The Scarab Path (8 page)

Petri Coggen read the letter again and felt like weeping.

She sat
at the little sloping lectern which the Khanaphir had given her for a desk, and
put her head in her hands. They were so
obtuse
,
those old men at the College. Worse, they had a gift for bad timing. Beside
Drillen’s letter was one of her own, completed last night and ready for
sending. It read:

Good Master
Drillen,

Forgive me for
writing to you directly but I am the bearer of terrible news. Master Kadro is
gone. He disappeared only two days ago. There is no trace of him. The Ministers
say nothing, but I am sure they
know
.

Something
terrible is happening here. There is a secret in Khanaphes and Kadro was close
to it. They have done something to him. I am sure he is dead.

Please tell me
what to do. I do not want to stay here longer, but I fear what might happen if
I try to leave.

Yours
Petri Coggen, assistant to Master Kadro.

She wanted to cry. She wanted to laugh. Instead she took her own letter
and folded it, then put it inside her tunic. Perhaps, somehow, it would arrive
in time to do some good. Assuming it arrived at all.

She
buckled on her belt, carrying her purse and her dagger. It was the only weapon
she owned but she would not know what to do with it if she was forced to use it
on another living thing. Petri Coggen had never been much more than an aide and
secretary to Master Kadro, who had been the great academic and explorer, dragging
her out here so that she could scribe his exploits. But now she was alone, and
the city of Khanaphes had become a brooding and hostile place. She was merely a
Beetle-kinden woman edging towards her middle years, short and stout and prone
to getting out of breath. She was certainly not the woman to avenge Kadro’s
death, but she felt she must at least try to investigate his disappearance.

She had
shared a third-storey room with Kadro, a little box with two windows squeezed
under the flat roof of a warehouse. Kadro had chosen it because the landlord
was a merchant, and therefore used to dealing with foreigners; also because the
place was cheap and lay close to the little stew of villainy that cluttered
this side of the river beyond Khanaphes’s great Estuarine Gate. This was a busy
market by day, a tent city by night, and the tents often grand and elaborate,
for there was a great deal of money changing hands at any given moment, and
people in Khanaphes – legitimate dealers or otherwise – liked to show that they
were doing well. It was a place that, in other circumstances, she would never
have dreamt of visiting on her own, but nowhere else in Khanaphes might she
find some kind of answer to her questions.

She made
good time. A few hurried glances detected no followers, but the streets were
teeming this close to the docks. There were always ships coming to the river
quays, and then a swarm of dockhands, fishermen, merchants and rogues to pester
them. Despite the time she had spent here, the heat still raised a sweat on to
her skin, and the bustle of bald heads, the murmur of quiet voices, remained
densely impenetrable.
These are my kinden but not my people
and I cannot understand them.

In the
shadow of the Estuarine Gate, she paused. The gate itself was out of sight,
supposedly deep in the waters of the river, under any ship’s draught passing
between those gargantuan carved pillars. Again she looked round and saw no
soldiers of the Ministers come to apprehend her, no skulking cloaked figure
with eyes fixed on her.

And a poor spy it would be that I would notice!
She did
not know what to do next. Her training at the College, all that history and
architecture and philosophy, had been no preparation for this crisis.

She
slipped past the gate by the narrow footpath, wall on one side, the choppy
brown waters on the other. She did not look up, past that monumental pillar, to
see the great stone likeness that was set into its southern side. Those
inhumanly beautiful, blandly smiling features were constantly in her dreams.
She had begun to fear them, for all they were a thousand years dead.

The maze
of tents and awnings that awaited her was known to the locals as the Marsh
Alcaia. She had come here twice before, both times with Kadro. Each time he had
been cautious. Khanaphes was a well-run city, law-abiding and peaceful, but
there was a froth of uncertainty where the external world met its walls, here
before the Estuarine Gate. Other foreigners were not always so respectful of
Khanaphes’s laws. The golden Royal Guard sometimes swept through here with
lance and sword, arresting and confiscating and slaying those that resisted,
burning the tents. Khanaphes needed its trade, though, and so long as it did,
the scum of the Marsh Alcaia would always re-establish itself before the
Estuarine Gate, just outside of the city proper.

