The Scarab Path (51 page)

‘It
makes you laugh, really, doesn’t it?’

Hrathen
turned to see the engineer, Angved, who had been busy these last few days,
working with his picked artillerists. He might not like his students, but
Hrathen could not fault him on his duty.

‘Why
laugh?’ Hrathen asked him.

‘The old
and the new,’ Angved said. ‘You know, among these people, two in three aren’t
even Apt.’ His lip curled in derision. ‘They’d make the worst of slaves, back
in the Empire, strong backs and nothing else. It didn’t matter to them before,
though – they didn’t know any better. Then we turn up with a job lot of
crossbows, and we make a warrior elite out of the best of them.’

‘You’ve
yet to say anything amusing.’ The engineer’s words were close enough to
Hrathen’s own thoughts to make him surly.

Angved
cocked an eyebrow. ‘Well, think about it. Who are the Inapt kinden that we’re
familiar with? Spiders, Moth-kinden, Grasshoppers. Not one of them that could
go a day in full armour without collapsing from it. Thin and delicate, the lot
of them. And yet with these lads, it’s the Apt that get the decent jobs. Your
host of bolt-fodder out there, with their swords and pikes, they’re your Inapt.
And they’ll die, battle after battle, until it’s only the Apt left of them. You
reckon that’s how it was with us, way back?’

Hrathen
stared at him. ‘You’re quite the philosopher, suddenly.’

Angved
shrugged. ‘We’re making a new nation here, sir. We’ve taken a rabble of
monsters that was no use to anyone, and we’ve put a mirror to it, and made a
kind of mockery of the Imperial army. All we need to do is paint them black and
yellow, and they’re ours.’

‘And is
that your brief?’

‘Mine?’
The grey-haired engineer laughed at that. ‘I’m just an engineer, sir. I just
have an inquiring mind, and I see the future, here. We’ve discovered the great
natural resource of this desolate waste. We’ve struck the richest lode of
Auxillian soldiers you could ever want to find. We just need to break their
pride enough so that the Empire can put a foot on their necks. And it’ll happen
– not today, maybe not in this generation, but it will.’

Angved
seemed to find all this reflection a cause for humour, but his words felt like
lead to Hrathen. ‘Go look to the siege engines,’ he snapped. ‘I want them ready
for a field battle, not just to assault the walls.’

Implacable,
Angved saluted and strolled off.

Is he Rekef?
was the instant thought, and it was not the
first time Hrathen had considered it. The artillerist would make a good
watcher, someone Hrathen could not dispense with. Sulvec need not be the only
sneak on this mission.

The Many
of Nem were all ready now, proving Angved right as they made formations that
looked like a child’s sketches of Imperial battle order. Hrathen strode towards
the automotives, aware of all eyes resting upon him. The Scorpions saw him as
an outcast, as a foreigner, but also as a warrior, as a provider of this golden
opportunity. They would follow him for now, and they would tear him to pieces if
he failed them.

Then let their claws rend me now
. But he stopped by the
lead automotive and looked back towards them.
If this is to
be the last flowering of the Many of Nem, then let them go to it gloriously
.
They were not his people, but then he had never had a people, so they would do.

Without
warning, Jakal was there beside him. She vaulted up on to the automotive’s
footplate and directed her spear ahead. ‘Ruin!’ Her voice sang clear out over
the throng. ‘Ruin and dust on the Khanaphir!’ Hrathen saw her tusks bared in a
mad grin, visible beneath the lip of her helm, her lithe body held straight and
proud as she clung to the automotive’s rungs, the spear thrust forward like
destiny. ‘Let the Jamail run red! Let us dam it with their corpses! Onward to
Khanaphes!’

Watching
her, as the automotives growled and rumbled, and were drowned out by the
roaring of the war host, Hrathen felt his heart leap, wanting her as he had
never wanted a woman before. He hauled himself up beside her as the machine
began to surge forward, and she turned to look at him with flashing eyes.

