The Scarab Path (67 page)

‘Come
on, you drunken bloody fool!’ Thalric roared at him. Che got most of the way to
the top before turning. Osgan was clenched up into a ball, but she could still
hear him cry out, ‘
It’s him! He’s come back!’

‘It’s
not him, Osgan!’ Che called. A stingblast cracked against the stones near her
and she fell back, clawed her way over to where the statues could be her
shield. ‘Osgan, please—!’

The
Rekef were now reaching the pyramid’s foot. still spread out. Thalric’s
occasional shots made them start back, leap briefly into the air with a flurry of
wings, before settling down again. Despite Thalric’s promises, it did not seem
that either flight or shot had tired them. They seemed all patience, closing
carefully, while they kept a wary eye on Osgan. They could have killed him
easily, but it was clear they would take him alive when they reached him. He
would provide the leverage to force their other quarry into reach.

It was
surreal, Che thought: they were standing in sight of the very fount of
governance for Khanaphes, an armed insurrection in the heart of the city, with
Rekef assassins running riot, and nobody else seemed to care.

‘Osgan!’
Thalric bellowed, just as a stingshot blazed from the Wasp on the leftmost
flank and seared Che’s shoulder. She cried out in pain and fell back. And fell
further.

There
was no solid ground behind her. What the grey stain of the ghost had been
hovering over was the pit: the shaft sunk into the middle of the pyramid. She
plummeted, too startled to call upon her wings. One outstretched hand scraped
the pit edge, dragging its way through a layer of slime inches thick. Then she
was gone, dropping into the darkness.

She
heard Thalric call out her name and then he was diving after her. Still
falling, in shock from the pain of her wound, she watched him outpace her with
his wings flaring, sparking against the sides of the shaft.

Then he
had her, arms tight about her, unimaginably painful where he grasped at her
injured shoulder. His wings backed, trying to fight against their descent,
their combined weight. She had a split-second glimpse of his face, his
expression gone taut with the effort.

They
struck bottom. She spilled from his arms, landing on her good side, scrabbling
for purchase. It was dark, which did not matter to her, but it mattered to
Thalric. He went stumbling away from her, arms out blindly. She tried for her
feet and got there, swaying. ‘Thalric,’ she said, and he swung towards her.

There
was a light, a lamp. It was getting brighter: from the shaft.

‘They’re
coming!’ he spat, backing away from it. She tried to make sense of their
surroundings. The shaft gave on to a narrow room –
Just how
far below the ground are we?
– and she saw a single passage beyond,
branching three ways almost instantly. Thalric was making for it, hoping for
cover, and she stumbled into him, clutching at him to hold herself upright. It
hurt to move her right arm, but she could still move it. The sting must have
just clipped her, for all the pain.

There
was something about the tunnels ahead. She could not reconcile it, but there
was something wrong there, hanging in the air like a ghost.

A pair
of Wasps dropped down the shaft behind them, their stings blazing blind even as
they did so, bolts of fire scattering within the confined space, their lantern
glaring beyond. Che saw Thalric back away into the passageway, and a stab of
panic overcame her, without any reason.

‘Run!’
she cried, then her wings hurled her at him fast, spoiling his aim as he tried
to shoot back. The two Wasps were almost on her heels, charging forward to
close with swords drawn.

She felt
the stone around them shift, even as she collided with Thalric, striking him
full in the chest, propelling him down the centre corridor. There was no
mechanism, no click and grind of machinery. The stone moved as if it was alive.

She
landed on Thalric hard enough to expel the breath from his lungs with a whoosh.

What
landed on the two Wasps, only feet behind her, was the ceiling itself. A
colossal block, the same height and width as the passage, thundered down on
them. It cut off their scream, which was mercifully brief.

Thalric’s
eyes were wide, staring, unseeing in the pitch darkness.

She rolled
off him with a groan, and lay flat on her back.
Traps
,
she thought,
traps for the intruder, the unwary
.
Traps laid by the Inapt, though. There had been no pressure point, no tripwire,
that had brought that fatal load down. There had been a watching magic, and she
had sensed it somehow, where Thalric and the dead Wasps had not.

