The Scarab Path

One

He was Kadro, Master Kadro of the Great College of the city of Collegium, which was half a world away and no help to him now. A little Fly-kinden man, long hair going grey and face unshaven, waiting for the pitchest dark before beginning his work. Oh, I have striven all my life against the way my race is seen. The perception of Fly-kinden as thieves, as rogues, as a feckless, rootless underclass in any city you cared to name. He had thought that he was beyond that, Master Kadro the antiquarian and historian, who had stood before a class of twenty avid scholars and propounded his learning. He had stood on a box, certainly, so as to be seen over the lectern, but he had stood there nonetheless.

And here he was, skulking like a villain as the evening drew on and the city below him grew quiet and still. The farmers would have come in from their fields by now. They would be lighting the beacons along the great wall. They would eventually be going to sleep. Those sentries that remained would be blind to the night hanging beyond their small fires. Kadro, who could see in the dark as the locals could not, would then strike. It was a poor way for a guest to treat his hosts, but he was beginning to believe that his hosts had not been entirely honest with him.

We sighted the walls of Khanaphes today. After the wastelands it was a view to take the breath away. Golden stone raised higher than the walls of Collegium or of any Ant city-state — and with statues piled on that — architecturally bewildering but, given the people that live here, I suppose it's not surprising. Huge buildings and broad avenues; every major building constructed vastly out of scale. For a man of my stature it was daunting — even for the locals it must make them feel like midgets. Beyond the walls, the strip of green that is the river's attendant foliage runs north, a single channel of life in the desert.

Everyone apparently pleased to see us — especially pleased to see Petri — much polite interest in Collegium but a little standoffish, as though news of a city inhabited by their close kin was something they heard every other day. Evening of the first day, and we seem to have been absorbed — found a place and now genteelly ignored, as the life of Khanaphes moves around us like a sedate and well-oiled machine.'

Kadro reread it with a shake of his head. How little I knew, then. Crouching high above the plaza, with its great hollowed pyramid, he watched the torches of a patrol pass indolently by. He had not been noticed, either in absence or by presence. His heart was hammering. This sneaking around was not his trade. The deftness of the Fly-kinden, his birthright, had mouldered for a good long while before being given an airing now. He was lucky his wings still worked. How they would scoff at me, back home. Collegium born and bred, and living amongst the cumbrous, grounded Beetle-kinden all his life, he had almost forgotten that he was more than a pedestrian himself.

Now! he told himself, but still he did not go, locking into place instead, clutching flat against the stone like a badly rendered piece of sculpture. They were mad keen on their carvings here in Khanaphes. It was obviously the main outlet for all their stunted creativity, he decided. They could never leave a stone surface blank when they could chisel intricate little stories and histories into it. Histories that revealed nothing. Stories that hinted at everything. This whole city was just a maddening riddle created specifically to drive an aging Fly-kinden academic insane. And here was the culmination of his insanity.

It was totally dark now. There was a patchy spread of cloud above, too, which had recommended tonight to him: a rare occurence out here on the fringes of this nameless desert. Nameless in the eyes of Collegium, anyway. In a lifetime of poring over the oldest of maps, Kadro had seldom come across the city of Khanaphes. The name existed only in those ancient, unintelligible scrawls that the Moth-kinden left behind, after the revolution had forced them out. The maps of Beetle merchant venturers barely admitted to its existence, barely gave it credence or fixed location, as though some conspiracy of cartographers existed to deny that a city called Khanaphes had ever taken physical shape. East, somewhere east, the stories ran: a city founded by the Beetle-kinden, and whose name, to those few academics who cared, was inseparable from legend and Inapt fancy.

And here he was, looking over this city, this great river Jamail with its acres of marshy delta and the desert that the locals called the Nem — all nothing but names to the academics of Collegium, until now.

It was the war, he knew, that had opened up so much more of the wider world to the Lowlands. Suddenly there had been a lot of new faces seen in the city, in the College even: Imperial diplomats and their slaves of many kinden, Solarnese Fly-kinden or the sandy-skinned near-Beetles they bred there, Spiderlands Aristoi, and even the occasional brooding Commonwealer. The world was bigger than it had ever been, and yet Kadro had found new territory still. The ever-talking Solarnese had eventually got around to comparing maps, and there, lying at the edge of their world, had been the winding blue line of a river with a jewel at its mouth: Khanaphes.

He shifted on his high perch, digging fingers into the reliefs to keep his balance. They build high here, yet they never look up. Rents in the cloud passed bands of silver moonlight over the Scriptora, the big, brooding mausoleum that served Khanaphes as the seat of its administration. The ember glow of a rush-light was visible in one high window as some clerk continued working all hours for the implacable bureaucracy he served. Below the window rose great columns that supported the building's facade, carved from huge slabs of stone to resemble scaly cycads. This was such a serious city, where nobody hurried and everyone was busy, and it was all just an act. He was sure of that by now. It was all to take one's attention off the fact that there was something missing from the public face of Khanaphes. The city was intrinsically hollow.

