The Scarab Path (62 page)

The
First Soldier was leaning on the ramparts, staring out at the enemy that he
could not defeat. He glanced at Totho, then looked back at the great ramshackle
chaos of the Scorpion camp.

‘Come to
say your farewells?’ he asked. ‘I shall have the Estuarine Gate lowered for
you.’

‘Not just
yet,’ Totho told him.

‘Oh?’
Amnon turned, barely flinching as another solitary leadshotter spoke thunder,
the shot whistling high over the city.

‘I have
an answer,’ Totho said. ‘The only answer that I can give you on how to defend
your city from the Many of Nem. It’s not an answer that the Ministers would
approve of, and I doubt you’ll like it much either, but it’s an answer.’

‘Speak,’
Amnon said, bracing himself for it.

‘The
Scorpions out there are not an army; they are a huge mob of thugs. A proper army
has supply lines, logistics. This lot are living directly off the land, and
that cannot support them long. They need a quick victory, so it follows that if
you delay them long enough, perhaps two tendays at the utmost, they will not be
able to sustain their attack.’

‘I had
thought as much.’

‘Exactly.
You don’t need to be a tactician to see it,’ Totho agreed. ‘But they’ll burst
through these walls tomorrow or the day after. No doubt of it. You’ve probably
already noticed a few cracks, where they’ve struck home.’ Totho could see the
truth of that in Amnon’s eyes. ‘So the wall will not hold, and they can keep
knocking holes in it. If you put men in the breach, they can knock holes in
them too. And their infantry is well suited to taking advantage of a breach, I
think: fast-moving, hard-hitting. They’re not men for standing in line and
taking a charge, but men for breaking through shield-walls and pushing forward.
So, the wall ceases to be a defensive asset very quickly. In fact, once they’ve
taken the wall, it becomes a disadvantage. Their crossbowmen will soon make
full use of the elevation.’

Amnon
nodded, taking it all in. ‘So,’ he asked, ‘what is your answer? How do we save
our city, even for a short while?’

‘Abandon
the western half of it,’ Totho said, expecting a strong reaction. In truth, he
half expected Amnon to throw him off the wall. Instead the big Beetle just
twitched, as he had when the leadshotter had loosed a moment before.

‘Have
your soldiers go house to house, instructing everyone to evacuate the western
city. Have them take every single boat to ferry people across the river, and
then paddle back for more. Have them cross the bridge in their hundreds. Have
them carry only what is easily to hand, and primarily whatever footstuffs they
can cart.
Everyone
. Everyone moves east, across the
river. Because the river becomes your defensive wall, Amnon, and the
leadshotters cannot tear it down. There is only one bridge, and we take every
single boat to the eastern bank. Barricade the bridge where I shall show you,
and put your best men there to hold it, with archers on the east bank, ready to
pick off any makeshift thing they do try and send over. That’s the answer: let
the river hold them off.’

‘You
know what you are asking me to do, how many people must be moved,’ Amnon said.
And then: ‘The Masters would not approve.’

‘I have
no other answer for you,’ Totho told him.

Amnon
gazed out again at the sprawling host. ‘I will give the orders,’ he confirmed
quietly.

Totho
only realized then that he had not expected this man to take his suggestion.
Am I become a tactician now? Am I a warleader?
And in the
shadow of those thoughts followed another one:
Would that
find favour with her?

‘For the
men holding the bridge, it will be hard,’ Amnon said slowly.

‘Put up
as much of a barricade as you can. Funnel them in until a small number of your
best men can stand them off,’ Totho said. ‘Those men will face repeated
charges, crossbows, Wasp stings. They must be your best. If the Scorpions
manage to force the bridge we will never hold them.’

Amnon
nodded. ‘I myself shall stand on the bridge,’ he said simply. ‘I shall ask for
volunteers from my Guard to stand with me.’

Totho
felt the ground lurch beneath him: no leadshot, not Amnon hurling him down, but
the vertigo of his own next words getting to him. ‘I shall stand beside you.’

