The Scarab Path

Eight

She was a prisoner in her own lodgings.

There were no guards. She was not bound. The door was not locked. Still, Petri Coggen felt her confinement as keenly as if the manacle was around her wrist. She had felt a sense of doom weighing on her since they had brought her back from the Marsh Alcaia.

They had given her servants, for the Khanaphir had been solicitous of her comfort to the point of patronizing her. The foreign lady must have everything. The servants cleaned her rooms and brought her food, and would have dressed and bathed her if she had let them. They ignored her when she told them to leave her alone. Shaven-headed Beetle men and women with fixed faces, they glided in and out of her life like tidy ghosts.

They made no attempt to stop her going out into the city. She had tried to escape their attention, to get her letter out, but the servants had followed at a respectful distance. She had tried running, but when she had stopped, wheezing for breath, they had been there still, or others like them, standing patiently by. There was no reproach in their faces, only polite concern for the stranger. She had run until heat and exhaustion had brought her to her knees, but they had been waiting there wherever she had run to, with slight smiles at her odd behaviour.

As her last resort, she had gone to the docks. Khanaphes traded all down the coast and across the sea, so there were always ships.

The first she had approached was a solid Khanaphir trawler. She had climbed halfway up the gangplank, already reaching for her money, before she saw the expression on the captain's face. He knew her. He had been told about her. Standing there at the rail, eyeing her with the polite disinterest of his city, he informed her, without needing words, that there was no way she was leaving the city on his ship.

So she had then looked for foreign ships. Surely the sinister influence of the Ministers could not be absolute. There would be ships out of distant ports, and at this point she would take a berth for anywhere. Even the dubious hospitality of the Spiderlands would be preferable.

She found a Spider-kinden trader, all elegant swept lines. She looked around for the captain, and saw her in conversation with a mild-looking Khanafir man. The Spider glanced at Petri and gave a faint shake of her head. Petri stumbled away, ran back down the quays. She did not care who stopped to watch the crazed foreigner make an exhibition of herself.

There was a broad-beamed cargo-hauler at the very end of the quays. Its crew was a mongrel mixture, halfbreeds, Mantis-kinden, lean and sallow Grasshoppers. They looked as disreputable as anyone Petri had ever seen. She rushed up to them, noticing their hands drift instinctively for hilts and hafts.

'Please, I need passage out,' she gasped. 'I have money.' She felt as though she was throwing herself from the jaws of one monster into the pincers of another.

One of the Grasshopper-kinden shouldered his way forward and crouched at the top of the gangplank, elbows crooked over his bony knees. 'Come up,' he said. He had a scar, jagged and twisted, down the side of his long face. In other circumstances she would have been terrified of him.

She made it up the gangplank, the villainous crew watching, narrow-eyed.

'You haven't been in Khanaphes long,' the Grasshopper captain observed.

'Long enough. Months now.'

He laughed quietly, shook his head. 'The blink of an eye. You have the city's interest, little helpless one. We have heard. There is no shipman who does not know.'

She felt a shudder go through her. 'Please … I must leave.'

'Anyone who took you away from here, while you bear that mark, would never trade here again, or ever be welcome. They carve their memories in stone here. They never forget. I could pass my ship on three times, and neither she nor I could put in safely at this port again, nor my sons, nor theirs.'

With a wrenching despair she realized that the incongruous tone of this vicious-looking creature was only sympathy.

'They will kill me,' she whispered. 'Please …'

'They might,' he said. His shrug indicated that the incidence of death punctuated his life as regularly as meals and sleeping. 'Or they might vanish you. Or they might lose interest and let you go. But we cannot help you. You do not have the money to compensate us for what we would lose.'

She left his ship, with feet dragging. Her concerned retinue was already waiting.

At Porta Rabi, it felt like the edge of the world.

