The Scarab Path

Four

She was dreaming, and she knew she was dreaming. The problem was that it was his dream. Worse still, she knew that the things that she was witnessing through his eyes were real.

Her mind was full of chanting voices, overlapping and blurring together. She heard no distinct words, just the ebb and flow of the sounds interfering with each other until it was like a great tide, rolling in towards her endlessly.

And she saw robed shapes …

She saw robed shapes. They were atop a mountain, and the air around them was bending and fragmenting under the strain of what they were doing. She could not tell which one of them was Achaeos. Because it was also her dream she rushed from one to another, to find him. She never could. Their pale, grey Moth faces, their blank white eyes, were all transfigured, so that each face looked the same. The ritual had gripped them with an identical hand. She shouted at them and tried to shake them. She warned them that he would die, if they kept tearing at the world like this. Because it was his dream, and she had not been present, they ignored her.

She knew that she was running out of time. It was not his time, not the time remaining until the barbed peak of the ritual, when the power they invoked would come thundering down through the city of Tharn, and his fragile body would be unable to take the strain. Instead it was the time until the other arrived.

It had always been there beside them, although she had been blind to it for so long. From the very first moment their minds had touched, he venturing among the ghost-infested trees, she imprisoned in the hold of a Wasp heliopter, it had been with them. Now she felt it rising from beneath them, through the warrened rock of the mountain, through the very weave of the world. It was surging upwards at a fierce, relentless pace, but it was still a good distance off because it was pursuing from five hundred years ago.

She thought of flying over the Exalsee and seeing the lake monster rushing for the surface, the great pale body of it forming from the depths.

The chanting grew even less and less coherent as the voices of the Moth-kinden fell into the echo of that older, greater ritual. Around them the rock of the mountain itself began to crack. Thorny vines thrust themselves violently into the air, then arced round to penetrate the stone once more, to pierce the flesh of the ritualists, yet they did not seem to notice. Transformations were being wreaked on them. Che would run faster and faster from one to another, trying to find Achaeos before the things of the Darakyon did. There were shadows all around now, the shadows of great twisted trees, of Mantis-kinden writhing, bristling with barbs, gleaming with chitin. The shadows were closing in, encompassing the ritual. The robed figures were being consumed.

She felt it again, as she had felt it in life. She felt the sudden silence, that utter silence as though she had been struck deaf. It was a silence so profound it left an echo in the mind. It was the moment when the wrenching strain of the ritual, the fierce attention of the Darakyon, had become too much for him, the moment when his wound had ripped open and he had died.

Had died, and yet not left her.

Behind the Tharen mountain top and the shadow-trees of the Darakyon lay the streets of Myna, the ziggurat of the governor's palace, her own dream evolving in the shadow of his. She saw a tiny figure break from the barricades, and then charge towards the soldiers clustered around the broken palace gates. She saw, as she had not seen at the time, the great clawed tide of the Darakyon hurtling forward, spewing uncontrollably out of that lone running figure, thrashing about her like a headless, dying thing. The last dregs of the Darakyon, now poisoning the minds of the soldiers ahead of her, making her into a vessel of terror.

She woke to find the shutters still dark, no piercing slants of sunlight. She, who had once slept late by choice, now woke regularly in darkness and saw every dawn arrive, tugged awake by shreds of a nocturnal life that had not been hers.

He was with her.

There, in the darkness that was no darkness to her, she could see him as a grey smear hanging in the air, formless and faceless. It moved and changed shape, and she received the impression of a dreadful urgency. He was trying to tell her something, desperately trying to make her aware of something, and yet he could not form words or even pictures for her.

'Help me to understand you,' she told him. 'Achaeos, please. I can't … I'm not strong enough to make you real. Just tell me what I have to do.'

He grew more agitated, and she thought of him trapped between life and death, a knot in the weave, shouting and screaming at her to help him. But she could not. None of the books she had trawled from the Collegium library had helped her. She was too dull a scholar, their old language too intricate, too occult.

