The Scarab Path

Five

Greetings and salutations of the Great College to my good friend Master Kadro.

It has occurred to me that you may think we do not allow sufficient importance to your far-flung mission.

Similarly, communicating as we do by such inadequate means, your discoveries to date — as opposed to your renewed requests for funding — have not been communicated to us here so well as I am sure you would prefer.

As the first College Master to study such a fascinating people as the Khanaphir, I can tell you we are all agog to learn what you have discovered, and to assist in furthering your studies.

So it is that no less a man than War Master Stenwold Maker, whose decisive role in the recent war cannot have escaped your attention, has proposed that we send some further members of the College to assist you in your labours.

Rejoice, then! For an ambassador of Collegium, none other than War Master Maker's own niece, shall be travelling to assist you, be the distance never so far. She shall take with her certain other academics who have expressed an interest — as who would not? — in the vital work you are doing. They shall of course bring equipment and funds to assist you, and they will be keen to hear from you regarding your theories and evidence.

I do hope you can arrange for them, with the Khanaphir authorities whoever they might be, appropriate lodging and similar conveniences.

Your most dutiful friend and sponsor

Master Jodry Drillen,

of the Assembly of that most enlightened city of Collegium.

Petri Coggen read the letter again and felt like weeping.

She sat at the little sloping lectern which the Khanaphir had given her for a desk, and put her head in her hands. They were so obtuse, those old men at the College. Worse, they had a gift for bad timing. Beside Drillen's letter was one of her own, completed last night and ready for sending. It read:

Good Master Drillen,

Forgive me for writing to you directly but I am the bearer of terrible news. Master Kadro is gone. He disappeared only two days ago. There is no trace of him. The Ministers say nothing, but I am sure they know.

Something terrible is happening here. There is a secret in Khanaphes and Kadro was close to it. They have done something to him. I am sure he is dead.

Please tell me what to do. I do not want to stay here longer, but I fear what might happen if I try to leave.

Yours

Petri Coggen, assistant to Master Kadro.

She wanted to cry. She wanted to laugh. Instead she took her own letter and folded it, then put it inside her tunic. Perhaps, somehow, it would arrive in time to do some good. Assuming it arrived at all.

She buckled on her belt, carrying her purse and her dagger. It was the only weapon she owned but she would not know what to do with it if she was forced to use it on another living thing. Petri Coggen had never been much more than an aide and secretary to Master Kadro, who had been the great academic and explorer, dragging her out here so that she could scribe his exploits. But now she was alone, and the city of Khanaphes had become a brooding and hostile place. She was merely a Beetle-kinden woman edging towards her middle years, short and stout and prone to getting out of breath. She was certainly not the woman to avenge Kadro's death, but she felt she must at least try to investigate his disappearance.

She had shared a third-storey room with Kadro, a little box with two windows squeezed under the flat roof of a warehouse. Kadro had chosen it because the landlord was a merchant, and therefore used to dealing with foreigners; also because the place was cheap and lay close to the little stew of villainy that cluttered this side of the river beyond Khanaphes's great Estuarine Gate. This was a busy market by day, a tent city by night, and the tents often grand and elaborate, for there was a great deal of money changing hands at any given moment, and people in Khanaphes — legitimate dealers or otherwise — liked to show that they were doing well. It was a place that, in other circumstances, she would never have dreamt of visiting on her own, but nowhere else in Khanaphes might she find some kind of answer to her questions.

She made good time. A few hurried glances detected no followers, but the streets were teeming this close to the docks. There were always ships coming to the river quays, and then a swarm of dockhands, fishermen, merchants and rogues to pester them. Despite the time she had spent here, the heat still raised a sweat on to her skin, and the bustle of bald heads, the murmur of quiet voices, remained densely impenetrable. These are my kinden but not my people and I cannot understand them.

In the shadow of the Estuarine Gate, she paused. The gate itself was out of sight, supposedly deep in the waters of the river, under any ship's draught passing between those gargantuan carved pillars. Again she looked round and saw no soldiers of the Ministers come to apprehend her, no skulking cloaked figure with eyes fixed on her.

