Instead, the man grinned openly as he stepped back three paces, letting a Scorpion pass him to his left, and another to his right. All his men kept widening their half-circle, until it was the Many of Nem that Meyr faced, and not the Empire. The Scorpions all wore the same hateful smile as their half-caste cousin. Step by step they closed in on the giant, pausing just out of the reach of his axe.
So, we are weak, in their eyes. Meyr found, belatedly, that he despised them. They had signed themselves over to the Empire, and they did not even know it.
One of them hurled a spear, almost without warning. Meyr got his shield up, felt the strength of the missile rattle against the aviation steel. Something else, perhaps a hand-axe, rebounded from his pauldron, striking from behind.
They came for him then. Without a war cry, with nothing but a glitter of raised weapons, they descended like ravenous beasts.
'I spit on you all,' Meyr roared at them, and then let himself fall into the earth.
That night, around the fires, Jakal came to find Hrathen. She crouched beside him, one sharp elbow knocking aWasp slaver away and clearing a space. She did not spare the unseated man a glance.
'You are very clever, Of-the-Empire,' she began.
'Am I?' he said, carefully neutral. Her presence, suddenly so close, had fired his pulse a little. Is it that I genuinely admire her, or simply because I cannot have her? he asked himself.
'Walk with me, great conqueror,' she said, standing again. 'We will talk of your deeds.'
It is because she challenges me, he thought. She cares nothing for rank, nothing for the Empire. She is the pure savage, and she would cut my throat in a moment — will do so, when I am no longer of use.
And the thought came back, And she would do the same with any other here, and so I am one of them. It was bittersweet, that thought. The Rekef in him jeered at it, but that part of him whose actions had seen him brought in for treason, that man understood. He launched himself to his feet and followed her off into the dark.
'What would you hear of my deeds, O Warlord?' he asked her, trying to match her tone. Away from the fires, he could not see her face clearly but he knew she was smiling.
'I shall tell you of them. You are a cunning creature, Of-the-Empire. You knew that the giant would escape my people.'
He shrugged. 'I was a slaver for the Empire. You learn about the Art of the lesser races. I knew that some of his kinden could walk within the earth.'
'How do you ever keep them enslaved?' she asked.
'Many don't have the Art. Most have kin that don't. For every runaway, every act of rebellion, we punish those we still have.' He spread his clawed hands. 'That man bought his freedom with the blood of his people. He's unusual. They're clannish, the Mole Crickets, and most of them just offer their backs to the lash and get on with their work.'
She gave a brief laugh. 'So your generosity gave the giant to my people.'
'And if they had killed him, they'd have thanked me,' Hrathen said. 'And if we'd gone for him and he'd escaped, we'd look weak. Do you disapprove?'
'No. I love cleverness. There are chieftains stronger than I, more skilled, more savage, but none is more clever, Of-the-Empire, remember that.'
'Must you call me that?' He surprised himself with the complaint. It was a weakness, to seek to avoid the name, but it jabbed him like a stone in his boot every time she used it. Perhaps it had surprised her, too, for she paused, appearing nothing but a darkness within the night. He sensed her staring back at him.
'What else am I to call you? That is all you are, to me: you are the Empire's halfbreed hand.' She sat down, looking back at the fires, at the hasty tents of her people. 'So tell me, Of-the-Empire, tell me of yourself — if there is more than that.'
He joined her carefully, within arm's reach of her. Now that his eyes were growing used to the dark, he saw how the distant wash of the oil flames gave her pale skin the faintest touch of blue fire.
'I was a slaver for a long time, working the Silk Road mostly,' he said. 'Then I was a Rekef man, keeping an eye on the slavers. It looked like that was all I'd ever be, travelling up and down the Dryclaw with the Scorpion-kinden-'
'I know of them,' she interrupted dismissively. 'The tame ones, we call them.'
He digested that, nodding. 'Then the war came,' he continued. 'War with the Lowlands. First strike was against an Ant city-state off the Silk Road, an army moving through the desert to get there. Throwing money at the Scorpions to act as guides. Suddenly I was important: the Rekef were leaning on me, wanting the Scorpions this place or that.'