She
peered about herself at last, saw that the room was not large. There was
Khanaphir picture-writing on the walls, but in bolder and larger characters
than she had seen before.

There
were no doors.

Sulvec perched on the lip of the pit, as the resounding crash died away
below him. He had heard the momentary cries of the two men he had sent after
Thalric.

‘Gram!’
he called down. ‘Gram, report!’

Only
silence replied.

Marger
and the soldiers joined him there, crouching among the statues. They would have
to go in, he realized. No matter what had happened to Gram, they would still
have to go in. He opened his mouth to give the order.

At that
moment he felt fear. It came steaming up like cold breath from the slime-edged
mouth of the pit. It caught him in mid-word, freezing him, wrenching at his
stomach. He felt himself gripped by an unreasoning terror.

We should not be here
. The placid faces of the statues had
become nightmarish without ever changing expression. They looked down upon the
intruding Wasps with condemnation. Sulvec heard his own breath sounding ragged
in his throat.
We should not be here. This is a terrible
place. Something terrible has happened to Gram
. Those screams, so brutally
stopped, had unnerved him, but now fear had taken hold and was shaking him in
its jaws.

I am a Rekef officer!
But in this faraway city the Rekef
seemed just a pale dream. He looked over to Marger, saw the man’s eyes wide,
his hands shaking. The other soldiers were retreating down the pyramid, away
from the statues and the dreadful pit.

‘Back.’
The word was dragged from him. ‘Go back. We …’ He could give no reason for it,
could not justify the order. He only knew that to stay where they were, in this
forbidden place, meant death.

None of
them needed to be told again. They fled down the side of the pyramid
gratefully, gathering near the archway to the Place of Foreigners.

‘They
must be dead,’ Marger was saying. ‘Thalric and the Beetle girl. Surely they must
be dead, all of them.’

Sulvec
wanted badly to agree with him, but he had been given his orders most
specifically. ‘He’s survived a lot,’ he got out. ‘We have to see the body.
Absolutely sure.’ Two of his men had a prisoner, he noticed. The wretched Osgan
was hanging limply in their grip. The man looked half dead.

‘What
now, sir?’ Marger asked him, a man with the luxury of not having to make
decisions. At that point, Corolly Vastern caught them up, looking like a local
with his shaved head.

‘Why did
you come down, sir?’ he asked. He had obviously seen something of what went on.
Sulvec opened his mouth, reaching for answers.
I can’t just
say ‘because I feared.’
His mind progressed to:
So
that cannot be the reason, but I must have had a reason. I do nothing without a
logical reason
.

‘Sir,
Guards coming,’ said one of his men, and his mind leapt. There was a squad of
Khanaphir soldiers arriving at the far side of the square, no doubt drawn by
all the noise.
I must have known that
, Sulvec told
himself.
I heard them coming. I knew that they would catch
us, if we were still up there
.

‘Marger,
keep a watch on this place. If Thalric comes out again, I want to know about
it,’ he snapped out. ‘The rest of you, fall back with me. We’ll return tonight
if they leave it unguarded, or we’ll be back tomorrow night, whatever. We have
a job to do here. Come on.’

He could
not entirely keep the trembling from his voice, still feeling that dread
gnawing at his innards.
A perfectly rational feeling: fear
of discovery. Good trade-craft. A Rekef agent’s instincts
. The words
rattled about inside his skull looking for acceptance.

Dawn stole in from the east to find the city of Khanaphes at war with
itself, split by the no-man’s-land of the river Jamail.

On the
eastern bank was arrayed the remainder of the Khanaphir army, ready to repel
all comers. Some Scorpions had spent the night desultorily nailing together
pieces of wood to make rafts – ugly, awkward things worked from first
principles. In the harsh dawn they quietly abandoned their labours, for there
were archers out there, whole detachments of them, both city folk and Marsh
folk. Anyone paddling a raft towards them would be riddled with quills as soon
as they came in range. The Scorpions lacked the craft to make vessels of any
greater complexity. Unless they could somehow lure boats from the far shore,
then a crossing would prove fatal.