And a poor spy it would be that I would notice! She did not know what to do next. Her training at the College, all that history and architecture and philosophy, had been no preparation for this crisis.

She slipped past the gate by the narrow footpath, wall on one side, the choppy brown waters on the other. She did not look up, past that monumental pillar, to see the great stone likeness that was set into its southern side. Those inhumanly beautiful, blandly smiling features were constantly in her dreams. She had begun to fear them, for all they were a thousand years dead.

The maze of tents and awnings that awaited her was known to the locals as the Marsh Alcaia. She had come here twice before, both times with Kadro. Each time he had been cautious. Khanaphes was a well-run city, law-abiding and peaceful, but there was a froth of uncertainty where the external world met its walls, here before the Estuarine Gate. Other foreigners were not always so respectful of Khanaphes's laws. The golden Royal Guard sometimes swept through here with lance and sword, arresting and confiscating and slaying those that resisted, burning the tents. Khanaphes needed its trade, though, and so long as it did, the scum of the Marsh Alcaia would always re-establish itself before the Estuarine Gate, just outside of the city proper.

Entering the Marsh Alcaia was like stepping underwater, as the faded orange and yellow cloth closed over her and muted the sunlight. She was abruptly in a different world, stuffy, gloomy, reeking of spices and sweat. As she stood, a silhouette against the bright day beyond, the denizens of the Alcaia jostled past her. They did not look at her, each preoccupied with his own business. Every one of them was armed, a hand always close to the hilt of a broad-bladed dagger, a short sword with a leaf-shaped blade, a hatchet. Some bore as weapons simply the extrusions of bone that the Art had raised from their hands.

She finally conquered her fears and pushed inwards. Kadro had walked here without fear, or at least he had shown none. She tried to emulate him, even though she was big and clumsy and kept getting in the way. Porters with sacks of flour and sweet spices jostled and cursed her. A be-ringed merchant's retinue pushed her aside against the counter of a jeweller so that she upset his scales in a tiny clatter of brass. Her apologies fell into the abyss: they all maintained the Khanaphir reserve. Whether they were the local Beetle-kinden or the sinewy Marsh folk, or one of a dozen breeds of foreigner or halfbreed, they looked at her as though she was not wanted there. As though I do not belong. She did not belong. She had no wish to belong. It was just that she had nowhere within this city to turn. Khanaphes was the problem. If a solution existed, it must be somewhere here.

She regained her balance. The offended jeweller was a Khanaphir Beetle, shaven-headed as they all were. With that narrow-eyed, unreadable look they all adopted when looking at her, he finished restacking his weights and measures. She tried to remember what route Kadro had taken through this maze of shifting streets, hoping it was still good. Her memory was not up to it, though: the Marsh Alcaia was a world without reference. Each day the faces here might be different, and if there was a code in the colours of the awnings that might have directed her where she needed to go, she had no way of reading it. Recognizing such patterns had been Kadro's strong point.

'Excuse me,' she said to the jeweller, the effort almost having her in tears again. 'I need to speak to the Fisher. Do you know her?' The title was all she knew. Most of the darker denizens of the Alcaia had left their real names behind a long time ago.

The jeweller stared at her with the Khanaphir stare reserved for foreigners. It was not hostile, in fact very polite, but suggested that she was speaking some kind of infantile nonsense that the man could not possibly be expected to understand. It humoured her without admitting any comprehension.

Petri bit her lip. Reaching for her purse, she took out a pair of coins — Helleron-minted Standards and a long way from home — and put them on his counter. With a deft motion he slipped them on to his scales. Weight and purity of metal was everything here. Her money from home was disastrously devalued and she knew that in exchange he would give her a fraction of the value that unadulterated gold of that same weight would have brought her.

'Please?' she asked. The jeweller still said nothing but, as if by magic, a small child appeared at his elbow. He muttered a few words and the girl ducked under the counter and ran off into the Alcaia. A nod of the jeweller's head then suggested that she follow.

