The Scarab Path (2 page)

Everyone
apparently pleased to see us – especially pleased to see Petri – much polite
interest in Collegium but a little standoffish, as though news of a city
inhabited by their close kin was something they heard every other day. Evening
of the first day, and we seem to have been absorbed – found a place and now
genteelly ignored, as the life of Khanaphes moves around us like a sedate and
well-oiled machine.’

Kadro reread it with a shake of his head.
How little
I knew, then.
Crouching high above the plaza, with its great hollowed
pyramid, he watched the torches of a patrol pass indolently by. He had not been
noticed, either in absence or by presence. His heart was hammering. This
sneaking around was not his trade. The deftness of the Fly-kinden, his
birthright, had mouldered for a good long while before being given an airing
now. He was lucky his wings still worked.
How they would
scoff at me, back home.
Collegium born and bred, and living amongst the
cumbrous, grounded Beetle-kinden all his life, he had almost forgotten that he
was more than a pedestrian himself.

Now!
he told himself, but still he did not go, locking
into place instead, clutching flat against the stone like a badly rendered
piece of sculpture. They were mad keen on their carvings here in Khanaphes. It
was obviously the main outlet for all their stunted creativity, he decided.
They could never leave a stone surface blank when they could chisel intricate
little stories and histories into it. Histories that revealed nothing. Stories
that hinted at everything. This whole city was just a maddening riddle created
specifically to drive an aging Fly-kinden academic insane. And here was the
culmination of his insanity.

It was
totally dark now. There was a patchy spread of cloud above, too, which had
recommended tonight to him: a rare occurence out here on the fringes of this
nameless desert. Nameless in the eyes of Collegium, anyway. In a lifetime of
poring over the oldest of maps, Kadro had seldom come across the city of
Khanaphes. The name existed only in those ancient, unintelligible scrawls that
the Moth-kinden left behind, after the revolution had forced them out. The maps
of Beetle merchant venturers barely admitted to its existence, barely gave it
credence or fixed location, as though some conspiracy of cartographers existed
to deny that a city called Khanaphes had ever taken physical shape.
East, somewhere east
, the stories ran: a city founded by
the Beetle-kinden, and whose name, to those few academics who cared, was
inseparable from legend and Inapt fancy.

And here
he was, looking over this city, this great river Jamail with its acres of
marshy delta and the desert that the locals called the Nem – all nothing but
names to the academics of Collegium, until now.

It was
the war, he knew, that had opened up so much more of the wider world to the
Lowlands. Suddenly there had been a lot of new faces seen in the city, in the
College even: Imperial diplomats and their slaves of many kinden, Solarnese
Fly-kinden or the sandy-skinned near-Beetles they bred there, Spiderlands
Aristoi, and even the occasional brooding Commonwealer. The world was bigger
than it had ever been, and yet Kadro had found new territory still. The
ever-talking Solarnese had eventually got around to comparing maps, and there,
lying at the edge of their world, had been the winding blue line of a river
with a jewel at its mouth: Khanaphes.

He
shifted on his high perch, digging fingers into the reliefs to keep his
balance.
They build high here, yet they never look up
.
Rents in the cloud passed bands of silver moonlight over the Scriptora, the
big, brooding mausoleum that served Khanaphes as the seat of its
administration. The ember glow of a rush-light was visible in one high window
as some clerk continued working all hours for the implacable bureaucracy he served.
Below the window rose great columns that supported the building’s facade,
carved from huge slabs of stone to resemble scaly cycads. This was such a
serious city, where nobody hurried and everyone was busy, and it was all just
an act. He was sure of that by now. It was all to take one’s attention off the
fact that there was something missing from the public face of Khanaphes. The
city was intrinsically hollow.

This city of
contradictions. To find an outpost of what should be civilization all these miles
east of Solarno, untouched by the Wasp Empire, untouched by the squabbles of
the Exalsee or the machinations of the Spiders … and yet to find it untouched,
also, by time.

Khanaphes has
welcomed me, and yet excluded me. Petri does not feel it, but she was always a
dull tool. There is a darkness at the heart of this city, and it calls for me.

