The Scarab Path (76 page)

‘No
wonder they are still revered as they are,’ Che said in wonder.

‘Oh,
true,’ Thalric snapped. ‘They’d be able to give our Slave Corps a few lessons:
how to keep an entire population under your thumb for a thousand years after
you’ve died! How about that? The greatest slavemasters in the history of the
world lie here, and I’m glad that, beyond this stinking piece of sand and
stone, nobody even knows about them.’

‘How can
you say that?’ Che demanded. ‘Thalric, what we’re seeing here … it’s an age of
history that Collegium has never guessed at. In all the Lowlands, there are
probably only a few records of this mouldering in the Moth-kinden strongholds.
I could go home right now and claim my seat as a College Master just for being
here. This is
history
, this is the past right here
for us to look upon. Can’t you see that?’

‘Do you
know what I see?’ he asked her. ‘I see those pillars in the main hall of the
Scriptora – the hall with the little fountain, where they held that reception
for us both.’

‘I
don’t—’

‘They
were just like these monsters: pillars carved into figures that were holding up
the ceiling. Very artistic. Only those ones were carved to look like
Beetle-kinden.
Your
people, the Khanaphir. What did
these dead Masters think? That it was your lot above ground, and monsters for
servants once they were dead? They were mad, Che. They’re better forgotten,
believe me …’ He trailed off just then, and she heard his breath suddenly
become ragged. She turned to see what had caught his eye.

One of
the stone coffins was bare.

The
sight – the absence – chilled her. For a moment neither of them moved. Then
Thalric said, ‘So, we’re both thinking the same ridiculous thing just now, and
we should stop it. After all, they wouldn’t be the first people not to finish
crafting a tomb. It’s something you tend to have built late in life.’

Che
walked closer and wiped slime away from the inscription to read it clearly.

‘Elysiath
Neptellian, Lady of the Bright Water, She whose Word Breaks all Bonds, Princess
of the Thousand,’ she translated.

‘Maybe
she didn’t care for the likeness,’ said Thalric harshly. ‘Now, can we get out
of this festering place and …’ His voice choked off and Che looked around
wildly.

‘What?
What now?’

‘I …
thought I saw something …’ he said, voice openly shaking. ‘Ahead there.
Something pale …’

‘The
lamps. The shadows of the lamps,’ Che said hurriedly. ‘The lamplight on the
stone.’ She was tense as a drawn bow, waiting for whatever terrible thing was
about to descend on them. The air was thick with it.

When it
came, it came from behind them: a long, drawn-out scream of human agony.
Thalric whirled around, his sword in his hand instantly.

‘Wait—’
Che started but he snarled, ‘Osgan,’ and was away from her at once, plunging
back the way they had come, and leaving her to scurry in his wake.

Totho was awoken by the sound of stone, great loads of it being hauled up
the span of the bridge by sled, and by the noisy efforts of a labouring draught
beetle.

Are we building the barricade now?
he wondered vaguely,
but had they not already built it? Had they not defended it for a day already?
I refuse to go through that again
.

He sat
up, seeing the great bow-backed animal settle, antennae twitching, as the sled
was unloaded. By the barricade itself, the centre had been reinforced, going
some way towards repairing the petard’s damage, and some complex woodwork was
being lashed together, a slope on either side of the central point, with what
seemed like a vast quantity of rope lying about. He could make nothing of it.

He
jumped up, looking for authority, and spotted Amnon. The big man was
supervising the unloading. Meyr, whose watch it was, leant against the
barricade well out of the way.

‘What’s
going on?’ Totho asked him. ‘When did this start?’

‘Hour
ago,’ Meyr said. ‘That Amnon, he’s got an idea or something. Look down at our
end of the bridge.’

Totho
did so, seeing a great many torches down below, and what seemed like two
hundred Khanaphir busy hauling stone about.
A second
barricade
. ‘Amnon!’ he called out. ‘I told you, once they get a
leadshotter up here, they’ll sweep away anything you put down at the shore.
They’ll just smash it to pieces.’

‘That is
indeed what you told me,’ Amnon confirmed.

‘Then
what?’

‘I have
been speaking with Praeda about the engines of the enemy, and what they are
capable of,’ Amnon revealed.

‘Yes,
that’s exactly what I meant when I said you should go home to her,’ Totho
remarked drily. ‘So what did she have to say about it?’

