The Scarab Path

Twenty-Three

They sat in silence in their room within the Collegiate embassy, one standing by the window, the other one by the door: Accius and Malius, the Vekken ambassadors.

They had been invited to join the hunt, of course: they had ignored the invitation. Instead this had seemed to them a golden opportunity for a little quiet, some space to think without the Collegiates crowding them with their constant noise.

We have watched for long enough, Malius decided. The King would expect some action from us by now.

The King does not know the conditions here, Accius thought darkly.

We are merely being distracted. No doubt that is the intent.

Agreed. Accius watched Khanaphir servants outside as they tended the gardens of the Place of Honoured Foreigners. This city is irrelevant.

Primitive, agreed Malius. There is no advantage to be secured for Collegium here. Even ten thousand Khanaphir soldiers could not stand for more than a moment against aVekken army. Bows and spears! In the voice of the mind, derision was so much purer and more satisfying.

So why are they here? Accius posed the riddle they had been slowly pondering for days.

Their scholars are almost certainly nothing more than that, Malius admitted reluctantly. They may have other standing orders that have yet to come into effect, but we have witnessed nothing about them to suggest that their claims hide anything more devious.

They are the typical irrelevant chaff with which Collegium always hides its true purpose, Accius agreed. Which purpose-

Which purpose is therefore embodied in the person of their ambassador. No doubt we were intended to watch the academics, or the city itself — the Collegiate contempt for the abilities of others, once again. Malius loaded the thought with particular emotion. It was their one pastime, really, this disparagement of their enemies. It enlivened the silence, and it even made the noise more bearable.

Her movements have been mysterious. She has been evading scrutiny and she has been impossible to track, Accius thought. She has an agenda that even her foolish compatriots do not realize. She is the real reason they are here, and they can look at all the stones and rocks they want. That much is clear.

That much is clear, Malius echoed. And we must now unearth her purpose. It is obviously something more than we had thought.

The King was wise to send us on this mission.

Indeed. We have seen where she visits most, who she associates with.

And that skirmish in the courtyard, Accius recalled. How swift she was to disarm it, and then spending so long speaking to the Wasp.

It is clear they have come here, so far from the Lowlands, because it is a neutral city where arrangements can be made.

They both paused then. Their joint conclusion, inexorable, was sufficiently dire for neither to wish it voiced. At last it was Malius who finished the thought.

Collegium has no stomach for another war, therefore they seek an alliance with the Wasp Empire.

Neither needed to state the obvious consequence of that. Where else could the combined eyes of such an alliance turn, save to Vek?

We must prevent this, at all costs, Accius decided. We must create disharmony between our enemies.

There is only one way, Malius concluded for him. Their secrecy shall be their undoing. We must kill both ambassadors. For the glory of Vek.

Scorpion dens were seldom quiet places at night. The darkness was punctuated by the sounds of drinking, brawling, vendettas abruptly realized, the crash of pottery and the clash of steel, but when the explosion ripped across the night of the city-camp of Gemrar it was of a different order. The entire city was shocked into panicked motion instantly, Scorpions surging out naked or half-dressed, weapons in their hands, shouting at each other or rushing for the gap-toothed outer wall to confront the attack. Even Hrathen himself was momentarily disoriented. He felt the desert chill and in his mind he was back in the Dryclaw during the war, bellowing orders to the Slave Corps officers who had followed him into infamy. The Empire has found us, was his first thought, as he shrugged on his banded armour, took up his shortsword and stepped into the night. His eyes scanned the sky, looking for the Light Airborne or the square bulk of an Imperial heliopter.

Then he remembered. This desert was the Nem, not its domesticated cousin. He was far from the Empire's reach.

'Report!' he bellowed, hoping that one of his men was in earshot. Most of the Scorpions were still rushing outwards, roused to a single purpose by the thought of an assault on their capital. There was a counter-current, however, that was calling some of them somewhere within the city's bounds. Hrathen joined the latter, sheathing his sword and tightening the buckles of his armour. Whenever the Scorpions got in his way he elbowed them aside, for all that they were bigger than he was. It was the only way.

He smelled the smoke soon enough, the acrid bite of spent firepowder in his nostrils. Has some fool fired the magazine? But the resulting explosion would have been greater than that, and besides, they weren't so easy to light, for the firepowder was packed in small charges, little metal-bound barrels not much bigger than a man's fist. The Imperial engineers had made the stuff as safe as possible, if only because it would be them who would be standing next to it most of the time.

