The Scarab Path

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  ‘The what?’

  ‘At the far end of this hall there’s a throne. Only – it’s not empty.’

  Thalric said nothing, waiting for more. Che took his sleeve and they both took a few steps closer until she was absolutely sure. ‘Armour,’ she explained. ‘There’s a suit of armour sitting there. Hammer and tongs, but it gave me a start.’

  She edged closer, then closer still, because the scale and the repeating ribs of the hall’s buttresses played tricks. ‘Look at that,’ she breathed.

  ‘I can’t,’ Thalric pointed out. Che continued to stare, trying to take it in.

  ‘It must be the oldest suit of sentinel plate in the world,’ she decided. It was true plate armour, an intricate suit of interlocking pieces that had been posed as if its missing occupant was deep in thought, elbow on knee, with the raised gauntlet supporting the edge of the open-faced helm. It must be wired together, she thought, staring into the cavernous emptiness of the helmet, and then realized: The slime is holding it together, like glue. ‘It’s absolutely huge,’ she said, shaken. ‘It would fit a Mole Cricket-kinden, I’d guess.’ It was made to fit one of those statues, came the next irresistible thought, but she shook it off. Perhaps that stone coffin held only ashes, or perhaps they had folded up Garmoth Atennar before putting him inside. Perhaps the box was actually the mouth of a pit and they had buried him standing up, or even standing on his head. She didn’t know, so there was no reason to get jumpy about it. Garmoth Atennar, Greatest of Warriors, sitting silently upright on his plinth, those dead stone eyes opening at last.

  I have to get out of this place. It is not healthy for the mind. ‘I have seen workmanship like this before,’ she said, ‘in drawings in very old books mostly, but once or twice in life, and never a complete suit. It’s Mantis work. It’s beautiful. I wish I could see it in the light, to look at the colours of the metal.’

  ‘The Masters of Khanaphes were Mantids?’ Thalric frowned.

  ‘Not if their statues are anything to go by, but they would have possessed the best of everything. A complete suit of Mantis-kinden sentinel plate like this …You could buy half the Assembly for the price of it.’

  ‘Che,’ Thalric interrupted, and the tone of his voice had changed. She felt her hand stray instinctively for her sword-hilt, ready for trouble.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I can see light.’

  ‘Daylight?’ she asked him instantly.

  ‘No, not daylight.’ His inflection said there was no doubt about it.

  ‘You’ll have to guide me, then. I just see, here, and I see greys and shadows. If there’s light coming from anywhere, I can’t make it out.’

  ‘Somewhere to our left. It’s very faint, but it looks … bluish. I think I can make out something … a further hallway there?’

  ‘There’s another hall each side,’ Che confirmed, ‘but I suppose we go left then.’

  ‘It must be daylight,’ Thalric said, without conviction. ‘What else could it be?’ His stance changed suddenly. ‘Or it could be lamplight. The Rekef?’

  ‘It could,’ Che confirmed. ‘So let’s creep up on them very carefully and find out whether it is or not. They won’t see us, after all.’

  ‘If it is Rekef, we’ll have to kill them all,’ Thalric said flatly. ‘If we catch them by surprise, my sting can take two or three down before they have a chance to react. We should be grateful for what happened in your embassy. That cut the numbers down a great deal.’

  Che paused a moment before saying, ‘Thalric, two of my friends died in that fight.’

  He stared back towards her, caught out, torn between spymaster and human being. ‘Of course they did. Forgive me.’

  ‘But you’re right,’ she said. ‘If there’s a chance we can surprise them, then we have to do it. I have my sword.’ Her voice trembled just a little.

  ‘Pray you don’t have to use it,’ he said.

  They crept forward, and this timeThalric took the lead. It was a long time before Che’s sight began to tint and waver, the light bleeding in to curdle her Art. It was not daylight, certainly: a strange unhealthy pale blue that picked out the alcove walls in stark contrast. More, it was not still, but dancing and guttering, playing up and down the floor and ceiling and making the slime gleam and glitter. It was clear that it was no kind of lamp that the Rekef could be expected to carry. They approached with trepidation.