Entering
the Marsh Alcaia was like stepping underwater, as the faded orange and yellow
cloth closed over her and muted the sunlight. She was abruptly in a different
world, stuffy, gloomy, reeking of spices and sweat. As she stood, a silhouette
against the bright day beyond, the denizens of the Alcaia jostled past her.
They did not look at her, each preoccupied with his own business. Every one of
them was armed, a hand always close to the hilt of a broad-bladed dagger, a
short sword with a leaf-shaped blade, a hatchet. Some bore as weapons simply
the extrusions of bone that the Art had raised from their hands.

She
finally conquered her fears and pushed inwards. Kadro had walked here without
fear, or at least he had shown none. She tried to emulate him, even though she
was big and clumsy and kept getting in the way. Porters with sacks of flour and
sweet spices jostled and cursed her. A be-ringed merchant’s retinue pushed her
aside against the counter of a jeweller so that she upset his scales in a tiny
clatter of brass. Her apologies fell into the abyss: they all maintained the
Khanaphir reserve. Whether they were the local Beetle-kinden or the sinewy
Marsh folk, or one of a dozen breeds of foreigner or halfbreed, they looked at
her as though she was not wanted there.
As though I do not
belong.
She did not belong. She had no wish to belong. It was just that
she had nowhere within this city to turn. Khanaphes was the problem. If a
solution existed, it must be somewhere here.

She
regained her balance. The offended jeweller was a Khanaphir Beetle,
shaven-headed as they all were. With that narrow-eyed, unreadable look they all
adopted when looking at her, he finished restacking his weights and measures.
She tried to remember what route Kadro had taken through this maze of shifting
streets, hoping it was still good. Her memory was not up to it, though: the
Marsh Alcaia was a world without reference. Each day the faces here might be
different, and if there was a code in the colours of the awnings that might
have directed her where she needed to go, she had no way of reading it.
Recognizing such patterns had been Kadro’s strong point.

‘Excuse
me,’ she said to the jeweller, the effort almost having her in tears again. ‘I
need to speak to the Fisher. Do you know her?’ The title was all she knew. Most
of the darker denizens of the Alcaia had left their real names behind a long
time ago.

The
jeweller stared at her with the Khanaphir stare reserved for foreigners. It was
not hostile, in fact very polite, but suggested that she was speaking some kind
of infantile nonsense that the man could not possibly be expected to
understand. It humoured her without admitting any comprehension.

Petri
bit her lip. Reaching for her purse, she took out a pair of coins –
Helleron-minted Standards and a long way from home – and put them on his
counter. With a deft motion he slipped them on to his scales. Weight and purity
of metal was everything here. Her money from home was disastrously devalued and
she knew that in exchange he would give her a fraction of the value that
unadulterated gold of that same weight would have brought her.

‘Please?’
she asked. The jeweller still said nothing but, as if by magic, a small child
appeared at his elbow. He muttered a few words and the girl ducked under the
counter and ran off into the Alcaia. A nod of the jeweller’s head then
suggested that she follow.

Where
the girl led her was nowhere near where she had gone before, but headed deeper
into the Alcaia than she had ever been. The thought came to her, within three
turns, that she was being led into some kind of trap. By then she could only
follow, because she was lost already. She was out of breath from keeping up
with the girl’s skipping figure, with dodging all the other bustling people
doing their secretive deals beneath this all-embracing cloth sky.

The girl
had stopped, ahead of her. Petri put a hand on her dagger-hilt, feeling it so
unfamiliar in her grip. There was a tent ahead, which surely could hold a dozen
people inside, all ready to lay hands on her. ‘This … this is it?’ she asked.
The girl looked back at her, as blandly unreadable as any local. She still had
hair, cut ragged to just above her shoulders. The ubiquitous head-shaving was
an adult affectation.

Deprived
of an answer, Petri took a deep, harsh breath. She could wait out here as long
as she wanted, but all she would accomplish would be to make herself look
indecisive and lost. She had to move forward, so she pushed into the tent.