He spotted the dark-and-light of an Imperial uniform up ahead. 'Report!' he shouted again, shouldering forward through the gawping crowd. Once he got clear of the scrum, the story was written plain ahead of him, although it took him a moment to take it in.

Those ravages time had begun in one of the ruined buildings of Gemrar, an instant's work had completed. What had previously been a sound enough shell of a building, a small dome-roofed structure with three intact walls, was now a broken eggshell, punched in upon itself, so flattened that very little of it still stood stone upon stone. Hrathen went close enough to see, in the bluish lamplight, what must have been at least three bodies lying torn apart within. He glanced back along the line of devastation, into the mouth of the leadshotter, still wisping smoke. Lieutenant Angved, the engineer, had arrived by now and, true to his trade, was inspecting the weapon for damage, heedless of the carnage nearby.

There was a Scorpion standing near the device, Hrathen saw, who looked defiant, and pleased with himself. That was all Hrathen needed to see to complete the picture.

'Where is the Warlord?' he asked.

'At your elbow, Of-the-Empire.'

He had not sensed her, though she was standing very close. She wore only a long hide hauberk, but she had her spear to hand and her helm on. He felt those red eyes studying him coolly.

'Do you regret giving us these weapons now, Of-the-Empire?' she asked him. He amused her, Hrathen knew. He was Scorpion enough to touch on her world, but she found the Empire and its ways tedious, pointless. When in her company, he almost felt he agreed.

'I am only glad that I have given you some enemies to turn them on,' he told her. 'A man has a right to use his strength. If his strength is in the mind, then so be it.' He gestured at the siege weapon and its victims. 'This is no business of mine.'

'That he took your weapon, does that not anger you, O possessive Empire?' Beneath the rim of the helm, she was smiling through her fangs.

'It is yours, given to you and your people. If he took it from you, then the theft is yours to punish,' Hrathen said, trying to match her grin. She put him off balance, and he knew it was because his Scorpion side — his rapacious father's side — wanted her. She was no whore like the Empress, though, who ruled through others' weakness. Jakal was strong and would seek only strength. She would yield herself to his strength, or else he would force her, or she would kill him. And now she drives me to the second of those, or perhaps the third.

'So glib,' she berated him. 'You change your colours, Of-the-Empire, but the black-and yellow-stain lies ever underneath.' She turned away suddenly, calling out, 'Genraki!'

The Scorpion that Hrathen had picked as the culprit came forward. He stopped a safe distance from Jakal, obviously not entirely sure of his own daring now.

'You have long warred with the Friends of Hierkan,' Jakal observed.

Genraki merely nodded, keeping a hand close to the hatchet on his belt.

'Are the Friends of Hierkan here to witness? Do they wish to match weapons with Genraki?'

There were enough glances cast at the staved-in house for Hrathen to suspect that the man had done his work well.

Jakal spread her arms, walking over to inspect the ruin of a ruin, stepping up on to cracked and tumbled stones, heedless of the bloody jumble beneath. 'See these stones I stand on now?' she addressed her people. 'The walls of Khanaphes are made only of such stones.'

They went absolutely silent, all of the watching Scorpions, and Hrathen found his heart catching in his chest at the sheer simplicity of it. How many challengers to her authority has she killed, how many conspiracies has she rooted out, that she leads them so deftly? He knew it was more than that, more than just the same brute force that prevailed in the Dryclaw. The Many of Nem had begun to recognize the true value of their leaders and their elders. They followed Jakal through respect and belief in her, and not only because she could put a spear through any one of them.

But she could. The knowledge excited him, and he forced his thoughts back to business. I am Captain Hrathen of the Imperial Slave Corps, of the Rekef. His heritage, his despoiled blood, surged within him, testing the bounds of his duty.

He found Angved still checking out the leadshotter. 'Report,' he said.

'No damage that I can see.'

'I don't mean the machine.'

The engineer looked up at him, and there was a tightness around his eyes. 'I don't know what to say, sir. It's a four-man job to move and load this thing, yet apparently he did it on his own.'

'A good student, then?'

'Not my best, I would have said.' Angved shook his head. 'I can't believe they're going to let him get away with it.'

'Look at what he's accomplished,' Hrathen pointed out. 'He's ended a feud, he's proved himself strong and wily. Why should they punish Genraki when he's exactly what they want?'

