The Scarab Path

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘Bloody ink and seals!’ Berjek swore, as he saw her. ‘You’re here! We weren’t sure you were even alive.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ Che asked, because the Khanaphir, in their private way, had not told her.

  After Berjek had done with his halting narrative, when the borrowed room had been loaded with two absences, one large, one small, Che remained very quiet.

  Too slow, Thalric, with your warnings. You must be losing your touch. ‘Manny, Trallo and Petri. Was Petri their victim as well?’

  ‘Unlikely.’ Berjek shook his head. ‘They mentioned her by name, as if expecting to find her at the embassy. Che, if it hadn’t been for Amnon and the Vekken—’

  ‘Where are the Vekken?’ Che demanded, feeling an uncomfortable twitch at the thought. She was not so blind to the way they had been looking at her. She did not know what conclusions they had come to in their hermetic little asylum of a shared mind, but none of it boded well for her.

  ‘They … would not accept our hosts’ hospitality,’ Berjek said, with an embarrassed glance at the Khanaphir Minister. ‘Certainly not after what happened this morning on the river.’ Seeing Che’s frown, he hastened to explain. ‘The Scorpions are here, Che. They arrived with the dawn, and they’re setting up outside the walls.’ The old Beetle sighed. ‘I was determined to leave today. I came here looking for a ship out of here. That’s how I met Tathbir, here. He’s the Minister of the Oceans.’

  The short, podgy Beetle genuflected briefly, bobbing his shaven head.

  ‘But when the Khanaphir lowered the river gate this morning, the Scorpions were already waiting for them,’ Berjek explained. ‘They put a leadshot into a fishing boat, sank it with all hands. They see that the river could be used to land a flanking force, is my guess. It doesn’t take a tactical genius to see the opening. They’ve got a pair of leadshotters waiting out there to hole any vessel that comes out. Meanwhile, nobody’s going anywhere until that can be dealt with.’

  ‘We have sent messengers to the Marsh people,’ Tathbir added. ‘They will take this matter into their own hands. Until it is done, though, we cannot lower the Estuarine Gate. We are sorry.’

  ‘The assault on the city has yet to start,’ Berjek put in. ‘The Scorpions are displaying unusual patience for their kind, I understand. Some small groups have come within bowshot of the walls, to their regret, but the rest are setting their engines to loose upon the city’s defences. I know my field enough to know that the walls of Khanaphes were not designed to resist leadshotters.’

  It was the suddenly stiffened pose of Tathbir that heralded the new arrival, the frisson of indignation radiating from the man. A shadow fell through the door: a man in dark armour, one whose face Che used to know.

  ‘Are you yet in the city?’ the Minister demanded. ‘I am sure the First Minister banished you.’

  Totho’s stare remained intense enough for the stout man to take a step back. With his snapbow slung under his arm, within easy reach, there was something of the pirate about Totho now, a man outside rules. ‘I was called here,’ he said flatly. ‘The First Soldier wishes to consult with me, so how could I say no?’ His eyes dismissed the Minister utterly. ‘Che, I need to talk with you.’

  ‘I suppose you do.’ This was not a conversation she had been looking forward to but, at the same time, she had been expecting it. ‘Elsewhere,’ she decided. This was not for Berjek and Praeda, or for the Ministers.

  She chose the pump room, eventually, out of some perverse need for the appropriate – the secluded room with its primitive vacuum pump that she no longer understood.

  ‘Are you going to start with pointing out how right you were?’ she began. He had paused in the doorway as though there might be an ambush waiting. Now he stepped in and found himself a seat on the horizontal shaft of the pump.

  ‘Would that help? Probably not,’ he replied, his shoulder-plates scraping as he shrugged. ‘The Empire never changes, as I should know well.’

  ‘You were wrong about Thalric,’ she told him, before she could stop herself.

  ‘Was I?’ There was no admission of it in his face. ‘You think he hasn’t betrayed you, just because you haven’t found out about it yet.’

  ‘The Empire wants him dead,’ she said.

  ‘The Empire has wanted him dead before. And then it calls, and he comes like a trained cricket. He’s spent the last four months sleeping with the Empress.’

  The thought cut her more deeply than she expected. She had known it, of course, but had steered her mind deftly away from it, every time. ‘You’ve done your research.’

  ‘He hurt you,’ Totho said simply, ‘so I found out what I could. We in the Glove have sources in the Empire. You’d have to walk a long mile before you found a man as untrustworthy as Thalric.’

  She could feel a wave of anger rising in her, hearing the man attacked behind his back. Nothing but the truth, surely, and yet because it was a truth Thalric himself owned to, with his chequered past so openly admitted, she felt that she should be defending him.

  ‘New topic, Totho?’ she said. ‘Unless all you wanted to do is come here and complain about Thalric.’

