The Scarab Path

Forty-Three

When the Iteration blew, it sprayed debris as high as the bridge and beyond, showering it with shards of twisted metal and fragments of wood. They pattered down across the stones, on attacker and defender alike. The thunderous explosion forced the two combating sides apart, halted even the frenzied activity of the archers. Totho broke from the line and rushed over to the bridge's north parapet, peering down at the ship's ruin below. His heart lurched. Oh, I've done it now. The pride of the Iron Glove's tiny fleet had been destroyed in some backwater, in a war it had no business taking part in. Drephos would be …

Drephos would be interested, if Totho ever got to pass the news back to him. Drephos would see the whole expensive business as a field test, and order someone to work on an improved design. In fact, Drephos would not be remotely upset. The thought of that reaction, shorn of all emotion, washed clean of the blood of Corcoran and his crew, made Totho feel even worse.

Then the Scorpions let out a great roar of triumph and came for them again, made newly bold and fierce by their artillerists' victory. Amnon began shouting for solidarity, and then the charge caught them, denting their line so deeply that Amnon almost skidded off the low rampart and fell back onto the bridge. The Scorpions almost had them then and there, by sheer weight of numbers, for, in the packed crush at the centre, there was precious little room for axe or spear. The Khanaphir resorted to their short swords to hack at their enemies, while the Scorpions used the savage claws their Art had given them.

Meyr loomed behind the lines, reaching past the Khanaphir with his mailed hands, heedless of the blows any Scorpions aimed at him. He caught them up at random, plucked them from their places and hurled them back into the mass of their fellows. It was blind, brutal work. Amnon's backplate was against Meyr's breastplate, and that was the only thing stopping him being forced to give ground.

There was a high, keening cry and Mantis-kinden began dropping among the Scorpion throng. Having discarded their bows, some now wielded knives of stone or chitin, while others relied only on their barbed forearms. It was enough for them, as they plunged into the enemy like strong swimmers and began to kill. Moving with a dazzling economy of effort, they sought out the edge of every piece of armour, aiming for throats and eyes. They were swift, almost dancing across the face of the enemy host where, slender and deadly, they spent themselves on behalf of the city that had conquered them long ago, buying time and room with their blood.

The Scorpions could not match them for speed, but their numbers were inescapable, and their strength enough to kill with a single blow. Totho could track the whirlpools of the Mantids' passing amid the surging sea of enemy, and could track each Marsh-kinden death by their sudden stilling. Soon only a few of them remained, cutting a path of death through the tight-packed Scorpions, then only one. Teuthete herself lived still, and slew, the two inextricably linked in her Mantis mind. By then the Khanaphir line was solid again, though perilously thin, and Amnon was calling her. With a sudden leap she joined him back in the lines, her arms drenched in blood to the shoulders. She was smiling, ablaze with madness.

Totho joined them, climbing to a higher position at one end of the line where he could take a clearer shot. The Scorpions had fallen back a few paces, shields linked again to ward off the archers, but this time they were not going away. There would be no retreating for them now, not until the breach was won. They could smell victory as close as their next breath.

Moments. We have just moments.

'Be ready with the ropes!' Amnon shouted.

It took Totho a moment to recall what he meant, that the stacks of loose stone on either side of the bridge were to serve as a defence and a trap.

The Scorpions struck the Khanaphir shield-wall with a single metal sound. They were fighting mad now, heedless of the archers' arrows striking down at them. They howled and foamed and battered against shields, splitting and cracking them with axe-blows or the solid strikes of halberds. They ran on to the Khanaphir spears and yet kept running, dragging the weapons from their wielders' hands. It was down to close-in sword work again in moments.

Totho loosed and loosed his snapbow, reloading and recharging as fast as his shaking hands could manage. I could do this in the dark, now. I could do it in my sleep. My hands know the drill off by heart. His mind just watched numbly, seeing the Khanaphir line edge slowly back, anchored at either end by the higher stone of the barricade, in the centre by Amnon, his dark armour awash with the blood of his enemies, backed by the whirling, murderous Teuthete and Meyr's bludgeoning reach and strength. Each time the Mole Cricket lashed out it seemed he held some new weapon. He took up whatever the enemy had left him, laying about him with halberds and axes whose shafts splintered and broke after a few swings, with swords whose blades he bent and shattered under the force of his striking. The centre was holding now, but the line bowing to either side. It would only take one breach for them to lose everything.

