The Scarab Path (86 page)

‘It does
not seem possible,’ agreed the man beside her, his tone unhurried,
conversational. ‘The vagabonds of the Nem should not have been able to pass the
walls. That suggests treachery within.’

‘Our
people have turned away from us while we slept,’ Lirielle agreed. ‘They flee
rather than fight. They are no longer what they once were.’

‘How can
you say that?’ Che glared at them. ‘They are dying for you right now!’
Totho is dying. He could be dying even now
.

They
looked at her patronizingly. ‘They have indeed grown weak. How dare they
abandon half the city,’ Elysiath said sternly. ‘They deserve all they get. They
should have trusted in our walls.’

Thalric
laughed at them. The sound of his derision broke across their pontificating
like a dash of water, shocking them with its irreverence.

‘Your
walls?’ he sneered. ‘Your walls fell in a few brief hours to Imperial
leadshotters.’ The faces of the Masters remained quite composed, but Che could
still detect the slight uncertainty in their eyes that showed they did not
recognize the word.

‘Leadshotters,’
Thalric repeated slowly. He had seen it in them too. ‘Siege engines. Machines.
Old relics of my own people, but great big magic to your poor citizens, because
they’ve been living in the Bad Old Days for the last few centuries.’ He took a
deep breath and she felt his hands tighten on her shoulders. ‘And, from what
you’ve been saying, that’s your fault. You’ve kept them back. You’ve kept them
ignorant. You’ve kept them
yours
. ’

‘How
dare
you speak to us thus, O Savage,’ Elysiath demanded.
Her voice was not angry but cold enough to cut to the bone. ‘Utter another word
and we will send your mind into a darkness so deep that you will never be
found.’

Che
expected Thalric to say more but, looking back at him, she saw him grimace,
baring his teeth. Whatever he might normally believe, in this dark tomb beyond
anything he knew, he believed in that threat.

‘And
what will you do to me?’ Che asked them. ‘Tell me, O Masters of Khanaphes? When
I speak the same truths?’

‘What is
this insurrection?’ the man said, almost good-naturedly. ‘Savages may babble
their nonsense, but we discerned merit in you. Our people have grown weak.
There is no more than that.’

‘A
leadshotter …’ She stopped because she now realized she could no longer explain
it as she once had, ‘… is a great engine that throws stones hard enough to
shatter a wall. The Wasp Empire in the north possesses hundreds of them. My
city has many stationed on its walls. The Ant city-states of Accius and his
cousins, they field dozens each. Helleron must make more than a thousand
crossbows a year in its factories. There are automotives for freight and for
war. On the seas there are armourclads, metal ships that float. In the air they
have heliopters and orthopters and ships of the air.’ The image of these
ravening hordes of progress was making her dizzy, slightly ill just to think of
it. ‘Look in my mind. I can no longer understand what I remember, but look
there. See it all. I gift you with five hundred years of artifice.’

They had
gone very still. She could feel them taking up the lifeless stones of her
memory with their cool, slimy fingers, turning them over and over. Thalric put
his arms around her, hugged her to his chest. She wondered if it was a gesture
for her reassurance or his own.

‘The
world has moved on,’ she said. ‘Everywhere but here.’

‘The
Moths have fallen,’ observed Lirielle. ‘What is this?’ Despite it all, there
was such mourning in her voice that Che felt sorry for them.

‘But the
rabble of the Nem …’ the man began, and trailed off, any confidence ebbing from
his voice.

‘They
will not stand still for ever,’ Che said. ‘Clinging to whatever life the desert
could give, fighting each other for a few scraps, they have been slow to
change, but all it took was a prod from the Empire, and they are now inside
your city.’

For a
long moment the Masters stared at one another, trying to cling on ponderously
to what they had believed, in the face of all they had now seen.
They don’t know what to do
, Che realized.
They slept too long
.

‘You
will help, surely,’ she pressed them.

Elysiath
turned a haughty look on her. ‘So much is lost, it hardly seems worthwhile to
salvage what is left.’

‘But
they’re your people,’ Che insisted.

‘They
have bitterly disappointed us,’ the man stated. ‘They have squandered all we
left them.’

‘They
have forgotten all I taught them of war,’ rumbled dark Garmoth Atennar from
behind them.