The desert petered out into a scrub of sawgrass and thorns, and then the land fell away completely in a tangle of vines. Stunted strees clung grimly to the cliff edge, leaning at mad angles over the rocks far below. The cliffs were relieved only the once, where the land slanted steeply down to a beach of broken stone. It was there the intrepid Solarnese had built Porta Rabi. They had used the pale grey stone of the cliffs, but the buildings were the same odd burlesque of Spider styles, all pointed arches, tapering columns, grillwork screens, but all looking slightly wrong. They had made a Solarno in miniature, a little stepped crescent of buildings gathered about two long piers that went far enough into the sea to allow big ships enough draught to moor there. Above, where the cliffs took over, there was a reaching scaffold of wooden floors and scaffolding, rooms and buildings suspended before the rockface, all of it looking open-plan and half-built. Che identified this as Dragonfly-kinden work. There was a sizeable presence of them here from Princep Exilla and, putting aside their normal rivalries, the two kinden worked together to keep the port open in this inhospitable corner of the world. Even so, Trallo warned them, the streets were not safe after nightfall. The merchants who ran Porta Rabi retired early to their well-guarded compounds, and everywhere else became lawless after dark.

They came in close to midday, but the cool air off the sea worked against the pounding sun. The port was seething: a dozen ships moored at the piers. Most had sails furled about their rigging-webbed masts, but one possessed the stout funnels of a steamer, and another was constructed of copper metal and had neither sails nor a visible engine. The largest of the ships had triple rows of holes along each side, and Trallo explained that if the wind dropped it had slaves to row it. Che recalled the human commodity she had recently travelled alongside, and hoped they were bound for a better future than that.

While the others settled in a taverna under the watchful eyes of the two Solarnese, Che followed Trallo to the dockside to see about arranging passage. Standing there, with the grey sea stretching, windlashed, to the far horizon, she felt dizzy at the thought of how far she had come.

'What sea is this?' she asked, touching Trallo's shoulder. She was past the edge of all her maps. Was this the same sea that washed Collegium's wharves? 'Where does it go?'

He smiled up at her. 'This is the Sunroad Sea, and they say it goes all the way to where the sun comes from, if you could but sail that far.' He added, 'We'll have passage on that ship,' and pointed out a sleek Spiderlands felucca, two-masted and painted gold and blue. 'She's the Lord Janis out of Portoriens — that's the furthest east in the world that the Spider-kinden claim, the very eastern limit of their satrapies. And you know what?' He was grinning widely now. She shook her head slowly to show she did not know, and he finished it gleefully. 'You know what? That's west of here.'

Che felt weak at the knowledge. The Lowlanders tended to assume that the Spidlerlands just extended as far as they needed to go. She was standing at the shore of a whole new ocean, being jostled by sailors and traders of a dozen kinden out of who-knew-what distant ports. This was not Collegium's wilful ignorance of the Empire's ambitions, or the self-spun mystery of the Spiderlands, or the deliberate isolation of the Commonweal. This was far. She found herself searching the crowd suddenly for a familiar style of dress, a brooch or a sword-hilt whose style she recognized. There were Solarnese there, in their flowing white, but no more. She was the only representative of the Lowlands, at the docks of Porta Rabi. She was all the world she knew.

Trallo put a hand to her elbow. 'Steady now,' he said kindly. 'It was the same for me, when my dad brought me here the first time. Around the Exalsee we mostly look west and south to the Spiderlands where our ladies and lords come from. It was a shock for me, too.'

The captain of the Lord Janis was now coming towards them, and Trallo nodded respectfully to her. 'Here,' he said sidelong to Che, 'you know why Spider-kinden always name their cities and their ships after men, don't you?'

Che mustered a small smile. 'Why?'

''Cos they're both ruled by women,' Trallo answered, and then he bowed before the Spider-kinden captain as she arrived.

She dreamt she was on board ship. She was on board ship, of course, rocking in her cramped bunk, above Praeda, as the Lord Janis steered wide of the cliffs and reefs of the Stone Coast. As she dreamt now, though, she left the cabin and clambered aloft. The crew was gone and the sky above was starless. The skeleton of the rigging was without sail. Only one man stood on deck, stood at the rail and stared out to sea, grey-robed and narrow-shouldered. The ship itself was dead still, the waves all about frozen into jagged teeth.

'Achaeos,' she said, and in the dream it was. He turned to her, and she saw his white eyes, his grey skin, and she ran forward.