He was fading now. It was only just after she woke each day that she could see him clearly. He would always be there, though, a half-sensed presence hovering over her shoulder.

Mourning was difficult, for Achaeos's death had left her with an indelible legacy. The sorrow of losing him still had its hooks into her, but the horror of having him still — in this horrible, half-formed way — was worse.

By the logic of her people, she was simply deranged. If she had gone to see a Beetle-kinden doctor, he would have told her that she was suffering from these hallucinations as a way of dealing with her loss. Alas, she could no longer subscribe to the logic of her people. The books she had pillaged from the library were written in the crabbed hands of Moth-kinden or the elegant loops of Spiders. The one thing she had learned from them was that, by their logic, she was not mad. There were precedents for her situation, though she was not sure that this was any reassurance. Being haunted was surely worse than mere madness. Especially being haunted in a city where nobody, not even her open-minded uncle, believed in ghosts.

During the ritual atop Tharn, Achaeos had called out to her, and she had lent him as much strength as she could, and possibly contributed thereby to his death. Her mind and his had been touching when the mouldering evil of the Darakyon had stirred itself to answer his call for power. When he had died, therefore, something of him had stayed with her. The logic — since all insanities have their own internal logic — was faultless. The books were silent on remedy, however.

And there was more than that: she was not whole, any more, after the war.

She stretched herself and shook her head. The ghost of Achaeos was gone: still there in the back of her mind but no longer apparent to her eyes. As she dressed, she saw the first pearl-grey of dawn glimmer through her shutters. She approached the door carefully, as though it might suddenly become a monster, a jailer. It was ajar, though, and she went out on to the landing.

Stenwold's door stood open, which meant he had not come back last night. She smiled at that. She knew that she was a burden on him that he could not shift, so it was good that he still had Arianna.

Che and Arianna had not got on well, not at all, and the real problem had been Stenwold himself, who simply did not know how to deal with them both at the same time: on the one hand his young niece, his daughter in all but name; on the other his lover, scarcely older than her, with whom he was a different man entirely. The confusion it threw him into had obviously amused Arianna at first, but then it had become inconvenient and, in her smooth Spider-kinden way, she had secured a first-floor residence across town. Stenwold was abruptly released from the pressure of having to be two men at the same time, while Che and Arianna did their best not to meet. Life was easier that way.

Che pulled her grey cloak on over her mourning reds, taking only a moment to look in the mirror. With the hood raised high her reflection always surprised her: her skin appearing too dark, her eyes disfigured by iris and pupil rather than blank white. Seeing any face framed in grey cloth, she expected to see his face and not her own.

'Achaeos,' she said softly. He must be able to hear her, from his vantage point at the back of her mind. 'Help me.' Sometimes she saw him flicker in the background of mirrors, but not now. She lifted the bar on the front door. There was no lock, only the simplest latch.

Collegium was a city of the day, but good business came the way of early risers. By the time she ventured out, the sky was already flecked by Fly-kinden messengers, and a big dirigible was making its way in slowly from the north towards the airfield, bearing goods and news from Sarn, no doubt. There was currently a law about running automotives through the city streets before a civilized hour of the morning, but handcarts and animal carts were already rattling across the cobbles, and she could hear the slow shunting of the trains almost all the way across the city, in the still dawn air.

Stenwold lived in a good part of town, not far from the College, and the short walk took her through what was now called War Harvest Square, because of the mummery that was enacted here every tenday. Collegium looked after its own. Collegium was wealthy enough, despite the costs of the recent war, to do that. She spotted the queues ahead of her, and knew it must be the day when the War Harvest was doled out.