A crossbow bolt suddenly ricocheted off Totho's helm, snapping his head back, and he clutched at the stonework, while letting his vision clear. Another struck his pauldron, and flew off behind the lines. He turned his snapbow on the enemy archers, killing them through the shields that were supposed to protect them. They will remember this, he thought. If they are writing the last chapter of Khanaphir history, yet we are writing a chapter of theirs. They will remember all of this.

'Archers back!' Amnon yelled, and he shouted it again and a third time before they would obey him. They dropped back from the barricades, and fled straight for Praeda's second line of defence: that huge maze of stone and wood that blocked the far end of the bridge.

'Totho, ready with the ropes!' came Amnon's next order, his voice loud enough to be heard clear over the Scorpions' howling. Totho found himself obeying automatically, slinging his snapbow over his shoulder and dropping back to the taut cables with his sword drawn. Between the surfaces of stone the line of defenders still held tenuously, straining and bulging. If I cut now I'll crush them. He waited, sword raised, looking back towards them as their line fell apart.

'Back!' Amnon shouted, and they tried, but the Scorpions would not let them go without further blood. A half-dozen of the Royal Guard were able to hurl themselves clear. Most of the rest either stayed and died, or died trying to withdraw. Totho noticed Dariset, half a shattered shield still held high, try to jump away, but a Scorpion moved with her, lunging with claws outstretched. He drove one spiked hand into her chest, and she rammed her sword into the huge man's belly, so that the point jutted from his back.

Scorpions were falling through the gaps in the line. There were moments, moments only to spare.

'Now!' It was not Amnon's voice but Meyr's. The huge man staggered back, slapping a half-dozen Scorpions back into their comrades' halberds with one arm, while he hauled at Amnon with the other. For a moment the Scorpions occupied the breach, but they could not come through it. Teuthete was there, and she was killing them as they came. She had a Khanaphir sword in each hand, and the spikes of her arms were flexed wide, and every edge and point she had was busy taking blood. She was never still, a swift storm of needling death that could not hold them more than a few seconds longer, and yet was holding them nonetheless.

'Now!' roared Meyr — and Totho hacked twice, and three times, then a leaping Scorpion slammed an axe into his back. The force of the blow drove him to his knees, though it twisted from his mail. He fell on the mauled rope and it snapped.

The tons of stone were abruptly in motion for a thunderous second. Totho turned and caught the axeman across the face and the gut, even as the Scorpion turned to look at his fellows. The sound of the stones clashing together was like the end of the world. For many Scorpions it was just that.

Meyr shouted something incoherent, then he and Amnon were killing the few Scorpions who had got through, as gripped by battle-rage as their enemies had ever been. Totho only had eyes for the slender figure now standing atop the tumbled wall of stones. Teuthete had leapt up there with Art-sped reflexes, even as the stone descended on her, and she stood there for a moment, proud and defiant, bloody with the demise of her enemies. The crossbow bolt found her as she stood, took her under the ribs with force enough to throw her from her perch. The fall robbed her of grace, and she was dead as she struck the bridge.

After the pictures had faded, there was a great silence amongst the Masters of Khanaphes. Che put her hands to her head, feeling the world tilt about her. It had seemed so real. She had been there, right there on the bridge. She had been all over the city. Her mind's eye had been dragged wherever the Masters had wished, to the sacked western city, to the refugee-clogged streets of the east. The colours had been over-bright, burning like fever, running like paint, and yet it had all been so real.

That was Totho, she thought numbly. Totho fighting, but why?

'Che?' Thalric had his hands on her shoulders. 'Che, what happened?'

'They're fighting,' she said, shaking. 'On the bridge. Couldn't you see?'

'Che, there was nothing to see,' Thalric insisted. 'You just … you were just staring into the dark.' She saw blank incomprehension on his face, and a measure of the same on the normally expressionless Vekken behind him.

'The city hangs in the balance,' she whispered. 'The Scorpions assault the bridge, and only a tiny few hold them off. It is the end for Khanaphes, it must be.'

