The Scarab Path

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  They struck bottom. She spilled from his arms, landing on her good side, scrabbling for purchase. It was dark, which did not matter to her, but it mattered to Thalric. He went stumbling away from her, arms out blindly. She tried for her feet and got there, swaying. ‘Thalric,’ she said, and he swung towards her.

  There was a light, a lamp. It was getting brighter: from the shaft.

  ‘They’re coming!’ he spat, backing away from it. She tried to make sense of their surroundings. The shaft gave on to a narrow room –Just how far below the ground are we? – and she saw a single passage beyond, branching three ways almost instantly. Thalric was making for it, hoping for cover, and she stumbled into him, clutching at him to hold herself upright. It hurt to move her right arm, but she could still move it. The sting must have just clipped her, for all the pain.

  There was something about the tunnels ahead. She could not reconcile it, but there was something wrong there, hanging in the air like a ghost.

  A pair of Wasps dropped down the shaft behind them, their stings blazing blind even as they did so, bolts of fire scattering within the confined space, their lantern glaring beyond. Che saw Thalric back away into the passageway, and a stab of panic overcame her, without any reason.

  ‘Run!’ she cried, then her wings hurled her at him fast, spoiling his aim as he tried to shoot back. The two Wasps were almost on her heels, charging forward to close with swords drawn.

  She felt the stone around them shift, even as she collided with Thalric, striking him full in the chest, propelling him down the centre corridor. There was no mechanism, no click and grind of machinery. The stone moved as if it was alive.

  She landed on Thalric hard enough to expel the breath from his lungs with a whoosh.

  What landed on the two Wasps, only feet behind her, was the ceiling itself. A colossal block, the same height and width as the passage, thundered down on them. It cut off their scream, which was mercifully brief.

  Thalric’s eyes were wide, staring, unseeing in the pitch darkness.

  She rolled off him with a groan, and lay flat on her back. Traps, she thought, traps for the intruder, the unwary. Traps laid by the Inapt, though. There had been no pressure point, no tripwire, that had brought that fatal load down. There had been a watching magic, and she had sensed it somehow, where Thalric and the dead Wasps had not.

  She peered about herself at last, saw that the room was not large. There was Khanaphir picture-writing on the walls, but in bolder and larger characters than she had seen before.

  There were no doors.

  Sulvec perched on the lip of the pit, as the resounding crash died away below him. He had heard the momentary cries of the two men he had sent after Thalric.

  ‘Gram!’ he called down. ‘Gram, report!’

  Only silence replied.

  Marger and the soldiers joined him there, crouching among the statues. They would have to go in, he realized. No matter what had happened to Gram, they would still have to go in. He opened his mouth to give the order.

  At that moment he felt fear. It came steaming up like cold breath from the slime-edged mouth of the pit. It caught him in mid-word, freezing him, wrenching at his stomach. He felt himself gripped by an unreasoning terror.

  We should not be here. The placid faces of the statues had become nightmarish without ever changing expression. They looked down upon the intruding Wasps with condemnation. Sulvec heard his own breath sounding ragged in his throat. We should not be here. This is a terrible place. Something terrible has happened to Gram. Those screams, so brutally stopped, had unnerved him, but now fear had taken hold and was shaking him in its jaws.

  I am a Rekef officer! But in this faraway city the Rekef seemed just a pale dream. He looked over to Marger, saw the man’s eyes wide, his hands shaking. The other soldiers were retreating down the pyramid, away from the statues and the dreadful pit.

  ‘Back.’ The word was dragged from him. ‘Go back. We …’ He could give no reason for it, could not justify the order. He only knew that to stay where they were, in this forbidden place, meant death.

  None of them needed to be told again. They fled down the side of the pyramid gratefully, gathering near the archway to the Place of Foreigners.

  ‘They must be dead,’ Marger was saying. ‘Thalric and the Beetle girl. Surely they must be dead, all of them.’

  Sulvec wanted badly to agree with him, but he had been given his orders most specifically. ‘He’s survived a lot,’ he got out. ‘We have to see the body. Absolutely sure.’ Two of his men had a prisoner, he noticed. The wretched Osgan was hanging limply in their grip. The man looked half dead.

