The Scarab Path

Thirty-Seven

We have reached a turning point, I think, was Accius's conclusion. The two Vekken were crouching in the shadows of the archway that linked the Place of Foreigners to the square fronting the Scriptora. They had, from one vantage or another, been watching the pyramid since last night, taking turns to sleep for short periods, knowing that the sleeper would wake the instant the sentry called on him.

Last night they had tracked the fugitive Beetle ambassador, street by street, silently and with grim determination. The Wasps had helped. The Vekken had followed Cheerwell Maker's trail by watching the sky and hunting the hunters. Their chase had been tireless, careful, and the Wasps had never guessed that they were acting as beacons in a greater pursuit.

They had been in time to see the Maker woman and her co-conspirators bearded at the pyramid. They witnessed the Wasp advance, one fugitive captured, the other, along with Maker, disappearing into the edifice itself. Two Wasps had followed them. There had been a sound.

Cheerwell Maker had not returned from inside that pyramid. Nor had any of theWasps, either her companion or their pursuers. The Imperials above had fled the structure, seemingly without cause or warning.

The Wasps still keep watch, Malius noted. They believe as we do, then, that they are still within.

There was a moment of silence between them, an understanding close enough that even unspoken words were not needed. Neither one said, We could let this rest here, but each knew the other was thinking just that.

I do not like that place, Accius decided. It is an irrational reaction, but something I cannot define disturbs me about it. He compared his perceptions with those of Malius, and was comforted to find the same disquiet in his colleague. The behaviour of the Wasps cannot be fully accounted for. They fled very swiftly, from nothing that was apparent to us. I cannot say what, but some other force is at work here — some force as yet invisible to us. We can see only its effects.

Agreed. Malius hunkered down lower, while checking the action of his crossbow. Again there was a pause in their thought-conversation, each steeling himself.

Our suppositions to date are challenged. It was Malius who voiced this silently. The Collegium ambassador's game is not so simple as one of loyalty or betrayal. There is division in the Imperial camp also. We came here to determine the Collegiate plans, and how they might affect our city. We know less now than we thought we did yesterday. We cannot return without gaining more concrete information. Otherwise we would have failed our city.

It is clear, then, that whatever the Collegiate ambassador is up to, it is substantially more complicated than we thought, Accius agreed with a sigh. Only a proper interrogation will reveal it, and for that we must catch her alive. And for that …

We must follow her, Malius finished. They both felt the strange dread exercised by the pyramid, but each took strength from the other.

I feel that this journey shall only be one-way. Accius was saying what they had both been thinking. There is something down there, something that I cannot give a name or shape to. There is only one way to do this. We must separate.

I shall- Malius started, but Accius overrode him. No, I shall. I shall venture within. You must stay hidden up here and I shall report to you all I encounter down below. If I meet theambassador, I shall relay her explanations to you. If matters come to their worst …

I shall find my way home, Malius stated firmly. No matter what, I shall take what you learn there back to our city. Your sacrifice shall be known. I only wish there was some other way.

None suggests itself, none to be achieved with honour. Accius took a deep breath. I fear.

Take strength from me.

I do.

They shall know, back in Vek, that you did your duty. Malius shifted position, eyes still on the pyramid. The sky above was darkening towards dusk, the square empty of life. What words for your comrades?

None but the usual: that through me the city shall prosper, and our enemies fail. Accius stood up slowly, seeking for inner calm. The alien, hostile city all around them seemed to encroach, to loom and threaten.

I shall speak personally to your mate and children, Malius assured him. I know you are fond of them. Is there any specific message?

What more could I want for my children, since they enjoy the greatest gift already? They will be brought up as soldiers of Vek. Accius slung his crossbow. The Wasps will see me as I approach the pyramid.

If they move to attack you, I shall draw their attention, Malius assured him. A death or two should serve. I shall be with you, brother.

Accius nodded, the bond of Art between them more potent than any clasping of hands, and then he was moving at a swift, low run out towards the pyramid and up the steps. Within moments, he was lost amongst the statues.

They had tied Osgan professionally. At least they had tied him in a chair, their rope-work rough about the elegant Khanaphir carvings, his hands bound together behind its back, palm pressed to palm, to stifle his Art.

They had even given him some wine, feeding two bowls of it to him messily, perhaps simply to keep him quiet. It had cleared his head a little, but he still had no real image of what had happened at the moment they caught him.

There had been a sound, a thunderous sound like a leadshotter going off … and screams. Not Thalric's scream, though, for they were not done hunting him. Thalric was one of life's survivors. Even brought to Capitas in chains as a traitor, he had got out of it — though he'd had to marry the Empress to do so.

