The Scarab Path

Three

'Khanaphes,' said Master Jodry Drillen and, although it was twelve years since the man had been a teacher at the College, Stenwold still heard in his head the squeak of chalk on slate.

'Khanaphes, indeed,' he murmured. The two of them had appropriated one of the smaller conference rooms at the Amphiophos. Nearby, the Assembly, the great elected mob that governed and failed to govern Collegium in equal measures, had only recently finished sitting.

'Something must be done.' Master Drillen was a great, fat Beetle-kinden man a few years Stenwold's senior. He had exchanged academia for politics years ago and never looked back, his influence and waist expanding in tandem as though by some demonstrable formula of statesmanship. At the moment he wore a little greying goatee beard in the Spider style, which Stenwold thought looked ridiculous but was apparently all the fashion.

Stenwold shrugged. 'The city of Khanaphes is a living, breathing city, rather than something consigned to the histories of the Inapt. That's no great surprise, is it? After all, the Moths left us with only the scraps from their table, academically speaking. No wonder, five centuries on, we're still rediscovering things that they have known all along. As for what you can mean with your "Something must be done" then it's simply one more field of study for the College geographers, unless you're now proposing going to war to wipe it off the map. It has been only recently added by the cartographers. The paint is probably still wet.' It was now two tendays after the incident at the mill, and Stenwold was feeling, at least, a bit more rested. Any good humour these days seemed to be fleeting, so he made any use of it he could.

'Sophist.' Drillen gave him a grin that was surprisingly boyish. 'You know why this is important.'

'Do I?'

'It's all the fault of the Solarnese, of course, all those squabbling little provincials huddled around the Exalsee — why are you laughing now?'

'Those "squabbling little provincials" have been teaching our artificers things we wouldn't have worked out for another ten years,' Stenwold said mildly. 'But do go on. You were blaming them for something.'

One of Drillen's servants arrived just then, having finally tracked down the right vintage in the Assembly's cellars, and the two statesmen took a moment to sip it appreciatively. 'The Solarnese,' said Drillen eventually, 'with their stupid names with all those extra vowels … what was that ambassador they sent? Oh yes, he wrote it as Caidhreigh, but then when you introduced him it turned out he was called Cathray. Anyway, everyone seems agreed now that they're some kind of stable halfbreed stock, Ant-kinden and Beetle-kinden combined. You can see it in their faces, and most especially you can see it in their Art, after we finally convinced them to talk about it. They're like those other fellows you were always banging on about.'

'Myna,' Stenwold agreed.

'Exactly. But they're obviously no relation because of their skin colour, and so the ethnologists started asking "Where did they come from?"'

'Nobody cared when it was just Myna,' Stenwold said.

'Two reasons, old soldier.' Drillen enumerated them on his chubby fingers. 'One: public attitudes were different back then. Two: Myna's within spitting distance of an Ant city-state — and not so very far from Helleron. No mysteries there, then. There are no Beetle-kinden around the Exalsee, and yet the ethnologists are adamant in their conclusions, so whence the Solarnese? Well, of course, we ask them that question, when politeness permits, and they show us their maps, and tell us their earliest word-of-mouth records say their ancestors came from Khanaphes. The Beetle-kinden city of Khanaphes, no less, just as some of our ancient-history fellows have been banging on about for ages. So now every scholar in that field is publishing his flights of utter fancy, saying that we came from there, that they came from here, all manner of lunacy. It makes you wish the Moths had been just a little more forthcoming with their menials, before the revolution. If there's one thing a man of the College hates it's feeling ignorant.'

'You are still a scholar at heart then?' Stenwold said. 'That amazes me. I happen to agree with you, but I'm surprised that a man of importance like yourself can still find time to concern himself with such abstruse academic matters.'

'There is more at stake here than scholarship,' Drillen said fiercely. 'You must be aware that people are looking at the world in a different way now, after the war. For me, I'd just as soon everyone went back to not really caring what lay east of Tark and north of Helleron, despite all the trouble that attitude has caused us, but it's too late now. Go into any taverna in the city and you'll hear scribes and guardsmen and manual labourers all talking about places like Maynes and the Commonweal and bloody Solarno, as though they were planning on going there tomorrow.' Drillen was becoming quite excited now. Stenwold sipped his wine and watched him with interest.