‘But
they’re now calling out for you!’ Che told them. ‘They pray to you. They invoke
your aid.’

‘Do
they?’ Elysiath actually cocked her head to one side, listening in some way
that Che could not imagine. She smiled faintly. ‘Ah, yes, they do. How faint
they sound. Ah, well.’

‘“Ah,
well”?’ Che protested. ‘Don’t you see what that means? It means that they
believe in you still. To them, after all these centuries, you are still the
Masters of Khanaphes. You are what they have lived for, and now you are the
reason why they are all going to die. You still have a responsibility to them.
They are your servants.’

‘Responsibility?
To the slaves?’ Elysiath echoed, as though the concept was remarkable.

‘You
said they’d failed you,’ Che told her. ‘They haven’t. They’re fighting for you
even now, as we speak. They’re bleeding and dying for you, for your city. The
first city, remember? The city you built so long ago. They’re giving their
lives to preserve it from the Scorpions, who will soon turn it into one more
desert ruin, and put an end even to the memory of you. And perhaps they’ll come
down here. If there are enough of them, or if the Empire tightens its hold,
then maybe even you won’t remain safe. Your tests and traps cannot hide you for
ever.’

The man
was frowning, as though he had eaten something distasteful. Lirielle toyed with
her comb. ‘But what can we do?’ she said.

‘It
would be such a waste of our power to intervene,’ the man mused. ‘The cost
would be terrible. It would set us back so much.’

‘What
were you saving it for?’ Che asked him.

‘The
revivification of the land, of course,’ he replied. ‘The reversal of the change
that the great cataclysm brought about. To bring green back to the desert, that
is our great purpose.’

Che
blinked at that, at the sheer hubris of it, for she could not imagine that even
the Masters could even start to accomplish such a thing.
Are
they just living empty dreams then, despite all their power
? ‘And who
will then profit from this,’ she pressed them, even so, ‘if your own people are
gone?’

The man
gave a petulant frown. ‘It will demand a great effort, hardly worth it, surely,
to preserve so little.’

‘So much
effort,’ Lirielle agreed, as though just combing her hair for so long had
exhausted her.

‘They’re
dying
,’ Che said, reaching the end of her ability to
explain herself to them. ‘As we speak, they’re dying.’
Totho
is dying. Oh, I am so sorry, Totho
.

‘I would
rather have slept,’ said Elysiath, surly. ‘Jeherian, will you lead us?’

The man
beside her nodded wearily. ‘So much lost,’ he said sadly. ‘Ah, well.’

Che
started, as someone moved past her. Without a sound, another of the Masters
stepped forward to join Elysiath and the others, a great bulky man whose
lustrous hair fell down past his shoulders. Looks were exchanged between them
all. Even as Che noted him, she saw another woman come padding from the
darkness beyond them, as tall and voluptuous as the rest, the necklace about
her throat bearing a kingdom’s ransom in precious stones. Next, another two
came, hand in hand, to stand nearby. Then, at last, Che saw what she had long
imagined. On the nearest sarcophagus, the crowning statue stirred, stretching
languorously, without visible transition from cold stone to live flesh.
Thus do the Masters of Khanaphes sleep out the centuries
.

There
were almost a score of them soon, male and female, looming from the dark to
join their kin, their grave and beautiful faces all marked with expressions of
concern. Che expected chanting. She was waiting for them to enact some ritual,
as Achaeos had said the Moths did. It took her a long moment of frustrated
silence until she realized that they were already at work.

Each of
them was looking up, towards the vaulted ceiling, up towards the embattled city
of Khanaphes and the sky beyond. Each and every one of them was sharing in the
same act of concentration, staring at some great focal point she could not imagine.
She knew she should hate them for their callous detachment, but there was such
grief and loss evident on those noble faces that it nearly broke her heart.

What have I driven them to?
she wondered.
What is this, that they sacrifice here?

Pictures
blurred and stretched in her mind again, taking her back to the city above.

‘Would you look at what they’ve done,’ Hrathen said. ‘How much effort
went into that?’

‘So
they’ve brought some more stone to fill the breach,’ Jakal replied
dismissively. ‘It will not stop us. An act of desperation.’ She jabbed a
thumb-claw towards a nearby Scorpion. ‘Call my guard together.’