It could have been worse. Collegium medicine was some of the best in the world, and modern weapons were efficient enough to kill more often than they maimed. There were enough, though, who had fallen between the extremes of kill and cure, and every tenday they made their arduous way here. These veterans, the men and women of Collegium who had fought for their city against the Empire or the Vekken, or else gone out to fight for the Sarnesh, and whose injuries meant they now had no trade left to them. Men and women missing legs, missing arms, missing eyes, they came and queued here every tenday, and the Assembly ensured that they were given enough to live on. There had been a bitter dispute over it at the time but, in the flush of peace, the Assemblers of Collegium were not going to turn their soldiers out to beg or starve. It had made Che proud of her kinden, and the veterans who gathered here for the handout had been left a little pride, a little self-respect. Passers-by saluted them, cheered them, and acknowledged their sacrifice, while the two tavernas nearby did a good trade from citizens buying them drinks.

The problem came with those whose wounds were less visible. She knew there were many: those who had not been able to bear the blood and destruction, the loss of loved ones; those who had retreated into themselves; those who could not hear a shout or a loud noise without being flung back into the fighting. Victims of the war without a mark on them, they were not provided for. Instead the doctors prodded them, frowned at them, and shrugged their shoulders.

She herself had not gone to see a doctor. They would not understand.

It had come upon her as she went by airship to Tharn, to try to visit Achaeos's ashes. Before then the shock of his death, the whirl of events at the end of the war, had kept her off balance. It had only been on that return journey that she had realized.

She remembered the waves of nausea first, losing her balance at the slight sway of the wind. She had crouched on the deck, feeling her stomach churn in sudden spasms. The movement of the vessel beneath her had seemed as unnatural as water on fire.

This is what he felt, she had reflected at the time, remembering how Achaeos had always been so uncomfortable with modern transport. She had assumed that was just because he was new to it, then.

She remembered staggering towards the stern, clinging to the rail, where the concerned expression of Jons Allanbridge had wavered through her view, a meaningless image. She had stared at the engine, the blur of the propeller, and felt a chasm gape beneath her. It was wrong — worse, it was meaningless. She had stared at all that pointless metal, its inexorable convolutions, its parts and pipes and moving things, and she had felt as though she was falling.

The white elegance of the College was straight ahead of her now. The library's great gates were still closed and barred, this early, so she went to the side door and knocked and knocked, until a peevish voice responded from within, announcing, 'It's not locked.'

Che drew a deep breath and knocked again. 'It's not locked!' called out the librarian, thoroughly irritated now. 'Either come in or go away.'

She stared at the handle, feeling tears prickle at the corners of her eyes. Her memory told her that this was simple but her body had no path for it, her mind no connection. She rattled with the metal ring, but the door would not move. She could not understand the process. It made no sense to her. In her final moments, while touching Achaeos's mind as a channel for the Darakyon, something fundamental had been ripped out of her.

At last someone came to the door and yanked it open. The librarian was a stern old woman, her face devoid of sympathy. 'What do you want?' she demanded.

'I want to come in,' Che replied in a tiny voice, fighting the urge to weep in frustration.

It would have been worse if there had never been Tynisa. Che had grown up with her as though they were sisters: Stenwold's clumsy niece and Tisamon's halfbreed bastard — although neither had known Tynisa's heritage at the time: Tynisa, who was graceful and beautiful and accomplished in every field save one. So it was that Stenwold had made alterations to his house, and given his servant special instructions about the doors and the locks. That servant had died in the Imperial siege, though, and the new man was taking a while to learn. It was not surprising, for the instructions were baffling to him and Che could hardly blame the man for forgetting. At least Stenwold was used to the idea; he could pretend he understood.

Walking through the streets of Collegium, she was nevertheless a cripple. She looked up at the slowly manoeuvring airship and felt that it should fall on her. It was too great; it could not stay up. The sounds of the trains, which had lulled her to sleep ever since she first came to Collegium, were now like the cries of strange and frightening beasts.

Yet she had spent years learning mechanics, basic artificing, forces and levers, power and pressure. Now it was as if she had spent all that time learning how to walk through walls or turn lead into gold. She could clearly remember being able to do it once, but not how. The logic had deserted her and she had become like him. She had lost her birthright, the basic tools that made the modern world comprehensible. She had become Inapt, unable to use — to even comprehend — all the machines and the mechanisms that her people loved so much. She was crippled in her mind and nobody would ever understand. There was a division between the races of her world: those who could, those who could not. Che had fallen on the wrong side of it and she could not get back.