'And the romances!' the fat man continued. 'Have you any idea how many talentless clerks are writing "true" romances boasting of their supposed travels in distant lands? And still the printing houses can't get them to the booksellers fast enough to satisfy public demand. Everyone wants to read about foreigners, and I'll wager that not one of those people writing about them has so much as stepped outside Collegium's walls. It's all lies, but people are gobbling it whole. Foreign is fashionable. People are falling over themselves to be more misinformed than their neighbours about distant lands. And then there's Master Broiler.'

Stenwold pressed his lips together, locking away his automatic reaction to the very name. The fact that Broiler had always been his vocal political opponent was something Stenwold could live with: such free debate was after all the cornerstone of Collegium governance. However, he had his own suspicions about precisely who had bought the man's loyalties.

'What is Broiler doing now?'

'Courting public support, as usual, by pandering to the latest fashion.' Drillen reached into his robes and came out with a smudgily printed volume whose title proudly proclaimed Master Helmess Broiler, His Atlas of the Known World and His Account of His Travels Therein.

'The shameless fraud,' growled Stenwold, the historian in him genuinely shocked.

'Quite,' Drillen agreed. 'He's taken every damn map he could copy from the library, put them all together in no particular order, even the ones that are obviously made-up or wrong, and called it "The World". And he's written about his incredible adventures, this man who would get lost just walking from his house to the marketplace. I swear that Helleron appears in three different places in his so-called "Known World", and on at least one of the maps he's got the sea and the land the wrong way round. And you know what?'

'People are reading it?' Stenwold said.

'People are lapping it up,' lamented Drillen. 'They think Broiler's the best thing since the revolution. Stenwold, it's time for Lots soon enough, meaning all change at the Assembly. We have to do something before then.'

'We?'

'I have to do something,' Drillen corrected, 'and, unless you want to see Broiler as the new Speaker, so do you.'

'Where do I come into this, then?' Stenwold asked, thinking again about the Vekken and his final words. I am fighting for our future and my footing is being eroded like sand shifted by the sea.

'The people like you, Stenwold.'

'But the Assembly loathes the sight of me,' Stenwold pointed out. 'I remind them of how they were wrong.' It was a point of pride with him.

'Yes, but the people like you. Everyone out on the street there remembers how you won the war. They fought alongside you. They watched you go out and send the Wasp army packing. People — I'm talking about that majority without political aspirations — respect you. That's one reason why I'm going to be seen shaking hands with you in as many places as possible.'

'Why should I prostitute myself like that?'

Drillen's grin resurfaced. 'Because I make sure that you get what you want. I was almost the only person backing your Vekken initiative, when you put it forward, but I wrestled enough support to push it through. You're not as detached as you pretend, old soldier. You don't give a fig for power, but there are things you want done, and for that you need people like me. Which is convenient, because people like me need people like you in order to defeat people like Helmess Broiler.'

Stenwold scowled, but he had no argument to hand that could refute the other man's logic.

'I need to trump Broiler's atlas if I'm to get enough lots cast in my direction to secure the Speaker's podium,' Drillen explained. 'Now, I could just match him, map for map, but I have no guarantee that my fraudulent cartography would be any better than his, so I rather thought I might produce something genuinely scholarly, just for the fun of it.'

'That is not the thing the political future of the city will hang on,' Stenwold told him.

'Believe me, stranger things have been known. Our cousins, our kinsmen, our estranged family of Khanaphes … I have planted a few seeds of rumour already. People are already beginning to talk about it. I will raise some pertinent questions at the Assembly, and you …'

'What?' Stenwold said finally. 'What do you want from me?'

'Your seal of approval. I happen to know a little more about Khanaphes than most. You remember Kadro the antiquarian?'

'Vaguely, yes. I haven't seen him around recently.'