She stopped close to him, but not close enough to touch. She remembered that harsh, commanding voice, its angry, distant tones.

'What is it?' she asked. 'Please, Achaeos, tell me what I have to do.' There was a scowl building on his face, piece by piece. The sight made her cower away from him.

He had always been a gentle man who seldom raised his voice. He had never struck her. In her dream she thought he would strike her, on the deck of the stilled ship.

'What is this?' he demanded. 'In dreams? Must you dredge my memory up in dreams? Is this what I have become, just a knife for you to prick yourself with?'

'I don't understand,' she said, but a wind had struck up along with his reproach, tugging now at the empty rigging. She had to shout it again. 'I can't put you down! You won't let me!'

He shook his head. When he spoke again, his voice was the wind, just as the voice of the haunted forest Darakyon had been the myriad sounds of the leaves. You put yourself on the rack of my memory. You turn the wheel yourself.

'That's not true!' she shouted at him. 'It's not fair. I want you alive, but I can't have you alive, and nor will you be dead! What can I do? Do you want me to follow you?' Standing there beneath that featureless sky, she wondered if she might already have done. Is this death, this petrified sea?

The wind died abruptly, leaving nothing but the two of them staring at each other. 'I am dead and gone, Che,' he said, and it was once more the voice of the man who had loved her, against all the dictates of history and his own people. 'Do not raise me up like this to injure yourself. I am gone. Just let me go.'

He made to turn away and she rushed at him, determined to hold him in her arms. For a moment she had the cloth of his robe in her hands, but then he was gone, and the rail was gone too, and she was falling with a shriek towards the razor-sharp claws of the frozen ocean …

Waking, suddenly, for once she remembered exactly where she was. She slipped from the bunk, felt herself swaying in time with the ship's pitch and yaw. Praeda muttered something and turned over, looking pale with her face sheened in sweat. All the Collegium academics had turned out to be poor sailors, and the Vekken were keeping to their cabin so obstinately that the same was probably true of them. The sea along this craggy coast did not rest easy, but Che had found herself proof against it. She dressed in her tunic and cloak, and pattered barefoot out into the walkway running between cabins. Around her the wood of the ship creaked and shifted, and she found it an oddly comforting sound, a created thing behaving in the way it had been intended.

Up above, it was cold but the change was refreshing to her. There was a handful of sailors still at their duties, Spider-kinden all and mostly men. If not for the dream, she might just have watched them work. They did everything with such conscious elegance, as though they had stayed out here not to work the ship but to perform for Cheerwell Maker. It was not the killing grace of the Mantis-kinden, but something more showy, and which they took more joy in.

She scanned the rails, finding nothing, no smear nor smudge of him. The sails billowed and the waves rolled the ship up on to their backs, and then sloughed it down the other side. The sky above boasted stars and a slice of the moon, save to port where the cliffs ate out a deeper darkness, unrelieved by anything.

She took a deep breath of the sea air, feeling the deck shift beneath her feet, her toes flexing automatically for balance. Below, the others would still be sleeping fitfully, groaning, or staggering off to be ill. Che, who had suffered the airships and the automotive, had at last found a vessel she was comfortable with.

But of course. The Lord Janis was built by the Inapt, crewed by the Inapt, and it therefore carried her along with it smoothly, while it dragged the others by force. She smiled at that, despite all her worries. Of all the rest, only Trallo had been weathering this rough sea well, and she guessed that it was sheer experience, in his case. He had made such trips so often that the sea held no more terrors for him.

The ship changed its tack noticeably, slanting away from the cliffs. Ahead, along the dark and starless line of the land, Che could see a red spark high enough to challenge the moon.

'What is it?' she demanded of the nearest sailor. He looked at her mockingly at first, but swallowed some flippant answer and said, 'The Light of Suphat.'

'The what?'

'A great fire atop a tower, that warns us where the rocks are.'

'A lighthouse,' she realized.

He shrugged. 'Stay above decks, lady, you shall see two more along the cliffs, named Amnet and Dekkir. When we have passed Dekkir, which shall be near dawn, we shall be within reach of the harbour of Khanaphes.'