  ‘What now, sir?’ Marger asked him, a man with the luxury of not having to make decisions. At that point, Corolly Vastern caught them up, looking like a local with his shaved head.

  ‘Why did you come down, sir?’ he asked. He had obviously seen something of what went on. Sulvec opened his mouth, reaching for answers. I can’t just say ‘because I feared.’ His mind progressed to: So that cannot be the reason, but I must have had a reason. I do nothing without a logical reason.

  ‘Sir, Guards coming,’ said one of his men, and his mind leapt. There was a squad of Khanaphir soldiers arriving at the far side of the square, no doubt drawn by all the noise. I must have known that, Sulvec told himself. I heard them coming. I knew that they would catch us, if we were still up there.

  ‘Marger, keep a watch on this place. If Thalric comes out again, I want to know about it,’ he snapped out. ‘The rest of you, fall back with me. We’ll return tonight if they leave it unguarded, or we’ll be back tomorrow night, whatever. We have a job to do here. Come on.’

  He could not entirely keep the trembling from his voice, still feeling that dread gnawing at his innards. A perfectly rational feeling: fear of discovery. Good trade-craft. A Rekef agent’s instincts. The words rattled about inside his skull looking for acceptance.

  Thirty-Five

  Dawn stole in from the east to find the city of Khanaphes at war with itself, split by the no-man’s-land of the river Jamail.

  On the eastern bank was arrayed the remainder of the Khanaphir army, ready to repel all comers. Some Scorpions had spent the night desultorily nailing together pieces of wood to make rafts – ugly, awkward things worked from first principles. In the harsh dawn they quietly abandoned their labours, for there were archers out there, whole detachments of them, both city folk and Marsh folk. Anyone paddling a raft towards them would be riddled with quills as soon as they came in range. The Scorpions lacked the craft to make vessels of any greater complexity. Unless they could somehow lure boats from the far shore, then a crossing would prove fatal.

  They had kept some prisoners over, following their triumphant surge into the city. Jakal now ordered each one brought forth before the eyes of the defenders. The Scorpions were inventive and gleeful in their treatment of such prisoners, and they spared nothing, hoping to provoke some futile attempt at rescue. They spent two hours of the first day in burnings and cuttings and rape.

  The Khanaphir would not be drawn, however. They watched, each one of them, from their Ministers down to the lowest peasant militiaman, and they saved their resentment for when they could pay it back twice over. They were too disciplined to take the bait.

  Which leaves the bridge, Hrathen decided. It was a painful conclusion, if only because the enemy had reached it too. They had fortified the bridge even while they were evacuating their people from the west city. Past the crest of the span they had put up a great barricade, of stone and of wood, while beyond the raised sides of the bridge his glass could make out constant movement there. He saw spear-tips waving, indicating a small, compact force ready to repel the invaders. They would not need many to hold there, at that choke point.

  ‘They are fools,’ Jakal said. ‘They should have brought their stones to the bridge’s top. They waste their archers.’ They had found a vantage on one of the roofs, the better to spy out the enemy.

  ‘If on
ly they had.’ Hrathen let out a long breath. ‘Angved, explain.’

  The old engineer glanced nervously at Jakal. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if they’d built on the actual zenith of the bridge, we’d be able to shoot them off cleanly with our leadshotters. Simple as that: they’d give us a direct line of sight on them, and we’d knock them straight into the river. Which shows they’re finally thinking like a proper army. They’re using the arch of the bridge itself as cover.’

  ‘So your weapons are useless now,’ Jakal said.

  ‘Oh, I could take them down, sure,’ Angved told her calmly. ‘Problem is, that bridge is built like their city walls, same stone, same style, save that the bridge isn’t even meant to stand off an attack. I hit that bridge with a few shots and, odds on, I might just knock a great big hole in it, and then how do we get across? In fact, if they’ve any explosives to hand, we’d better be careful of them doing the same.’

