The Scarab Path (75 page)

‘Make
it.’

‘I’ll go
first.’

‘Why?’
Sulvec was instantly suspicious. He felt absolutely on edge here, amongst the
statues overlooking the coolly breathing pit. Everything seemed like a threat,
a challenge. He tried to calm himself.

‘I can
see in the dark, with my Art, and I can climb down the walls,’ Vastern
explained. ‘If there’s an ambush below, from Thalric and the Vekken, say, then
either I’ll see their lights, or they won’t be able to see me. When I get down,
I’ll signal if it’s safe.’

It was
absurd that a man in Sulvec’s position should be putting more faith and trust
in an inferior kinden than in his own kind, but the other Wasps were clearly
not at their best. Marger’s expression was openly rebellious, and the rest
weren’t far off.

I didn’t join the Rekef Inlander to make friends
, Sulvec
reminded himself harshly. ‘Do it,’ he snapped, and Corolly approached the pit,
feeling round the edge and examining the glistening slime left on his gloved
fingers.

‘Lovely,’
the Beetle muttered. He had strung his crossbow in a moment, and now slung it
over his shoulder. Then he perched on the pit’s edge for a second, hunched
forward and, hands clamping to the side, descended head-first down the shaft.

They
waited for a long time, hearing barely a scuffle or a clink from him, all
crouching in the statues’ shadows. The sheer scale of the stone figures was
beginning to oppress Sulvec. Standing straight, his head would barely come past
their waists, and their faces above him were obscurely intimidating. They made
him feel
small
.

‘There,
sir!’ one of his men called out, and he peered over the edge into the darkness.
A tiny spark was dancing there, as the flame of Vastern’s steel lighter
flickered on and off at intervals. He counted the pattern.

‘That’s
it. We go down.’ Sulvec expected to feel once more the clutching grasp of fear,
but his decision passed unmarked. His men were all staring at him expectantly,
and he knew that, if he did not go next, neither would they.

He stood
at the edge and stepped off, letting his wings catch him as he fell down the
stone-walled shaft until he felt the sides widen out. The darkness below was
almost total, save for what waning light still came from above. One by one the
others joined him. Osgan and Marger descended together, landing awkwardly in a
tangle of limbs.

‘Report,
Vastern,’ Sulvec said.

‘Three
passageways running parallel, the centre one blocked off by a stone block the
size of a house. There’s … a boot sticking out from under the block. Army
issue.’

Sulvec
heard the uneasy shuffling of his men. ‘Any sign of Thalric or the others?’

‘No sign
of anyone, but the clear passages head off as far as I can see. This place is
big.’

‘Light a
lantern. Keep it low and shuttered.’

He did
not have to ask twice. One of his men carried a little gas lamp, and even the
faintest glow from it was welcome.

‘If
Thalric’s under that stone, he’s gone,’ Vastern observed.

‘If,’
Sulvec replied.
Trust the bastard to go and die in a way
that we can’t check
. ‘We’ll move deeper in. If he survived at all, we
should find some trace of him.’ None of them liked the suggestion but that
wasn’t the point. ‘Vastern, walk ahead of the lamp, quiet as you can. We’ll
take the left-hand way first.’

‘Right,
sir.’ Moving surprisingly softly for a bulky Beetle, Corolly Vastern padded off
into the darkness with his crossbow levelled.
Dark-sight
,
Sulvec understood.
A useful Art, but rare. Perhaps we
should try to breed Beetle-kinden for it
. The Wasps were creatures of
the day, and night attacks had caused havoc among them several times during
their war with the Lowlanders.

He gave
Vastern a long enough count to get well ahead, then gestured for his men to
follow him, using the faint gleam of the lantern to navigate by. It was
tempting to turn the flame up, but Thalric and the others could be waiting
there in the pitch dark, watching for the faintest glimmer.
In which caseVastern will see them before they see him
. In
the back of his mind ran the litany:
Be dead, Thalric. Be
dead and let us find your corpse
.

Then he
spotted the Beetle ahead, waiting for them. ‘What is it?’ he hissed. ‘You’ve
noticed movement?’

