The Scarab Path (71 page)

‘It’s a
long story.’

‘Well, I
didn’t have any other plans.’

She
stopped, gazing back at him. He was still sitting in the middle of the floor,
head turned vaguely in her direction. Something of his normal expression was
gone, that hard mockery that was usually there when he spoke to her.
Has
he really given up hope?
She realized it was far simpler than that. Just as her face was invisible to
him in the dark, so he had not considered that his was not invisible to her. This
was Thalric caught unawares, without his customary armour. She took the chance
to study him: the years of hard deeds, of bitter loyalty, all the betrayals
that could be traced on his face. Each had put its grip on him, twisting and
turning to fit him to the mould, yet finally he had not fitted. At the end,
after the scars and the fingerprints, there was still a core that was only
Thalric.
Only a man who truly knows himself could have come
out of all that still recognizing himself in the mirror
.

‘What?’ he
asked suspiciously, into the silence. She felt suddenly ashamed, as though she
had been spying on the spymaster.

‘Just
looking at the carvings,’ she claimed, although her voice held no conviction.
‘Look, if you want a conversation, why don’t you talk? I’ve had enough of you
interrogating me.’

He gave
an amused snort and she was surprised at how familiar it sounded.
How well do I know him? Sometimes it seems that I know him even
better than my own family. My life has been riddled by the holes left by his passing,
like some kind of grub
.

‘You
could tell me, for a start, why the Regent-general of the whole Empire is
currently buried alive in a nowhere city out here on the Sunroad Sea,’ she
said. ‘Because I myself don’t understand it. Life just keeps giving you
chances, and you waste every one of them. You were the big man of the Empire,
after the war, so how did this happen?’

For a
long time he remained quiet, while she kept on industriously cleaning up the
carvings. Fragments of their meaning drifted loose into her head, but nothing
that she could string together.

‘The
Empress,’ he said at last, slowly. ‘The Empress Seda the First. And if you ask
me how that happened, well, I wasn’t there at the time. An Empress? Nobody had
ever heard of such a thing: a woman in charge of the Wasp Empire.’

‘Well,
we know about your people’s attitudes towards women,’ Che said primly.
‘Although you’ve had your share of women agents, haven’t you? The Rekef, at
least, isn’t so blinkered.’

‘Mistakes,
all of them,’ he said darkly. ‘Arianna tried to kill me, and I actually did
kill Scyla, or at least I’m as sure of that as I can be. No, I’ve not been the
luckiest man with women.’

‘You
were married, though, weren’t you? I thought you told me that once? What
happened to her?’

‘She was
only too glad to yield place to the Empress,’ Thalric replied, with a brief
laugh. ‘Not that she’d have had much choice, but we hadn’t seen each other in
years. I had a son, too. I still have, I suppose. The union was all for the
Empire, and part of my duty. I was never that interested. It was just something
you’re supposed to do before you go off and die in the wars. I’m sure the woman
was compensated.’

‘I’ll
never understand your people – or like them, frankly,’ Che remarked.

‘Well,
maybe I’ll join you in that, seeing as they seem to want me dead yet again.
Maybe it’s
her
. Maybe she’s decided I’m now surplus
to requirements.’ Thalric grimaced sightlessly. ‘While the provinces were in
rebellion she needed a man as a figurehead that her people could be reassured
by. That was me, at the time, but now the Empire’s pretty much together again.
Maybe it’s as simple as that.’ He paused in thought. ‘But in that case she
could simply have had me executed, or assassinated, when I was last in the
capital. It wouldn’t be hard for her to do away with me. There’d be no reason
to go about it like this, snuffing me out in some distant corner of the world.’

‘What’s
she like?’ Che asked. When he did not reply, she urged, ‘Come on, tell me. The
woman who rules an Empire, what’s she like – your new match?’

Still he
did not answer, and she turned from her work to look at him. His expression was
far away, somewhere that he did not want to be.

‘Thalric?’
she prompted, and his eyes flicked towards her.

‘You
really want to know?’ he asked. ‘The best-kept secret in the Empire?You want to
know about Seda?’