'I'm not surprised, as he's been in Khanaphes for several months. He'd followed the Solarnese trail long before anyone was looking in that direction. I know because he's been writing to me for money, and I've been sending it. That makes him my man.'

'And what has your man found out?'

'My man has been keeping his cards close to his little Fly chest.' Drillen grimaced. 'Which is why there will be an expedition sent to help him out. The first official Collegiate expedition to Khanaphes. Our ambassadors will extend the hand of friendship to our estranged brothers. Master Kadro will receive his due, but I need results.'

Stenwold nodded patiently, letting the quietness spin out until he was finally forced to ask. 'So where do I come into all of this?'

'Aren't you roused by the sheer academic challenge of it all?' Drillen asked, still grinning like a fool.

'As it happens I am, but where do I come in?'

'You propose the expedition, which I then agree to sponsor and fund.'

'Do I now?'

'Because if I tried it myself, then Broiler would be all over me, and I'd be fighting tooth and nail every step of the way to stop him making it his expedition and his triumph. You, though … Broiler hates and loathes every inch of you there ever was, but more than that, he doesn't have the guts to take you on. If it's your expedition, he'll mutter and complain, but he won't dare stick his neck out, and you know why.'

Stenwold cocked a surprised eyebrow at Drillen, seeing that his own suspicions about Broiler's loyalties were obviously not unique. He shrugged philosophically, waiting for the catch.

'Please, Stenwold,' Drillen said, in a pleading tone that surprised both of them. After an awkward pause the fat man continued, 'I'm a devious bastard whose only aim is my own betterment, I freely admit it, but I'm also on your side. A coup involving Khanaphes could be enough to swing the voting next Lots. We need each other.'

Stenwold sighed. 'This sort of politics has always been exactly the sort of thing I've tried to avoid. So you want me to go to Khanaphes?'

'No, no, I need you here to continue shaking hands with me in public. I just want you to drum up a few scholars to go there in your name, with my money. So people will like me more and Broiler less. And also the academic knowledge of the College will be expanded by another few feet of shelf space. That's a secondary consideration for me, but I do still care about it.'

'I know,' said Stenwold tiredly. 'That's the only reason why I've been listening to you for this long.' Inside he was fighting his own battle. There was a lot of him saying that once he started making these deals he was on a slope — and his kinden were notoriously clumsy. That the future of Collegium might depend on closet conspiracies like this one made him feel sick about the whole business. Drillen was right, though: Stenwold needed support in the Assembly, and he must pay for any services rendered.

And he was intrigued. Despite himself and despite everything he was intrigued. A Beetle-kinden city located beyond Solarno. What might we learn there? And on the back of that, another thought — the possible solution to another personal problem.

'I'll do it,' he said. 'I'll regret it, but I'll do it.'

'That's my old soldier!' Drillen clapped him on the shoulder with a meaty hand, and poured out another two goblets of wine.

Stenwold took his and drank thoughtfully, turning implications over in his mind. 'I suppose you'll want everything to look spontaneous,' he mused.

'Oh, of course,' Drillen agreed heartily. 'The serendipitous meeting of two great minds.'

'Best if it looks that way,' Stenwold muttered darkly. 'I'm not thinking about Broiler now, but about the Imperial ambassador.'

Drillen blinked at him blankly.

Stenwold looked unhappy as he continued. 'Think about it: Stenwold, implacable enemy of the Empire, entering into secret negotiations that will send agents to a city that is not so very far from the Empire's southern border.'

'The war's over.'

'The war isn't currently active. Both the Empire and I understand the distinction.'

Drillen shrugged. 'Whatever you want. You're in charge. It's your expedition.'

She was still in mourning, but mourning was difficult for her.

In Collegium the official colour of mourning was grey. True, it was not customary any more for widows and grieving family to parade around the city in drab vestments for tendays, or even just days, but for funerals at least, grey was the order of the day.

For Cheerwell Maker, though, grey was his colour, therefore a life colour, the colour of her happiness, in the same way that black and gold had become colours of death. She could not make grey the colour of her mourning because that would be a negation of his life.