Genraki himself was returning to them, with a couple of others following in his wake. 'I shall return the machine, Lieutenant,' he said to Angved, with a surprising deference. The engineer nodded, faking a smile, and the three Scorpion-kinden made light work of wheeling the leadshotter away.

'They learn fast,' Angved observed. 'You were right on that, sir. They're not disciplined, and it's difficult to get a decent speed up, because they always want to watch the shots, see the damage and have a bit of a talk about it, but they're strong and they're tough. Make good Auxillians, is my report.'

Hrathen nodded, wondering again if that was why they were here — and if not, what then? 'But you're not comfortable with them,' he finished.

'Permission to speak freely, sir?'

'Go ahead.'

'Are you comfortable with them?' Angved enquired. 'I know it's the fashion to call people like these savages, but with these people it's true. It's not that they're stupid, it's just … they have no rules. Shedding blood means nothing to them, either their own or anyone else's. I can't even understand how they survive from generation to generation. How do their children even live to full growth?'

'You want to know?'

'I want to understand, sir.'

'When she's close to term, the mother leaves the camp, goes off and fends for herself in the desert,' Hrathen told him, remembering. 'She stays there two, three years — a Scorpion child learns fast, grows fast. By then it can walk, run, fight with the other children. Then she comes back to the camp and gives the child to the tribe, and it has no mother or father from that day. They hold their children in common, and soon enough nobody recalls ancestry. No families, Angved — nothing to stand between the individual and the group.'

'That sounds harsh, sir.'

'Life is harsh. Life in the Dryclaw or the Nem is harsh. If a child was linked to its mother, it would become a weapon against her. Their best chance for survival is anonymity: it breeds strength, self-reliance.' Hrathen smiled, and he saw Angved pale at the sight of those underslung tusks in a Wasp-kinden face. 'It breeds a callous disregard for others, but think how much effort the Empire puts into teaching us something the Scorpions learn for free.'

Angved remained carefully silent after that.

Hrathen chuckled. 'Just teach them to destroy,' he said. 'Teach them to break walls with the leadshotters, to break men with the crossbows. Then we will take them to Khanaphes and simplify the maps — one less city in the world.'

'Why, though?' Angved asked. 'What's the point? Why does the Empire want Khanaphes gone?'

'Think like the Scorpions,' Hrathen told him, not unkindly. 'We do it because we can.'

Hrathen sought out Angved the next morning, finding him not at the leadshotters, amidst the noise and the smoke and the curses, but hidden away beneath a lean-to of chitin over wood. The engineer was cooking something, or at least heating something in a small pan.

'Not deserting your post, is it?' Hrathen asked, looming. Angved looked up at him, unalarmed.

'At the moment we're just working on speed, Captain, seeing if these brutes can manage faster than a shot every twenty minutes. They already know what they're doing, but they lose focus so quickly.' The engineer shrugged. 'My lads out there can shout at them without me needing to strain my throat, so I decided to do a little investigating.'

'Really?' Hrathen knelt by him. 'Beyond your brief, isn't it?'

'Engineers and Slave Corps both, we think for ourselves,' Angved replied, meeting Hrathen's small, yellow eyes. 'This rock-oil of theirs, they use it just for lighting, yes?'

'What else is there?' Hrathen asked. The engineer smiled at that.

'It's a slow-burning stable mineral oil, sir. That's useful for engineering, and there are pools of it all over, probably entire lakes of it underground. Would they trade it, do you think? For more weapons?'

'I don't see why not. Like you say, there's no shortage of the stuff.' Hrathen, no artificer, shrugged the idea off. 'Are they going to be ready?'

'It's up to them, now. I'm keeping the artillery under my thumb, but the crossbows are already out there — the warriors we taught are teaching the others, as best they can. It's not difficult, to point a crossbow. That's why we like them.'

Hrathen nodded, standing up straight. It had been like watching a slow-building rockslide, seeing the Scorpions take to the crossbows. The weapons were old Imperial Auxillian standard issue kit, second-hand and almost obsolete, but for the Many of Nem they had been a revolution.

Jakal had ordered her two advisers to examine them first. The old man, with his fetishes and charms of cogs and gears, had climbed all over them, muttering to himself, testing the action on the weapons, thrumming the strings with his thumb-claw. He had reported that they were good, a worthy armament for the Host of the Nem. Next, the young man, wearing a cloak of clattering chitin shards, had walked round the wagons with his eyes closed, trailing one hand near them. He had then announced that the land believed it was well time for the city of Khanaphes to be broken open like an egg.