Where the girl led her was nowhere near where she had gone before, but headed deeper into the Alcaia than she had ever been. The thought came to her, within three turns, that she was being led into some kind of trap. By then she could only follow, because she was lost already. She was out of breath from keeping up with the girl's skipping figure, with dodging all the other bustling people doing their secretive deals beneath this all-embracing cloth sky.

The girl had stopped, ahead of her. Petri put a hand on her dagger-hilt, feeling it so unfamiliar in her grip. There was a tent ahead, which surely could hold a dozen people inside, all ready to lay hands on her. 'This … this is it?' she asked. The girl looked back at her, as blandly unreadable as any local. She still had hair, cut ragged to just above her shoulders. The ubiquitous head-shaving was an adult affectation.

Deprived of an answer, Petri took a deep, harsh breath. She could wait out here as long as she wanted, but all she would accomplish would be to make herself look indecisive and lost. She had to move forward, so she pushed into the tent.

The Fisher lay there, attended by a quartet of young Khanaphir men serving her wine and grapes. She was spread out on a heap of cushions, wearing Spiderland silks that must cost a fortune to import here, and adorned with gold all over: armlets, anklets, rings, pendants, even a band of it across her forehead. She was compensating in some way, Petri suspected, for the Fisher was a halfbreed of mixed Khanaphir and Marsh people stock. Her skin was an oily greenish colour and, somewhere between the solid Beetle build and the slight grace of the estuary folk, she had turned out shapeless and baggy. Her eyes were yellow and unblinking as they regarded Petri. A servant handed her a long-stemmed lit pipe made from smoke-coloured glass, and she accepted it, wordlessly.

How did Kadro do this?

'I … er … I wish to do business,' Petri began, trying to keep her voice steady. Responding to a small tilt of the Fisher's head, abruptly one of the servants appeared by Petri's arm, offering her a shallow bowl of wine. Gratefully Petri took it and subsided on to the cushions. It was hot and airless in here, and the bittersweet pipe smoke made her head swim.

'Please …' she said, before she could stop herself.

The Fisher continued to regard her silently, waiting. Petri summoned all her reserves of strength.

'I wish you to find someone for me.' How would Kadro have put this? 'I know that, of all the knowledgeable people in the Marsh Alcaia, you are renowned as being the one who can locate anyone or anything.' Compliments were important in Khanaphes, she knew.

A slight nod revealed the Fisher's acceptance of Petri's clumsy offering. 'A friend of Kadro of Collegium is always my friend too, of course,' she replied. 'But a curious woman would wonder at the purpose of such a hunt. Perhaps some fool who has insulted you, and is therefore deserving of death? You should know that there is another who would be keenly interested in such dealings.'

Petri's mouth twitched. 'It is no such matter,' she stammered, 'only that a friend of mine has been … too long out of touch, so that I am now concerned for him.'

'Your sense of duty does you credit,' the Fisher told her, with a shallow smile. 'The path to my tent is not the worst that you might have chosen. Who is this ailing friend?'

Petri drained her wine for courage. The local stuff was strong, and she waited for a moment of dizziness to pass her. 'Ma … Kadro. I need you to find Kadro.' Never Master Kadro, not here. Here, the word had other meanings.

The Fisher's slight smile did not flicker, and its very fixed immobility told Petri that something was wrong. The halfbreed woman took a long puff of her pipe, then handed it back to one of her servants.

'Fisher?' Petri pressed, knowing that things had gone awry, but unable to see precisely how or why.

In a single movement the Fisher stood up, her face still devoid of expression. 'Alas, what you ask is impossible,' she declared. Her servants had moved closer to her, as though expecting attack. Petri stood up as well, mouth working silently, searching for words.

'But …' she got out finally. 'I have money!' It was unspeakably rude, by local standards, but the Fisher did not visibly react to it. Instead she simply retreated further and further. What had seemed a wall of cloth parted for her, and then she had vanished beyond it, her servants following silently. Petri was left in sole possession of the tent, deep within the Marsh Alcaia.