  Before an open archway they found them: two metal bowls, each a foot across, on elegantly worked, coiling legs. Some oil within them burned almost smokelessly, its scent rusty to the nostrils. Che and Thalric stopped and stared, half ducking into an alcove. It was not fear of the Rekef that made then seek cover, but a feeling of trespass, like two children lost in a giant’s castle.

  ‘The oil burns,’Thalric observed. ‘So it has been lit – but by who?’

  If I said by magic, would he believe me? she asked herself. Perhaps now he would. ‘I think that we have … caused them to be lit. I think that our presence here has made this happen.’ Ancient enchantments – but why give tomb robbers light to work by?Why this long-dead hospitality?

  ‘Some device …’ Thalric mused. ‘It’s possible.’ Yet he did not seem eager to examine the braziers for artifice. Che looked past them into the next hall. There were other braziers there, glowing and flickering with pale light. Did I notice those before? She could not be wholly certain that she had.

  What are we nearing? How large is this place? She felt they had been exploring, admittedly at a cripplingly cautious pace, for hours.

  They stepped through the archway and stopped. For a long time they simply looked.

  The ceiling was at least another six feet higher, and it was supported by great columns that had been fantastically worked into the shape of abominations. It was an old motif. She had seen carvings like it in Tharn, but never as grandly detailed as these. Human features were merged with those of beasts so that each column became a monster with its arms or claws raised high to support the earth. There were spiders with the faces of women, and scorpion-tailed men with pincered hands, beetle-headed, wing-backed, joint-legged. One depicted a woman who was partly consumed within the shell of a great mantis, and this image in particular Che turned away from, finding it obscurely, disturbingly familiar.

  Between the columns were the tombs, arrayed in earnest now. Where Garmoth Atennar, whoever he had been, had kept a lonely vigil, here were an even score of great stone sarcophagi interspersed with the grotesque carved pillars.

  The eerie light leapt and dwindled on them, these sleeping statues, the ranks of the forgotten, the Masters of Khanaphes. She saw their names: Hieram Tisellian, who Raised the Temple and brought Life to the Parched Land, Lord Architect of all Time … Killeris Jaenathil, the Beautiful, the all-Knowing, Lady of the Utmost Sorcery … Iellith Quellennas, Bringer of Death, the Harvester of the Old Lands, the Chariot of War …

  ‘How many hundreds of years,’ Che wondered, ‘since anyone last saw this?’

  ‘Always assuming you don’t count the lamp-lighters.’ The sense of awe and reverence had passed Thalric by, and he was becoming increasingly unnerved, looking up at the hybrid visages of the carved abominations and shuddering. For impossible monsters, they had been rendered extremely lifelike.

  They were crude, however, compared to the likenesses that the Masters had decreed for themselves. Each one of these was an individual, as recognizable and distinct as they must have appeared in life. The white stone flowed smoothly over their musculature, each curve of gut and jowl and breast. Theirs was an alien aesthetic, but one that seemed to overrule all others. They were not delicately beautiful as Spiders were, or Dragonflies or Beetles or Moths, or any other kinden. They were simply beautiful de facto, commanding and magnetic. Even their stone facsimiles confirmed it.

  ‘No wonder they are still revered as they are,’ Che said in wonder.

  ‘Oh, true,’ Thalric snapped. ‘They’d be able to give our Slave Corps a few lessons: how to keep a
n entire population under your thumb for a thousand years after you’ve died! How about that? The greatest slavemasters in the history of the world lie here, and I’m glad that, beyond this stinking piece of sand and stone, nobody even knows about them.’

  ‘How can you say that?’ Che demanded. ‘Thalric, what we’re seeing here … it’s an age of history that Collegium has never guessed at. In all the Lowlands, there are probably only a few records of this mouldering in the Moth-kinden strongholds. I could go home right now and claim my seat as a College Master just for being here. This is history, this is the past right here for us to look upon. Can’t you see that?’