He
looked behind, to see the barren landscape crawling dark with the great mass of
Scorpion-kinden and their beasts.
Ruin and dust
, he
echoed,
and curse the future
.

The dust was bitter in his mouth as he trudged on through the wasteland,
heading eastward, ever eastward. Meyr’s people possessed a solid endurance,
such as had endeared them to the Empire’s slavemasters, but by now he was ready
to drop. Sheer stubbornness alone kept him stomping on towards the river Jamail
and the city of Khanaphes.

The
journey through the earth had been taxing enough. It was an Art hard-learned,
and draining to use. He had clawed blindly through the sand and grit, the
compacted strata of the dust of centuries, and through the bones of rock
beneath, as if swimming through the earth’s very body. In grindingly slow
sweeps of his massive limbs, he had dragged his way out from under the Scorpion
camp. Then, feeling his strength failing, he had struggled for the surface, hauling
himself hand over hand from the solid darkness into the light.

He had
still been within sight of the Scorpion fires, so he had made pitifully little
progress, for all his exertions. He could not rest, either. There was a long
way to travel.

His
shield and axe had been abandoned within the earth, deep within the rock where
they would never be found again. He considered abandoning his armour, too, but
they had made it for him especially. It had been the armoursmiths’ greatest
challenge, to adapt their designs to his mighty frame. It barely slowed him,
anyway, and, more to the point, he did not feel that he had the reserves of
mental strength to undo all the buckles.

So he
had set forth, away from the Scorpions, with a slow and deliberate tread. Some
uncounted hours later, he had observed the sun rising, and adjusted his aim to
where the landscape first lit up red. It had been a cool night, the breezes
from the distant sea treacherous with their promises. The sun, even while still
low in the sky, had banished all that, beginning to roast him with its infinite
patience.

We are not a people made for this
. The Mole Cricket-kinden
could toil in the earth for hours without complaint, but they had never been
built to travel. He had long since stopped listening to the muscles of his
legs. Their complaints had nothing new to tell him. He had retreated into some
small part of his mind, focused on nothing save the horizon.

And it
was all futile, he knew. He did not look behind him any more. He had already
seen the great wall of dust that the Many of Nem were stirring up ahead of
them. They were fresh, fierce and anxious to taste the blood of their enemies.
They would easily overhaul a poor Mole Cricket lost in the desert. If he was
lucky then their natural bloodlust would see them kill him in the moment of
finding him: he knew them well enough to expect worse if he fell into their
taloned hands alive.

I have regrets
. His people were close-mouthed and
inward-looking: even among their own kind, they said little. Perhaps there was
little needing to be said.
I should have let the Wasps kill
me there in the camp
. But the will to survive was deep-entrenched. Even
another hour of life, even another hour of crawling through this barren,
loveless land, was life enough.
We are so tenacious, and
for what?

His
people were philosophers of a sort, but their philosophy was a fragmented
thing. Few in number, slow to act, seldom roused to passion, they had been
slaves in the Days of Lore, and they had been slaves ever since. Mere strength,
sufficient to shatter stone and bend steel, was powerless against the
imprisoning chains of history.

Something
passed overhead, only a shadow on the earth to indicate it. He felt almost
relieved:
They have me, then
. He had wondered if the
Imperials would send scouts out after him. Perhaps they were not even looking
for him at all, but simply flying ahead to see what defences Khanaphes had
prepared. It mattered not, either way, for word would return to the host and
then they would send out some cavalry, perhaps, to run him down.

He
trudged on. He would not make their task easier, even if such resistance
accounted for only a hundred yards more of effort for them.

There
was something ahead. He heard the movement: the creak of harness and chitin.
Already, then?
There must have been other scouts earlier,
whose shadows he had missed. Abruptly something went out of him, that guttering
spark that had driven him so far, and he stopped. For a moment he swayed, his
body thrown out of its plodding rhythm. Then his legs gave way, and he fell to
his knees.

Make it quick
, was all Meyr could think.