'This is a grave disappointment,' said Elysiath. 'Have our servants fallen so low that they will allow our enemies into the city?'

'It does not seem possible,' agreed the man beside her, his tone unhurried, conversational. 'The vagabonds of the Nem should not have been able to pass the walls. That suggests treachery within.'

'Our people have turned away from us while we slept,' Lirielle agreed. 'They flee rather than fight. They are no longer what they once were.'

'How can you say that?' Che glared at them. 'They are dying for you right now!' Totho is dying. He could be dying even now.

They looked at her patronizingly. 'They have indeed grown weak. How dare they abandon half the city,' Elysiath said sternly. 'They deserve all they get. They should have trusted in our walls.'

Thalric laughed at them. The sound of his derision broke across their pontificating like a dash of water, shocking them with its irreverence.

'Your walls?' he sneered. 'Your walls fell in a few brief hours to Imperial leadshotters.' The faces of the Masters remained quite composed, but Che could still detect the slight uncertainty in their eyes that showed they did not recognize the word.

'Leadshotters,' Thalric repeated slowly. He had seen it in them too. 'Siege engines. Machines. Old relics of my own people, but great big magic to your poor citizens, because they've been living in the Bad Old Days for the last few centuries.' He took a deep breath and she felt his hands tighten on her shoulders. 'And, from what you've been saying, that's your fault. You've kept them back. You've kept them ignorant. You've kept them yours. '

'How dare you speak to us thus, O Savage,' Elysiath demanded. Her voice was not angry but cold enough to cut to the bone. 'Utter another word and we will send your mind into a darkness so deep that you will never be found.'

Che expected Thalric to say more but, looking back at him, she saw him grimace, baring his teeth. Whatever he might normally believe, in this dark tomb beyond anything he knew, he believed in that threat.

'And what will you do to me?' Che asked them. 'Tell me, O Masters of Khanaphes? When I speak the same truths?'

'What is this insurrection?' the man said, almost good-naturedly. 'Savages may babble their nonsense, but we discerned merit in you. Our people have grown weak. There is no more than that.'

'A leadshotter …' She stopped because she now realized she could no longer explain it as she once had, '… is a great engine that throws stones hard enough to shatter a wall. The Wasp Empire in the north possesses hundreds of them. My city has many stationed on its walls. The Ant city-states of Accius and his cousins, they field dozens each. Helleron must make more than a thousand crossbows a year in its factories. There are automotives for freight and for war. On the seas there are armourclads, metal ships that float. In the air they have heliopters and orthopters and ships of the air.' The image of these ravening hordes of progress was making her dizzy, slightly ill just to think of it. 'Look in my mind. I can no longer understand what I remember, but look there. See it all. I gift you with five hundred years of artifice.'

They had gone very still. She could feel them taking up the lifeless stones of her memory with their cool, slimy fingers, turning them over and over. Thalric put his arms around her, hugged her to his chest. She wondered if it was a gesture for her reassurance or his own.

'The world has moved on,' she said. 'Everywhere but here.'

'The Moths have fallen,' observed Lirielle. 'What is this?' Despite it all, there was such mourning in her voice that Che felt sorry for them.

'But the rabble of the Nem …' the man began, and trailed off, any confidence ebbing from his voice.

'They will not stand still for ever,' Che said. 'Clinging to whatever life the desert could give, fighting each other for a few scraps, they have been slow to change, but all it took was a prod from the Empire, and they are now inside your city.'

For a long moment the Masters stared at one another, trying to cling on ponderously to what they had believed, in the face of all they had now seen. They don't know what to do, Che realized. They slept too long.

'You will help, surely,' she pressed them.

Elysiath turned a haughty look on her. 'So much is lost, it hardly seems worthwhile to salvage what is left.'

'But they're your people,' Che insisted.

'They have bitterly disappointed us,' the man stated. 'They have squandered all we left them.'

'They have forgotten all I taught them of war,' rumbled dark Garmoth Atennar from behind them.

'But they're now calling out for you!' Che told them. 'They pray to you. They invoke your aid.'

'Do they?' Elysiath actually cocked her head to one side, listening in some way that Che could not imagine. She smiled faintly. 'Ah, yes, they do. How faint they sound. Ah, well.'