After the ship had passed the Light of Dekkir, and after dawn had come, sluggish, to the Sunroad Sea, the land had changed, the cliffs falling smoothly away until the Lord Janis made its smooth progress across a shoreline of sand. The beach ran inland as far as the eye could see, and Che realized it was the desert, the true desert.

'How can it be so dry, right next to the sea?' she asked. There were odd defiant clumps of gorse and thornbushes, and a big ridge-shelled beetle was carefully collecting the dew that had condensed across its carapace. Other than that, life seemed to have abandoned the place.

'Dry means no rain, that's all,' Manny Gorget pointed out. He was leaning heavily on the rail, still looking green despite the easier going. 'Find me a map and I'll show you where the rain stops. It's all in the wind and the landscape. Salt water's no substitute.' When he could be persuaded to talk on his subject, he was quite competent.

Che turned to Trallo, who had been making some arrangements with the captain. 'Have you been there? The desert?'

'Just the once.' His smile was thin-lipped. 'Not nice. And you have to pick a time when the Scorpion-kinden aren't on the warpath.'

'But how can they live out there? How can anything survive?'

'Bella Cheerwell, you have to look cursed hard to find a place where nobody lives. People find a way, always. Now, Sieur Gorget, would you go roust your fellows? We're going to be coming up on the city soon and, frankly, if you visit Khanaphes, you should see it from the seaward side.'

'What happens when we arrive?' Che asked him, as Manny lurched off unsteadily against the ship's swell.

'I find out how welcome we are, to start with,' Trallo said. 'They're odd fish, these Khanaphir. They're quiet as you like, hard-working, polite, and if they don't like you, you might as well turn around and go away, because you'll never change it no matter what. So I'll take a sounding, as the sailors say, and find out how best to stay on their good side.'

'I'm glad we've got you along,' she told him.

'The labourer is worth his hire,' he said. 'I'll see about letting word trickle to the Ministers, about you being an ambassador. Until they come to you, you mustn't try to push in on them.'

'I've no intention of it. All I really need to do is make sure Master Gripshod and the others get to study the place, and they can probably do that just by standing and looking.'

'Hmm, two things,' Trallo said. 'First, don't poke and pry until I give the all-clear. They are a very private people, the Khanaphir. Second, don't call him that.'

'What?'

'Master Gripshod — or Master anything. Local customs, local rules. They keep the word "Master" for other purposes, and it's got nothing to do with people like us.'

He was quite serious. She waited for him to elaborate, and he shrugged.

'I'm not saying that I understand it. I've been to Khanaphes a score of times and I still don't understand the place. But, take my word for it, find some other way to make introductions.'

She was below when the Lord Janis began to tack, but she felt the change in the timbers, and ran up on deck to see.

The desert had turned green. While her back was turned the land had been colonized by a vast expanse of reeds and spidery-rooted trees and huge arthrophytes twice as high as a man, all sprouting from a maze of little water channels. The Lord Janis was taking in sail, slowing down, and Che saw that it was angling for a broad watercourse that cut through the marsh ahead, a river in its own right.

The others were assembled on deck by now: the three academics standing forward of the mast, the two Vekken sullenly behind it. Che went to join Berjek Gripshod, watching the riot of vegetation pass by on the port side.

'The Jamail delta,' Trallo clarified for them. 'Goes on for miles. Once a year they dredge the main channel clear of silt, but it still moves around a bit. It all does. They say nobody but the natives can find their way in there from day to day.'

The channel itself was wide enough for five ships like the Janis to have sailed in abreast. It was a truce with nature, for beyond those carefully maintained borders the greenery ran mad. There were flies and dragonflies near man-size quartering the air over the water, and she saw something huge and brown and slimy-looking surface to peer at the ship with goggling eyes.

'This river is life, basically,' Trallo was saying. 'This river is Khanaphes and all the other towns north of it. This is the line of green through the desert that everyone here needs to survive.'

