The Scarab Path (5 page)

How is it that I am still here, after all of this?
He had
a sudden sense, almost like vertigo, of all the people he had sent out to die
or get hurt: Salma, Totho, Tynisa, Achaeos, Sperra, Scuto, Tisamon, Nero – even
the madwoman Felise Mienn. There was no justice in a world that preserved
Stenwold Maker after all that loss.

But it
was worse when he considered the survivors. The Assembly was crawling now with
men boasting of their exploits in the war, but Stenwold could not remember
seeing
any
of them defending the walls at the time.

He
glanced up, at last, to find no scarlet watcher above. The war had left so many
casualties, with so many different wounds that he was powerless to cure.

‘Lady
Arianna sent word that she would be expecting you at her residence, sir,’ his
servant informed him. The thought stirred an ember of a smile, but he was so
tired that it could be no more than that.

He began
the slow clump up the staircase.

There
were books all over Cheerwell’s room, open, bookmarked or stacked, lying on the
bed and at her desk. They looked old and valuable, and he knew she was trading
on her family name to extract favours from the librarians. On the other hand,
it was not as though the topics she was researching were required reading for
College scholars. Most of these tomes had not been opened before during her
lifetime, perhaps not even in Stenwold’s. The sight of them reinforced his
disquiet, reminded him of the scale of the plight they faced.

‘How was
the Assembly?’ she asked him. She sat demurely on her bed but there was a
brittle aura about her, as of some fragile thing delicately balanced.

‘Tedious
as usual.’ He racked his mind for something amusing he could recount to her,
was forced to accept that nothing amusing had occurred. ‘I did my normal job of
making friends, so I’m surprised they’re not burning my effigy in the square
before the Amphiophos.’

He saw
her smirk at the quip, a reaction more than the words warranted. ‘You have no
idea,’ Cheerwell told him. ‘You should get her … get Arianna to go to the play
with you.’ She stumbled a little over the woman’s name, but only a little. She
was at least trying.

‘Play?’
he asked blankly.

‘Haven’t
you heard? At the Rover on Sheldon Street?’ Her smile was genuine, though a
sadness shone through it. ‘They call it
The Shell Crack’d
or something like that. It’s about goings on in this city when the siege was
under way. It’s all people leaping into each other’s beds and arguing.’

‘There’s
a play about the war and it’s a
farce
?’ said
Stenwold, quite thrown off course from what he was originally going to say.

‘Yes,
but you’re in it too. You’re the serious bit in the fourth act, like they
always include,’ Che told him. ‘When you went out to confront the Wasp army and
got them to surrender and go away—’

‘It
wasn’t like that—’

‘Tell
that to the playwrights. Tell that to the audience. You’re a hero, Uncle Sten.’
Her shoulders shook briefly with mirth, for a moment like the Che he knew from
before it all. Then another layer of solemnity enveloped her and she said,
‘Your man from Paroxinal came back today.’

‘Oh?’
and he was serious at that news, too.

‘He said
he’d report fully to you, for what it was worth, but nothing.’

‘He
found nothing, or they’d tell him nothing?’

‘Nothing
either way. Nothing at all. He found no trace of her.’

For a
moment they just looked at one another, chained together by an equal guilt,
until Stenwold bared his teeth in annoyance and looked away.

‘Damn
the girl!’ he said. ‘Why—?’

‘You
know why,’ Che interrupted him flatly.

‘Oh, I
know what sparked it, but why go off—?’

‘You
know why,’ she repeated firmly, and he had no answer to that, because he did
know.

Feeling
weary to his bones he pulled the desk chair out and reversed it, sitting so he
could rest his arms on the carved back. He heard it creak at the unaccustomed
strain.
I’ll be as fat as Drillen, one of these days.
‘Che, I’ve had a thought about … something for you.’

She sat
very still, waiting warily. It was not the first time he had tried to find
things for her to do. She knew he meant well, but he did not understand that
her current problems could not simply be left behind.

‘Che …
you did some good diplomatic work during the war.’

That
took her by surprise. ‘When?’

‘In
Myna, for example.’

‘Sten,
they nearly killed me there as a traitor.’

He
smiled slightly at that. ‘Same here … and with death, it’s all about the
“nearly”. The way I hear it, you finally got their rebellion inspired to the
point where they could throw off the Empire.’

‘It
wasn’t like that,’ hearing in her voice an echo of his own words.

‘Tell
that to my agents. Tell that to the Mynans. Che …’ Staring at his hands as he
always did when he sought inspiration. ‘You need something to do …’ One hand
rose, quickly, to cut off her objection. ‘I
know
, I
know it won’t stitch the wound, and it won’t make everything better, just to be
doing something, but you need time to heal, and at the moment it’s just you and
the wound, and nothing else. I have a job I need doing, and you need something
to do – and you’re good at it.’ When she just stared at him he continued, ‘I
need an ambassador. An official ambassador representing Collegium, bearing the
seal of the Assembly and everything.’

