The Scarab Path

Thirty-Six

She woke up because he had stepped on her arm. The sudden pain, and waking into utter dark, left her wholly bewildered. Che had no idea where she was. Someone was apologizing to her but all reference escaped her. For a brief moment she was nowhere, and had no idea even who she was.

Then she remembered her Art: it was still not second nature to her. She let her eyes gradually find their way, and saw Thalric a few paces away, looking frustrated.

'Clumsy bastard,' she told him, and enquired, 'I've been asleep?'

'Unless you've been snoring just to annoy me.' He was not quite looking at her and it took a moment to realize that it was because he could not, of course, see her. Her voice, in the confined space, must be hard to pin down.

'You swallowed some of that herbal muck you were giving to Osgan,' Thalric went on. His eyes were very wide, futilely trying to stare the darkness down. 'Because of your shoulder. Then, after a while, you were sleeping. It's been a long night.'

'And then you trod on me,' she pointed out. 'How long has it been?'

'I have no idea.' He was moving about the room again, feeling for the walls. 'I used to think I had a good sense of time, but there are no clues down here: no light, no sounds. It's been hours, anyway. It must be daylight outside.'

'Thalric,' she said, 'what are you doing, exactly?'

'Trying to get a proper idea of this place — which has turned out to be surprisingly difficult, and somewhat disgusting.'

'Do you want me to help you?'

'I'll be fine.'

'Only, I can see in the dark.'

He stopped abruptly, turning towards where she was. His expression was completely unguarded. 'Since when?'

Since you locked me in your heliopter after Asta — but she wasn't going to say that. 'It's a Beetle Art, Thalric. Granted, it's not common, but it's there.'

His lips moved, but whatever he was going to say died there. Abruptly he sat down and put his head in his hands. How long has he been feeling his way around this place? How many hours of going round and round? She was treated to a brief moment of Thalric in absolute despair. Then he lifted his head, and he was already adjusting. 'So tell me then,' he said, 'what do we have?'

She clambered to her feet, feeling her shoulder twinge, peering about. Her Art-sight leached the colours, turning Thalric's skin pallid and his clothes drab. She suspected there were few enough colours in their surroundings to begin with.

'It's a room maybe twelve paces to a side,' she decided. 'The ceiling's about the same extent high. A cube, then, but the walls slope slightly inwards as they go up. There's an archway in each wall. Trapezium-shaped.' She stopped.

'And no doors,'Thalric finished for her.

'And no doors,' she echoed. 'There are just … the archways just have stone behind them. And one … one of them's been blocked off by the trap.'

'I felt carving on the walls,' he said weakly.

'It's the usual old Khanaphir script,' she said. Even with her Art-enhanced eyes it was hard to discern it. She moved to one wall, using a sleeve to wipe at it. At the first touch she made a horrified noise and flinched back. 'There's something on the walls.'

'Yes, there is,' said Thalric, with some satisfaction. 'Every cursed surface here is coated with it. It's made my explorations a real joy.'

I can't see it, she realized, but then logic reasserted itself. There was a thin layer of transparent slime coating the walls, coating the floor too — at least from the state of her clothes and the sounds her sandals made. As there was no light to gleam off it, it was completely invisible, even to her. It showed only in a blurring of the carvings beneath.

And why go to the trouble of writing all of this here, in this little room of death? Of course, the Khanaphir engraved these things everywhere, but she could tell just by looking that this script was the real old hieroglyphs, not the meaningless babble that was all the modern masons could manage. Someone had deliberately put a message here, for those with eyes to see and minds to understand it.

'This wasn't really how I thought we'd end up,' said Thalric quietly.

'We haven't ended up yet,' she told him.

'Only a matter of time. The air can't last for ever.'

'What happened to the old resourceful Thalric then?' she asked him, feeling suddenly annoyed that he was just sitting there. 'Don't the Rekef teach you to be ready for anything?'

'The old resourceful Thalric is currently blind, slimy and trapped in a cell underground with no possible way out,' he said, 'and very, very tired. Some of us here haven't been getting our beauty sleep.'