‘Firstly,
she said she is an artificer, and a professor of artifice at their College, so
she knows about these things,’ Amnon told him.

Totho
shrugged. ‘That covers quite a range of competences.’

‘She
then also says that our stones cannot resist their shot, because our stones are
rigid. She says that Collegium walls have a soft core to them, where the mortar
is, that makes them move when struck, which is why these engines would not beat
them down so easily. True?’

‘True,’Totho
admitted, ‘all true. So what’s going on?’

‘Down
there they are preparing a very great deal of stone, all of it we have dressed
and ready to place. As of now there is a narrow pass to one side, to let the
defenders here escape, but that will be filled at need,’ Amnon said. ‘We are
building bands of wall: stone backed with wood and wicker, then stone again,
and so forth, the whole of it a score of feet deep at least, and high as we can
build it. The spaces of softer stuff, Praeda says, will give the stones
somewhere to go when they are struck. The enemy will take twice as long to
batter through. And she says, when the leadshotters shoot at it, they will only
be turning standing stones into rubble that they will have to climb across. We
will have archers on every roof. What do you think, about my Praeda?’

‘I think
she’s thought it through,’ Totho conceded. ‘As last lines of defence go, I
can’t think of a better one. I should have thought of that myself.’

‘Good to
be appreciated,’ he heard a female voice interrupt. Praeda herself came walking
towards them up the slope. She had traded her Collegium robes for hard-wearing
artificer’s canvas, and there was a crossbow of Iron Glove make slung over her
shoulder. ‘Amnon, you’re sure the barricade can hold them off here while they
complete the barrier down there, after you fall back?’

‘Of course.’
Amnon was looking at Totho as he said it, and the wince was evident, that told
of the lie.

Every plan has its flaw
. ‘So what’s this up here?’ Totho
asked hastily, to ward off more questions from Praeda.

‘When
this barricade is due to fall, my soldiers will still need time to flee down to
the eastern shore,’ Amnon explained. The labourers were loading great blocks of
stone on to the ramps that flanked the barricade’s mid-point, building them
high and securing them against the slope with ropes. Totho extrapolated, seeing
two big columns of stone, poised and straining, waiting to thunder together in
the centre, an instant breach-blocker.

‘That’s
mad,’ he said. ‘What if the ropes go? Anyone fighting in the centre will be
squashed flat.’

‘We make
good ropes, and we know our stone,’ Amnon replied. ‘We have been building like
this for a thousand years. The ropes will hold until we cut them. I will be in
the centre of our line. It is my own life that I stake on this.’

Totho
shook his head at it.
Oh you say that here and now, with
that confidence, because your lady is with you. It would not do to point out
the cracks in this plan
. It would not take the Scorpions long to break
through the barricade, as soon as its defenders had retreated. Another petard
would suffice and they would surely have one ready. If there were sufficient
bodies on the far side, or if they possessed the Art, then they might even just
swarm straight over. At the foot of the bridge the fleeing soldiers would
either be trapped by the barrier’s completion, or the barrier would not be
finished in time, letting the Scorpions through.

Unless
. But he did not need to voice that ‘unless’ here.
You are a fool, Amnon. You have more to live for than you know
.
Amnon’s sense of duty was crippling to be near, and Totho could barely imagine
it. If he himself had been born with all the advantages that Amnon owned, with
his strength and energy and easy manner, and if he had a Beetle girl who loved
him, then there was nothing in the world that would make him turn away from it.
Not duty, not honour, nothing.

But, then, perhaps that duty is what makes Amnon what he is
.

‘You
should sleep again,’ Amnon told him. ‘It is your turn.’

‘Small
chance of that,’Totho grumbled.

‘They
will be done here soon enough.’ It was true, the piles of stone, immaculately
placed, were now almost as high as the barricades. The webwork of ropes that
held them in place had been run to pulleys fixed on the bridge’s sides, and
then back to a single ring set in the stonework behind. It would take a sword’s
blow to those taut ropes to drop four tons of stone together like clapping
hands.

‘I don’t
think I’m going to get much sleep tonight,’Totho admitted. ‘Tomorrow is
oppressing me already.’