  She saw his lips purse, but then he said, ‘I can get you out of Khanaphes. You and your friends.’

  She stared at him, waiting for the catch. He, however just waited for her response, looking down at his hands as they rested on his knees.

  He got that from Uncle Sten, she thought, and asked, ‘How? They say the Scorpions have engines watching the river.’

  ‘My ship is the Fourth Iteration, and she’s fast enough to dodge leadshots, tough enough to shrug a few off before suffering. She’s a Solarnese corsair with a reinforced hull. She even has some smallshotters for the rails. She can leave as soon as the Khanaphir lower the gates, and for us they’ll lower the gates because they want rid of us. Even with the Scorpions outside their walls.’

  She stood up, with desperate hope. ‘Take Berjek and Praeda,’ she said. ‘Please, take them away from here.’

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Totho …’

  ‘I will take you,’ he said. ‘I will take you, and with you, anyone you wish – save for Thalric. I will not leave here without you.’

  ‘Totho, the city’s under siege now. What will you do here, if you don’t leave? Don’t be a fool.’

  ‘I’ll just have to make sure the Scorpions lose, then, won’t I,’ he said.

  ‘You are a fool,’ she decided. ‘You’d risk your life, your followers …’

  ‘Yes, I’m a fool. One among many.’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘You know why.’ He was on his feet suddenly and she shrank back from him. ‘Che, you don’t need to ask that question. I will stay, if you stay. I will also leave if you will leave with me. That’s because I love you. You know that I love you. That I always have, since we were students and you were copying down my answers in class.’

  ‘You’re right. I didn’t need to ask,’ she replied, and then: ‘I wish I hadn’t.’

  He took the blow, rolled with it. ‘I never knew what you saw in the Moth,’ he said, ‘but I knew what you missed in me. I’ve tried, Che, to make something more of myself. I’ve tried to patch the defects that nature gave me. I’m still a halfbreed, but I’m a magnate now. I’ve money, prospects. They’d kiss my feet in Helleron, if I walked in under Iron Glove colours. My hand is on the tiller of artifice.’ He looked into her face, forcing her to avoid his gaze lest it scorch her. ‘And I can see, though – I can see it’s not enough. So tell me what you want me to be, Che. Tell me what it is I’m still missing. Or is it the blood? It didn’t seem to matter to you, of all people, that I was a half-caste.’

  ‘It’s not your heritage,’ she said. ‘Do you really think I care about that?’

  ‘No,’ he said, fiercely. ‘No, I don’t. I really don’t. So tell me what it is that’s wrong with me.’

  ‘Oh, Totho,’ she sighed, ‘all this time you’ve been trying to make yourself i
nto what you think I might want … but I can barely see the friend I once knew, let alone anything beyond. You’ve built yourself a suit of armour for the inside as well as the out. Just listen to you now!’ She felt suddenly frustrated with him. ‘You’re bargaining for my affection with the lives of my friends, yet you spent most of the war working for the Empire.’

  ‘To save Salma!’ he put in hotly, but she came back just as hard.

  ‘Was it?’ she demanded. ‘Was that what it was? And did they never give you a chance to leave them, after that? Totho, you rail at Thalric for all the things he has done, and, yes, he has done terrible things, but at least he tried to divert his course away from them. You have just moved towards and towards. Totho, tell me you could not have escaped from the army, if you had wanted.’

  ‘And what would have happened then?’ he demanded. They were almost nose to nose now, an inch from drawing swords. ‘I beat them in the end, Che. I beat the Empire, in Szar. What would have happened there, if I had just snuck off and left?’

  The moment teetered in the balance, the weights of recollection dropping. Che had been in Myna, of course, and she had heard the news from Szar, in more detail than she needed. It had been a great victory against the Empire, but nobody had felt much like celebrating it, not even the Szaren.

  ‘Szar?’ she began. She had not seen the twisted bodies of the Wasp garrison, but there had been no shortage of description. An entire force of thousands, with their slaves and servants and Auxillians, dead in a single night, and in agony. The last she had heard, there was still a whole district of their city that the local Bee-kinden did not enter, for fear of the coughing sickness that might still come to cull them. They said that the air still smelled of sour death, there, when the wind was in the wrong quarter.

  ‘Che …’

  ‘Szar. That was you?’

  His face was that of a man who would do anything just to retract a few words. ‘Che, you weren’t there. There was nothing else …’

  She was retreating from him, back to the doorway, staring at the creature that wore her friend’s face. He called her name again, but at the mere sound of it she fled from him, leaving him in the darkness of the pump room, her skin crawling at the thought of what he had done.

  Amnon summoned him soon after. The defeat on the field had not managed to stifle his fierce energy. Totho felt tired just looking at him.