In the end she had tracked down a Moth-kinden, a pallid trader from Dorax, and not left him alone until he had explained the customs of his people. For the Moths, the concept of colour seldom entered their lives, since they lived in a midnight world where they could see perfectly without need for sunlight or spectrum. For death, though, they made an exception. For shed blood, they took on the hue of blood. She learned how Mantids did the same, dressing their honoured dead in scarlet, and then entrusting them to the red, red flames. The Moths, who had been the Mantis-kinden's masters since time immemorial, had become infected by such superstitions.

And red was the colour of the Mynan resistance, their emblem of red arrows on a black background proclaiming their impossible triumph over the Empire. And Myna had been where he had died, for her, though he had been so many miles away.

So Che wore red, and thus caused public comment. She wore a tunic of deep wine colours edged with black, or else black arrowed with resistance scarlet. Even though she also wore a Moth cape of grey sometimes, nobody realized that she was mourning.

When she had gone to Tharn, after the war, they would not let her in nor tell her what rites had been performed over the body of poor Achaeos. They would barely spare two words for her. With the Empire beaten back, the old hatreds had resurfaced. She was Beetle-kinden, therefore a despoiler and an enemy. Her previous history as a Moth seer's lover had been erased and, in the end, the Moths had forced her, at bow-point, back on to the airship. Only the intervention of Jons Allanbridge, the aviator, had prevented her being shot dead there and then.

She had tried to tell them of the mark, of the affliction she had been left with in his wake, but they had not wanted to know. Instead they had told her to leave promptly or they would throw her off the mountainside.

Mourning was so hard for Che. Her own people had not understood her choice of lover, and now they did not understand her grief. She was surrounded by her own folk, yet feeling more alone each day that passed.

Yet not alone enough. Sitting here on her bed, with the bright light of day blazing in through the window, she felt a sudden presence beside her. It always happened the same way: the movement did not manifest as such, at first, neither flicker nor shadow, but just as a concrete awareness of there being something there.

If she moved her head to look, it would be gone. If she stayed very still, though, and emptied her mind the way he had taught her, and waited … then sometimes there would be a greyness at the edge of her vision, a tremor in the air, a something.

Mourning was difficult for her because she knew that he was still there. He had been a magician, after all, which she now finally believed only after his death. He had been a magician, truly, and now he had become something else. She had been far away when he died, having left him to the failed mercies of his own people. Now, posthumously, he was close to her, and she could not bear it.

She stood up, feeling the non-presence recede away instantly, knowing that it was still there somewhere, beyond her notice. At the same time she heard the front door, the hurried feet of Stenwold's servant running to greet his master. She drifted out on to the landing in time to see her uncle down below, divesting himself of his cloak. He complained so often of being old and tired, and yet seemed to her to be possessed of boundless reserves of energy. He complained of being mired in politics and intrigue, yet he fed on it with a starving man's appetite.

He still wore his sword, one of the few Assemblers who did. Stenwold was still at war, they would joke, but their laughter had a nervous quality.

She drew back into her room, knowing he would come to speak with her soon enough. He did not understand, could not fathom, what she was going through, but he did his best, so she could not complain. He was perpetually a busy man.

Downstairs, Stenwold stopped himself from turning his head as he heard the landing creak. Either she was still there or she had retreated and he did not know whether her absence or her presence was more disturbing: this ghostly, red-clad apparition that his niece had become.

I need help. But there was nobody to help him. The war had stripped him of both allies and friends. Above the fireplace, he had finally had framed and hung the old picture that Nero had done of Stenwold and the others when they had just been setting out. Dead faces now, only Stenwold Maker living on out of all of them.

How is it that I am still here, after all of this? He had a sudden sense, almost like vertigo, of all the people he had sent out to die or get hurt: Salma, Totho, Tynisa, Achaeos, Sperra, Scuto, Tisamon, Nero — even the madwoman Felise Mienn. There was no justice in a world that preserved Stenwold Maker after all that loss.

But it was worse when he considered the survivors. The Assembly was crawling now with men boasting of their exploits in the war, but Stenwold could not remember seeing any of them defending the walls at the time.