‘Not
movement, but signs.’ Vastern gestured at the floor, which showed Sulvec
precisely nothing. ‘It’s hard to see but there’s been a disturbance here. That
slime, that’s everywhere here, it’s been disturbed. Looked odd to my sight, and
now the lamp really shows it up. Tracks, more than one.’

‘Thalric
and the Beetle girl?’

‘Best
guess,’ Vastern confirmed.

‘Then
follow him and find him and kill him,’ Sulvec managed to get out. The dark and
the weight of stone above were oppressive. ‘Or perhaps we’ll start cutting his
friend up, until he comes to investigate. Either way I want him dead before
dawn, and then I want us out of this city.’

‘No
argument there, sir,’ concurred Vastern wholeheartedly.

Che had recoiled with a strangled cry, tumbling into Thalric and nearly
knocking him backwards onto the effigy-crowned tomb.

‘What,
what is it?’ he demanded, hand outstretched and directed futilely at nothing he
could see.

‘I …’
Che took a deep breath, a better look. Her heart was still hammering from the
shock. For just a moment … ‘It’s nothing. It’s – I just got a bit of a fright,
that’s all. The throne …’

‘The
what?’

‘At the
far end of this hall there’s a throne. Only – it’s not empty.’

Thalric
said nothing, waiting for more. Che took his sleeve and they both took a few
steps closer until she was absolutely sure. ‘Armour,’ she explained. ‘There’s a
suit of armour sitting there. Hammer and tongs, but it gave me a start.’

She
edged closer, then closer still, because the scale and the repeating ribs of
the hall’s buttresses played tricks. ‘Look at that,’ she breathed.

‘I
can’t,’ Thalric pointed out. Che continued to stare, trying to take it in.

‘It must
be the oldest suit of sentinel plate in the world,’ she decided. It was true
plate armour, an intricate suit of interlocking pieces that had been posed as
if its missing occupant was deep in thought, elbow on knee, with the raised
gauntlet supporting the edge of the open-faced helm.
It
must be wired together
, she thought, staring into the cavernous emptiness
of the helmet, and then realized:
The slime is holding it
together, like glue
. ‘It’s absolutely huge,’ she said, shaken. ‘It would
fit a Mole Cricket-kinden, I’d guess.’
It was made to fit
one of those statues
, came the next irresistible thought, but she shook
it off. Perhaps that stone coffin held only ashes, or perhaps they had folded
up Garmoth Atennar before putting him inside. Perhaps the box was actually the
mouth of a pit and they had buried him standing up, or even standing on his
head. She didn’t
know
, so there was no reason to get
jumpy about it.
Garmoth Atennar, Greatest of Warriors,
sitting silently upright on his plinth, those dead stone eyes opening at last
.

I have to get out of this place. It is not healthy for the mind
.
‘I have seen workmanship like this before,’ she said, ‘in drawings in very old
books mostly, but once or twice in life, and never a complete suit. It’s Mantis
work. It’s beautiful. I wish I could see it in the light, to look at the
colours of the metal.’

‘The
Masters of Khanaphes were Mantids?’ Thalric frowned.

‘Not if
their statues are anything to go by, but they would have possessed the best of
everything. A complete suit of Mantis-kinden sentinel plate like this …You
could buy half the Assembly for the price of it.’

‘Che,’
Thalric interrupted, and the tone of his voice had changed. She felt her hand
stray instinctively for her sword-hilt, ready for trouble.

‘What is
it?’

‘I can
see light.’

‘Daylight?’
she asked him instantly.

‘No, not
daylight.’ His inflection said there was no doubt about it.

‘You’ll
have to guide me, then. I just
see
, here, and I see
greys and shadows. If there’s light coming from anywhere, I can’t make it out.’

‘Somewhere
to our left. It’s very faint, but it looks … bluish. I think I can make out something
… a further hallway there?’

‘There’s
another hall each side,’ Che confirmed, ‘but I suppose we go left then.’

‘It must
be daylight,’ Thalric said, without conviction. ‘What else could it be?’ His
stance changed suddenly. ‘Or it could be lamplight. The Rekef?’

‘It
could,’ Che confirmed. ‘So let’s creep up on them very carefully and find out
whether it is or not. They won’t see us, after all.’