For a
moment she continued to stare, then she laughed at him incredulously. ‘You
can’t be serious.’

‘Why
not? You’ve already proven your worth: in Myna, in Solarno, in Sarn. This isn’t
just Uncle Sten finding jobs for his family. You’ve shown you’re more than
equal to the task, and—’

‘And it
would give me something to do,’ she finished sourly. ‘And where, pray?’ A
thought struck her. ‘The Commonweal?’

‘Not the
Commonweal,’ he said. ‘We’re being … very careful there. They’re a strange lot,
up north. They don’t really seem to understand yet why ambassadors are
necessary. We may even have to buy into their “kin-obligate” business, not that
we really understand it.’ He waved his hand impatiently. ‘No, it’s a place
called Khanaphes.’

She
stared at him, which he interpreted, incorrectly, as ignorance.

‘The
Solarnese know a path to reach it. It’s east of the Exalsee, a long way off any
Collegiate trade route.’ He left the appropriate pause before revealing, ‘A
Beetle-kinden city, Che.’

Since
her return from Tharn she had been deep in the old tomes of the Moth-kinden.
She had been immersing herself in the world that the revolution had shattered,
in an attempt to find some cure for her own affliction. In the very oldest of
the books and scrolls remaining to the College, amid the most impenetrable
shreds of ancient history, there had been a city of that name. It was a relic
of the forgotten world that the Beetles had shrugged off in order to become
what they were now.

‘Think
about it, please.’ Stenwold took her silence for reluctance. He wanted to tell
her that it was a golden opportunity, that she should look to her own future,
capitalize on the respect she had won in the war. He wanted to tell her, in
short, that no mourning could be for ever. He knew better than to say it. ‘Just
think about it. You are a student of the College after all, and the
possibilities for scholarship alone are—’

‘I’ll
think about it,’ she said, a little harshly, and he nodded, standing up to go.
‘Another thing,’ she began, her voice sounding strained. ‘You …’ She paused,
gathered her courage together. ‘Please tell the new man about the doors again.
He forgets.’

Stenwold
stared at her, a welter of different emotions momentarily at war across his
broad face.

‘It’s
not just me … it’s … I’m thinking about Arianna as well.’ Che’s voice shook
under the sheer humiliation of having to say it.

‘Of
course I will,’ he said. ‘Of course. I’ll have a word with him when I go back
downstairs.’

The expedition was approved by the Assembly, despite anything that
Broiler and his supporters could say against it. The Town vote, comprising the
merchants and magnates, scoffed at the expense, but the Gown vote of the
College masters was mostly for it, and Drillen’s promise to secure funding
without troubling either College or Assembly coffers sealed the matter neatly.
There was no suggestion that the proposal had been stage-managed from the start.

The very
night of the Assembly meeting, however, found a clerk working late. Drillen was
a rigorous employer who demanded results from the least of his underlings, so
candlelight in the late evenings was nothing unusual. This clerk, a young man
who had hoped to make more of himself, and had lived beyond his means, was just
finishing his last missive. The letters seemed nonsense, strings of meaningless
babble, but an informed eye would have deciphered them as:

Urgent.
Codeword: ‘Yellowjacket’. You told me to keep an eye on all dealings of
Stenwold Maker, so this should interest you: the expedition being launched to
Canafes (sp?) is not as it seems. JD and SM met twice beforehand re: this
matter. Unusual secrecy. Believe JD and SM have their own purposes aside from
those stated. Thought you would appreciate knowing.

He folded the note over, and went over to his rack of couriers. Drillen
used these various insects as missivecarriers across the city. They rattled and
buzzed in their tubes, each tube with its label to show what place the creature
was imprinted on. The clerk, whose responsibility these carrier-creatures were,
selected one carefully: a fat, furry-bodied moth. It bumbled out of its tube
and crouched on his desk, cleaning its antennae irritably as he secured the
message to its abdomen. He had no idea where it went, or to whom, save that it
would not be the man who had originally recruited him into this double-dealing.
He only knew that the insect would be returned safe, along with a purse of
money, to his house. This told him two things: that his shadowy benefactors
were wealthy, and that they knew where he lived.

The
insect whirred angrily off into the night, swooping low over the streetlamps
but impelled by an inescapable instinct to return home. Before morning the
Rekef operatives in Collegium, placed there with exquisite care after the close
of the war, had something new to think about, and other, grander, messengers
were soon winging their way east.

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.