They had
kept some prisoners over, following their triumphant surge into the city. Jakal
now ordered each one brought forth before the eyes of the defenders. The
Scorpions were inventive and gleeful in their treatment of such prisoners, and
they spared nothing, hoping to provoke some futile attempt at rescue. They
spent two hours of the first day in burnings and cuttings and rape.

The Khanaphir
would not be drawn, however. They watched, each one of them, from their
Ministers down to the lowest peasant militiaman, and they saved their
resentment for when they could pay it back twice over. They were too
disciplined to take the bait.

Which leaves the bridge
, Hrathen decided. It was a painful
conclusion, if only because the enemy had reached it too. They had fortified
the bridge even while they were evacuating their people from the west city.
Past the crest of the span they had put up a great barricade, of stone and of
wood, while beyond the raised sides of the bridge his glass could make out
constant movement there. He saw spear-tips waving, indicating a small, compact
force ready to repel the invaders. They would not need many to hold there, at
that choke point.

‘They
are fools,’ Jakal said. ‘They should have brought their stones to the bridge’s
top. They waste their archers.’ They had found a vantage on one of the roofs,
the better to spy out the enemy.

‘If only
they had.’ Hrathen let out a long breath. ‘Angved, explain.’

The old
engineer glanced nervously at Jakal. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if they’d built on the
actual zenith of the bridge, we’d be able to shoot them off cleanly with our
leadshotters. Simple as that: they’d give us a direct line of sight on them,
and we’d knock them straight into the river. Which shows they’re finally
thinking like a proper army. They’re using the arch of the bridge itself as
cover.’

‘So your
weapons are useless now,’ Jakal said.

‘Oh, I
could take them down, sure,’ Angved told her calmly. ‘Problem is, that bridge
is built like their city walls, same stone, same style, save that the bridge
isn’t even
meant
to stand off an attack. I hit that
bridge with a few shots and, odds on, I might just knock a great big hole in it,
and then how do we get across? In fact, if they’ve any explosives to hand, we’d
better be careful of them doing the same.’

‘Where
would the Khanaphir get explosives?’ Jakal demanded, but Hrathen made an
unhappy noise in response.

‘They’re
no longer fighting this alone,’ he told her. His spyglass raked across the
barricade, seeing blocks of stone built to four feet high, wooden boards added
above. It looked solid but not indestructible. ‘I’ve noticed people in dark
armour out there. Not locals, for sure. Not many of them, but it looks like
they’re giving the orders. I think it’s our friends from the Iron Glove wanting
a little blood.’

‘So
where does that leave us? I shall ready men for the assault,’ Jakal decided.

‘Send in
some dross first, a couple of waves of chaff you won’t mind losing,’ Hrathen
advised. ‘After that we’ll try for a surprise. Angved, get me a petard
readied.’

‘They’re massing!’ Tirado’s high-pitched voice came clearly to them from
his hovering point twenty feet up. Totho felt the stir amongst the Khanaphir,
the gathering of nerves and determination. The archers were stringing their
bows with the ease of long practice, bending the simple slats against their
calves to hook the string over. Some were already positioned aloft, standing on
the stone barrier with four foot of wooden barricade to cover them. They had
been complaining, Amnon said, that they would not get a good enough shot at the
Scorpions once they charged, but they had no idea what he had saved them from
by having the barrier put up this far back from the apex.

Caltrops
were another invention that had never reached Khanaphes. Totho’s people had not
been allowed the chance to make many, but the ground before the barriers was
liberally strewn with the jagged little four-spined iron things, looking like
spiders in the dawn light.

The
danger he had foreseen was that the Scorpions would come around the sides,
clambering and grappling about the edges of the barricade and using the walls
of the bridge itself as purchase. They had built the sides out as far as he
dared without creating a safe target for the leadshotters, but he had indulged
in a little psychology as well. He had sacrificed some of the centre, made a
low point where the spearmen would be standing, to give the Scorpions a target.
It would seem easier to them to force their way through that choke-point. It
would be the task of Amnon and his people to stop them.