Last night’s entry. He should have left this journal with Petri, just in
case.

The
heart of Khanaphes yawned for him, here overlooking this grand plaza. They
liked their space, here. After they had won a victory against the Many of Nem,
they had paraded their chariots all around this square, their soldiers and
their banners, before immortalizing their own triumph on further expanses of
stone. But who had they been parading for? Not for the ministers, who had stood
with heads bowed throughout; not for the common people of the city, who had
been away at their daily tasks. It had been for the
others
.

There
were
others. Kadro was convinced of that now. They were
spoken of so often that their name became meaningless, and therefore they were
never truly spoken of at all, as if held so close to the face that they could
not be focused on.
Here
was the heart, though. If
Khanaphes was holding a secret, then it was here in the tombs.

In the
centre of the plaza stood the pyramid. It was a squat thing, rising just thirty
feet in giant steps, and was sliced off broadly at the top, to provide a summit
ringed with huge statues. From his high vantage, a vantage that the structure’s
earth-bound builders could never have enjoyed, Kadro could see that within the
ring of statues’ silent vigil there was a pit, descending into a darkness that
his eyes had yet to pierce. It was the great unspoken
what
at the centre of Khanaphes, and tonight he intended to plumb it.

A bell
rang deep within the city, maybe a late ship warning the docks of its approach.
The sound took up all of the night, low and deep as wells, for the bells of
Khanaphir ships were as hugely out of scale as the rest of the city. Aside from
the faint scratchings of crickets and cicadas from the riverbanks, there was no
other sound in the darkness.

Petri
would already be looking for him. By tomorrow she would be asking questions of
their hosts, in her well-meaning and perplexed manner. She would bumble about
and make a mild nuisance of herself, and yet be utterly, patently oblivious to
what was going on. That was good. It meant that, if something bad happened to
him, if he was caught, then they would not suspect her of any complicity. He
hoped that was the case, anyway. He had no guarantees.

With a
flicker and flare of his wings he coasted gently down to stand between two of
the statues. The Khanaphir really loved their statues, and these were huge and
strange. It had been the expression on their white stone faces that had drawn
him here in the first place.
They know something
.
They were older than the rest, and bigger than most, and better made, and
different
. There was no man or woman in Khanaphes who
could lay claim to those beautiful, arrogant and soulless smiles.

He now
crouched between the pyramid summit’s edge and the pit. The same rush-light
ember still glinted in a high-up window of the Scriptora, that diligent clerk
hard at work. Or perhaps it was a spy, tracking Kadro in the darkness? The
Fly-kinden huddled closer, trusting to the bulk of the statues to conceal him.
They would have come for me, by now, if they knew
. He had
no choice but to believe it. They had a word here:
reverence
.
It was not the word that the Collegium scholars thought they knew: here it
carried tomes of unspoken fears. It was stamped on all the minds and faces of
Khanaphes.

He
peered down cautiously, into the black. The shaft fell into a gloom that even
his eyes wrestled with.
The Royal Tombs of Khanaphes
,
he told himself, and Kadro of Collegium will be the first outlander to enter
there in a thousand years. The thought brought a rush of excitement that
dispelled the fear. He had always been a man to dig in strange places. Back in
Collegium he had been a bit of a maverick, dashing all over the Lowlands to
look at unusual rocks or talk to wizened mystics. There had always been method
in his research, though, as he negotiated with grim Moth-kinden or bandied
words with shrewd Spiders. There had always been a trail to follow and,
although he could not have known at the start, that trail led here.

All
around him the statues kept silent guard, and he even summoned courage enough
to grin at them. If the Khanaphir had wanted to keep him out, they should have
posted a living watch here. The white faces stared impassively out into the
night over the sleeping city.

Kadro
hunched cautiously at the top of the steps, staring downwards. Fly-kinden had
no fear of darkness or confining walls. They were small and nimble, and left to
their own devices they built complex warrens of narrow tunnels, impossible for
larger folk to navigate. There was a cold breath coming from that hole below
him, though: chill and slightly damp, and he wondered whether the tombs
connected to the river.