‘We knew
they were working on something, and now it looks like they’ve built the world’s
biggest single-use nutcracker.’ They were standing on a rooftop overlooking the
bridge and the river, Hrathen with his telescope to his eye. ‘The archers, all
the rest, are running for the second barricade.’

‘Bring
it down,’ Jakal told him. ‘Use one of your petards. Or move one of the engines
up on to the bridge.’

‘No need
for the sweat,’ Hrathen said. ‘All that effort, and we’ll still crack it in
less than a minute.’ He signalled to one of his own, one of the few Slave Corps
soldiers left. Of late, the Khanaphir archers had become very good at shooting
them down. ‘Fly to Lieutenant Angved,’ he instructed. ‘Tell him to sight on
that blockage and bring it down.’

‘Yes,
sir.’ The man kicked off and made a short dart over the rooftops to where
Angved and his leadshotter were waiting.

Jakal
regarded Hrathen with a slight smile. It was not a fond look, for Scorpion
faces did not lend themselves to fondness. There was fire in it, though:
anticipation of victory had set light to her.

‘You’ll
go in yourself now?’ Hrathen asked her.

‘Their
archers have fled. I shall destroy what warriors they have left. You should
bring your engines up to the bridge’s crest, so that we can destroy their
second wall.’ Her understanding of artillery and its uses was increasing by
leaps and bounds. ‘My warriors must see me fight. They must remember why I am
Warlord.’

‘Then
they will see me fight alongside you,’ Hrathen said. ‘The engineers can manage
without me.’

She
looked at him for a long moment, then shook her head. ‘Your Empire breeds
fools,’ she said. ‘If my warriors obeyed my words as swiftly as yours obey you,
I would not need to shed my blood for them. Still, you shall have the chance to
prove yourself, if you so wish.’

‘Why do
you go, then?’ he asked her. ‘It’s not as though your host is short one more
warrior.’

Her
smile was scornful. ‘I am Warlord because I am the best. I slew many to take
the crown, and there are many who would slay me for it in turn. If I did not
fight they would all take up arms against me. I too must shed the blood of the
Khanaphir, but I shall choose when I shed it. I am not destined to become mere
prey for arrows. My people shall see me take the bridge itself, and they shall
remember.’

‘They
shall see
us
take the bridge.’

‘Are you
strong enough?’ she asked him. ‘Does your blood run so pure? You may just as
well remain behind. My people would not care.’

It stung
like a slaver’s lash. ‘I have the strength of my father’s kinden and the guile
of my mother’s,’ he told her, ‘as you will soon see. Perhaps it will be I who
will challenge you.’

That
made her smile. ‘I would welcome it.’ Below, in the ravaged street, a company
of Scorpions had assembled, huge men and women loaded with scavenged armour. A
dozen of them stamped and rattled, waiting impatiently. Jakal had chosen them
carefully, Hrathen knew, from among the most vicious and bloodthirsty of all
her people, thus keeping her potential enemies close to her.

She
descended to join them and they greeted her with a roar of approval. Today was
their day. The day their Warlord had delivered their ancient enemy to them. Hrathen
followed as they struck out for the bridge, after sending back an order to have
one of the leadshotters brought up after them.

Not a great day for the Empire
, he thought.
Probably not even a footnote in the Imperial histories
,
but I shall know. I shall know that I was true to my father’s
bloody-handed kinden, at the end. The desolation of Khanaphes shall be my
legacy to my people
.

The archers, and a scattering of Royal Guard, were still in sight,
fleeing towards the end barricade. Amnon faced the new-formed wall of loose
stones and squared his shoulders. Meyr crouched close to him, a hulking,
brooding shadow, and in his hands he had a rough-ended beam from the
construction works, ten feet long. Totho checked that his snapbow was charged.
I had feared I might run out of ammunition today
, he
considered.
That seems unlikely now
.

Another
thought struck him, that Drephos would be proud now: not of Totho but of the
armour.
Field-testing complete: the aviation plate can be
considered worth its considerable cost. We three are the proof of that
.
He was amazed how quickly Amnon had adapted to it, but then the man was a
warrior born, and Beetles took easily to wearing a second shell.