Amnon
settled down with his back to the bridge’s right flank. His glance, away from
Praeda towards the western bank, caught him wearing a strangely irresolute
expression. ‘Praeda,’ he said suddenly, ‘would you leave us? Return to the
city?’

The
Collegiate woman frowned at him. ‘Actually I …’

‘You
were going to stay to face the dawn,’ Amnon finished for her, nodding. ‘You
bought a crossbow from one of the Iron Glove people. You want to fight
alongside me, tomorrow.’

‘Yes.’
Her expression was determined, set. Totho glanced from her to Amnon, who would
not look at her at all.

‘You
must not,’ was all he said.

‘I have
a right to defend you,’ Praeda told him. ‘How can you keep me away? I know
you’re First Soldier of Khanaphes, and all that, but that doesn’t mean you’re
immortal.’

‘No, it
does not,’ Amnon said heavily. ‘But you have never fought before, and many will
die here who have lived their whole lives carrying spear and shield. And I will
not be able to fight to my best, knowing that you are in danger. I will not.’

‘Amnon,
that’s not fair … I was up on the walls during the Vekken siege of Collegium. I
loosed a crossbow then.’

‘Praeda.’
He said her name very softly, and that silenced her. In the pause that
followed, Totho felt unbearably awkward, a voyeur to something intensely
private.

‘Praeda,’
Amnon repeated. ‘Do not make me choose between you and my city. If I knew that
you were fighting here, and might be hurt at any moment, I would give commands
that would compromise our position so that you might remain safe, or at least
safer. If you forced me to it, I would give over my people just to save your
life – but I would never forgive myself, after, for doing so. Do not tear me
apart.’

Totho
saw tears come to her eyes, glinting red in the torchlight. ‘Amnon,’ she
whispered, then she knelt down beside him, throwing her arms around him,
kissing him. She was shaking slightly, after she stood up again.

‘Come
back to me,’ she urged him. ‘You must.’ Then she was running back towards the
construction works at the bridge’s foot, heading towards the eastern shore.

Totho
had been about to pass some comment about how much Amnon loved his city, but
one look at the big man’s face warned him off it. Instead he sat down beside
him, feeling all his bruises from yesterday complain.
And
soon I shall have to put the armour on again. Joy
.

The
broad shadow that was Meyr joined them, setting a cask down in front of him,
and a stack of clay bowls. ‘In the Delve, when a great construction is
completed, we drink to it,’ the Mole Cricket murmured. ‘I had called for this,
so that we might drink before tomorrow sees the colour of our blood, but shall
we not drink to these stones behind us instead? How well they are laid, one on
another. Nothing compared to my own people’s work, of course, but pretty
enough. They will do their job.’

His huge
hands laid out the bowls – one, two, three – and then he craned his head to
look back. ‘Mantis-girl, come and join us in a drink.’

Teuthete
stepped down from the barricade, head cocked to one side. ‘The Khanaphir do not
know how to brew,’ she said. ‘I will not drink their beer. It is sour.’

‘Then
drink some Imperial brandy,’ Meyr told her, ‘which is not.’

‘We were
keeping that as a gift,’ Totho pointed out, ‘to cement our trading links with
Khanaphes.’ He considered it. ‘So let’s crack it open, why not?’

‘Where
is Tirado?’ Meyr asked, the fifth and final bowl cupped in his hand.

‘Your
Fly-kinden sleeps like a dead man,’ Teuthete said. ‘You could launch him from
one of the Scorpion war-engines and he still would not wake.’

‘We’ll
save him some,’Totho decided, gesturing for Meyr to start decanting. The little
barrel looked just like a cup in the Mole Cricket’s broad hands. Teuthete
slipped down to kneel beside him, looking childlike in comparison. Meyr passed
the first bowl to her.

‘My
people are pragmatists: we do not acknowledge freedom,’ Meyr said, pouring a
bowl in turn for each. ‘We were slaves of the Moth-kinden before we were ever
slaves to theWasps. There is no one alive who is not a slave, we say: slave to
city, slave to past, slave to feelings. Even the wild beast in the wastes is a
slave to hunger.’ He put the barrel down carefully, replacing the bung that he
had dug out with one thick, square fingernail. His own bowl sat neatly in his
palm. ‘In all my life,’ said Meyr, ‘I have been no happier than in my servitude
to the Iron Glove. Of all my slaveries it is the least onerous.’