Amnon
clapped a hand to his shoulder, sending him staggering. Totho saw the degree of
emotion in the man’s eyes.
Ah, but it is the right thing to
do. She would say so, too, were she here
.

‘I shall
give orders for the evacuation,’ Amnon said. ‘We shall start right away. By the
morning we shall not be finished, but we shall at least have what time the
walls shall buy us.’

‘There
are other ways of buying a little time,’ Totho said. The thought was heavy on
him, loaded as it was with memories of the last time, but he persevered. ‘A
night attack on the engines may disrupt them, buy us a few hours. If you have
those available who can make the attempt.’

Amnon
nodded fiercely and beckoned one of his men over.

‘Get me
Teuthete,’ he ordered. ‘Then bring me all my officers.’

Her name was Teuthete. The word she used to define herself was ‘Chosen’.
The title was woven through with history: the long and complex interactions and
accords between her people and the Masters of Khanaphes.

She was
slender, five feet and a half tall at most, far shorter than any of her distant
western kin. Her skin was silvery grey, like light shining on silty water. She
wore the armour of her people: a breastplate, shoulder and leg-guards of wicker
and wood woven together tightly, interlaced with sinews and tightly plaited
cords of hair: enough to turn a sword-stroke or snarl an arrow. Her own hair
would have been white, except that she had ceremonially re-shaved her scalp before
this mission. That was the mark of her servitude, her calling.

Being
Chosen was not just about being in service to the city, for she was something
more than the levies of their army or the followers of their hunts. She was
hostage for the freedom of her people, for the continuance of their ancient
ways. Her personal loyalty bound her people to the city, and protected them
from the wrath of the Masters. Such wrath had not been felt since time out of
mind, but it was remembered nevertheless. They had warred with the Khanaphir,
in that very distant past. The Marsh people had fought with all their skill and
stealth, and their diminishing numbers, until the Masters had offered them a
truce. A truce of servitude but not slavery, for Mantis-kinden could never abide
slavery. With their backs to the wall they found other names for it and called
it loyalty.

And now
Khanaphes itself looked to be facing its last days. Teuthete was no fool: she
had read Amnon’s face even as he delivered to her the word of the Masters, or
what was left of that word once it had passed through him. Amnon did not seem
frightened. She reckoned the man did not quite know what fear was. He had been
severed from hope, though. This was not a man who looked forward to the next
dawn.

It would
be easy enough for the Marsh people to withdraw now, to step into the mists and
shadows of their murky realm and wait until it was over. The Many of Nem were
not equipped to hunt Mantids through the waterways, and if they tried it, they
would regret it and then die of it, in short order. Teuthete’s people were not
directly threatened, and the descending rod would strike only the backs of
their age-old taskmasters. The mission they had given her, given her people,
was a death waiting to happen. It seemed to her that they would none of them
see their villages again.

She had
thought – and the thought shocked her – of turning away from the Khanaphir in
their time of need. It was only a thought, though. To act upon it would be to
break an oath her people had sworn generation after generation, and that she
herself had sworn as their proxy, as their Chosen. The sense of honour that
bound her would have been entirely understood by her kin in the distant
Lowlands, whose existence she did not even guess at.

She had
a score of her people with her, as many as she dared take. They were all Marsh
hunters, skilled in the ways of silence, blessed by their Art to strike fast,
to step unseen. They padded wordless out of the Marsh on the west side of the
river, with the walls of the city standing bravely to their right, the
festering camp of the enemy directly ahead of them. It was three hours before
dawn, those longest hours when sentries slumbered and it seemed the night would
never end.

They
carried their bows made from layers of different woods and sinews bound
together with fish glue, curved and recurved so that, when unstrung, they
coiled forward like worms. The Mantids would hold one end down with a foot,
bracing their entire bodies, wrestling the rebellious strength of those composite
materials until they had turned them inside-out, then secured them with
ten-times interwoven hair and imprisoned all that straining power within a bow
that looked small enough to be a child’s toy. Their arrows normally had heads
of stone or bone; the best of them were tipped with the hard, sharp chelicera
of a certain water spider, and were lethal with venom. They had spears, too:
long, flexible weapons headed like their arrows. They had the flexing spines
that sprang from their forearms. There was not a piece of metal on any of them,
and they were barefoot. The Scorpion thousands, equipped with their halberds
and armour, their greatswords and axes and usurped Imperial weapons, awaited
them.