Osgan shuddered, on recalling the hints Thalric had dropped about that situation, when his tongue had been loosened by drink down in the palace cellars. Terrible things, terrible secrets. Osgan's life contained enough terrible things on its own, without Thalric loading him with any more. Was that the price he must pay for Thalric's unreliable patronage — to be steadily eroded by ghastly secrets that he had no place knowing? He had survived his own moment of horror, while crouching there by the Emperor's side as He, as the avenging monster, had come for them both.

Osgan felt the terrors building in him again, his muscles twitching with them, making the chair creak. He was in some half-stripped room, some abandoned upper storey where the Rekef were hiding out. If he cried out, only the guards would hear, and then they would strike him again. His face was already overwritten with their despite of him.

But He had been there. They did not understand. Even Thalric had not understood. He had followed Osgan to Khanaphes. He had been hovering over the summit of that pyramid. Osgan had not actually seen that cruel face, nor any material form, but he had known it as sure as if the Mantis had stood there in plain view.

It did not matter that he had already seen the man dead, his blood mingling with the Emperor's. It only mattered that he was here, and that he had found Osgan at last.

Osgan whimpered, feeling the shakes build up inside him, and this time he could not control them. He fought against his bonds, wrenching the joints of the chair, while he cried out in fear and frustration. He cried out for help, though in all the world there was not one with the ability and the inclination to help him.

Perhaps it was his mother that he cried for, in the end.

The door kicked open and he flinched, but it was not one of the guards this time. It was Marger, supposedly Thalric's second at the embassy, now revealed as a Rekef double-agent all this time. Not even the senior man, he was a puppet, a mere mouthpiece. Sulvec and the Beetle were both his masters, and Marger was a man dethroned.

'Shut up,' Marger told him, 'or we'll gag you. Don't think you won't get your brain boiled if anyone hears you and comes looking.'

There were tears in Osgan's eyes, amongst the puffiness of the bruising. Marger came over and examined him more closely.

'Waste it, just look at you. What's the point of you? You were a fool to come.'

Oh how true, but Osgan could say nothing. His lips were pressed tight to keep himself from sobbing.

There was an uncomfortable expression on Marger's face, which might have been pity or disgust. 'Call yourself an Imperial soldier?' he asked, shaking his head. 'Curse you, but they did a proper job on you, no mistake — not that it'll make much difference in the long run.' Marger was talking too much, hiding some nervousness.

'And … and you?' Osgan got out. 'How are they treating you? What's it like as a professional betrayer?'

'In the Rekef? Ask your friend Thalric, should you get the chance.' Marger shrugged easily, but it was clear that there was something else on his mind. 'We're going back tonight, you know.'

Osgan felt a moment of freezing horror. 'Back to the … to the …'

'To the ziggurat. We've had it watched all day, and nobody's come out. That means Thalric's still in there, skulking somewhere about. Maybe he's waiting for darkness too. If so, we'll be ready for him, because we're going in and we're taking you with us.'

'No!' Osgan choked. 'No, you mustn't! You don't understand what's in there!'

'So tell me.'

'It's … It's Him.'

Marger rolled his eyes. 'Don't make me slap you. Just tell me who's him now?'

'It's … I saw him … the man who … who killed the Emperor.' There, it was said, but Marger just shook his head.

'How long have they left that arm without tending it?' He scowled. 'You better not get so feverish that you stop making sense. Give me a plain answer and I'll get you some more wine. You'd like that, right?'

'I'm serious …' Osgan started, but saw the man's face turn sour. 'What do you want? What do you want from me?'

'Thalric, ideally. Then we can all get out of this backwater. We'll take you into the pit because Sulvec reckons if we start cutting pieces off you then Thalric might — might — come running. No guarantees, though, because he might not be such a sentimental bastard as all that. Unless you've got any better ideas?'

'Please,' Osgan whispered. 'Kill me here. Kill me now. Kill me slowly. Just don't take me back there. Not with Him.'

Marger frowned at him, clearly a little shaken. 'Nothing about this damn job makes sense,' he complained. 'Nothing about this damn city makes any sense. And that place.' He shuddered — not his customary shrug but a shiver that Osgan could well relate to. 'There's something not right about all of this, so give me answers. Right now, while it's just you and me. Don't make me call the others in here to cut it out of your hide a strip at a time.'

'What do you want to know?' Osgan asked him fearfully.

Marger took a moment to formulate the question, with a glance at the door that suggested he was not supposed to be conducting this solo interrogation. When he spoke again it took them in a new direction.

'What in the wastes has Thalric done?' he demanded.

'When? What?' Osgan replied weakly. His head was beginning to ache, and the entire room seemed to shift around him as the fever rolled back over him.

'Tell me what the pits is so important,' Marger insisted, his voice now a hushed whisper. He crouched beside Osgan's chair like a conspirator. 'Why do they want him dead so badly?'

'Ask your big Rekef man out there,' Osgan suggested. 'Surely he's told you.'