It was worse now because of Tynisa. Of all the people in the world, Che could have spoken to Tynisa about it. Tynisa would have understood, would have helped her. Tynisa was gone, though, to Stenwold's fury. Che had not understood, at first, why Stenwold had reacted so angrily.

I drove her away.

And it was true. Not anything Che had done but the simple fact of her. In the end Tynisa had not been able to look at the sight of mourning Che without recalling whose blade had lanced Achaeos, whose hand had inflicted the wound that eventually killed him. Che did not blame her. Of course, Che did not blame her, but that did not matter. Tynisa had lived through the violent death of her father and come home to find herself a murderess. She had stayed as long as she could bear it, growing less and less at home in this city she had dwelt in all her life, unable to talk to Che, grieving a dead father, nursing a killer's conscience for all that Che tried to reach out to her. At the last she had fled Collegium. She had gone, and not one of Stenwold's agents could discover where.

Stenwold's rage, Che finally understood, had been over the undoing of twenty years of civilized education, over all the care and time he had spent in making Tynisa the product of Collegium's morality. In the end she had shown herself her true father's daughter. She had gone off, Stenwold felt sure, to lose herself in fighting and blood — chasing her own death just as Tisamon always had done.

Hooray, Che thought. Hooray for those of us who won the war.

The vast stacks of the library normally absorbed her. The Beetle-kinden claimed this to be the single greatest collection of the written word anywhere in the world. The Moths scoffed at them for this boast but nobody had performed a count. There were texts and scrolls here that dated back to before the revolution, to a period when the city bore a different name. They kept them in cellars whose dim lighting offered no impediment to Che. She had been searching for months, now, trying to find a cure to her affliction, a way of helping Achaeos's wretched shade.

All of a sudden she found she could not face it, not today. The thought of poring over more ancient scrolls that she could barely understand, of another day's fruitless delving into an incompletely rendered past, was more than she could bear. She searched her mind for the reason for this change, and found there Stenwold's offer of the previous night. At the time she had not cared, but something had lodged there, waiting for the morning light.

'Khanaphes,' she said slowly to herself, and it was as if the word created a distant echo in her mind. Ancient histories, old Moth texts: the city name would barely be found in any writings that post-dated the revolution, but if the diligent student dug deep into the writings of the old, Inapt powers, that name glowed like a jewel, ancient even to those antique scribes.

She needed to talk, but who could she talk to about Khanaphes?

Two dozen bemused students had turned up for the aviation lecture: Beetle-kinden, Ant and Fly youths, all wanting to be pilot-artificers — aviators as the new word went. They were without a teacher. So far all they had were some scribbled notes left on the chalkboard, instructing them to fold flying machines out of paper. This was now what Che discovered.

She knew where to look, as the avionics students did not, yet, though it took her a fight with her courage to cross town to the new airfield and enter the hangar. The shapes there, the winged things arranged in their untidy horseshoe pattern, looked only predatory. The air was filled with the sounds of metal and cursing artificers. It was a sharp reminder of her former self that she could have done without. She had encountered this and beaten it before. Had she wanted she could have shut herself away and never had to deal further with her affliction, but that was not her way: she was still Beetle-kinden, and Beetles endured. They were tough, both within and without.

'Taki!' she shouted, whereupon the little Fly-kinden pilot looked up, delighted.

'That,' she said, 'is the first time in five days that someone's addressed me properly, instead of "Miss Schola". I should never have told them my full name, honestly.'

She was looking well. Taki had also been crippled by the war, but in her case the damage had been made good by artifice. Her beloved Esca Volenti had been destroyed over Solarno, but here she was fine-tuning the Esca Magni. It was the perfect fusion of Solarnese know-how, Collegiate industry and Taki's prodigious skills as a pilot. She claimed it as the most agile flying machine in the known world. The boast had been put to the test and so far never proved false.