The
sentries were sporadic, loose, inattentive. There were even gaps where several
had deserted their posts. Teuthete found one, though, staring directly out
towards the Marsh. She crept close enough to see clearly the man’s narrow eyes,
trusting to her Art to hide her. She nocked an arrow tipped with a spider’s fang.
The first blood must always be shed properly. To stint on that now would be to
curse their mission.

She drew
the bow back slowly, with incremental motions of her arm, her shoulder, her
entire frame taking the strain of it. Another Scorpion was passing by, weaving
slightly, already drunk on looted beer. She waited, untiring, until he was
gone.

Then she
loosed. The arrow was gone from her bow, had lanced through the man’s eye,
without seeming to cover the brief distance between. Instantly she and her fellows
were on the body, and had hauled his heavy corpse off into the night.

She took
out her best knife, its blade a serrated razor of stone. The others of her
party gathered around reverently. Before a hunt of this importance, these
things must be done. There were rites that must be observed.

She cut
the dead man’s armour free and opened him up, spilling as much of his blood as
she could on to the earth. Dabbling her hands in the gore, she anointed her
fellows one by one, placing a handprint in steaming red on each forehead, the
fingers of it curling over each shaved skull.

‘Now let
us hunt,’ she said, and they surged into the Scorpion camp, at a fast rush that
was not running, but a silent, ghostly charge.

Amnon
had explained to her what they must do, and she had not completely understood,
other than that at the camp’s heart there were some great iron weapons that the
Khanaphir feared. Amnon’s foreign creature had tried to tell her how best to
disable them, but his words had shattered on the shield of Teuthete’s
Inaptitude, and she had not grasped them. In his frustration the foreigner had
offered to come with them, but Amnon had dissuaded him in time. No outsider
could hunt alongside her people and live to tell of it.

The
Scorpions remained oblivious as Teuthete’s hunters passed between their tents.
Most of them slept but there were plenty still wandering about in the dark,
laughing, fighting, drinking. However stealthy they were, the Mantids were not
invisible, not quite, so it was inevitable that they would be spotted
eventually. Meanwhile, they continued soundlessly, deeper into the camp,
relying on their speed to take them close to where they needed to be.

She
could see ahead of her the tarpaulined shapes that matched Amnon’s words. There
were many Scorpions nearby, some sleeping, some not. One of the weapons had its
cover stripped back, and a foreigner was doing something to it, prodding and
poking.

We have come far enough
.

Teuthete
drew back her bowstring once more, and around her the others followed suit,
save for the few that trusted their spears more and were getting ready to leap.

The
arrow sped from the string, plunging through the foreigner so far that its
stone head shattered on the iron of the weapon he was busy working on.
Simultaneously, a dozen other arrows rammed home into the Scorpions standing
around him, killing them instantly. Teuthete was already moving forward, bow
now slung over her shoulder. There was no time to admire her handiwork.

The
Mantids screamed as they came in, each one of them giving a high, whooping yell
that froze the Scorpions briefly in their tracks. The spears then lunged in,
flickering fast. Many of the enemy wore armour that could have broken the bone
spearheads or snapped the stone points, but the Mantis were precise. They
lanced eyes, throats, skewering under arms or into groins. When they had left
no target standing, they began killing those on the ground, those just now
waking up, with brutal efficiency. Half of them continued loosing arrows into
the bulk of the camp at every new figure that presented itself.

Teuthete
vaulted on to the uncovered weapon with a brief shimmer of her wings. It was
mostly composed of a solid iron body. There were various holes and pieces to
it, but it seemed invulnerable to her. The foreigner’s instructions had been
just words and they had made no sense to her.