No
matter. He had not dared this much only to fall victim to his own imagination.
He shifted the strap of his satchel and took a deep breath.
Into history
, he spurred himself.

He
glanced across the pit and saw one of the statues staring at him, its blind
white eyes open at last, and now darker than the night sky behind. Something
moved close by, and he gave out a hoarse shout and called up his wings to take
flight, but by then it was already too late.

It was all over before they arrived, the charred wood and ash gone cold,
and just the smoke still drifting into a cloudless sky. The sail-mill, the
warehouse, the miller’s home, everything had been systematically razed. By the
time word was rushed to Collegium by the neighbouring hamlet, it would already
have been too late to stop it.

Stenwold
stared at the ruins, his hands hooked in the belt of his artificer’s leathers.
The miller and his family and staff would all be dead. This was the third
attack to occur hereabouts and the pattern was dismaying in its precision.
Around him the guardsmen from Collegium were fanning outwards from the
automotive, some with their shields held high and others with snapbows at the
ready.

‘You
think we did this.’

He
looked around to see one of the Vekken ambassadors staring at him. The
Ant-kinden’s expression was one of barely controlled dislike. The man’s hand
rested on his sword-hilt as though he was waiting for a reason to slice
Stenwold open. Stenwold was wearing a breastplate over his leathers and he was
glad of it.

‘I don’t
think anything as yet,’ he replied patiently. A lot of effort had been involved
in there even
being
a Vekken here to talk to, and
most of it was his work.

‘Yet you
have brought me here for a reason,’ the man said. He was smaller than Stenwold,
shorter, stockily athletic where the Beetle was broad. He would be stronger
than Stenwold too. His skin was dark, not the tan of the Sarnesh or the deep
brown of Stenwold’s own people, but a slightly shiny obsidian black.

‘You
insisted on coming with us,’ Stenwold reminded him, ‘so we brought you.’ He bit
back anything else. ‘Touchy’ was an understatement, with the Vekken. Stenwold’s
men were moving cautiously further out. There was still enough cover left, in
fallen masonry and half-standing walls, to conceal some bandits or …

No bandit work, this.
But who, then? Collegium had its
enemies, more than ever before, but there was currently supposed to be a
general peace. Someone clearly had not been informed.

He heard
a scrape and scuff as the automotive disgorged its last passenger. His niece
hesitated in the hatchway, looking unwell. She shook her head at him as he made
a move towards her.

‘Just
give me a moment,’ she said, as she eyed the wreck of the mill bleakly. ‘This
is bad, isn’t it?’

‘Quite
bad, yes.’ Seeing the officer of his guardsmen backing towards him, he said,
‘Che, would you look after our Vekken
friend
here
while I see to something.’ He had not meant to put so much of a stress on the
word, but it had come out that way.

Che
dropped to the ground and staggered, before catching her balance. The journey
had been hard on her. The Vekken was staring at her, but if her discomfort
meant anything to him, it was lost in a generic expression of distaste for all
things Collegiate.

‘Do you
think …?’ His look did not encourage discussion but she pressed on. ‘Do you
think someone could be causing trouble between our cities?’ In the absence of a
reply, she added, ‘We are west of Collegium here, and Vek is the closest port.’

‘As I
said, you believe this is our work,’ the Vekken said flatly.

‘Che,
get back in the automotive,’ Stenwold said suddenly. ‘You too …’ He looked at
the Vekken and obviously could not put a name to him. The Vekken squared off
against him, wanting to see whatever was being hidden from him.

‘Now!’
Stenwold shouted, and then everything went to pieces. Without a sound, there
were men popping up from all sides, their crossbows already clacking and
thrumming. Every shadowy corner of the mill’s wreck that could afford a hiding
place was disgorging attackers. One of Stenwold’s soldiers was down in that
instant, another reeling back with a bolt through the leg. All around was the
sound of missiles blunting themselves against shields, or rattling off the
automotive’s armoured hull.