'"Ah, well"?' Che protested. 'Don't you see what that means? It means that they believe in you still. To them, after all these centuries, you are still the Masters of Khanaphes. You are what they have lived for, and now you are the reason why they are all going to die. You still have a responsibility to them. They are your servants.'

'Responsibility? To the slaves?' Elysiath echoed, as though the concept was remarkable.

'You said they'd failed you,' Che told her. 'They haven't. They're fighting for you even now, as we speak. They're bleeding and dying for you, for your city. The first city, remember? The city you built so long ago. They're giving their lives to preserve it from the Scorpions, who will soon turn it into one more desert ruin, and put an end even to the memory of you. And perhaps they'll come down here. If there are enough of them, or if the Empire tightens its hold, then maybe even you won't remain safe. Your tests and traps cannot hide you for ever.'

The man was frowning, as though he had eaten something distasteful. Lirielle toyed with her comb. 'But what can we do?' she said.

'It would be such a waste of our power to intervene,' the man mused. 'The cost would be terrible. It would set us back so much.'

'What were you saving it for?' Che asked him.

'The revivification of the land, of course,' he replied. 'The reversal of the change that the great cataclysm brought about. To bring green back to the desert, that is our great purpose.'

Che blinked at that, at the sheer hubris of it, for she could not imagine that even the Masters could even start to accomplish such a thing. Are they just living empty dreams then, despite all their power? 'And who will then profit from this,' she pressed them, even so, 'if your own people are gone?'

The man gave a petulant frown. 'It will demand a great effort, hardly worth it, surely, to preserve so little.'

'So much effort,' Lirielle agreed, as though just combing her hair for so long had exhausted her.

'They're dying,' Che said, reaching the end of her ability to explain herself to them. 'As we speak, they're dying.' Totho is dying. Oh, I am so sorry, Totho.

'I would rather have slept,' said Elysiath, surly. 'Jeherian, will you lead us?'

The man beside her nodded wearily. 'So much lost,' he said sadly. 'Ah, well.'

Che started, as someone moved past her. Without a sound, another of the Masters stepped forward to join Elysiath and the others, a great bulky man whose lustrous hair fell down past his shoulders. Looks were exchanged between them all. Even as Che noted him, she saw another woman come padding from the darkness beyond them, as tall and voluptuous as the rest, the necklace about her throat bearing a kingdom's ransom in precious stones. Next, another two came, hand in hand, to stand nearby. Then, at last, Che saw what she had long imagined. On the nearest sarcophagus, the crowning statue stirred, stretching languorously, without visible transition from cold stone to live flesh. Thus do the Masters of Khanaphes sleep out the centuries.

There were almost a score of them soon, male and female, looming from the dark to join their kin, their grave and beautiful faces all marked with expressions of concern. Che expected chanting. She was waiting for them to enact some ritual, as Achaeos had said the Moths did. It took her a long moment of frustrated silence until she realized that they were already at work.

Each of them was looking up, towards the vaulted ceiling, up towards the embattled city of Khanaphes and the sky beyond. Each and every one of them was sharing in the same act of concentration, staring at some great focal point she could not imagine. She knew she should hate them for their callous detachment, but there was such grief and loss evident on those noble faces that it nearly broke her heart.

What have I driven them to? she wondered. What is this, that they sacrifice here?

Pictures blurred and stretched in her mind again, taking her back to the city above.

'Would you look at what they've done,' Hrathen said. 'How much effort went into that?'

'So they've brought some more stone to fill the breach,' Jakal replied dismissively. 'It will not stop us. An act of desperation.' She jabbed a thumb-claw towards a nearby Scorpion. 'Call my guard together.'

'We knew they were working on something, and now it looks like they've built the world's biggest single-use nutcracker.' They were standing on a rooftop overlooking the bridge and the river, Hrathen with his telescope to his eye. 'The archers, all the rest, are running for the second barricade.'

'Bring it down,' Jakal told him. 'Use one of your petards. Or move one of the engines up on to the bridge.'