'And who did you betray?' she asked, keen as a razor, enough to make him pause for one second, thinking: Is she Rekef? Is this the reckoning for me, here and now?
'To run with your kinden, even the "tame ones", one must live like you, share your values,' he explained. 'When the time came that they seized on the hand that fed them, I did not restrain them. Perhaps they could not have been restrained, anyway. Imperial supplies began disappearing. It was only a matter of time. If they hadn't gone on to hatch this plan, I'd be on crossed pikes by now.'
'Yes, this plan.' After that she was silent for a long time and, although he opened his mouth to speak several times, he could not find the words.
Eventually she sighed. 'Your Empire thinks us stupid,' she said, and then, 'I had the omens read, today, from the blood spilt on the sand.'
He had nothing to say to that, so he waited for her to elaborate.
'The haruspex told me that we would advance like the desert wind, that we would break the walls of Khanaphes and scourge them from the city's streets.'
'That sounds a good omen.'
'Does it?'
He gave her time to explain but she said nothing, and her melancholy was now infecting him. Eventually he said, 'I don't … we don't have omens and such in the Empire. Even amongst the Dryclaw tribes. I don't know what you mean.'
She laughed softly. 'Oh, the desert storm is a terrible thing, but where does it go to, when the wind is blown out? When the sand has settled again, where shall we be? The world is changing, Of-the-Empire. The Khanaphir do not realize it, and so they will be destroyed, but the world is changing. As for us, what do we build? What do we craft, save weapons? What do we create? And now we have your Empire to our north, and we look upon the tame ones and we can see our future. How long will it be before the Nem is no longer ours to rule? Perhaps I am the very last who can truly call herself the Warlord of the Many.'
He said nothing to this, because he could deny none of it.
'But in these last days we are strong,' she said, and with that she had banished her mood back to where it could not be heard or seen. 'And if the grave-marker of my people shall be the ruin of Khanaphes, so be it. Let them look upon those broken walls and know that once the Nem was free.' He saw the faintest movement of her face turning to him with its distant phosphorescence. 'You will never be one of us, Of-the-Empire, but I think you will never be of the Empire either. Men like you are cast simply for moments when the desert storm strikes. And then they are cast away. And then cast away, remember that.'
Next morning found Hrathen out of sorts, Jakal's words still echoing faintly inside his head. All around him the war-host of the Many was mobilizing, buckling on their armour and forming into their mobs. Their cavalry was already harnessed and ready. Riders with long lances sat in offset saddles strapped on to great scorpions that had been plated with armour, clattering forth with claws agape and stings raised high. Lesser beasts were put in pairs or fours to draw the Nemian chariots with their jagged-hubbed wheels, each beast with its outer claw sheathed in metal, like a shield. The chariots were traditional, light, chitin-built things for shock assaults, but now, behind the charioteer, they carried two crossbowmen apiece.
The great mass of the host went on foot, and it surged and quarrelled and milled as it formed up into marching order. There was a discord to them that he had not witnessed before: someone had drawn lines and boundaries about their
naturally chaotic exuberance. That someone was Hrathen himself. While once they had all been warriors, now he had sieved them, divided them. Some of them were checking over the leadshotters, now drawn by animal carts and the Imperial automotives. Some carried their crossbows, standing distinctly apart from the rest. Others were simple soldiers with greatsword and halberd and axe. There was barely a shield amongst them, these hard, close-quarters traditionalists. Their place would be to bleed for the Nem when the battle was joined.
These were a people who possessed little, and put it all into their wars. Metal was not so scarce in the desert, for they melted down the wealth of past ages, from the Nem's ruined cities, to make their sword blades and axe heads. They scavenged armour of a dozen different styles then stretched and mauled it to fit their larger frames. Wood was harder to find, but they hunted the desert locusts, in their season, for the strong chitin shafts of their legs. A thousand insects had been trapped and killed to make hafts for the forest of halberds that Hrathen saw waving and weaving amid the host's advance guard.
'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 li
fe 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?'
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