  ‘Do you know what I see?’ he asked her. ‘I see those pillars in the main hall of the Scriptora – the hall with the little fountain, where they held that reception for us both.’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘They were just like these monsters: pillars carved into figures that were holding up the ceiling. Very artistic. Only those ones were carved to look like Beetle-kinden. Your people, the Khanaphir. What did these dead Masters think? That it was your lot above ground, and monsters for servants once they were dead? They were mad, Che. They’re better forgotten, believe me …’ He trailed off just then, and she heard his breath suddenly become ragged. She turned to see what had caught his eye.

  One of the stone coffins was bare.

  The sight – the absence – chilled her. For a moment neither of them moved. Then Thalric said, ‘So, we’re both thinking the same ridiculous thing just now, and we should stop it. After all, they wouldn’t be the first people not to finish crafting a tomb. It’s something you tend to have built late in life.’

  Che walked closer and wiped slime away from the inscription to read it clearly.

  ‘Elysiath Neptellian, Lady of the Bright Water, She whose Word Breaks all Bonds, Princess of the Thousand,’ she translated.

  ‘Maybe she didn’t care for the likeness,’ said Thalric harshly. ‘Now, can we get out of this festering place and …’ His voice choked off and Che looked around wildly.

  ‘What? What now?’

  ‘I … thought I saw something …’ he said, voice openly shaking. ‘Ahead there. Something pale …’

  ‘The lamps. The shadows of the lamps,’ Che said hurriedly. ‘The lamplight on the stone.’ She was tense as a drawn bow, waiting for whatever terrible thing was about to descend on them. The air was thick with it.

  When it came, it came from behind them: a long, drawn-out scream of human agony. Thalric whirled around, his sword in his hand instantly.

  ‘Wait—’ Che started but he snarled, ‘Osgan,’ and was away from her at once, plunging back the way they had come, and leaving her to scurry in his wake.

  Thirty-Nine

  Totho was awoken by the sound of stone, great loads of it being hauled up the span of the bridge by sled, and by the noisy efforts of a labouring draught beetle.

  Are we building the barricade now? he wondered vaguely, but had they not already built it? Had they not defended it for a day already? I refuse to go through that again.

  He sat up, seeing the great bow-backed animal settle, antennae twitching, as the sled was unloaded. By the barricade itself, the centre had been reinforced, going some way towards repairing the petard’s damage, and some complex woodwork was being lashed together, a slope on either side of the central point, with what seemed like a vast quantity of rope lying about. He could make nothing of it.

  He jumped up, looking for authority, and spotted Amnon. The big man was supervising the unloading. Meyr, whose watch it was, leant against the barricade well out of the way.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Totho asked him. ‘When did this start?’

  ‘Hour ago,’ Meyr said. ‘That Amnon, he’s got an idea or something. Look down at our end of the bridge.’

  Totho did so, seeing a great many torches down below, and what seemed like two hundred Khanaphir busy hauling stone about. A second barricade. ‘Amnon!’ he called out. ‘I told you, once they get a leadshotter up here, they’ll sweep away anything you put down at the shore. They’ll just smash it to pieces.’

  ‘That is indeed what you told me,’ Amnon confirmed.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘I have been speaking with Praeda about the engines of the enemy, and what they are capable of,’ Amnon revealed.

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly what I meant when I said you should go home to her,’ Totho remarked drily. ‘So what did she have to say about it?’

  ‘Firstly, she said she is an artificer, and a professor of artifice at their College, so she knows about these things,’ Amnon told him.

  Totho shrugged. ‘That covers quite a range of competences.’

  ‘She then also says that our stones cannot resist their shot, because our stones are rigid. She says that Collegium walls have a soft core to them, where the mortar is, that makes them move when struck, which is why these engines would not beat them down so easily. True?’

  ‘True,’Totho admitted, ‘all true. So what’s going on?’

  ‘Down there they are preparing a very great deal of stone, all of it we have dressed and ready to place. As of now there is a narrow pass to one side, to let the defenders here escape, but that will be filled at need,’ Amnon said. ‘We are building bands of wall: stone backed with wood and wicker, then stone again, and so forth, the whole of it a score of feet deep at least, and high as we can build it. The spaces of softer stuff, Praeda says, will give the stones somewhere to go when they are struck. The enemy will take twice as long to batter through. And she says, when the leadshotters shoot at it, they will only be turning standing stones into rubble that they will have to climb across. We will have archers on every roof. What do you think, about my Praeda?’