'No need for the sweat,' Hrathen said. 'All that effort, and we'll still crack it in less than a minute.' He signalled to one of his own, one of the few Slave Corps soldiers left. Of late, the Khanaphir archers had become very good at shooting them down. 'Fly to Lieutenant Angved,' he instructed. 'Tell him to sight on that blockage and bring it down.'

'Yes, sir.' The man kicked off and made a short dart over the rooftops to where Angved and his leadshotter were waiting.

Jakal regarded Hrathen with a slight smile. It was not a fond look, for Scorpion faces did not lend themselves to fondness. There was fire in it, though: anticipation of victory had set light to her.

'You'll go in yourself now?' Hrathen asked her.

'Their archers have fled. I shall destroy what warriors they have left. You should bring your engines up to the bridge's crest, so that we can destroy their second wall.' Her understanding of artillery and its uses was increasing by leaps and bounds. 'My warriors must see me fight. They must remember why I am Warlord.'

'Then they will see me fight alongside you,' Hrathen said. 'The engineers can manage without me.'

She looked at him for a long moment, then shook her head. 'Your Empire breeds fools,' she said. 'If my warriors obeyed my words as swiftly as yours obey you, I would not need to shed my blood for them. Still, you shall have the chance to prove yourself, if you so wish.'

'Why do you go, then?' he asked her. 'It's not as though your host is short one more warrior.'

Her smile was scornful. 'I am Warlord because I am the best. I slew many to take the crown, and there are many who would slay me for it in turn. If I did not fight they would all take up arms against me. I too must shed the blood of the Khanaphir, but I shall choose when I shed it. I am not destined to become mere prey for arrows. My people shall see me take the bridge itself, and they shall remember.'

'They shall see us take the bridge.'

'Are you strong enough?' she asked him. 'Does your blood run so pure? You may just as well remain behind. My people would not care.'

It stung like a slaver's lash. 'I have the strength of my father's kinden and the guile of my mother's,' he told her, 'as you will soon see. Perhaps it will be I who will challenge you.'

That made her smile. 'I would welcome it.' Below, in the ravaged street, a company of Scorpions had assembled, huge men and women loaded with scavenged armour. A dozen of them stamped and rattled, waiting impatiently. Jakal had chosen them carefully, Hrathen knew, from among the most vicious and bloodthirsty of all her people, thus keeping her potential enemies close to her.

She descended to join them and they greeted her with a roar of approval. Today was their day. The day their Warlord had delivered their ancient enemy to them. Hrathen followed as they struck out for the bridge, after sending back an order to have one of the leadshotters brought up after them.

Not a great day for the Empire, he thought. Probably not even a footnote in the Imperial histories, but I shall know. I shall know that I was true to my father's bloody-handed kinden, at the end. The desolation of Khanaphes shall be my legacy to my people.

The archers, and a scattering of Royal Guard, were still in sight, fleeing towards the end barricade. Amnon faced the new-formed wall of loose stones and squared his shoulders. Meyr crouched close to him, a hulking, brooding shadow, and in his hands he had a rough-ended beam from the construction works, ten feet long. Totho checked that his snapbow was charged. I had feared I might run out of ammunition today, he considered. That seems unlikely now.

Another thought struck him, that Drephos would be proud now: not of Totho but of the armour. Field-testing complete: the aviation plate can be considered worth its considerable cost. We three are the proof of that. He was amazed how quickly Amnon had adapted to it, but then the man was a warrior born, and Beetles took easily to wearing a second shell.

If we had come with twenty men in full mail, we would have held against anything the Scorpions or the Empire could throw at us, he thought. We could have held off the world.

'They'll bring a petard up to blow the barricade down,' he warned the others. 'We won't have long before we must fight again.'

'We won't need long,' Amnon told him. 'Just enough time so they can complete the works, close up the breach at the far end. That is all the time we need to buy them.' Totho wondered what Praeda Rakespear was doing right now, whether she had realized that Amnon was not coming back to her. He wondered whether Amnon had left people ready to restrain her, to stop her running up here. Probably he had: it was the sort of thing the big man thought of.

He spotted the plume of grey smoke, and knew immediately what it meant. Leadshotter on a rooftop. There were words in his mind to warn the others, but he had no time to give actual voice to them before the missile struck the barricade.