  ‘Where would the Khanaphir get explosives?’ Jakal demanded, but Hrathen made an unhappy noise in response.

  ‘They’re no longer fighting this alone,’ he told her. His spyglass raked across the barricade, seeing blocks of stone built to four feet high, wooden boards added above. It looked solid but not indestructible. ‘I’ve noticed people in dark armour out there. Not locals, for sure. Not many of them, but it looks like they’re giving the orders. I think it’s our friends from the Iron Glove wanting a little blood.’

  ‘So where does that leave us? I shall ready men for the assault,’ Jakal decided.

  ‘Send in some dross first, a couple of waves of chaff you won’t mind losing,’ Hrathen advised. ‘After that we’ll try for a surprise. Angved, get me a petard readied.’

  ‘They’re massing!’ Tirado’s high-pitched voice came clearly to them from his hovering point twenty feet up. Totho felt the stir amongst the Khanaphir, the gathering of nerves and determination. The archers were stringing their bows with the ease of long practice, bending the simple slats against their calves to hook the string over. Some were already positioned aloft, standing on the stone barrier with four foot of wooden barricade to cover them. They had been complaining, Amnon said, that they would not get a good enough shot at the Scorpions once they charged, but they had no idea what he had saved them from by having the barrier put up this far back from the apex.

  Caltrops were another invention that had never reached Khanaphes. Totho’s people had not been allowed the chance to make many, but the ground before the barriers was liberally strewn with the jagged little four-spined iron things, looking like spiders in the dawn light.

  The danger he had foreseen was that the Scorpions would come around the sides, clambering and grappling about the edges of the barricade and using the walls of the bridge itself as purchase. They had built the sides out as far as he dared without creating a safe target for the leadshotters, but he had indulged in a little psychology as well. He had sacrificed some of the centre, made a low point where the spearmen would be standing, to give the Scorpions a target. It would seem easier to them to force their way through that choke-point. It would be the task of Amnon and his people to stop them.

  Time. Totho had no idea how long they could hold, but the first few waves of attack would provide useful data. How long until the Scorpion host breaks up, hungry and frustrated? How long before masses of them start raiding further upriver?

  There are so many of them. He was beginning to see the enemy as the locals did. Compared with the size of the Imperial armies he had travelled with, both sides here were betting with pocket change only. Here and now, though, there really were a lot of Scorpions ranged on the other side of the river.

  If they just come at us, if they just charge and charge and charge, climbing over their own dead like mad things, we’ll be swept off here within hours.

  He shifted his shoulders, letting the plates of his pauldrons settle. This new armour had seen no battles yet. This one would be its first. The hush falling on the Khanaphir, as the three of them had arrived, had been shocking. Totho, big Amnon, giant Meyr: three war-automata, things of faceless black metal, lords of war. We are making legends here, he thought, and then: but only if we win.

  He had hoped Che would be here. She wasn’t, and there was no help for that, but he had hoped she might hear of what he was doing, and come to see him off.

  He saw the Mantis woman, Teuthete, leap up on to the barricades, with her recurved bow in one hand. There was a scattering of her people here, all archers. It really has been a long time since I fought alongside the Mantis-kinden. That felt like another world, another epoch, a story of once upon a time.

  Amnon vaulted up to take the centre, of course, his shield on his arm and his spear drawn back. To either side of him were the pick of his Royal Guard, men and women in scaled hauberks, with their elliptical shields and long spears. They were braced, and Totho could hear the thunder of the Scorpions, the roar of their battle cries, as they rushed up the facing slope of the bridge.

  Rush on, he thought, and welcome to the modern age.

  He did not even have to look. The first screams each denoted a caltrop for him, and he imagined the charge stumbling over itself, warriors trying desperately to stop, feet run through with agony, while being shoved from behind by their heedless fellows. The archers were busy, methodical and unchallenged, as they emptied their quivers into the enemy. There were always more arrows.

  Totho clambered up, not too proud to take the offer of a helping hand. The Scorpions were already in retreat, leaving a great bank of their dead that was still yards short – spike-studded yards short – of the barricade. The archers continued to let fly, sending their arrows over the arch of the bridge on to the fleeing host, heedless of individual targets.