  ‘I think she’s thought it through,’ Totho conceded. ‘As last lines of defence go, I can’t think of a better one. I should have thought of that myself.’

  ‘Good to be appreciated,’ he heard a female voice interrupt. Praeda herself came walking towards them up the slope. She had traded her Collegium robes for hard-wearing artificer’s canvas, and there was a crossbow of Iron Glove make slung over her shoulder. ‘Amnon, you’re sure the barricade can hold them off here while they complete the barrier down there, after you fall back?’

  ‘Of course.’ Amnon was looking at Totho as he said it, and the wince was evident, that told of the lie.

  Every plan has its flaw. ‘So what’s this up here?’ Totho asked hastily, to ward off more questions from Praeda.

  ‘When this barricade is due to fall, my soldiers will still need time to flee down to the eastern shore,’ Amnon explained. The labourers were loading great blocks of stone on to the ramps that flanked the barricade’s mid-point, building them high and securing them against the slope with ropes. Totho extrapolated, seeing two big columns of stone, poised and straining, waiting to thunder together in the centre, an instant breach-blocker.

  ‘That’s mad,’ he said. ‘What if the ropes go? Anyone fighting in the centre will be squashed flat.’

  ‘We make good ropes, and we know our stone,’ Amnon replied. ‘We have been building like this for a thousand years. The ropes will hold until we cut them. I will be in the centre of our line. It is my own life that I stake on this.’

  Totho shook his head at it. Oh you say that here and now, with that confidence, because your lady is with you. It would not do to point out the cracks in this plan. It would not take the Scorpions long to break through the barricade, as soon as its defenders had retreated. Another petard would suffice and they would surely have one ready. If there were sufficient bodies on the far side, or if they possessed the Art, then they might even just swarm straight over. At the foot of the bridge the fleeing soldiers would either be trapped by the barrier’s completion, or the barrier would not be finished in time, letting the Scorpions through.

  Unless. But he did not need to voice that ‘unless’ here. You are a fool, Amnon. You have more to live for than you know. Amnon’s sense of d
uty was crippling to be near, and Totho could barely imagine it. If he himself had been born with all the advantages that Amnon owned, with his strength and energy and easy manner, and if he had a Beetle girl who loved him, then there was nothing in the world that would make him turn away from it. Not duty, not honour, nothing.

  But, then, perhaps that duty is what makes Amnon what he is.

  ‘You should sleep again,’ Amnon told him. ‘It is your turn.’

  ‘Small chance of that,’Totho grumbled.

  ‘They will be done here soon enough.’ It was true, the piles of stone, immaculately placed, were now almost as high as the barricades. The webwork of ropes that held them in place had been run to pulleys fixed on the bridge’s sides, and then back to a single ring set in the stonework behind. It would take a sword’s blow to those taut ropes to drop four tons of stone together like clapping hands.

  ‘I don’t think I’m going to get much sleep tonight,’Totho admitted. ‘Tomorrow is oppressing me already.’

  Amnon settled down with his back to the bridge’s right flank. His glance, away from Praeda towards the western bank, caught him wearing a strangely irresolute expression. ‘Praeda,’ he said suddenly, ‘would you leave us? Return to the city?’

  The Collegiate woman frowned at him. ‘Actually I …’

  ‘You were going to stay to face the dawn,’ Amnon finished for her, nodding. ‘You bought a crossbow from one of the Iron Glove people. You want to fight alongside me, tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes.’ Her expression was determined, set. Totho glanced from her to Amnon, who would not look at her at all.

  ‘You must not,’ was all he said.

  ‘I have a right to defend you,’ Praeda told him. ‘How can you keep me away? I know you’re First Soldier of Khanaphes, and all that, but that doesn’t mean you’re immortal.’

  ‘No, it does not,’ Amnon said heavily. ‘But you have never fought before, and many will die here who have lived their whole lives carrying spear and shield. And I will not be able to fight to my best, knowing that you are in danger. I will not.’