The noise passed by him, the physical force overriding it. A piece of broken rock hit his chest like a sledgehammer, his feet skating from under him, so that he slammed down on his back. The air was all dust, with stone fragments pattering all about them. Gasping for breath, he could not get to his feet yet, but he tried to peer through the drifting white veil, to see what had been done.

The new stones had fallen, forming a broken pavement between him and the barricade, and the Scorpions were coming through the breach. He realized even then that their artillerists would have preferred a second shot, to widen the gap, but the warriors already on the bridge had been so long denied this chance that nothing could have held them back. They surged in along with the stone-dust, as Meyr and Amnon met them at full charge.

It would have been suicide but for the mail. It could have been suicide anyway. There were enough weak points — throat, armpit, groin — that one spear or blade could have ended either of them. They thrust themselves into the thick of the Scorpion weapons, and Totho saw Amnon take a dozen blows, and Meyr twice that number. Each rebounded from the dented plate, frustrated by its fluted curves that turned the strongest blow aside. Amnon's sword descended repeatedly, chopping indiscriminately at the enemy. Meyr laid about himself like a mad thing, crushing the Scorpions, flinging them from the bridge with great swipes of his club. They tried to drag him down, to get under his reach, but Amnon killed them as they came, shield high and sword never still.

Totho struggled to his feet, feeling sharp pains from his ribs. His breastplate had a prodigious dent to one side, where the stone had struck him. He staggered a little, and then ran up to stand to Amnon's left. With a desperate concentration, he resumed the business of running out of ammunition, emptying each magazine in turn into the host of Scorpions, punching holes in their mail and through their mail, even through one man and into the next. Beyond those that Meyr crushed and Amnon slew, the bridge was heaving with them. He could see bigger, better-armoured warriors forcing their way through the breach, eager to get to the fight. There was no subtlety now, no pretence at tactics. Only three men stood on the bridge between the Scorpions and their prey. Faced with that, it was down to blade and claw. Crossbows, leadshotters, all were forgotten, as the Many of Nem returned to what they knew best.

Amnon was down on one knee, his pauldron bent almost in two by a halberd blow. Totho shot the wielder through the head as he raised the weapon for a second strike.

Meyr's breastplate was buckled, the catches at his side split apart by the stroke of a greatsword. It was impossible to tell how much of the blood on him was his own. There was a broken spear jutting from beside his neck that must surely have pierced his mail. The Scorpions were leaping on him, climbing up him, trying to unshell him with daggers and their clawed hands.

Totho loosed and loosed, reloaded and recharged and loosed again, picking them off every time Meyr remained still enough to shoot at. The giant grabbed them and tore them away from him, roaring in rage. If he got both hands on the same man, he ripped the wretch apart. Totho wondered whether anyone had ever seen an enraged Mole Cricket before.

Abruptly the Scorpions facing them were more heavily armoured, larger. They thundered into the shields of the two defenders hard enough to drive them back a step, hacking with sword and axe. Meyr backhanded one into the river. Another slammed an axe at his throat which was deflected by the plates of his shoulders. The strap on Amnon's shield broke under a sword blow and he discarded it, taking his sword in both hands.

Totho slung his snapbow and rushed in beside him, with his own shield on his arm. He received three strikes immediately, two on the shield's curved face and one to his helm that made his head swim. He tried to lunge back with his sword, but it was all he could do to just stand upright, shield held up and being struck at repeatedly by the Scorpions — all he could do not to fall back immediately and yield the breach to them. I am not a warrior. All he had was his armour, the one thing standing between life and death for him.

Another blow struck his shield so hard that he was knocked into Amnon. The Khanaphir did not even pause in his sword work, merely pushing Totho back with his free hand.

A stingshot struck Amnon clean in the chest, flaring gold, and he staggered. The Scorpions surged forward, but Totho was there to meet them. He raised his shield and sword against the blows, putting his shoulder to the enemy as though he was trying to hold a door closed. Meyr was being swarmed, Scorpions hacking at his legs, leaping up to drive their claws at his throat, hanging off his armour. Totho felt four solid blows land on his shield, numbing his arm. His sword was battered out of his hand.