'Not that it would do much good, in your case.' She wiped away slime from more of the carvings, feeling the thick gunge caking her sleeves. It had a feel to it that was familiar, but unpleasantly so. She hunted the memory down, associating it with guilt, panic, danger … 'Hammer and tongs!' she spat. 'Thalric, this is Fir.'

'What now?'

'This slime, it's Fir. This is the forbidden elixir of Khanaphes, that the Ministers will kill you for sampling.' And that the Ministers themselves eat gallons of. 'This is their link with the Masters, they claim. There must be enough down here for everyone in the city to go out of their minds on.'

'Are you suggesting we spend our last few hours drugged into a stupor?'Thalric asked her acidly.

'No, but don't you see …' But he doesn't see. He doesn't understand what Fir is. So, do I? Fir, the drug that somehow opened one's mind to the past, that the Khanaphir underclasses swore let them look on the faces of the Masters, that the Ministers thought opened a direct link by which they could hear their Masters' voices. Did she still believe that there were Masters yet, or that there ever had been?Yet the Khanaphir believed. Ethmet believed. Was their entire culture built on hallucinations derived from this slime? No, there has to be something more to it than that.

'I've been knocking on the walls,' he said. 'No echo anywhere. I've even tried my sting against them. That slimy stuff smells vile when you burn it. The stone underneath barely warmed.'

'I think I need to read these inscriptions,' she decided. 'Give me your cloak.'

He frowned at the dark, but shrugged the garment off without question, holding it out blindly until she took it from him. She began scrubbing at the walls, clearing away the Fir that had turned those crisp carvings into illegible smears.

'Since when,' Thalric said after a moment, 'can you read that gibberish? Since when can it even be read?'

'It's a long story.'

'Well, I didn't have any other plans.'

She stopped, gazing back at him. He was still sitting in the middle of the floor, head turned vaguely in her direction. Something of his normal expression was gone, that hard mockery that was usually there when he spoke to her. Hashe really given up hope? She realized it was far simpler than that. Just as her face was invisible to him in the dark, so he had not considered that his was not invisible to her. This was Thalric caught unawares, without his customary armour. She took the chance to study him: the years of hard deeds, of bitter loyalty, all the betrayals that could be traced on his face. Each had put its grip on him, twisting and turning to fit him to the mould, yet finally he had not fitted. At the end, after the scars and the fingerprints, there was still a core that was only Thalric. Only a man who truly knows himself could have come out of all that still recognizing himself in the mirror.

'What?' he asked suspiciously, into the silence. She felt suddenly ashamed, as though she had been spying on the spymaster.

'Just looking at the carvings,' she claimed, although her voice held no conviction. 'Look, if you want a conversation, why don't you talk? I've had enough of you interrogating me.'

He gave an amused snort and she was surprised at how familiar it sounded. How well do I know him? Sometimes it seems that I know him even better than my own family. My life has been riddled by the holes left by his passing, like some kind of grub.

'You could tell me, for a start, why the Regent-general of the whole Empire is currently buried alive in a nowhere city out here on the Sunroad Sea,' she said. 'Because I myself don't understand it. Life just keeps giving you chances, and you waste every one of them. You were the big man of the Empire, after the war, so how did this happen?'

For a long time he remained quiet, while she kept on industriously cleaning up the carvings. Fragments of their meaning drifted loose into her head, but nothing that she could string together.

'The Empress,' he said at last, slowly. 'The Empress Seda the First. And if you ask me how that happened, well, I wasn't there at the time. An Empress? Nobody had ever heard of such a thing: a woman in charge of the Wasp Empire.'

'Well, we know about your people's attitudes towards women,' Che said primly. 'Although you've had your share of women agents, haven't you? The Rekef, at least, isn't so blinkered.'

'Mistakes, all of them,' he said darkly. 'Arianna tried to kill me, and I actually did kill Scyla, or at least I'm as sure of that as I can be. No, I've not been the luckiest man with women.'

'You were married, though, weren't you? I thought you told me that once? What happened to her?'

