The Scarab Path (6 page)

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.