'Oh, they haven't even told him,' Marger said. 'But they've told him just how far they intend going just to have him dead. Do you think the Empire really cares two spits about Khanaphes or those Scorpion savages? Oh, maybe the Scorpions would make good Auxillians, but that's not the point. They're here just for Thalric, all of them. All the thousands of them currently attacking the bridge out there — they're here because the Empire wants Thalric dead.'

'I … don't understand,' stammered Osgan.

'No, I don't understand,' Marger told him, 'because it makes no cursed sense at all. Someone wants Major Thalric the Regent-General so very dead that they've sent Skater assassins and a Rekef team and engineers and leadshotters and a whole desert full of Scorpion-kinden, and they'll see forty thousand Beetles dead so long as his corpse lies somewhere amongst them. I swear they'll kill every living thing within miles of here just to make sure he's dead. That's what it's all for, because the Empire doesn't care a toss about this city. Someone very highly placed within the Empire wants Thalric dead, as dead as he can possibly be and — and this is apparently the important thing — every trace of howit happened buried under the rubble of a dead city so that nobody can ever pick up the pieces of what went on or work out who to blame. Now what in the wastes is going on?'

Osgan goggled at him. 'Why are you asking me?' was all he could say. 'It's nothing to do with me.'

'Because I hoped you would know,' said Marger, abruptly exhausted by the whole business. 'I really did. Because nobody is talking about it but we all know it's mad. Something's gone wrong back home, to have all this happening out here in the sticks. I mean, I don't dislike Thalric as a man. I really don't. But when orders come down from the bloody palace to see him dead by any means, including exterminating an entire people, then you jump to obey.'

Someone called out Marger's name from the next room, and the man started guiltily, putting some paces between himself and the prisoner. 'In here,' he said loudly.

One of Sulvec's men put his head around the door. 'Word from the sentries,' he announced. 'There's been some movement at the pyramid. It's dusk anyway, so time to move.'

The Scorpions had not stopped hurling themselves continually at the barricade until the sky began to darken in the east. In the thick of it, loosing snapbow bolts as fast as he could charge the weapon, Totho had wondered whether they might not eventually whittle the horde down to nothing, slaying so many of them that their corpses mounded up against the barricade and fell off the bridge into the river on either side.

There were only five left now of the original thirty Royal Guard who had held the breach, and many of their replacements had fallen also. The Khanaphir losses were far less than the Many's, but the Nem had far more warriors to lose. The Scorpions did not even have to kill them, only to force their way through the breach just the once. They had come close to it several times, but Meyr and Amnon had held the line, in their mail that was proof against axe and crossbow bolt, fighting like murderous automata until the force of the latest Scorpion charge ebbed.

Halmir, he who wooed the widow, had lost half his face to a Nemian halberd and Totho did not know if he lived or not. Dariset had her shoulder laid open by a greatsword, but her armour had saved her, leaving the wound messy but shallow. She still fought on. Old Kham had broken two shields defending Amnon's back at the moment when the Scorpions were closest to breaking through, and he would not let his cousin forget it. Totho had already shot several hundred bolts, and sent to the Iteration for more.

He had sent new orders for Corcoran too. Having looked out at the west bank and seen the monstrous mass of fires out there, he had realized that, despite all its losses, the war-host of the Nem had so far been spending only the small change from its pockets. Tomorrow would be worse: Amnon could only trust the Royal Guard to hold the breach, but so many of them had already perished out on the field. Their numbers grew slender, and the archers had taken their losses too, under crossbow bolts, axes, javelins. They could all be replaced, but only by weakening the force that waited, up and down the shore, for any rafts or boats the Scorpions could scrounge together.

There were some fires burning now behind the barricades, a force of soldiers waiting in case of an assault. Marsh folk were stationed on the wall itself, their eyes better in the darkness. Any creeping force of Scorpions would be rudely surprised by their arrows.

Totho found Amnon fiddling with the straps of his armour, his gauntleted hands clumsy with the buckles.

'Hold still,'Totho said. 'I'll take you out of it.'

'Tighten it,' Amnon told him. 'If they attack tonight, I will be needed.'

'If they attack tomorrow, you will be needed too, and then you will be in need of sleep,' Totho said. 'Meyr and I will quarter the night between us.'

'The three of us will take a third each,' Amnon argued stubbornly.

'As you will, but you sleep now. I'll take first watch, Meyr will take the middle, you the last. Meyr can see in the dark, anyway.'

Amnon sighed. 'Get me out of this, then, but I will sleep here alongside my people.'

Totho stripped off his own gauntlets and stood close to him, finding the buckles from long experience. 'Tomorrow will be ugly. They have enough fresh troops to force the breach,' he observed, his tone neutral.

'I know.'

Totho glanced up, but the firelight revealed no expression on Amnon's face. 'You have a plan?'