Her heart was beginning to pound. She had the sense of something chasing her. The Fisher had known something, had known enough not to want anything to do with this. Petri was fast running out of places to turn.

There was someone, though: there was the very person the Fisher had alluded to. The Khanaphir loved middlemen. Even in the business of seeking another's death there was someone to go to, who would then find someone else to wield the knife. Petri had never met the current holder of the office, but she knew the name from a casual mention by Kadro.

When she asked for the name of Harbir, people drew back from her, turned away, refused to speak. She persisted, and suspected that carrying the name before her made her proof against the petty robbers and killers that haunted the interior of the Alcaia. Somebody who had business with Harbir the Arranger, however they might seem, was not prey for smaller fish.

But it was Harbir who found her. After she had spent a half-hour wandering at random through the coloured maze of the Alcaia, and regularly dropping his name, a cowled Khanaphir woman approached her, tugged once at her sleeve, and then retreated deeper into the gloom. Petri followed meekly, again because she had nowhere else to go.

Harbir's tent was bigger than the Fisher's, and inside it hanging drapes cordoned off the man himself. Petri found herself in a surprisingly large space, empty save for overlapping rugs on the floor. Two men stood by the door, bare-chested Khanaphir Beetles with axes in their belts, whose stare did not admit to her presence or existence.

'You have bandied my name a hundred times beneath the roof of the Alcaia,' came a voice from the tent's hidden reaches. It was a male voice, but Petri could tell no more than that. Even if this was the Arranger's tent, it could have just been another servant speaking.

'I … give you my apologies if I have caused any difficulties.' She stumbled over the words, which was poor, knowing the Khanaphir valued eloquence.

'There are many who come to me seeking a final arrangement,' the man responded, with the unhurried measure of someone fond of his own voice. 'The wealthy speak to me of their rivals, the bitter regarding those who have wronged them, the desperate concerning those who have more than they. Honoured Foreigner, have you been in our lands so long that you would be prepared to take part in our pastimes?'

'No …' The word came out as a squeak, so she calmed herself and started again. 'I only wish to know, great Harbir, whether a friend of mine has been arranged … has had an arrangement made about him.'

She hoped she had remembered properly what little Kadro had said of the traditions here. Amongst some assassins, she was sure, such a direct question would transgress etiquette — perhaps fatally.

'You have not come empty-handed, expecting to bear away such a weighty answer?' the voice enquired, upon which she finally relaxed a little. She reached into her purse and came out with a fistful of currency: Helleron Standards, the local lozenges of metal stamped with weight and hallmark, even a few bulky and debased Imperial coins.

There was a slight sound that might have been a snigger. 'And who is it that is so fortunate as to have you solicitous after their health?'

'Kadro … Kadro of Collegium, the Fly-kinden,' she replied. The words dropped heavily into the tent and left a silence.

'Please …' she said again, before biting off the words. The locals never said 'please'. Their indefatigable politeness danced around the word.

'Go,' said the voice.

'Please tell me!' she managed, suddenly very aware of the two axemen by the tent-flap.

'His name has not been passed to me,' said the unseen voice. 'Now go.'

The axemen had subtly shifted their stance, and Petri was suddenly very afraid. She tripped on the rugs, stumbled, and was out of the tent before she realized it, into the stifling alleyways of the Marsh Alcaia.

She looked around her, having no idea what path might lead her out of this warren of fabric. She had known she was intruding too far, but somehow had envisaged, after a successful quest, that the way out would open before her. But her quest was not successful, and no clear exit was to be seen. The one thing she could not ask the locals was How do I get out of here?

Petri started walking. She tried to make her gait seem determined, as of someone who frequented the Marsh Alcaia every day. But she was a foreigner, dressed like a foreigner, wearing a head of hair like a foreigner. She no longer had any names of power to awe the locals. She passed through avenue after cloth-roofed avenue, each lined only with the openings of tents. People stopped to watch her pass, and eyes from within the shadows picked out her movements. She was aware of this scrutiny but did not stop, just kept walking to who-knows-where.