'It's good to see you again.' Che eyed the opened innards of the machine, fought down a brief stab of queasiness. 'Something wrong here?'

'Not wrong, just could be made better. One of your fellows at the College came up with an idea about air exchange, so I reckon I can get another few per cent efficiency out of the rewinding gears.' She grinned in the face of Che's polite expression, because she didn't know what was behind it. 'I want to try a non-stopper to Capitas.'

'Capitas in the Empire?' It was a stupid question, Che knew, but it leapt out before she could stop it.

'Where else? They're keen on their fliers up that ways. I've had an invitation.' She shrugged. 'If not there, then there's an exhibition in Helleron in a month's time, and I won't miss that.'

The Esca Magni was sleek, hunched up from nose to cockpit, then with a long sweep of tail. The two wings, silk stretched over a frame of wood and wire, were currently folded back along her length. Beneath the nose emerged the compact fist of a pair of rotating piercers, another Solarnese innovation in the world of aviation. Taki, just three foot tall in her sandals, sat on its hull like an empress, mistress of all she surveyed.

'What?'Taki asked her. 'I know that look. What's up?'

'Taki … have you ever heard of a place called Khanaphes?'

The Fly gave her a surprised look. 'Well, of course, but how did that come up?'

'It's just that … people have been mentioning it.'

Taki shrugged. 'Well, why not? Big old place down the east coast from the Exalsee. All a bit, you know, backward thataways.'

'Backward?'

'Not really keeping pace with progress, you know.' Taki made a vague gesture. 'We get food from them, trading through Ostrander. Now, Ostrander's a strange place, and you never saw it when you were over …' She saw something in Che's expression. 'But Khanaphes? What's to say? Let's get a drink and then you can ask your questions.'

The Fly had never actually been there, was the first thing Che learned. Taki's life had always been fiercely centred on the airborne elite of the Exalsee.

'They don't have flying machines in Khanaphes?' Che probed.

Taki made a condescending noise. 'They don't have machines of any kind in Khanaphes, from what I hear. Like I said, backward.' She looked amused, her eyes flicking across the clientele of the taverna as though she included them loosely in the same definition.

That took a moment to sink in. 'But they're … I thought they were supposed to be Beetle-kinden.'

'Oh, yes, yes they are. Not anything like your lot, though. I remember how Scobraan went there once, for a bet …' Her voice twitched for a moment, another colleague dead in the war. 'He said they'd never seen anything like his flier — didn't know what to make of it. Didn't want to know, either. And he couldn't get it refuelled, of course, had to get it shipped back to Porta Rabi by boat.'

'But that doesn't …' Something odd moved inside Che. 'And have they been settled there long?'

'Oh, you might say that. Long enough to have founded Solarno.'

'Seriously?'

'Oh now, this is long, long ago — and I'm remembering back to my school days for this, too. They used to own halfway around the Exalsee, way back before anyone can remember. But that was long before the Spiders and my own people came over — a thousand years before, something crazy like that. Then I suppose they just … got left behind. The way I hear it, they haven't changed much since those days. They still own a fair bit of territory up and down the river where they are.'

Che digested these words, thinking: the past. It made no sense: she knew Beetle-kinden even if she could not quite claim to be one of them any more. It made no sense. Something doesn't add up. It gave her a strange sense of excitement. Khanaphes — what might I learn there?

It struck her then, and she actually jumped up, knocking back her chair. Taki was in the air in an instant, wings a-blur and a knife in her hand. A few of the other taverna patrons had gone for their weapons too. The war was not so very long ago.

She sat down, made herself give an apologetic wave around the room. Taki stood on her chair back for a moment, wings flicking for balance, before consenting to sit down.

A city of Beetle-kinden without machines?

A city of Inapt Beetle-kinden?

