The Scarab Path

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  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 the 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 protégé – 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 tape 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.

  They had not liked her being there, those craftsmen: they were members of a select and occult fraternity. However, Ethmet’s word, his mere glance, had been law. They had given the book over to her and she had opened its pages, and her mind had jolted at what she had seen.

  She had thought it might be something simple, perhaps with a text in hieroglyphs set out on one leaf, and letters on the opposite, or even like a reading primer for children, the glyphs drawn large and their meaning inscribed beneath them. But no.

  The pages of the book had been layered end to end in hieroglyphs, drawn in large, bold strokes, page after page after page. Her eyes had been bombarded by their cryptic images, but after that first page she had ceased to see them as impenetrable symbols, but simply as the words that they represented. There was no apparent meaning to the book, no story, no sense of grammar, nothing but a cascade of images but, as she turned the last page, she had looked from it to the walls and read: ‘All praise to the Masters, the lifeblood of the Jamail, the sweet rains and the rich earth,’ and the words had struck her in the heart.

  She had looked to Ethmet, and then at the masons, and she had known, beyond the frailest doubt: They cannot see this. Ah, no, their own history is opaque to them, but I can read it. The pages of the book had worked a magic in her. Wherever she now looked, the stories of Khanaphes unravelled their meanings for her, on every wall.

  But not on every stone – the individual words, yes, the stories no. As she looked upon the greater book that was the city, she saw the cruel theft that time had committed. On the walls of the Scriptora, on the elder buildings, were tracked the countless voices of ancient Khanaphes. Merely in passing from the masons’ room back to the library, her eyes snagged on every passageway, at each turning or pillar: ‘In this year the great Batheut ventured into the Alim with his nine hundred …’; ‘Of grain, fourteen baskets; of oats, nine baskets more, and he shall …’; ‘And she sang the songs of her far homeland, and all who listened were …’ until she had to almost shut her eyes to keep out the thronging meanings that would not leave her alone. Where new construction had been made, though, the script fell into babble: ‘She boat sun leap shoe coral great if …’

  And then she understood: They have lost their ancient language. It died when their Aptitude was born. Generation by generation, those carving hands became more Apt, less arcane, until they were merely going through the rotes. In their secret little brotherhood, they copy and they carve, but it has no meaning any longer. The informative had long since become the merely decorative.

  And Ethmet knew it. She could see it in his face. He looked at her and there was hope in his eyes, a terrible, misplaced hope. It was as though her reading of the book of glyphs had revealed the key to his expressions as well.

  She had assumed he would keep her, but he had let her go. He believed, despite his Aptitude, in destiny. He believed she would come back to him voluntarily, to fulfil whatever role he wished of her. As an Inapt Beetle, her very curse had made her his messiah. Her mind was now reeling as she set off for the Place of Foreigners. She did not dare look at the pyramid, with those statues placed irregularly about its top, for fear of the stories it might tell her. She was painfully aware that she had failed Petri and Kadro, and that her own selfishness was to blame, once more.

  As she reached the archway leading through to the embassies, something stopped her, snapping her back to the here-and-now. She found her hand on her sword-hilt, yet no danger in sight. What is it? Some sense she had not known before was calling to her … No, I have known this. The desert, the Scorpion raid.

  ‘Achaeos?’ she asked softly, feeling an edge of tension that was external to her, the result of some other’s keener senses.

  Someone moved in the shadow of the archway. Up until then, she had not so much as glimpsed him. When she saw him she started to relax, but whatever had alerted her kept its hook in her twisted tight. It was one of the Vekken, she realized. As usual she could not have said which one.

  ‘Were you waiting for me?’ she began.

  He stared at her blankly and she saw, so very late, that his sword was clear of its sheath, blackened with pitch. Her reactions caught up then, her hand clenching on her own hilt as she looked into his hating eyes.

  There was a rapid flutter of wings, and Trallo was standing beside her, all smiles. ‘Ah, there you are, been looking all over. You do wander off some, Bella Cheerwell!’ His hollow cheer washed over them both, but Che guessed at once that he knew where she had spent the day. The Vekken looked from her to the Fly-kinden, then stalked away without a word. He had already told her more than he had intended. Something has snapped in th
e Vekken’s ambassadorial calm.

  ‘Trallo, what’s going on?’

  ‘You’re asking me?’ The little man shook his head. ‘Nothing’s happened at the embassy. The professors are all off looking at rocks down by the river, for reasons unknown to man or insect. Oh, and Sieur Gorget is being more insufferable than usual, but apart from that …’ He was staring after the Vekken ambassador, rubbing at his beard.

  ‘Manny is …?’

  ‘Oh, it might be that Bella Rakespear received a certain Khanaphir beau this morning, in her own chambers, but more than that I have no knowledge of.’

  Che managed to raise a small smile at that. They passed through into the Place of Foreigners, and she took a seat by the pond. I need to speak with the Vekken, but I first need to know what’s set them off. She remembered that brief moment of confrontation. This is more than injured pride.

  ‘That’s twice you’ve been there for me, Trallo,’ she noted. It was a train of thought she had stored away a while ago, now dragged out into the sunlight again. The little man merely shrugged, and did not look surprised when she continued, ‘I don’t recall you asking me for any pay recently.’

  ‘Well, you know …’ he replied, but he was waiting for what she said next.

  ‘You’re a business-minded sort.’ She wanted to pick her words with more care, but it had been such a long day. ‘The plan was that you’d be back in Solarno by now. Talk to me, Trallo.’

  ‘You’ve a complaint about my services?’ he enquired, light-heartedly, but with a brittle edge.

  ‘Quite the opposite. Talk to me.’

  He smiled. ‘You’re a popular woman,’ he explained. ‘You have a lot of friends, and they’re anxious that you’re well.’

  ‘We’re not talking about Berjek and the others. I know that much,’ she said flatly. ‘Trallo, are you taking orders from the Ministers?’