'I have some thoughts for delay. It will be only delay. A second barricade at the bridge's foot, supported by every archer who can still draw a bow, deployed from the bank and the rooftops.'

'That will last only until the Scorpions think of bringing a leadshotter to the bridge's peak,' Totho said sadly. 'Then … no more barricade. We are now at the only point where we can hold without their shot smashing us to scrap as soon as they find the range.'

'I'm glad I listened to you regarding that, at least,' Amnon said. 'One less failure that could have been mine.'

'You? You've fought like a hero!'Totho assured him.

'Yet still I have failed my people. I am First Soldier. Who else should take the blame?' A tremor ran through him, and he tore himself from Totho's ministrations. 'Except you, old man!' he exclaimed.

Totho looked up, taking a moment to see the robed figure of the First Minister. Faced with the weary soldiers, the fires, the vast host of the enemy lit up red along the western bank, Ethmet was looking twenty years older.

'I came to see …' he began, and his voice trailed off.

'Well, you have seen,' Amnon replied. 'No doubt the Masters have already told you how this will all end. In truth it needs no prophecy, but I would spare my soldiers your words of doom. What do you want here?'

'The Masters … are considering,' Ethmet almost mumbled. He looked confused, an old man out too late, who has forgotten the way home. 'They … I wait for them to instruct me.'

'Oh, really?' Amnon said, but there was a catch in his voice, and Totho thought, Still he believes, despite all he says. If these Masters were to rise up now and smite him for his failures, he would not care so long as they saved the city.

'Amnon,' Ethmet came close, 'you must tell me.'

'Tell you what?'

'Tell me what will happen. The Masters … are silent.'

Totho saw different expressions at war in Amnon's face: compassion and anger in bitter feud.

'We stand firm. We will stand until there is none left to stand, and only then we will fall,' he said. 'I am no seer to tell the future. The Masters have never spoken to me. All I can do is set an example for my soldiers, as the first into the breach, the last to walk away. And these foreigners are contributing as well, despite the welcome they have received from you. We would be lost already had it not been forTotho and his followers.'

Ethmet blinked rapidly, and Totho realized with horrible embarrassment that the old man was crying, the tears running freely down his lined face. 'I am sorry,' he said, and it was not clear whether he referred to his treatment of Totho or of Amnon. 'I am so sorry.'

There was a whoop from the barricades and Totho heard the creak and twang of the Mantis bows, the shouts of surprise from the Scorpions beyond. He was reaching for his snapbow but, by the time he had a magazine in place, the attack was over, the Scorpions startled into retreat.

Ethmet had clenched his hands together over his chest. 'What can I do?' he whispered. 'What can I do?'

'If this bridge falls then you must lead all you can out of the city,' Amnon told him. 'It does not matter where to. Have them sail out to the sea. Have them flee towards the eastern plains. Anything but stay here within these walls.'

'Leave … Khanaphes?' Ethmet gaped. 'Leave our city?'

'It will not be our city at that point.'

'But this is the Masters' city,' Ethmet protested. 'They would never let it fall. They would never abandon their people …'

'If they ever lived at all then they have left us now,' Amnon replied harshly, a man trying to convince himself.

'No, I have heard them …' And Ethmet's tone was the same.

Amnon shook his head tiredly. 'Go home, First Minister. I have told you what you must do, if the worst comes to the worst, but I cannot make you do it. Go home, and we shall bleed here for as long as we can, and hope that the Scorpions run out of food or bloodlust before we ourselves run out of blood.'

Ethmet nodded, still trembling. He nodded and turned and tottered off down the bridge, and even Totho felt a fragment of sympathy for him.

'You go home too,' he told Amnon.

'I'll sleep here-' he began.

'And Praeda? Don't you think she wants to see you tonight?' Totho felt a catch in his throat, but he forced the words out anyway. 'If … if … if I could go to Che tonight, and if she would have me, I would. I wouldn't care what happened here. I would go and … kiss her, and lie with her, if she'd let me.' He was shaking, without warning or precedent, as he unlatched the last of Amnon's buckles. As the greave fell free, he did not rise, but pressed his hands against the stonework of the bridge for strength. 'If … if I could, that is what I would do.' In that other dream worldwhere things worked out for us, for me … where some cursed thing in this whole wasted world actually went right for me.

As he stood up, Amnon clapped a hand to his armoured shoulder. The big warrior was Ethmet's reverse, looking suddenly as young as Totho, even younger.

'You are right. I will go to Praeda,' he said. 'I don't know why I need a foreigner about to tell me the obvious things, but you are right.'

Totho arranged Amnon's armour carefully so that it would be easy to don quickly in the morning, and because he was badly in need of something to do just then. Amongst other concerns, Tirado had not been able to find the first sign of Che anywhere in the free half of the city.