'She was only too glad to yield place to the Empress,' Thalric replied, with a brief laugh. 'Not that she'd have had much choice, but we hadn't seen each other in years. I had a son, too. I still have, I suppose. The union was all for the Empire, and part of my duty. I was never that interested. It was just something you're supposed to do before you go off and die in the wars. I'm sure the woman was compensated.'

'I'll never understand your people — or like them, frankly,' Che remarked.

'Well, maybe I'll join you in that, seeing as they seem to want me dead yet again. Maybe it's her. Maybe she's decided I'm now surplus to requirements.' Thalric grimaced sightlessly. 'While the provinces were in rebellion she needed a man as a figurehead that her people could be reassured by. That was me, at the time, but now the Empire's pretty much together again. Maybe it's as simple as that.' He paused in thought. 'But in that case she could simply have had me executed, or assassinated, when I was last in the capital. It wouldn't be hard for her to do away with me. There'd be no reason to go about it like this, snuffing me out in some distant corner of the world.'

'What's she like?' Che asked. When he did not reply, she urged, 'Come on, tell me. The woman who rules an Empire, what's she like — your new match?'

Still he did not answer, and she turned from her work to look at him. His expression was far away, somewhere that he did not want to be.

'Thalric?' she prompted, and his eyes flicked towards her.

'You really want to know?' he asked. 'The best-kept secret in the Empire?You want to know about Seda?'

'It doesn't look likely that I'll get a chance to gossip about it much,' she pointed out. Do I really want to know? she asked herself: something in his face had disturbed her.

'The Empress … Seda the First,' he said, and she had now lost her chance to avoid the knowledge, whatever it would be. 'She is not quite eighteen yet, younger than you by a year or two. She was eight when her father died, Alvdan the First, and she told me how she'd lived in fear of death ever since. She was the only sibling of the new Emperor to survive his coronation. He kept her around because making her afraid was one of his pastimes. That's how she tells it.'

Another pause. Che kept scrubbing away diligently.

'I wasn't there when the Emperor died,' Thalric said. 'In fact I was imprisoned in the cells beneath the arena, where they keep the fighters and the animals. When I found out about what she had become, the Empress, I searched out someone who could tell me exactly how it had happened, because it seemed clear to me that something had gone very badly wrong indeed.'

'Osgan,' Che filled in.

'Osgan,' Thalric confirmed. 'The same man who was stupid enough to follow me here, and who's surely paid for it now. But Osgan sat beside the Emperor, and saw it all. And then I heard what he had to say, and it made no sense.'

'Tisamon killed the Emperor,' Che said. 'That's what Tynisa said.'

Thalric was silent again.

'Or what? Did he just die? Did he have a weak heart?' Che prompted. 'Tisamon and that Dragonfly woman came charging out of the fighting pit and killed just about everyone they could get hold of. Did the Emperor just die coincidentally?'

'I don't know,' Thalric said. 'All I know is that something happened, something … very wrong. The Emperor was there, and Seda, and General Maxin, and some slave of the Emperor's. This is not just from Osgan. I've spoken to a few others who were there, too. It's amazing how people remember … or don't remember. Everyone remembers the mad Mantis killing the Emperor: it's just that none of their versions quite match.'

'And what does your new wife have to say?'

Another pause, terminating in a laugh that was surprisingly free from bitterness. 'You bloody Beetle woman,' he said, but fondly, 'why can't I ever have a conversation with you, just once, where you don't manage to trip me up? This … being here, in the dark, it's the whole situation with us, from the start. You've always seen things in me I've wanted to hide, while you … I can't make you out at all.'

'That's because what you see is all of me, Thalric,' she told him. 'And you're not used to people who aren't hiding things from you.' But even as she said it, she realized that it was no longer true, that it had not been true for some time. Even I have secrets now. 'So what did she say?' she pressed on, to turn his attention away from the subject.

'She said that Tisamon didn't really kill the Emperor. That the Emperor's old slave — nobody seems to have known who he was — was in the middle of the conspiracy to put her on the throne, only she's glad he's now dead. He's dead, Maxin's dead, the Emperor's dead. It's only Seda left from the royal box. Seda and Osgan, of all bloody people.'

'So who killed the Emperor?' Che asked. 'According to her story.'