‘It
doesn’t look likely that I’ll get a chance to gossip about it much,’ she
pointed out.
Do I really want to know?
she asked
herself: something in his face had disturbed her.

‘The Empress
… Seda the First,’ he said, and she had now lost her chance to avoid the
knowledge, whatever it would be. ‘She is not quite eighteen yet, younger than
you by a year or two. She was eight when her father died, Alvdan the First, and
she told me how she’d lived in fear of death ever since. She was the only
sibling of the new Emperor to survive his coronation. He kept her around
because making her afraid was one of his pastimes. That’s how she tells it.’

Another
pause. Che kept scrubbing away diligently.

‘I
wasn’t there when the Emperor died,’ Thalric said. ‘In fact I was imprisoned in
the cells beneath the arena, where they keep the fighters and the animals. When
I found out about what she had become, the Empress, I searched out someone who
could tell me exactly how it had happened, because it seemed clear to me that
something
had gone very badly wrong indeed.’

‘Osgan,’
Che filled in.

‘Osgan,’
Thalric confirmed. ‘The same man who was stupid enough to follow me here, and
who’s surely paid for it now. But Osgan sat beside the Emperor, and saw it all.
And then I heard what he had to say, and it made no sense.’

‘Tisamon
killed the Emperor,’ Che said. ‘That’s what Tynisa said.’

Thalric
was silent again.

‘Or
what? Did he just die? Did he have a weak heart?’ Che prompted. ‘Tisamon and
that Dragonfly woman came charging out of the fighting pit and killed just
about everyone they could get hold of. Did the Emperor just die
coincidentally?’

‘I don’t
know,’ Thalric said. ‘All I know is that something happened, something … very
wrong
. The Emperor was there, and Seda, and General Maxin,
and some slave of the Emperor’s. This is not just from Osgan. I’ve spoken to a
few others who were there, too. It’s amazing how people remember … or don’t
remember. Everyone remembers the mad Mantis killing the Emperor: it’s just that
none of their versions quite match.’

‘And
what does your new wife have to say?’

Another
pause, terminating in a laugh that was surprisingly free from bitterness. ‘You
bloody Beetle woman,’ he said, but fondly, ‘why can’t I ever have a
conversation with you, just once, where you don’t manage to trip me up? This …
being here, in the dark, it’s the whole situation with us, from the start.
You’ve always seen things in me I’ve wanted to hide, while you … I can’t make
you out at all.’

‘That’s
because what you see is
all
of me, Thalric,’ she
told him. ‘And you’re not used to people who aren’t hiding things from you.’
But even as she said it, she realized that it was no longer true, that it had
not been true for some time.
Even I have secrets now
.
‘So what did she say?’ she pressed on, to turn his attention away from the
subject.

‘She
said that Tisamon didn’t really kill the Emperor. That the Emperor’s old slave
– nobody seems to have known who he was – was in the middle of the conspiracy
to put her on the throne, only she’s glad he’s now dead. He’s dead, Maxin’s
dead, the Emperor’s dead. It’s only Seda left from the royal box. Seda and
Osgan, of all bloody people.’

‘So who
killed the Emperor?’ Che asked. ‘According to her story.’

‘She
says I wouldn’t believe her,’ he replied. ‘And she says she won’t tell me. And,
knowing what I do about her, I don’t think I want to know.’

‘You’re
going to soon run out of ways not to tell me,’ Che said, moving on to the next
wall. ‘So why not just say? What’s so wrong? What’s the problem? I don’t think
there are many Wasp excesses that could surprise me.’

‘Oh, is
that so?’ he said quietly. She heard him move closer to her. ‘You want me to
tell you?’

She put
out a hand that brushed his shoulder. He flinched back from its touch, then
took it briefly, confirming what it was. With that frame of reference, he got
himself facing her directly, and his expression told her that he had been
keeping this to himself for a long time.
And wanting to
tell someone for a long time, and not been able to …

‘She’s
mad,’ he said. ‘She’s completely insane. She thinks she … She thinks she has
powers. Not Art, but magic powers.’ His expression was almost embarrassed on
behalf of the Empress, but Che was abruptly paying full attention, the carvings
forgotten.