Scorpion-kinden made bad archers, and Hrathen knew it well. It was their claws, arching over forefinger and thumb, that got in the way, snagging or even severing a bowstring as the arrow was loosed. Those few of the locals who still preferred the bow had cut notches into their claws to hook the string with, but they were poor shots even so. Most reverted to throwing axes, spears and javelins.

The big, pincered hands of the Scorpion-kinden could manage a crossbow, though. They were still slightly clumsy with it, but they were strong enough to re-cock their weapons without the bracing and ratcheting the makers had intended. Once the crossbow was loaded they could pull a trigger as well as anyone. Eyes that had learned to foresee the flight of a spear could adjust to the swift shiver of a crossbow quarrel. There were hundreds of them, now busy eating through the stock of bolts that Hrathen had brought with him. Hundreds more were crafting new quarrels, with more and more confidence, out of chitin and wood and pillaged metal. There were not enough crossbows to go round, but about half the Scorpions were unable to use them anyway, crippled by their Inapt heritage. These would become the shock troops, the warriors of the traditional way, using greatsword and halberd and double-handed axe. There was a new fighting nobility emerging, though, and it brandished a crossbow.

We have brought a revolution, Hrathen reflected, and was slightly awed by the thought. The population of Gemrar had doubled in the last tenday, was set to double again. Allied tribes had been summoned out of the mid-desert, eager to have their part in the destruction of their age-old foe.

'Why do your people hate Khanaphes so?' he had asked Jakal once.

'Of-the-Empire, you try so hard to be Of-the-Scorpion, but you will never succeed,' she had replied, with a cruel smile. 'So we are told that our ancestors fought with theirs when this land was yet green, when these broken cities still thrived. So we are told that, of all the peoples in their Dominion, only we did not bow the knee to their Masters. So we are told all of this. What other reason do we need but that we can, and that they are there?'

'Jakal means to leave in a tenday,' he told Angved now. 'Enough time?'

'We can practise on the road, when we camp,' the engineer said. 'They'll be rough but they'll be ready, as we say.'

'Good.' Hrathen passed his eyes over the camp, not quite looking and yet finding. He saw the dark armour of a small knot of men and women. A stab of annoyance pricked him. We should do something about them sooner, rather than later, he thought.

They were traders, he understood — the only traders who had dared to come into the Nem to deal with the Scorpions, men and women in dark leathers or dark metal, and with that defiant open gauntlet emblazoned on their tabards.

'Since when do you tolerate merchants?' he had asked Jakal.

'Since they show us they are strong,' she had replied. 'Is Of-the-Empire jealous?' He knew she was leading him on, and part of him knew that he was letting her. She was drawing a reaction from him, and it would eventually lead to a coupling or a blood-letting. He was uncomfortably aware that the choice would be hers.

'Strong?' he asked, but then she had pointed out to him the Iron Glove's chief factor in the Nem, and he had understood. Scorpion-kinden were powerful, standing half a foot or more over the Wasps, but in the midst of the Iron Glove people stood a Mole Cricket, watching his minions distribute swords and metal ingots. Now Hrathen could see the same giant walking with impunity amongst the Scorpions, overseeing business.

Yes, we will have to deal with you, slave. There were three Mole-Cricket enclaves in Imperial hands, their populations decreasing, generation to generation, as the Empire siphoned off their menfolk for work in the mines or for the army. That prodigious strength and stamina, and their way with rock and earth, was too useful to conserve. The Empire spent it all too lavishly.

The huge creature noticed Hrathen's interest and strode over, putting him under its shadow. A runaway slave, Hrathen decided, or an Auxillian deserter. How else would a Mole Cricket come to be here? The Iron Glove had a lot to answer for.

'You wish to make a purchase, Captain?' it rumbled. It had a name, and its name was Meyr.

Hrathen stared up at the creature. The bastard must be eleven feet tall, he reckoned. Meyr wore a vast hauberk of leather with metal plates sewn into it, and an axe the size of an ordinary man was thrust through his broad leather belt. His monstrous hands had great square nails that looked every bit the equal of a Scorpion's claws. Certainly, Meyr was the face of the Iron Glove as far as the Scorpion-kinden were concerned, big enough and strong enough to protect his people from their depredations.