A Scorpion woman was abruptly in front of Meyr, stepping aside from his descending fist with a deft grace and then driving her spear up with all her might past the edge of his breastplate, under his arm. Totho saw the shaft sink deep through the sundered mail with an explosion of blood. Meyr struck at her furiously with both hands but she ducked inside his reach and ripped at his throat with her claws. Another man, a Scorpion halfbreed, was beside her, one hand outstretched. Totho saw the bolt of golden light strike Meyr's helm around the eye-slit and the huge man staggered back, rearing to his full height.

The Scorpion woman tore her spear free, turning as she did so and coming back to hurl it into Meyr's throat, where it stuck, shaft quivering. Totho could hear himself shouting something wordless.

Amnon was there. Amnon was there now, but it was too late. Meyr collapsed on to one knee, a hand on the spear-shaft that was running with his blood. Amnon lunged forward at the woman, for a moment not caring if the Scorpions were through the breach or not. The halfbreed got in the way, fending the sword off and reaching out with the open palm of his off-hand. The stingshot struck Amnon's damaged pauldron hard enough to rip it off, then the halfbreed's sword jammed into the Beetle's side, scraping against mail and severing straps.

Amnon rammed his own blade into the man's chest, driving it in two-handed up to the hilt. He was ducking immediately to scoop up a new sword, a sharp, slender piece originating from the Iron Glove factories. My sword, Totho recognized it. My sword.

The Scorpions had paused a moment with the halfbreed's death, and Totho realized it was to give the woman room. She grinned fangs at Amnon and took hold of her spear with one hand, wrenching it from Meyr's neck. The giant gave out a sound, a monstrous sigh, and toppled backwards.

Totho knew he should find another sword or unsling his snapbow, but he found he could only watch Amnon and the Scorpion woman. Amnon stood unevenly, his weight on one leg. His once-pristine armour was a maze of dents and scratches, missing plates and broken buckles. He had been fighting for too long. It was not the mail that weighed on him, but a deadly weariness. The Scorpion woman looked fresh, fleet, long-limbed and strong. Worse, she looked skilled.

'You killed him,' she said, with a nod at the dead halfbreed. 'You saved me the trouble. I shall kill you now.'

'Do it,' Amnon urged her. 'I'm tired.' He braced himself for it, left hand extended before him to reach for her spear, sword held wide to cut.

A stir of unease rippled back through the Scorpions, and at first Totho imagined it was because of the two combatants, perhaps because they had realized who Amnon was. They were looking upwards, though, more and more of them following suit. He tried to do the same, but the lobster-tail plates that guarded the back of his neck had locked in place. Now Amnon himself was tilting his head back, falling from his fighting stance, and the Scorpion woman too. Totho cursed and wrenched at his helm, finally tearing it from his head entirely.

Something struck him in the face as he did, and then another: tiny impacts like insistent little insects. A third followed soon after. He touched his face, which was grimy with dirt and sweat, and found it wet.

There was a look on the faces of the Scorpions that he could not identify. Amnon had tilted his helm back, the better to see what was happening. His expression looked shaken, wide-eyed with fear.

'What?' Totho demanded of him. 'It's only rain.'

Amnon stared at him. All around them the drops of moisture were slanting down, thicker now, the air grown misty with them, the sound a constant hiss off the bridge's stonework, off the river below.

'Rain,' Totho repeated. Amnon shook his head.

'I know of rain, for I saw it once in the Forest Alim. It rains on the sea, sailors say, but it never rains here.'

'It must,' Totho argued. The Scorpions were actually cowering back. Only the woman still stood straight, clutching her spear as though it was a talisman.

'It has never rained in Khanaphes,' Amnon said firmly, barely audible now over the rain which fell faster and faster, battering at them. 'Not ever, in written record, has it rained here.' He could not have looked more horrified and frightened if the Scorpions had been about to skin him alive. 'It is the wrath of the Masters, their judgement on us.'

'It's just rain!' But Totho had to shout, and even then he was not sure his words were heard. He looked into the sky and saw it boiling and thunderous, full of pregnant clouds that surely could not have been there a moment ago. The sun had gone dark with them.

He felt his stomach turn as he looked upriver, and the sight struck a blow that his armour could not protect him from. There were clouds rolling and seething in the sky all the way north. They were following the course of the river, a great train of deluging clouds as far north as the eye could see, curving with the meanders of the Jamail.