‘Hey,
big man, no time for that,’ he heard a voice say – neither the clipped Imperial
accents nor the mangled, mumbled Scorpion speech. He forced his head up against
the brightness of the sun, and started at what he saw.

There
were three great beetles on the ridge ahead of him: black-bodied things with
their bulbous abdomens held high, their long legs as awkward and stilt-like as
scaffolding. They twitched their mouthparts and antennae, lifting their feet
off the hot ground in careful sequence. Each was saddled and harnessed, and
each with a Khanaphir rider: two men and a woman in scale armour, bow and lance
scabbarded beside their saddles.

‘Come
on, Meyr, have you looked behind you?’

That
voice again. Meyr tilted his head and this time saw the tiny figure of Tirado,
his messenger. The Fly nodded urgently and flitted off towards the beetles.
With a supreme effort, Meyr got to his feet and craned his head back in the
direction he had come.

The
western horizon was a single wall of dust. He even thought he could make out
the dots of the Scorpion vanguard.

‘Meyr,
we haven’t got all day!’ Tirado shouted and, with infinite weariness, the Mole
Cricket stumbled towards the waiting animals.

There
was no complaint from the beast as he hauled his huge body on to its back, just
a patient redistribution of its feet to take the additional weight. Then the
three riders were urging their animals round, heading back east towards the
city with a rapid, skittering gait, bringing news that the war host of the Many
of Nem was in sight.

There had been no easy answers forthcoming. The Ministers of Khanaphes
had put question after question to him until, at the last, he had realized that
they just would not
believe
him.

Thalric
paused on the steps of the Scriptora, looking at the stepped pyramid that
dominated the square ahead of him. At its top was poised that maddeningly
asymmetrical ring of statues, frozen in their dance. It seemed that they smiled
mockingly at him, from their barren, perfect faces. He had a strong urge to
just sit down, right there, and put his head in his hands. He had a stronger
urge, however, to seek out Che and try to make her, at least, believe him. He
needed someone’s belief, and his own was a washed-out, faded colour, after all
the questioning.
Could it be that they told me, and that I
somehow didn’t notice? Could a planned invasion have passed me by somewhere in
the minutiae of my briefing?

They had
not asked him whether Totho’s claims were actually true. They had not even
bothered with that preamble. Instead they had gone straight to probing him for
details of the attacking force. They had wondered by what means the Empire had
spurred the Many of Nem on to this act. They had enquired how long the Empire
had been in contact with the Scorpions, what degree of control the Empress had
over them. At no time had they left enough space for his denials.

Most of
the time, he had just shaken his head. ‘I have no knowledge of this,’ he had
stated, over and over. They had nodded sagely, those bald-headed men and women
in severe robes, and their scribes had written all of it down.

They had
conferred together: he remembered acutely the sound of their quiet, polite
voices. Then they had come back to sit before him again, some score of
Ministers, with Ethmet at their head, and they had asked him, in so many words,
the exact same questions again. Their patience was infinite, their manner told
him. Again he had made his disclaimers. The Empire had no such plans, he
assured them. He, as the Empire’s ambassador, would surely know of any such
intention. If the Scorpions were coming, it was without any mandate from the
Empress.

They had
made no threats, had not even raised their voices. He had been free to leave at
any time, save for the bonds of his ambassadorial duty, which kept him there as
if bound by steel chains. He had begun to experience the despair of the man who
knows nothing, faced with the questioner who does not believe him.

It had
been hours before they had finally, and for no obvious reason, lost interest in
him. Even then they had suggested that he remain available for any other
further questions they might think of.

He had
no idea where Che might have gone, meanwhile. She might be holed up with the
Iron Glove, for all he knew. The entire Collegium delegation might have left
the city. Worst of all, he had no idea, here on the steps of the Scriptora, if
there really was a Scorpion army at the gates.

I must find Che
. That was a traitorous thought because
what he
must
do, without question, was make his
report. This was Imperial business: the name of the Empire had been sullied.
Or else the Empire’s designs have been exposed
. He no
longer knew which. The relentless questioning had stripped him of any certainty
he might have possessed.