I'll deal with you, soon, Hrathen promised himself, but he said nothing, just ignoring the creature and walking away.

Instead he went to find the officer of the Light Airborne that he had brought with him. The man was packed ready to go, along with half a dozen of his men. Their leader was a hollow-cheeked type, his receding hair cropped close. His mouth crooked up on one side into a dry little half-smile, as though enjoying some small joke that only he was privy to. As he was the ranking Rekef officer here, Hrathen thought that might be true. His name was Sulvec and he was obviously Rekef Inlander to the core, for Hrathen knew enough to recognize a man who had given himself over heart and mind to the service.

'Not forgotten anything?' Hrathen asked him, realizing that if his own task was intended to be a suicide mission, then Sulvec would be his executioner. He wanted to show the man he was not afraid. Scorpion thinking, since Wasp-kinden tread carefully where the Rekef are. The fact that half of Sulvec's men were staying with Hrathen's party had not escaped him. He was plainly not trusted, but that was hardly news.

'We'll depart presently.' Sulvec's fragment of smile made its inevitable appearance: it signalled disdain for everything Hrathen was or could be. 'Don't be too long in coming, Captain.'

'Scorpion-kinden move fast,' Hrathen told him. 'Make sure we don't outstrip you.'

'Hm.' A slight noise was the response, all the humour the man would voice. 'We'll liaise with you when you arrive with your thousands, Captain.'

Hrathen just nodded, and in the next moment the seven Rekef men were airborne, streaking across the sky towards distant Khanaphes with a speed born of well-practised Art, and Hrathen had no idea what their orders were, for implementation once they arrived in Khanaphes.

And if they are to betray me? Do they plan to win the Khanaphir by betraying the Many of Nem? He considered the possibility coldly. Then they do not understand what the Scorpion-kinden are capable of, he decided, and left it at that.

With Hrathen gone, the Mole Cricket-kinden called Meyr took stock. He had a dozen people here: enough, when allied to his strength, to dissuade the Scorpions from precipitate action. The Scorpions would trade whenever there was reason not to steal or take. The Iron Glove turned up with small shipments, always promising more in the next, each visit a tentative link in the mercantile chain. Meyr was a cautious man like most of his kind and, given a free choice, he would not want to be the Iron Glove ambassador to the Nem. He paid his debts, though. Totho had taken him in when he had been fleeing the Empire, and Meyr had been a slave long enough that working for a living, to another man's orders, had become second nature. He might hate it in himself, but he could not deny it.

'We're going to have trouble soon,' he said softly. His second-in-command, a Solarnese woman named Faighl, was nodding. She was a tough, compact woman, a mercenary out of Chasme for more than a decade before signing on with the new-formed Glove. She had already killed two Scorpions who assumed that her size meant weakness rather than a killing speed. Now they gave her space at their fires and drank with her.

'Pull out?' she asked.

Meyr was a big man to be balanced on a knife-edge. Pulling out was safe, but he would not be thanked for it. It was not the trade that mattered, it was the information. Something was happening here that the Glove had to be informed of. The Empire was in the Nem, and had become everyone's best friend, giving out free presents and holding lectures. The Scorpions had no idea of secrecy, so word of their target had come to Meyr almost as soon as he and his team had arrived with their packs and crates.

But why? It makes no sense. Meyr knew the Empire well enough to understand, that, whatever their evils, they did nothing without reason.

'We stay,' he replied heavily. 'But … Where's Tirado?'

'Here, chief.' The Fly-kinden man ducked forward under Faighl's arm. 'What, where and who?'

'I'll write it out,' the Mole Cricket decided. One of his people snapped open a folding desk, a square of wood smaller than Meyr's two open hands. He knelt by it awkwardly, taking a fresh slate out from his pack. His Art rose within him, and he put the corner of one fingernail to it. Back home, his people wrote their letters in stone. Pens were lost in his grasp and paper tore under his nails. His people had ways with the earth, though, which was why the Empire enslaved them so enthusiastically.

The tip of his nail scribed, carving blocky, close-packed script into the slate as though it was wet clay. He filled the square of stone from edge to edge, a solid mass of writing, trusting to Totho to decipher it. When he made an error he smoothed the stone over and wrote again.

When he was done he wrapped the slate in cloth and handed it to Tirado in a comedy of scale: the receiving hand would barely match one of Meyr's fingers for size.

'Fly to Totho at Khanaphes, swift as you can,' he instructed. 'This information must be known.'