The
Fisher lay there, attended by a quartet of young Khanaphir men serving her wine
and grapes. She was spread out on a heap of cushions, wearing Spiderland silks
that must cost a fortune to import here, and adorned with gold all over:
armlets, anklets, rings, pendants, even a band of it across her forehead. She
was compensating in some way, Petri suspected, for the Fisher was a halfbreed
of mixed Khanaphir and Marsh people stock. Her skin was an oily greenish colour
and, somewhere between the solid Beetle build and the slight grace of the
estuary folk, she had turned out shapeless and baggy. Her eyes were yellow and
unblinking as they regarded Petri. A servant handed her a long-stemmed lit pipe
made from smoke-coloured glass, and she accepted it, wordlessly.

How did Kadro do this?

‘I … er
… I wish to do business,’ Petri began, trying to keep her voice steady.
Responding to a small tilt of the Fisher’s head, abruptly one of the servants
appeared by Petri’s arm, offering her a shallow bowl of wine. Gratefully Petri
took it and subsided on to the cushions. It was hot and airless in here, and
the bittersweet pipe smoke made her head swim.

‘Please
…’ she said, before she could stop herself.

The
Fisher continued to regard her silently, waiting. Petri summoned all her
reserves of strength.

‘I wish
you to find someone for me.’
How would Kadro have put this?
‘I know that, of all the knowledgeable people in the Marsh Alcaia, you are
renowned as being the one who can locate anyone or anything.’ Compliments were
important in Khanaphes, she knew.

A slight
nod revealed the Fisher’s acceptance of Petri’s clumsy offering. ‘A friend of
Kadro of Collegium is always my friend too, of course,’ she replied. ‘But a
curious woman would wonder at the purpose of such a hunt. Perhaps some fool who
has insulted you, and is therefore deserving of death? You should know that
there is another who would be keenly interested in such dealings.’

Petri’s
mouth twitched. ‘It is no such matter,’ she stammered, ‘only that a friend of
mine has been … too long out of touch, so that I am now concerned for him.’

‘Your
sense of duty does you credit,’ the Fisher told her, with a shallow smile. ‘The
path to my tent is not the worst that you might have chosen. Who is this ailing
friend?’

Petri
drained her wine for courage. The local stuff was strong, and she waited for a
moment of dizziness to pass her. ‘Ma … Kadro. I need you to find Kadro.’ Never
Master
Kadro, not here. Here, the word had other meanings.

The
Fisher’s slight smile did not flicker, and its very fixed immobility told Petri
that something was wrong. The halfbreed woman took a long puff of her pipe,
then handed it back to one of her servants.

‘Fisher?’
Petri pressed, knowing that things had gone awry, but unable to see precisely
how or why.

In a
single movement the Fisher stood up, her face still devoid of expression.
‘Alas, what you ask is impossible,’ she declared. Her servants had moved closer
to her, as though expecting attack. Petri stood up as well, mouth working
silently, searching for words.

‘But …’
she got out finally. ‘I have money!’ It was unspeakably rude, by local
standards, but the Fisher did not visibly react to it. Instead she simply
retreated further and further. What had seemed a wall of cloth parted for her,
and then she had vanished beyond it, her servants following silently. Petri was
left in sole possession of the tent, deep within the Marsh Alcaia.

Her
heart was beginning to pound. She had the sense of something chasing her. The
Fisher had known something, had known enough not to want anything to do with
this. Petri was fast running out of places to turn.

There
was someone, though: there was the very person the Fisher had alluded to. The
Khanaphir loved middlemen. Even in the business of seeking another’s death
there was someone to go to, who would then find someone else to wield the
knife. Petri had never met the current holder of the office, but she knew the
name from a casual mention by Kadro.

When she
asked for the name of Harbir, people drew back from her, turned away, refused
to speak. She persisted, and suspected that carrying the name before her made
her proof against the petty robbers and killers that haunted the interior of
the Alcaia. Somebody who had business with Harbir the Arranger, however they
might seem, was not prey for smaller fish.