‘If it
is Rekef, we’ll have to kill them all,’ Thalric said flatly. ‘If we catch them
by surprise, my sting can take two or three down before they have a chance to
react. We should be grateful for what happened in your embassy. That cut the
numbers down a great deal.’

Che
paused a moment before saying, ‘Thalric, two of my friends died in that fight.’

He
stared back towards her, caught out, torn between spymaster and human being.
‘Of course they did. Forgive me.’

‘But
you’re right,’ she said. ‘If there’s a chance we can surprise them, then we
have to do it. I have my sword.’ Her voice trembled just a little.

‘Pray you
don’t have to use it,’ he said.

They
crept forward, and this timeThalric took the lead. It was a long time before
Che’s sight began to tint and waver, the light bleeding in to curdle her Art.
It was not daylight, certainly: a strange unhealthy pale blue that picked out
the alcove walls in stark contrast. More, it was not still, but dancing and
guttering, playing up and down the floor and ceiling and making the slime gleam
and glitter. It was clear that it was no kind of lamp that the Rekef could be
expected to carry. They approached with trepidation.

Before
an open archway they found them: two metal bowls, each a foot across, on
elegantly worked, coiling legs. Some oil within them burned almost smokelessly,
its scent rusty to the nostrils. Che and Thalric stopped and stared, half
ducking into an alcove. It was not fear of the Rekef that made then seek cover,
but a feeling of trespass, like two children lost in a giant’s castle.

‘The oil
burns,’Thalric observed. ‘So it has been lit – but by who?’

If I said by magic, would he believe me?
she asked
herself.
Perhaps now he would
. ‘I think that we have
… caused them to be lit. I think that our presence here has made this happen.’
Ancient enchantments – but why give tomb robbers light to work
by?Why this long-dead hospitality?

‘Some
device …’ Thalric mused. ‘It’s possible.’ Yet he did not seem eager to examine
the braziers for artifice. Che looked past them into the next hall. There were
other braziers there, glowing and flickering with pale light.
Did I notice those before?
She could not be wholly certain
that she had.

What are we nearing? How large is this place?
She felt
they had been exploring, admittedly at a cripplingly cautious pace, for hours.

They
stepped through the archway and stopped. For a long time they simply looked.

The
ceiling was at least another six feet higher, and it was supported by great
columns that had been fantastically worked into the shape of abominations. It
was an old motif. She had seen carvings like it in Tharn, but never as grandly detailed
as these. Human features were merged with those of beasts so that each column
became a monster with its arms or claws raised high to support the earth. There
were spiders with the faces of women, and scorpion-tailed men with pincered
hands, beetle-headed, wing-backed, joint-legged. One depicted a woman who was
partly consumed within the shell of a great mantis, and this image in
particular Che turned away from, finding it obscurely, disturbingly familiar.

Between
the columns were the tombs, arrayed in earnest now. Where Garmoth Atennar,
whoever he had been, had kept a lonely vigil, here were an even score of great
stone sarcophagi interspersed with the grotesque carved pillars.

The
eerie light leapt and dwindled on them, these sleeping statues, the ranks of
the forgotten, the Masters of Khanaphes. She saw their names:
Hieram Tisellian, who Raised the Temple and brought Life to the
Parched Land, Lord Architect of all Time … Killeris Jaenathil, the Beautiful,
the all-Knowing, Lady of the Utmost Sorcery … Iellith Quellennas, Bringer of
Death, the Harvester of the Old Lands, the Chariot of War …

‘How
many hundreds of years,’ Che wondered, ‘since anyone last saw this?’

‘Always
assuming you don’t count the lamp-lighters.’ The sense of awe and reverence had
passed Thalric by, and he was becoming increasingly unnerved, looking up at the
hybrid visages of the carved abominations and shuddering. For impossible
monsters, they had been rendered extremely lifelike.

They
were crude, however, compared to the likenesses that the Masters had decreed
for themselves. Each one of these was an individual, as recognizable and
distinct as they must have appeared in life. The white stone flowed smoothly
over their musculature, each curve of gut and jowl and breast. Theirs was an
alien aesthetic, but one that seemed to overrule all others. They were not
delicately beautiful as Spiders were, or Dragonflies or Beetles or Moths, or
any other kinden. They were simply beautiful
de facto
,
commanding and magnetic. Even their stone facsimiles confirmed it.