This city of contradictions. To find an outpost of what should be civilization all these miles east of Solarno, untouched by the Wasp Empire, untouched by the squabbles of the Exalsee or the machinations of the Spiders … and yet to find it untouched, also, by time.

Khanaphes has welcomed me, and yet excluded me. Petri does not feel it, but she was always a dull tool. There is a darkness at the heart of this city, and it calls for me.

Last night's entry. He should have left this journal with Petri, just in case.

The heart of Khanaphes yawned for him, here overlooking this grand plaza. They liked their space, here. After they had won a victory against the Many of Nem, they had paraded their chariots all around this square, their soldiers and their banners, before immortalizing their own triumph on further expanses of stone. But who had they been parading for? Not for the ministers, who had stood with heads bowed throughout; not for the common people of the city, who had been away at their daily tasks. It had been for the others.

There were others. Kadro was convinced of that now. They were spoken of so often that their name became meaningless, and therefore they were never truly spoken of at all, as if held so close to the face that they could not be focused on. Here was the heart, though. If Khanaphes was holding a secret, then it was here in the tombs.

In the centre of the plaza stood the pyramid. It was a squat thing, rising just thirty feet in giant steps, and was sliced off broadly at the top, to provide a summit ringed with huge statues. From his high vantage, a vantage that the structure's earth-bound builders could never have enjoyed, Kadro could see that within the ring of statues' silent vigil there was a pit, descending into a darkness that his eyes had yet to pierce. It was the great unspoken what at the centre of Khanaphes, and tonight he intended to plumb it.

A bell rang deep within the city, maybe a late ship warning the docks of its approach. The sound took up all of the night, low and deep as wells, for the bells of Khanaphir ships were as hugely out of scale as the rest of the city. Aside from the faint scratchings of crickets and cicadas from the riverbanks, there was no other sound in the darkness.

Petri would already be looking for him. By tomorrow she would be asking questions of their hosts, in her well-meaning and perplexed manner. She would bumble about and make a mild nuisance of herself, and yet be utterly, patently oblivious to what was going on. That was good. It meant that, if something bad happened to him, if he was caught, then they would not suspect her of any complicity. He hoped that was the case, anyway. He had no guarantees.

With a flicker and flare of his wings he coasted gently down to stand between two of the statues. The Khanaphir really loved their statues, and these were huge and strange. It had been the expression on their white stone faces that had drawn him here in the first place. They know something. They were older than the rest, and bigger than most, and better made, and different. There was no man or woman in Khanaphes who could lay claim to those beautiful, arrogant and soulless smiles.

He now crouched between the pyramid summit's edge and the pit. The same rush-light ember still glinted in a high-up window of the Scriptora, that diligent clerk hard at work. Or perhaps it was a spy, tracking Kadro in the darkness? The Fly-kinden huddled closer, trusting to the bulk of the statues to conceal him. They would have come for me, by now, if they knew. He had no choice but to believe it. They had a word here: reverence. It was not the word that the Collegium scholars thought they knew: here it carried tomes of unspoken fears. It was stamped on all the minds and faces of Khanaphes.

He peered down cautiously, into the black. The shaft fell into a gloom that even his eyes wrestled with. The Royal Tombs of Khanaphes, he told himself, and Kadro of Collegium will be the first outlander to enter there in a thousand years. The thought brought a rush of excitement that dispelled the fear. He had always been a man to dig in strange places. Back in Collegium he had been a bit of a maverick, dashing all over the Lowlands to look at unusual rocks or talk to wizened mystics. There had always been method in his research, though, as he negotiated with grim Moth-kinden or bandied words with shrewd Spiders. There had always been a trail to follow and, although he could not have known at the start, that trail led here.

All around him the statues kept silent guard, and he even summoned courage enough to grin at them. If the Khanaphir had wanted to keep him out, they should have posted a living watch here. The white faces stared impassively out into the night over the sleeping city.

Kadro hunched cautiously at the top of the steps, staring downwards. Fly-kinden had no fear of darkness or confining walls. They were small and nimble, and left to their own devices they built complex warrens of narrow tunnels, impossible for larger folk to navigate. There was a cold breath coming from that hole below him, though: chill and slightly damp, and he wondered whether the tombs connected to the river.

No matter. He had not dared this much only to fall victim to his own imagination. He shifted the strap of his satchel and took a deep breath. Into history, he spurred himself.

He glanced across the pit and saw one of the statues staring at him, its blind white eyes open at last, and now darker than the night sky behind. Something moved close by, and he gave out a hoarse shout and called up his wings to take flight, but by then it was already too late.