The Scarab Path (89 page)

The
Mantis looked up and his eyes, one lit and one shrouded in shadow, found
Sulvec.

‘Now,’
he said, as the lamps went out.

Che sagged back into Thalric’s arms, mind still full of the swollen
river, even though the images had now left her. Looking up at the assembled
Masters, she saw not one of them was looking at her.
They
did not even mean to show me
, she thought numbly.
I
just got carried along, when they looked. What have I seen? I cannot take it in
.

‘What?’
Thalric was demanding. ‘They haven’t done anything. What’s happening, Che?
What’s wrong?’

She
stepped away from him, feeling a tug of resistance and then release. ‘Do not
ask me,’ she said. ‘I cannot say. I don’t have words for what I’ve seen. Oh,
Thalric, I can’t hope to make you understand.’

There
was a great sigh from the Masters, and she knew that they had finished. A great
burden of sorrow was upon them, their faces disfigured by the dregs of effort.
Some simply walked away. Many lingered as though, having awoken, they were
unsure what it had been for. Only one was missing: armoured Garmoth Atennar had
absented himself, perhaps to take his huge sword to the Scorpions in person.

‘Such
waste of our resources,’ said Jeherian bitterly. ‘We should be angry with our
servants for putting us to this, but I cannot find the will to care.’

‘But
what happened?’ Che asked them. ‘How did you do it? Such a ritual, brought to
bear so swiftly!’ Words of Achaeos recurred to her. ‘I
know
the Moths would never have attempted it.’

‘No,’
replied Elysiath, ‘but they, like most kinden, are brief and impatient. What
you saw was not the making of a ritual, but the breaking of one. It is very
simple.’

‘Not to
me, it’s not,’ Che insisted. ‘Please, you must tell me what you did.’

Elysiath
sighed, her shoulders slumping as though the very act of having to explain
herself to Che required more effort than she could countenance. ‘Little child,’
she said, ‘we have told you.’

‘Yet it
is important she understands,’ Jeherian put in, surprising Che. ‘We have told
you how, when we foresaw the changes these lands would suffer, we came to the
decision to absent ourselves from the harsh surface above, and to work our
great ritual from these our halls. Our ritual is for the restoration of the
land, the balance that was broken by that great earthquake and cataclysm so long
ago. For nine hundred years we have maintained it, and so we shall for
millennia to come, if need be, however long our work may take. For we foresaw
that the only way to break the drought was to hurry it to its ultimate ends,
spur it on to its worst excesses. Of a dry land we have made a desert, watered
only by the deep wells, and by the faithful Jamail.’

‘You
made
the desert?’ Che asked, astonished.

‘By our
will it has not rained in these lands for centuries past. It rains over the
Forest Alim, where the clouds break on the mountains, and thus the Jamail does
not run dry, but from over our city and dominion, we take the rain and hide it
from the world, for year after year.’

‘That’s
monstrous,’ Che protested in a small voice. She could not conceive of it.

‘Who may
presume to judge our actions? We who live longer, see further. Without us, the
land would dry and dry, over the ages. Instead we have brought that drought
before its time, and hold it while the rain gathers, forcing it to burn too
bright, to consume itself in its own heat. We have broken our ritual just to
save our idiot servants. We have set ourselves back two hundred and
seventy-five years of rain.’

Che
could not speak. The man smiled, arrogant beyond the dreams of emperors.

‘When we
shall unleash that hoarded rain, when we have finally gathered sufficient of
it, we shall transform the entire world. We shall strike a blow whereby we
shall reverse the cataclysm. The land shall be green again, and we shall rule
it directly once more.’

His
words washed over her, and she swayed under their impact. They were madness and
yet, revealed to her by the Masters of Khanaphes, she knew that they must be
the truth. Here was a magic a thousand years in the making, and accumulating
still, and of such power that the Moth-kinden themselves could not have dreamt
of it.

‘The
rain
has washed the Scorpions away?’ Thalric’s voice broke
in on them, an outsider intruding. ‘I understand nothing of this.’ The Masters’
expressions clearly told him:
Of course you don’t
.’
Tell me one thing,’ he went on, and they looked at him without interest as he
asked, ‘What will you and your people do when the Empire gets here?’