'She says I wouldn't believe her,' he replied. 'And she says she won't tell me. And, knowing what I do about her, I don't think I want to know.'

'You're going to soon run out of ways not to tell me,' Che said, moving on to the next wall. 'So why not just say? What's so wrong? What's the problem? I don't think there are many Wasp excesses that could surprise me.'

'Oh, is that so?' he said quietly. She heard him move closer to her. 'You want me to tell you?'

She put out a hand that brushed his shoulder. He flinched back from its touch, then took it briefly, confirming what it was. With that frame of reference, he got himself facing her directly, and his expression told her that he had been keeping this to himself for a long time. And wanting to tell someone for a long time, and not been able to …

'She's mad,' he said. 'She's completely insane. She thinks she … She thinks she has powers. Not Art, but magic powers.' His expression was almost embarrassed on behalf of the Empress, but Che was abruptly paying full attention, the carvings forgotten.

'Her powers, these powers she thinks she has, they derive from blood, you see,' Thalric explained. 'It's something to do with this old slave, some nonsense he told her, but she must have blood. And when an Empress sets her heart on something …' The corner of his mouth twitched. 'The thing is … there's someone inside there, just a Wasp-kinden girl who's had a hard life, and who's terrified of what's happening to her, but the madness, it takes possession of her. Then she gives the orders, and another two or three slaves are bled. For her bath. To fill her cup. She says it makes her powerful.' A shudder went through him. 'I have drunk from that cup, too, when she has asked me to.'

Deep inside, Che felt an unease that was nothing to do with the overt horror in Thalric's story. Something else had connected with her, and she did not know what. Something was trying to tell her that this was important, and at first she thought, Achaeos? She heard no harsh voice in her mind, but there was some link there, something close to her.

'The thing is, though,' Thalric continued, the words sounding as if they were dragged from him, 'somethinghappened to her. When the Emperor died … I don't know how to explain it, but something went terribly wrong. She was changed. It drove her mad. She was … wounded.'

'What do you mean?' Che whispered.

'She has … lost something,' Thalric said raggedly. 'Something in her mind has broken and driven her mad. She has lost her Aptitude. She is like some other kinden now, not a Wasp at all. That connection, that understanding … her mind is changed utterly. She does not think like we do any more. The worst thing is that she is not just mad, but she is Inapt and ruling an Apt Empire.'

Che slumped back against the slick wall, feeling something within her plummet. 'Oh that … that is the worst thing, is it?' she got out, but she was finding it difficult even to draw breath.

He got her reaction wrong, of course. 'I'm not talking about your Moth lover,' he protested. 'You can't imagine it. It's as though she's not human any more. Some part of her mind has just been cut away, and it's the part that would let anyone else understand her. It's turned her into a monster.'

She felt her heart lanced through with horror, with anger, even with that old revulsion at what she was, that she thought she had put behind her. 'And me,' she said. 'Would you say that of me, Thalric? Am I a monster?'

'What are you talking about?'

'Answer me? Am I a monster, too?' The anger was triumphing. Her fists were clenched. He would never see the blow coming.

'Che, I don't understand you.'

'No, you don't. Because some part of me has been cut away, Thalric. I'm Inapt. I lost it at the end of the war, when Achaeos died. I'm the same as her, so I suppose that makes me a monster too.'

She watched him, secure in the knowledge that he could not see her. She had felt like hitting him, but it was fast dissolving in a morass of despair at what she had lost. Who'sto say he's wrong? Perhaps I am a monster. Something's wrong with me. I've been crippled where nobody can see.

It was his hands that drew her attention. His fingers twitched, in and out, closing for safety, opening for danger. Hammer and tongs, is he going to kill me for it? She always forgot who he was when she spoke to him, forgot what he was. It was a small room. He would not need many blind sting-shots to find her.

'No,' he said, and he sounded surprised at his own conclusion. 'No, it doesn't. It makes her a monster, but not you under any circumstances. Perhaps she was more monstrous to begin with. Something to do with her kinden, probably.'