Impossible, he thought, but his eyes saw what they saw, although, as the rain became more and more furious, he could see less and less.

Amnon was now crouching, in terror or reverence, and many of the Scorpions were fleeing the bridge or milling madly. They could have captured the eastern half of Khanaphes right then, but the storm had struck them with the same fear as had infected Amnon.

And what about the other Khanaphir? Totho turned and peered at the east city. He could see little enough of it, but it seemed to him that the roofs of the houses were dark with people. He went to the bridge's parapet and gazed north again. Abruptly he could not breathe. He wanted to shout a warning, wanted to tell Amnon to brace himself. He wanted even more to deny what he was seeing. Instead he could only cling to the bridge's rail and stare, unable even to close his eyes.

There was a wall of water rolling down from the north. It seemed impossible that it would not dissipate itself along either bank, but it did not. It descended purposefully on the city of Khanaphes with the inexorable speed of a rail automotive. The bridge, of course, stood in its path. Totho had cause to remember the bridge's many pillars, narrowed and lowered to impede shipping. At last he dropped to his knees, still holding on to the parapet.

He counted down the seconds in his mind. He was slightly late for, just as he counted two, the entire bridge jumped beneath him. Those still standing, meaning most of the Scorpions, fell down. Some were thrown from the bridge altogether.

It will destroy the whole city, he thought, and clawed his way up to look. The river Jamail had burst its banks, the water breaking against the bridge, which still stood despite all laws of architecture. The Jamail had exploded from its course in a ruinous wave of destruction, but heading only to the west.

Totho simply stood there, watching the murderous wall of water roll over the Scorpion war-host, sweeping them without mercy through the pillaged streets of the western city. He saw smaller buildings collapse even as Scorpions sought sanctuary atop them, the detritus of the last few centuries' expansion obliterated in seconds, leaving only the greatest and the oldest of buildings untouched. A few Scorpions managed to claw their way to safety on top of those but, of the Many of Nem, the vast majority were already gone, swept away and drowned by the rushing waters.

The eastern bank still held firm, and that was another thing that Totho knew was impossible. Later he would construct all manner of explanations to account for what he had seen, but right then, faced with the enormity of it, he simply knew that it could not be done, and yet it had been. He had no words for it.

The rain was still coming fast, and hard enough to sting the skin. The Scorpion woman was looking back, watching her people try to flee, fighting amongst themselves to escape, pushing each other from the bridge or being carried away by the roiling waters. When she turned back his way, her face was death.

'Amnon!' Totho shouted, and the Beetle just managed to regain his feet before she was on him. She struck him across the helm with the shaft of her spear, hard enough to stagger him, and then rammed the point into his unarmoured shoulder, drawing a thick welt of blood. Amnon drove for her with his sword out, but she spun aside and struck him across the back of the head, whirling her spear one-handed about her. The claws of her off-hand lunged for him, but scraped off his armour. Amnon cut back at her, making her jump away. He was moving too slowly, though, and she was as swift as a Mantis. When safely at a distance, she stabbed at him with her spear, when within his sword's reach her claws raked for him. She danced about him, never still, forcing him always to stumble after her.

She lashed her spear across the side of his head, snapping him round and sending him to one knee. Her claws pincered around his neck, digging into the mail there. She twisted his helm back and poised her spear above the eye-slit.

Totho shot her through the centre of the chest. The bolt passed straight through her, and she shuddered once, but remained standing for some time before the spear fell from her hand and she collapsed. He turned to face the other Scorpions. He had surely broken some law of single combat, and no doubt they would come for him now.

They were backing off. Although there was only water beyond their end of the bridge, they were backing off. Totho could not understand it until the Khanaphir soldiers passed him.

They were just the neighbourhood militia, untrained civilians with their spears and shields, but they were enough. They swept the demoralized Scorpions ahead of them like the river itself, furious and fierce, and when they had done their work, the Jamail took over. So ended the Scorpion siege of the city of Khanaphes, and the enduring memory Totho had of its conclusion was Praeda Rakespear kneeling beside Amnon, trying to pull his helm free as she wept.