A man fell into step alongside her. He was a Khanaphir Beetle, short, shaven-headed, wearing a simple robe. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and found he was not looking at her.

'Pardon this no doubt unwarranted observation but you look like one who is seeking the direction to where she should be,' he said, smiling out at the canvas sky.

'E-excuse me?' she stammered. She felt hope steal up on her, now, although she had no reason for it.

'I know where you need to be, and I can assist you, Honoured Foreigner,' said her companion. She stopped and turned to look at him directly.

'Please help me,' she said.

'Why, of course.' He smiled broadly. 'What you wish, of course, is to be in company with myself and my fellows. Who would not?'

She looked behind her and spotted the gathering of rogues that were his fellows. There were a full dozen of them, Khanaphir and silver-skinned Marsh folk, halfbreeds, and even a Spider-kinden woman from somewhere far, far off.

'No, please,' she whispered. 'I don't want to go with you. I just want to get out of this place.'

'Who would not want to leave here?' the Beetle agreed, still smiling at her. 'And what better companions to leave with than such stout fellows as we? We have a fine ship, too, which lacks only one of your elegance to complete her company. Surely you will be our guest.'

She understood then: slavers. The rogues were meanwhile drawing closer to her in a kind of casual saunter. Any one of them looked as though he could outrun her and they had broad-bladed daggers, short-hafted axes, sported spurs of bone.

'Please, I … I am a scholar of Collegium. I will soon be missed.'

'Then surely your friends will reimburse us for our hospitality,' replied the smiling Khanaphir. There was a dagger in his hand, its blade as bright as a mirror even here under cover of the tents.

She opened her mouth to protest again but he grabbed her tunic, twisting it at the collar and drawing her up on to her toes. His smile stayed robustly unchanged. Another of his men was abruptly close enough to take hold of her other arm.

'Please-!' she cried, just as a spear plunged so far into his chest that its leaf-shaped head emerged complete and red-glossed through his back. His eyes popped wide open but the smile, horribly, stayed quite intact as he dropped. Petri fell back and sat down heavily, staring.

They had found her at last. She saw their gold-rimmed shields inlaid with turquoise, their raised spears and drawn bows, the gilded and alabaster armour of the Royal Guard of Khanaphes.

The slavers made no attempt at fighting. At the sight of the Royal Guard, they took to their heels. Petri saw the three guardsmen holding bows calmly aim and loose, and heard the solid sounds behind her of arrows finding their mark. The lead guardsman was now approaching her, one hand held out to draw her to her feet. She saw it was their captain, Amnon, who had always terrified her. He was over six foot — very tall for a Beetle — but he seemed at least a foot taller still. He seemed larger than life, packed with energy and strength, bulging with muscles, with hands that could have crushed rocks: so fiercely alive and strong that she felt his presence as if he were a fire. She cringed away as he reached out, but he put her back on her feet one-handed, the other grasping a second spear behind his glorious oval shield.

'Honoured Foreigner Petri Coggen,' he said, grinning at her with white teeth, 'how fortunate that we found you.'

She could only nod. This was the First Soldier of Khanaphes, the Captain of the Royal Guard. He was everything she had been trying to escape from, to warn Collegium about. He was part of what had taken Master Kadro, she felt sure of it.

'Come, we will take you to your new rooms,' Amnon informed her, putting an arm about her shoulders. He made her feel like a mere child, like a Fly-kinden. He had come accompanied by only five men, but twice the number of slavers would not have dared face him, for he could have walked into the Marsh Alcaia on his own. Amnon was a legend here, and his position in the city was well earned.

At last his words got through to her. 'New rooms?' she asked timorously.

'Of course.' He drew a folded paper from inside his broad belt. It was the same letter from Collegium that she had left on the desk back in her lodgings. 'Your people are sending friends, so we must ensure that our hospitality is not wanting. We will prepare a proper welcome for them.' His smile was guileless, yet as savage as the sun.