‘Her
powers, these powers she thinks she has, they derive from blood, you see,’
Thalric explained. ‘It’s something to do with this old slave, some nonsense he
told her, but she must have blood. And when an Empress sets her heart on
something …’ The corner of his mouth twitched. ‘The thing is … there’s someone
inside there, just a Wasp-kinden girl who’s had a hard life, and who’s
terrified of what’s happening to her, but the madness, it takes possession of her.
Then she gives the orders, and another two or three slaves are bled. For her
bath. To fill her cup. She says it makes her powerful.’ A shudder went through
him. ‘I have drunk from that cup, too, when she has asked me to.’

Deep
inside, Che felt an unease that was nothing to do with the overt horror in
Thalric’s story. Something else had connected with her, and she did not know
what. Something was trying to tell her that this was important, and at first
she thought,
Achaeos?
She heard no harsh voice in her
mind, but there was some link there, something close to her.

‘The
thing is, though,’ Thalric continued, the words sounding as if they were
dragged from him, ‘
something
happened to her. When
the Emperor died … I don’t know how to explain it, but something went terribly
wrong. She was changed. It drove her mad. She was … wounded.’

‘What do
you mean?’ Che whispered.

‘She has
… lost something,’ Thalric said raggedly. ‘Something in her mind has broken and
driven her mad. She has lost her Aptitude. She is like some other kinden now,
not a Wasp at all. That connection, that understanding … her mind is changed
utterly. She does not think like we do any more. The worst thing is that she is
not just mad, but she is Inapt and ruling an Apt Empire.’

Che
slumped back against the slick wall, feeling something within her plummet. ‘Oh
that … that is the worst thing, is it?’ she got out, but she was finding it
difficult even to draw breath.

He got
her reaction wrong, of course. ‘I’m not talking about your Moth lover,’ he protested.
‘You can’t imagine it. It’s as though she’s not human any more. Some part of
her mind has just been cut away, and it’s the part that would let anyone else
understand her. It’s turned her into a monster.’

She felt
her heart lanced through with horror, with anger, even with that old revulsion
at what she was, that she thought she had put behind her. ‘And me,’ she said.
‘Would you say that of me, Thalric? Am I a monster?’

‘What
are you talking about?’

‘Answer
me? Am I a monster, too?’ The anger was triumphing. Her fists were clenched. He
would never see the blow coming.

‘Che, I
don’t understand you.’

‘No, you
don’t. Because some part of me has been cut away, Thalric. I’m Inapt. I lost it
at the end of the war, when Achaeos died. I’m the same as her, so I suppose
that makes me a monster too.’

She
watched him, secure in the knowledge that he could not see her. She had felt
like hitting him, but it was fast dissolving in a morass of despair at what she
had lost.
Who’s
to say he’s
wrong? Perhaps I am a monster. Something’s wrong with me. I’ve been crippled
where nobody can see
.

It was
his hands that drew her attention. His fingers twitched, in and out, closing
for safety, opening for danger.
Hammer and tongs, is he
going to kill me for it?
She always forgot who he was when she spoke to
him, forgot
what
he was. It was a small room. He
would not need many blind sting-shots to find her.

‘No,’ he
said, and he sounded surprised at his own conclusion. ‘No, it doesn’t. It makes
her a monster, but not you under any circumstances. Perhaps she was more
monstrous to begin with. Something to do with her kinden, probably.’

When Che
said nothing, he began to look around, imagining that she had moved elsewhere.
‘When I found out about her, about her loss, it made a kind of sense of her, of
all her other habits – of the blood. But you … I find I don’t honestly care. I
know
you. I know you’re not what she is.’

Am I not? Perhaps not, but I think I could understand why she
does what she does
. ‘I’ve only ever told Uncle Sten,’ Che admitted. She
had just realized that her secret, her terrible secret, was now known by two
others, and one of them was a Wasp.

He
reached out and, more by luck than judgement, brushed her hair, then found her
uninjured shoulder. She held his hand there with her own.
He
does not flinch or struggle, at having to touch the monster
.

‘You
don’t believe in magic,’ she said. ‘How could you?’ It reminded her of a
conversation she’d had once with Salma, long ago. ‘But you must have seen some
things, during your life …’