He glanced up, at last, to find no scarlet watcher above. The war had left so many casualties, with so many different wounds that he was powerless to cure.

'Lady Arianna sent word that she would be expecting you at her residence, sir,' his servant informed him. The thought stirred an ember of a smile, but he was so tired that it could be no more than that.

He began the slow clump up the staircase.

There were books all over Cheerwell's room, open, bookmarked or stacked, lying on the bed and at her desk. They looked old and valuable, and he knew she was trading on her family name to extract favours from the librarians. On the other hand, it was not as though the topics she was researching were required reading for College scholars. Most of these tomes had not been opened before during her lifetime, perhaps not even in Stenwold's. The sight of them reinforced his disquiet, reminded him of the scale of the plight they faced.

'How was the Assembly?' she asked him. She sat demurely on her bed but there was a brittle aura about her, as of some fragile thing delicately balanced.

'Tedious as usual.' He racked his mind for something amusing he could recount to her, was forced to accept that nothing amusing had occurred. 'I did my normal job of making friends, so I'm surprised they're not burning my effigy in the square before the Amphiophos.'

He saw her smirk at the quip, a reaction more than the words warranted. 'You have no idea,' Cheerwell told him. 'You should get her … get Arianna to go to the play with you.' She stumbled a little over the woman's name, but only a little. She was at least trying.

'Play?' he asked blankly.

'Haven't you heard? At the Rover on Sheldon Street?' Her smile was genuine, though a sadness shone through it. 'They call it The Shell Crack'd or something like that. It's about goings on in this city when the siege was under way. It's all people leaping into each other's beds and arguing.'

'There's a play about the war and it's a farce?' said Stenwold, quite thrown off course from what he was originally going to say.

'Yes, but you're in it too. You're the serious bit in the fourth act, like they always include,' Che told him. 'When you went out to confront the Wasp army and got them to surrender and go away-'

'It wasn't like that-'

'Tell that to the playwrights. Tell that to the audience. You're a hero, Uncle Sten.' Her shoulders shook briefly with mirth, for a moment like the Che he knew from before it all. Then another layer of solemnity enveloped her and she said, 'Your man from Paroxinal came back today.'

'Oh?' and he was serious at that news, too.

'He said he'd report fully to you, for what it was worth, but nothing.'

'He found nothing, or they'd tell him nothing?'

'Nothing either way. Nothing at all. He found no trace of her.'

For a moment they just looked at one another, chained together by an equal guilt, until Stenwold bared his teeth in annoyance and looked away.

'Damn the girl!' he said. 'Why-?'

'You know why,' Che interrupted him flatly.

'Oh, I know what sparked it, but why go off-?'

'You know why,' she repeated firmly, and he had no answer to that, because he did know.

Feeling weary to his bones he pulled the desk chair out and reversed it, sitting so he could rest his arms on the carved back. He heard it creak at the unaccustomed strain. I'll be as fat as Drillen, one of these days. 'Che, I've had a thought about … something for you.'

She sat very still, waiting warily. It was not the first time he had tried to find things for her to do. She knew he meant well, but he did not understand that her current problems could not simply be left behind.

'Che … you did some good diplomatic work during the war.'

That took her by surprise. 'When?'

'In Myna, for example.'

'Sten, they nearly killed me there as a traitor.'

He smiled slightly at that. 'Same here … and with death, it's all about the "nearly". The way I hear it, you finally got their rebellion inspired to the point where they could throw off the Empire.'

'It wasn't like that,' hearing in her voice an echo of his own words.

'Tell that to my agents. Tell that to the Mynans. Che …' Staring at his hands as he always did when he sought inspiration. 'You need something to do …' One hand rose, quickly, to cut off her objection. 'I know, I know it won't stitch the wound, and it won't make everything better, just to be doing something, but you need time to heal, and at the moment it's just you and the wound, and nothing else. I have a job I need doing, and you need something to do — and you're good at it.' When she just stared at him he continued, 'I need an ambassador. An official ambassador representing Collegium, bearing the seal of the Assembly and everything.'

For a moment she continued to stare, then she laughed at him incredulously. 'You can't be serious.'