  ‘You called for me, First Soldier,’ the artificer said, feeling in no mood for this now. No mood at all.

  ‘You are still in the city,’ Amnon observed.

  ‘Is that it? Is that why you sent for me?’ Totho demanded. ‘Yes, I am still in the city. My people are still in the city. So what are you going to do about it? Shed a little blood early, before the Scorpions come for the rest?’

  ‘I will make use of you, if you will let me,’ Amnon suggested. ‘Totho, will you walk the walls with me?’

  ‘Walk the …? Why?’

  ‘Because I need to understand,’ the big Khanaphir said. ‘I need to know what to do, Totho, and I need your wisdom to guide me.’

  ‘Wisdom?’ Totho managed to say, strangled by the need to laugh at the word. ‘I’ve precious little wisdom, Amnon.’

  ‘I’ll take anything I can get,’ Amnon said, quite seriously. ‘Will you do this one thing for me before you go?’

  ‘Of course,’ Totho replied, finding that he meant it. He liked Amnon: there was some trace of commonality between them, despite their disparate cultures and histories. Both of them, at this moment, were where the metal met.

  Khanaphes was gripped by panic. Totho saw people cowering inside their homes, saw groups of soldiers rushing here and there, seemingly with no aim at all. Passing over the great span of bridge that linked the two halves of the city, they heard a hollow knocking sound, distant and harmless save for the plume of dust that rose beyond the walls. Amnon started, but Totho put a hand out.

  ‘That wasn’t an attack. There’s been no attack yet.’

  ‘They are raiding all the farms, burning the fields,’ Amnon spat. ‘Also they know that by making us wait, they also make us fear.’

  ‘And by launching a few rocks over the city they’ll make you fear even more,’ Totho agreed. ‘They want you shaken up by the time they meet you hand to hand.’

  ‘No,’ Amnon said firmly, ‘they simply want us to fear. That is their sport, to know that the good people of my city live in terror of them for this interval of time, before the end comes.’

  From the lofty arch of the bridge they could see the city’s soldiers atop the walls. Totho took his telescope out automatically, panning its lens across the battlements. The Khanaphir sentries were rushing back and forth, and then he noticed a sudden haze of dust rising from between the great stones of the wall. The sound of the leadshotter’s discharge came a moment later.

  The walls of Khanaphes had stood a long time. They were tall and thick, built of massive slabs of rock, curving slightly as they rose. There was a walkway along the top to allow two men to walk abreast, with stone steps leading up to the parapet every two hundred yards. Those walls would have seemed a remarkable piece of engineering even two centuries ago, let alone whenever they had actually been built. Totho knelt as he reached the top, pressing a hand to the stone to feel the grain of it. In his mind were the fortress designs that Drephos had sketched out on scrap paper, in order to resist a siege by modern weapons. They were all planes and edges, thrusting out into the besieging force to give the widest arc of shot, and slanted to let the enemy’s weapons glance off them.

  ‘Tell me,’ Amnon asked him, ‘will we hold? They tell me that the Masters would never let the walls of Khanaphes fall. What do you tell me?’

  Totho went to the ramparts and the sight beyond struck him hard, although it must strike any Khanaphir observing it that much harder. The Many of Nem were encamped outside, a squalid mess of tents and lean-tos against a horizon thick with smoke. They had laid waste everything that lay within a day’s ride, pillaged everything worth taking. They must expect a quick siege, otherwise they will starve.

  The artillery positions were well ensconced within the front ranks of the Scorpion horde. Clearly the Scorpions, or their Imperial masters, knew how vulnerable unattended engines could be. There was a bank of ten leadshotters, positioned quite tightly. Through his glass Totho could recognize the model as an old Imperial make that had first seen service before the Twelve-year War. It would still do the trick though.

  Three rounds? No, the Khanaphir walls were too thick and solid. Twelve rounds? Perhaps, yes. The stones were not properly mortared, not as a Lowlander Beetle would have built them. They were not hard, either. With a dagger’s blade he could scratch deeply into them, turning stone to sand by his own tiny industry. How accurate were the Scorpion artillerists? Twenty rounds then, at most.

  ‘Your walls will not hold,’ he declared, and the shudder of fear that ran through the men around him made him feel like some doomsaying prophet. ‘Unless they lose the use of their engines, or are very short on ammunition, your walls will crack and then fall.’

  Another single leadshotter boomed out its plume of smoke, and Totho felt the faint vibration as the shot hammered into stone. It was obviously a day of idle practice for the Scorpions, since the war host was still reassembling after a day’s hard looting. If we had the full army of the city with us now, perhaps we could have broken them, Totho thought. They had already left too many dead on the field, though, and hope and morale now lay out there amongst the broken weapons and the corpses. The Khanaphir did not have it in them to sally out and attack their besiegers.

  ‘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 i
t 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.