  The second and third Scorpion advances were desultory. They came without enthusiasm, barely got within the sight of the archers before they were falling back in a scattered and dispirited rabble. The Khanaphir cheered as their opponents disappeared back beyond the curve of the bridge.

  ‘We can’t have broken them,’ Amnon stated, stepping down from the breach. He had not yet bloodied his spear. ‘They are stronger than that.’

  ‘They’re preparing something,’ Totho said. He leant back against the stones, feeling their reassuring solidity against his backplate. ‘They’ve got a plan. This is just to keep them busy while they work it up.’ He glanced at Amnon, but the man’s open, honest face was now a metal carapace, just a dark slot for the eyes.

  We look evil in these helms. It was a child’s gleeful thought. He imagined the Scorpions seeing Amnon the deathbringer, the black-armoured warlord at the centre of the line. It must give them pause, he thought. It must shake them. The sight was worth a fistful of caltrops, at the very least.

  There was a call from the barricades and Amnon stepped back up. A moment later he shouted, ‘This is it!’

  Totho scrabbled at the stones hurriedly, using his Art to clamber up to the archery platform. What he saw from there wrenched his stomach.

  Oh Che, he thought, with a fervent hope that she never learned about this small stratagem.

  The Scorpions again crested the bridge’s arc, and this time they had brought company. Ahead of their line, herded forward by spears and halberd-points, were perhaps two score Khanaphir, prisoners who had so far escaped torture or butchery. Some were children. Totho glanced at the archers around him, with their strings drawn back, and saw faces abruptly torn with shock.

  Shoot them, Totho thought. Shoot them and save the caltrops for the enemy. He opened his mouth, looking to see if Amnon would give the command. Shoot them! Do not even think to break ranks and let them through. The lines of spears, Amnon and his Royal Guard, all held fast but no orders came.

  Bowstrings twanged. It was the Mantis-kinden, drawing and loosing with casual speed, between the prisoners and over them. Totho did not know whether they were confident of their aim or heedless of the consequences. Still, the Scorpions were slowed by their own trick. Each arrow brought a death
, winging from over the wooden parapet to plunge through Scorpion mail, through flesh. There were only a dozen Mantids at the wall, though, and the Khanaphir archers still held back, arms trembling and teeth bared.

  ‘Loose!’ bellowed Amnon, and Totho wondered whether he had simply not seen the problem, with his vision limited to that unfamiliar slot. Even with his orders, most of the archers did not shoot. Those that did pitched their arrows high, trying to curve down on the Scorpion rear ranks. The advance was now at the bank of bodies that the first wave of attack had left behind.

  A great roar went up from the Many of Nem, not just the warriors on the bridge but the whole host on the west bank, and they pushed forward. The rearmost of the prisoners went down at once, lanced through by spears, hacked by axes. The rest fled.

  Totho braced himself for it, but it was brutal. As tactics went, it had a clever simplicity that Drephos would have approved of. The prisoners fled towards their fellow citizens, heedless of the spears, but it was not the spears that took them. They plunged on to that unplumbed no-man’s-land, and screamed and fell and clambered over each other, and fell again, lanced through by the caltrops. Totho felt the defenders shudder, saw the spearpoints ripple as the soldiers fought against their own instincts. They were an inch away from breaking forward to recover the fallen.

  ‘Hold!’ he shouted, and who cared that he was in no position to give orders. ‘Hold and ready!’ he commanded, just like a real battlefield officer, like a Wasp captain who had only his voice to keep his unruly soldiers in line.

  Oh, if only artifice could give us the Ants’ mindlink.

  But they held. It was their discipline or Amnon’s steady presence, or even Totho’s exhortation, but they held. There were tears in some eyes, and hands shook. The Scorpions were coming.

  They enacted a savage mercy upon the fallen as they came, stamping and hacking at them, working themselves into a greater frenzy. Arrows, long restrained, punched into them, but they were at the barricades now, and the dead Khanaphir were a few extra inches of height to assault the spears.