demanded. Her voice was not angry but cold enough to cut to the bone. 'Utter another word and we will send your mind into a darkness so deep that you will never be found.'

  Che expected Thalric to say more but, looking back at him, she saw him grimace, baring his teeth. Whatever he might normally believe, in this dark tomb beyond anything he knew, he believed in that threat.

  'And what will you do to me?' Che asked them. 'Tell me, O Masters of Khanaphes? When I speak the same truths?'

  'What is this insurrection?' the man said, almost good-naturedly. 'Savages may babble their nonsense, but we discerned merit in you. Our people have grown weak. There is no more than that.'

  'A leadshotter …' She stopped because she now realized she could no longer explain it as she once had, '… is a great engine that throws stones hard enough to shatter a wall. The Wasp Empire in the north possesses hundreds of them. My city has many stationed on its walls. The Ant city-states of Accius and his cousins, they field dozens each. Helleron must make more than a thousand crossbows a year in its factories. There are automotives for freight and for war. On the seas there are armourclads, metal ships that float. In the air they have heliopters and orthopters and ships of the air.' The image of these ravening hordes of progress was making her dizzy, slightly ill just to think of it. 'Look in my mind. I can no longer understand what I remember, but look there. See it all. I gift you with five hundred years of artifice.'

  They had gone very still. She could feel them taking up the lifeless stones of her memory with their cool, slimy fingers, turning them over and over. Thalric put his arms around her, hugged her to his chest. She wondered if it was a gesture for her reassurance or his own.

  'The world has moved on,' she said. 'Everywhere but here.'

  'The Moths have fallen,' observed Lirielle. 'What is this?' Despite it all, there was such mourning in her voice that Che felt sorry for them.

  'But the rabble of the Nem …' the man began, and trailed off, any confidence ebbing from his voice.

  'They will not stand still for ever,' Che said. 'Clinging to whatever life the desert could give, fighting each other for a few scraps, they have been slow to change, but all it took was a prod from the Empire, and they are now inside your city.'

  For a long moment the Masters stared at one another, trying to cling on ponderously to what they had believed, in the face of all they had now seen. They don't know what to do, Che realized. They slept too long.

  'You will help, surely,' she pressed them.

  Elysiath turned a haughty look on her. 'So much is lost, it hardly seems worthwhile to salvage what is left.'

  'But they're your people,' Che insisted.

  'They have bitterly disappointed us,' the man stated. 'They have squandered all we left them.'

  'They have forgotten all I taught them of war,' rumbled dark Garmoth Atennar from behind them.

  'But they're now calling out for you!' Che told them. 'They pray to you. They invoke your aid.'

  'Do they?' Elysiath actually cocked her head to one side, listening in some way that Che could not imagine. She smiled faintly. 'Ah, yes, they do. How faint they sound. Ah, well.'

  '"Ah, well"?' Che pr
otested. 'Don't you see what that means? It means that they believe in you still. To them, after all these centuries, you are still the Masters of Khanaphes. You are what they have lived for, and now you are the reason why they are all going to die. You still have a responsibility to them. They are your servants.'

  'Responsibility? To the slaves?' Elysiath echoed, as though the concept was remarkable.

  'You said they'd failed you,' Che told her. 'They haven't. They're fighting for you even now, as we speak. They're bleeding and dying for you, for your city. The first city, remember? The city you built so long ago. They're giving their lives to preserve it from the Scorpions, who will soon turn it into one more desert ruin, and put an end even to the memory of you. And perhaps they'll come down here. If there are enough of them, or if the Empire tightens its hold, then maybe even you won't remain safe. Your tests and traps cannot hide you for ever.'

  The man was frowning, as though he had eaten something distasteful. Lirielle toyed with her comb. 'But what can we do?' she said.

  'It would be such a waste of our power to intervene,' the man mused. 'The cost would be terrible. It would set us back so much.'

  'What were you saving it for?' Che asked him.

  'The revivification of the land, of course,' he replied. 'The reversal of the change that the great cataclysm brought about. To bring green back to the desert, that is our great purpose.'

  Che blinked at that, at the sheer hubris of it, for she could not imagine that even the Masters could even start to accomplish such a thing. Are they just living empty dreams then, despite all their power? 'And who will then profit from this,' she pressed them, even so, 'if your own people are gone?'

  The man gave a petulant frown. 'It will demand a great effort, hardly worth it, surely, to preserve so little.'

  'So much effort,' Lirielle agreed, as though just combing her hair for so long had exhausted her.

  'They're dying,' Che said, reaching the end of her ability to explain herself to them. 'As we speak, they're dying.' Totho is dying. Oh, I am so sorry, Totho.