'Why not? You've already proven your worth: in Myna, in Solarno, in Sarn. This isn't just Uncle Sten finding jobs for his family. You've shown you're more than equal to the task, and-'

'And it would give me something to do,' she finished sourly. 'And where, pray?' A thought struck her. 'The Commonweal?'

'Not the Commonweal,' he said. 'We're being … very careful there. They're a strange lot, up north. They don't really seem to understand yet why ambassadors are necessary. We may even have to buy into their "kin-obligate" business, not that we really understand it.' He waved his hand impatiently. 'No, it's a place called Khanaphes.'

She stared at him, which he interpreted, incorrectly, as ignorance.

'The Solarnese know a path to reach it. It's east of the Exalsee, a long way off any Collegiate trade route.' He left the appropriate pause before revealing, 'A Beetle-kinden city, Che.'

Since her return from Tharn she had been deep in the old tomes of the Moth-kinden. She had been immersing herself in the world that the revolution had shattered, in an attempt to find some cure for her own affliction. In the very oldest of the books and scrolls remaining to the College, amid the most impenetrable shreds of ancient history, there had been a city of that name. It was a relic of the forgotten world that the Beetles had shrugged off in order to become what they were now.

'Think about it, please.' Stenwold took her silence for reluctance. He wanted to tell her that it was a golden opportunity, that she should look to her own future, capitalize on the respect she had won in the war. He wanted to tell her, in short, that no mourning could be for ever. He knew better than to say it. 'Just think about it. You are a student of the College after all, and the possibilities for scholarship alone are-'

'I'll think about it,' she said, a little harshly, and he nodded, standing up to go. 'Another thing,' she began, her voice sounding strained. 'You …' She paused, gathered her courage together. 'Please tell the new man about the doors again. He forgets.'

Stenwold stared at her, a welter of different emotions momentarily at war across his broad face.

'It's not just me … it's … I'm thinking about Arianna as well.' Che's voice shook under the sheer humiliation of having to say it.

'Of course I will,' he said. 'Of course. I'll have a word with him when I go back downstairs.'

The expedition was approved by the Assembly, despite anything that Broiler and his supporters could say against it. The Town vote, comprising the merchants and magnates, scoffed at the expense, but the Gown vote of the College masters was mostly for it, and Drillen's promise to secure funding without troubling either College or Assembly coffers sealed the matter neatly. There was no suggestion that the proposal had been stage-managed from the start.

The very night of the Assembly meeting, however, found a clerk working late. Drillen was a rigorous employer who demanded results from the least of his underlings, so candlelight in the late evenings was nothing unusual. This clerk, a young man who had hoped to make more of himself, and had lived beyond his means, was just finishing his last missive. The letters seemed nonsense, strings of meaningless babble, but an informed eye would have deciphered them as:

Urgent. Codeword: 'Yellowjacket'. You told me to keep an eye on all dealings of Stenwold Maker, so this should interest you: the expedition being launched to Canafes (sp?) is not as it seems. JD and SM met twice beforehand re: this matter. Unusual secrecy. Believe JD and SM have their own purposes aside from those stated. Thought you would appreciate knowing.

He folded the note over, and went over to his rack of couriers. Drillen used these various insects as missivecarriers across the city. They rattled and buzzed in their tubes, each tube with its label to show what place the creature was imprinted on. The clerk, whose responsibility these carrier-creatures were, selected one carefully: a fat, furry-bodied moth. It bumbled out of its tube and crouched on his desk, cleaning its antennae irritably as he secured the message to its abdomen. He had no idea where it went, or to whom, save that it would not be the man who had originally recruited him into this double-dealing. He only knew that the insect would be returned safe, along with a purse of money, to his house. This told him two things: that his shadowy benefactors were wealthy, and that they knew where he lived.

The insect whirred angrily off into the night, swooping low over the streetlamps but impelled by an inescapable instinct to return home. Before morning the Rekef operatives in Collegium, placed there with exquisite care after the close of the war, had something new to think about, and other, grander, messengers were soon winging their way east.