Something caught Che's eye, something too rigid and angular to be natural. Between the ferns and the articulated trunks of horsetails, she saw huts — a rabble of little straw-roofed hovels lifted out of the water on stilts. She caught a glimpse of people, and then a boat gliding through the shallow channels, half-obscured by the green. A moment later it cut out on to the river behind the Lord Janis, a long, low boat with a high bow and stern, constructed only from reeds and rope. A woman with silvery-grey skin was effortlessly poling it near the bank. Almost unsurprised, now, Che recognized her as a Mantis-kinden. She looked anxiously at the Spider sailors, but none of them paid the native the slightest attention.

They do things differently here.

'And there we go,' said Trallo.

Che followed his gaze and caught her breath. The academics, too, were abruptly at the rail, staring.

'Khanaphes, the majestic, the mysterious,' said the showman, Trallo, as though he was charging admission.

Ahead of them, the river was flanked by squared pillars of stone four storeys high, vast at the base and barely tapering as they reached up to support the sky. The stone of the pillars was a dusty tan, while the statues set into their faces gleamed white. They stood almost the entire height of the pillars, carved seamlessly from marble, a man and a woman, barely clad and walking forward. The sculptor had lavished infinite care on their colossal proportions, the man's body heavy and broad-waisted, the woman's rounded breasts and hips, the flowing cascade of long hair down both sets of shoulders. Their faces viewed the marsh and the sea with cold beatitude. These were the countenances of a man and woman who ruled everything they saw as far as the wave-stirred horizon and beyond. Before that commanding, all-encompassing gaze the academics momentarily quailed. Che felt a shiver go through her, witnessing such perfection in stone. Those were beautiful faces, but they were appalling in their utter lack of empathy. It was no failing of the sculptor, though: the hands that had shaped them had carved and chipped to instil them with just such a coldness.

They were certainly not Beetle-kinden. No trick of style could ever have transformed them out of something so mundane. Che had never seen anyone or anything that even approached them.

'The Estuarine Gate,' Trallo announced, but she barely heard him. The blind stone gaze seemed to follow the matchwood thing that was the Lord Janis as it passed through the gulf between them and they saw Khanaphes proper.

It was a city built of stones — more so than any other place Che had seen. Houses raised of tan masonry clustered thickly about both sides of the river, and beyond the single-cell dwellings of the poor loomed the edifices of the wealthy. Avenues flanked by pillars led off toward statue-adorned squares where great squatting palaces faced one another, rising higher and higher, each surrounded by a miniature city of smaller structures, and the gaps between them filled with meaner dwellings and workshops.

'Well, rack me,' Berjek Gripshod exclaimed softly. 'Now look at that.'

The Janis pulled in skilfully at a dock near the gate, and the crew tied up. With the gangplank down, Che led the way on to the wharves of Khanaphes. Even the pier they were moored to was of stone. How many pairs of hands, how many years, to make all this? And yet so little of it looked recent. Time had laid its rounding hand on each surface and angle.

'Look,' said Berjek, and he sounded as though he was going to weep. Even the buildings nearest to them, mere stone huts, were intricately carved. Some simply had borders of angular, stylized images etched on to them, others bore whole panels of complex, intricate, indecipherable work. Looking around, Che could not see a single surface of stonework, even the pier beneath her sandals, that had not somehow been illustrated.

'We should have brought more people,' Berjek said hoarsely. This was hopeless. It would take an army of scholars all their lives to record this. The city was its own library.

Trallo was meanwhile organizing the luggage, his two Solarnese hauling it down on to the quayside. Che stepped aside from the academics, and the brooding Vekken, and stared into the crowd. The docks were a continuous bustle, a dozen ships unloading, the same number again preparing to cast off. There were men and women of many different kinden there, together with a swarm of the ubiquitous bald-headed Beetles. Her eyes had grown used, not so long since, to being wary of crowds. Helleron, Solarno, Myna: the war had given her instincts that had become stubborn guests.

As she looked, so she found. The face leapt out at her, a moment's eye contact across the crowded docks, but that was not a face she was ever likely to forget. Not five minutes after stepping from the ship, and her world was reverting to its old faithless ways once again.

Thalric.