'Yes,' she said, thinking of Stenwold's offer. 'Oh, yes I will.'

Stenwold was enjoying an after-lunch bowl of wine in the College refectory when someone came brushing past behind him, murmuring, 'The Vekken are after you.'

His stomach sank and he looked back. 'Which ones?'

His informant, a natural history master, shrugged. 'Who can tell? They all look the same.'

This was Stenwold's chance to make himself scarce, but he did not seize it. 'They're my problem,' he replied, whereupon his benefactor shrugged and made a quick exit. Stenwold braced himself mentally for another taxing encounter. His Vekken initiative which, in their mutual derision of it, had at last provided Collegium and Vek with something in common. Yet nobody understood how important it was. He was trying to do what Collegium should have done in the first place, instead of relying solely on the strength of its walls and assuming the Vekken had been defeated a generation ago. Stenwold was trying to make sure that there would be no third Vekken war. He was trying to build bridges. The result of his months of careful diplomacy was that the Vekken had at last sent four men who claimed to be ambassadors, and were more probably spies.

Two of them located him soon enough after the tip-off, and came marching up to stand before his table.

He couldn't even tell which two of the team they were. Ant-kinden all looked like siblings, and the Vekken seemed to have sent four ambassadors who were absolutely identical. They stared at him now as though they had just found out he had sent assassins to kill their families.

'Masters …?' He made a motion at the table, offering chairs. They stared at the seats as though they were venomous, then turned the same expressions on him. His Vekken initiative had been worth it, if just for this. He had always known the dislike of his own people for the city of Vek, inspired by two repelled attempts at conquest, but he had not guessed at the reciprocal loathing felt by the Vekken because of Collegium's successful resistance. They hated the Beetle-kinden and, because they could not see how mere Beetles could resist the might of an Ant city-state, they feared them also. Stenwold was working as best he could to disarm that enmity but there was a lifetime of ingrained distrust to overcome.

'We are aware of your plans,' one of them said, and then paused as if waiting for him to admit everything.

He looked at them blankly. 'I have many plans,' he said at last. 'Which ones do you mean?'

'You are gathering allies,' said the same one, speaking with the flat courage of a man who expects his hosts to have him killed. 'You are sending to another Beetle city to secure them.'

That gave Stenwold pause, but he was good at handling surprises and just drained his wine bowl while he pondered, Now that's interesting. If they think that, then who else does?

'Your silence indicates admission,' said the same ambassador. They had an identical expression of dislike etched onto their mirror-image faces, but no more than that. As with all Ant-kinden, the real feelings were expressed inside their heads, secret among their own kind.

'You're talking about the Khanaphes expedition?'

'So,' the Vekken said, all their fears confirmed.

'What of it? It's simply an academic expedition to study a city of our cousins …' He was about to ask them if they would not be similarly interested, in his position, but they would never be in a similar position, because any other Ant city was automatically their enemy.

'So you say,' said the Vekken. 'But we see more.'

'Please sit down,' he suggested, but they would not. They continued standing there with their hands near their sword-hilts, waiting for the worst. He had a sudden dizzying thought of what it must be like for these envoys, surrounded by those they knew to be their avowed enemies, while deprived of the comforting voices of their own kin that they had lived with all their lives: just the four of them cut off and alone in an alien sea.

'What do you want?' he asked them patiently.

'Warmaster Stenwold Maker is sending an expedition,' declared one of the Vekken crisply. 'He tells us it is peaceful and that no harm is meant. He will not deny a Vekken presence, therefore.'

They waited for his furious objections as he stared at them, mind spinning. They saw a military purpose in everything, and that purpose forever turned against Vek.

At the thought, it was all he could do not to laugh, but that would not have been diplomatic.

'If you want to go, I shall make the arrangements,' he agreed.

They betrayed nothing in their faces, but he knew he had caught them out. They did not know whether to rejoice at defeating him, or curse at themselves being defeated.

He only wondered what they would make of Khanaphes.