When Che said nothing, he began to look around, imagining that she had moved elsewhere. 'When I found out about her, about her loss, it made a kind of sense of her, of all her other habits — of the blood. But you … I find I don't honestly care. I know you. I know you're not what she is.'

Am I not? Perhaps not, but I think I could understand why she does what she does. 'I've only ever told Uncle Sten,' Che admitted. She had just realized that her secret, her terrible secret, was now known by two others, and one of them was a Wasp.

He reached out and, more by luck than judgement, brushed her hair, then found her uninjured shoulder. She held his hand there with her own. He does not flinch or struggle, at having to touch the monster.

'You don't believe in magic,' she said. 'How could you?' It reminded her of a conversation she'd had once with Salma, long ago. 'But you must have seen some things, during your life …'

'Some,' he acknowledged grudgingly. 'I saw the spy, Scyla, doing her tricks with my own face. It was no Art, and yet she did it — and I cannot say how.'

'The world is full of the inexplicable,' she said. 'I find it easier to see that now.' She felt his hand tense for a moment, then relax. 'Or at least, I cannot explain such things for you, but I can navigate them. Would you believe that?'

'Just because I cannot explain something does not mean that there is no rational explanation,' he replied. There was a faint edge to his voice that told her, He's frightened. He knows just enough to be frightened.

'If I told you that I sensed the trap, where you saw nothing, you would say it was because my eyes and my Art let me see better. If I told you that I can read these carvings because of what I have lost, you would say it was merely because I had studied.' It made her feel lonely, saying it out loud, the way that she had been cut off from so much of the world. 'If I told you that I did believe in magic, you would think me mad.'

Through each revelation, she could feel him on the point of pulling away from her, but he never quite did. 'Che …' he began. His hand tightened. 'Actions are more important than beliefs. You believe what you want, so long as you don't start bathing in the blood of slaves.' His lips twitched, the long-absent mocking smile coming back. 'An Inapt Beetle? You've finally found a way to make yourself completely useless to everyone.'

'What?' she snapped, and pushed him in the chest, hard enough to make him stagger. She tried to follow up, but now he had the measure of where she was. In a moment he was holding her against his chest, her forehead on his shoulder. She did not dare look up and see what unguarded expression he wore.

She had expected him to let go, while he made some other barbed comment, but instead he stood quite still, his breath rising and falling against her.

'Thalric …' It felt strange, comfortable and horribly guilty all at once. She kept expecting the spectre of Achaeos to loom large in order to castigate her, but it seemed to have absented itself since enticing her to this place. 'What if I told you now that I could open the doors to this room, from what I have learned in the carvings here? Would you say it was just artifice?'

His breath quickened. 'You can open this room up?'

'I don't know, for sure,' she said. 'But the carvings say I can, if I try.'

'Then I'd say it was magic and not care who heard me,' he said quickly, but she knew that was not true. Achaeos was right: belief is easy in the dark, but soon banished by sunlight. If we ever get out of this he will invent some explanation to settle his mind.

She pulled away, was held tight for a moment and then released. Oh this is wrong. Stenwold would be mortified. In fact the list of people who would recoil from her was long: Tynisa, Achaeos, Totho … How many was she betraying by feeling this way about a Wasp, a Rekef Wasp? About Thalric.

It had been growing on her since she spotted him in this city, a face if not friendly then familiar, amid an ocean of strangers. It had been growing since she found such common territory with him, her opposite number, her old adversary. Now, looking at his face, she did not any longer automatically think of the cells in Asta and Myna, of the interrogation and what he would have done to her, for the Empire's sake. The past had reclaimed its own. She had acknowledged the account was settled, through what he had done later.

'I remember Myna,' she said, and saw him stiffen, expecting rebuke. 'The second time, I mean. I remember that you gave yourself up for the resistance — and for me.'

'These things never quite work out how you plan them,' he said.

I remember Collegium, too, and the signing of the Treaty of Gold. That moment we were able to speak freely, before the diplomacy claimed him.

She felt a wellspring of emotion about to burst, and fought it down. Not now. Not here. But how strange that it should come to this. 'You try and rest,' she advised. 'You look as though you need it. I'll work on getting us out of here.'