‘Your
Empire does not interest us,’ said Lirielle. ‘Mere children and their toys.’

‘But you
seem to have realized now what those toys can do,’ Thalric insisted. ‘A pack of
barbarians with a little artillery has nearly destroyed your city. The Empire—’

‘We can
see your Empire in your mind,’ Elysiath silenced him at once, ‘like a child’s
chalk drawing of power. They will come, you assume, and seek to command
Khanaphes, to make it part of your dominion.’ She stretched expansively. ‘It
would be tiresome to have to destroy your Empire, and distracting. I imagine,
therefore, that we will allow you to bring your governors and your soldiers,
and thus pretend that Khanaphes is yours.’ She smiled at that, at last a real
expression, sharp-edged and aimed directly at him. ‘But how long do you believe
your Empire will last?’

He
stared at her blankly and she continued, ‘I am nine times older than your
Empire, O savage, and I shall still be young when your kinden have become the
playthings of some other children. Your Empire will decay and die in due
course. Only we are eternal.’

Thalric
opened his mouth, but no words came out.

‘But
enough of such trifles,’ Elysiath said. ‘Let us instead talk of you.’ She was
looking at Che. In fact they were all looking at her.

‘Me?’
Che stared.

‘You who
have answered our summons,’ the woman said. ‘You who have been gifted, by
chance, with such an open power. You have been separated from the tawdry
heritage of your own people. You have been made special.’

‘I …’

‘Why did
you come here, really?’ Elysiath asked her.

‘I was
sent …’ She stuttered into silence, feeling the lie burn on her tongue. ‘I was
not happy in Collegium. I wanted to discover what has happened to me.’

‘And so
you heard our call,’ the Master told her. ‘And you followed your destiny all
the way to Khanaphes.’

‘But
what do you want? Why would you call me?’

‘You can
see how remiss our servants have been here, and yet you ask that?’ Elysiath
smiled. ‘The old blood that rules our city has grown thin and weak. We should
have anticipated that. They hear our commands but faintly. They are only a
shadow of their ancestors. We would appoint you as our priestess, instruct you
in the ways of our power. We would set you above our other servants, as one who
can hear us clearly, and is therefore most dear to us.’ The expression she
turned on Che was almost maternal. ‘You shall become First Minister of our
city.’

‘Che …’
she heard Thalric’s warning tone, but she shrugged him off.

‘Why?’
she asked. ‘Why would I?’ She expected them to recoil from the insolence of the
question, to inform her that serving them was reward enough in itself. She was
ready for that.

‘Because
you are a true scholar,’ said Elysiath, ‘one who seeks knowledge always. And
nowhere will you find such understanding as we have, we who have lived out, in
person, the ages that are your kind’s ancient history. We can give you knowledge
that even the Moths have forgotten, and that, even if they possessed it, they
would not share. We can tell you the names of all the kinden in the world. We
can reveal to you why it is that the Mantids of the Lowlands hate the Spiders
so, though even they have let themselves forget it. We can teach you where the
Art came from, and how to truly master it.’ Her fond look deepened. ‘But more
than that, little child, where else have you to go? You are in a world that has
no place for you, save here. You are no longer one of your people, no longer a
creature of your home. You are adrift in a land that cannot understand you. You
cannot even understand yourself. We shall explain everything. We shall give you
a place here. You shall be honoured, become the messenger of the Masters to
their servants.’

Che
tried to refuse them, but the words came reluctantly to her mind and she could
not force them out. It was their sympathy that struck her to the heart, the
understanding that they had promised. They knew what she had gone through, and
she felt tears in her eyes. Where else but here would she ever find real
acceptance? Better a servant of the Masters than a lonely outcast forever
moving on.

‘Yes,’
she said, her voice choking.

Elysiath’s
approval warmed her. ‘You know what you must do,’ she said, ‘to be ours, and to
enter into our grace.’ At her side Jeherian held out something small, and Che
stepped forward, reached up and took it. In her hand rested a curved blade of
sharpened copper: a razor.

Kneeling
down, she took a fistful of her hair, bringing the razor up to it. Of course
she knew what she must do, what the Khanaphir had done since time immemorial in
order to demonstrate their servitude.

‘Che!’
Thalric spoke urgently. ‘Don’t do this.’ She could sense the attention of the
Masters focused on her like a pressure guiding her hand. The blade, keener than
copper should rightly be, severed the first few strands.

‘Che,
you heard them,’ Thalric persisted. ‘They don’t care about you. They don’t care
about anyone in Khanaphes, or anyone in the world. Listen to me, Che, this is
insane. You can’t want to stay down here in the slime and the dark.’

She just
gazed at him, and already felt him as a memory, receding into her past. ‘I’m
sorry,’ she said, not sure who she was sorry for, or why.

‘They
killed your man Kadro, and that woman his assistant,’ Thalric went on. He was
fighting to get out the words as though the air itself was smothering him. ‘And
they don’t care. People like us, the Apt kinden, we’re just beasts to them,
nothing but insects.’

‘I
know,’ she replied sadly, ‘but what are we, if not that?’ She moved the razor
more decisively, severing a handful of her locks, took hold of some more.

‘Che, I
like your hair. Don’t cut it off,’ Thalric implored her.

She
looked for him again, finding that he was hard to focus on. Even his name
seemed strange in her mind.

‘Che,
please,’ he went on, ‘listen to me. You know that I care for you. Ever since we
first met, there was something about you.’ He laughed desperately. ‘I’ll admit
we got off to a poor start, but you can’t say I don’t have some claim on you.
Please, Che, stay with me.’

She
shook her head, astonished by his temerity. ‘With you?’ she said incredulously,
the memories drawn back to the surface of her mind whether she wanted them or
not. ‘Thalric, when the Masters tested me, do you know what they made me live
through? What they chose as the most terrible memory I must relive? It was the
interrogation room in Myna. That was the worst moment in my life, and they made
me watch you torturing me, over and over.’

‘What do
you think,’ he replied through gritted teeth, ‘they made
me
see?’

‘…What?’
She felt as though something deep within her had exploded, yet so far away that
she had only heard the hollow knock of it, that the main force of it was still
travelling towards her.

‘What do
you think was the moment in my life they took me back to, if not that? The one
moment of them all that I would take back if I could. Not your bastard sister
and her father destroying me in Helleron. Not killing my own mentor for some
Rekef General’s whim. Not my own kind turning on me outside Collegium. Not that
bitch Felise Mienn with her blade held at my throat, or being strung up in
Armour Square, ready for execution. Not my pain at all, but
yours
. They used their Art, or whatever, to make me hurt
you, in my head, and I could not endure it. It would have destroyed me if you
had not broken their hold.’

The
breath whooshed out of her, and she felt the razor slip from her hand. It left
a shallow cut on her thigh as it bounced from her leg, and then clacked onto
the oily floor.

‘Help
me,’ she whispered, and Thalric took her hand, pulled her up towards him and
held her tightly. She sensed Accius moving forward, until he stood beside
Thalric, and belatedly she realized that this was because the Masters were now
frowning at them.

She
hugged Thalric briefly and then turned to them, and their glowering
expressions. The awesome disappointment and disapproval she saw there nearly
dried up the words in her mouth. She finally got out, ‘I thank you for your
offer, your generous offer, but I am not the person you take me for. I am not
fit to serve you, surely. We must return to the city. I have friends there.’

Elysiath
regarded her sourly, almost petulantly, and Che wondered whether she was the
first person to ever refuse the Masters something they wanted. ‘Return?’ the
woman said drily. ‘Return to Khanaphes Above?’

‘We
must, all three of us,’ Che said, with more strength. ‘I’m sorry.’

The
Masters exchanged looks from the corners of their eyes. ‘Perhaps you are
right,’ Elysiath said. ‘You are not fit to serve us, if that is what you
believe.’

‘You
have heard entirely too much of our secret histories,’ added Lirielle, but
Elysiath actually interrupted and spoke over her: ‘These two with you, the
savages, were doomed from the moment they stepped into our resting place, but
you, you had a chance to become something greater than you are. Yet you have
turned your back on that chance. You were born amongst the slave races, and now
you shall die amongst them. Think only how you could have been more.’