The Scarab Path (13 page)

Che did.
She started awake in the tent, shocked out of a deep sleep to utter wakefulness
by the urgent command. Her eyes were already penetrating the dark without her
summoning the Art. She sat up.

The
others lay crammed around her. Praeda Rakespear was a sloping, blanket-covered
form to one side, and the Solarnese teamster was curled up on the other, knees
drawn up almost to her chin.

Wake up!

‘I—’ She
stopped the words, realizing the voice was inside her, not in her ears. She
formed the name in her mind, as tentatively as touching a wound.
Achaeos?

Get up! Now!
The voice inside her was harsh, impatient.
She stumbled to her feet, shaking off her blankets like a landslide, colliding
with the tent pole. Her hand found her scabbarded sword by instinct.

The
voice was urgent.
Now!

I’m going mad
. She slung her grey cloak over her
nightshirt and blundered from the tent, hearing the Solarnese woman cursing
sleepily behind her.

Outside,
the world was immense. The sky reached cloudless, star-studded, from every
horizon. For a moment she could only stare.
Is this what he
wanted to show me?
She had not guessed at it, how vast the sky was, out
at the desert’s edge. It was well worth seeing.

Then:
Hammer and tongs but it’s cold!

‘Bella?’

She
jumped. The Solarnese, Trallo’s hired man, stood nearby, frowning at her. The
two of them stood in the middle of their triangle of tents, and beyond was the
big marquee of the Spider slaver and the pitches of the Dragonflies and the
Iron Glove. She stared about at it all, trying to read a secret that the scene
did not possess.

There
was a shimmer and a shadow in the air. The Solarnese man clearly could not see
it. It was there nonetheless.

‘Achaeos
…?’ she said, and she reached out, and who cared what anybody thought. ‘Please
…’

Draw your blade!
the voice snapped, and the weapon was in
her hands in the same instant. There was a startled shout from the Solarnese, a
whisper of steel as his own curved sword leapt out. The shout further drew
attention. A Dragonfly woman Che had not even noticed had abruptly stood up,
drawing back her bow. One of the Spider’s slave-guards appeared, running round
the edge of her tent with a crossbow at the ready.

Everyone
was staring at her.

‘…’ Her
voice was dry. There were words inside her, but she was fighting to keep them
down.

Say it
.

‘There’s
…’
I don’t know this. I can’t say this
. ‘There’s
about to be an attack.’

They
continued to stare at her. She saw that Trallo had put his head out of the tent
he shared with Manny and Berjek, and that one of the Vekken was also looking
out from their compact little billet.

‘There’s
going to be an attack,’ she said helplessly. ‘An attack. Going to be an attack.’

‘Woman
…?’Trallo said hoarsely. The Dragonfly woman let loose a shout, and abruptly
their tent started moving as her kinsfolk began to rouse themselves. Everyone
else was still staring at Che, but the Dragonflies were moving.
They’re Inapt. They’re Inapt and so they
…

No. They can see better in the dark
.

She
turned, using her Art to penetrate the night, seeing the dust they were
throwing, no matter how carefully they approached.

‘There!’
she shouted, a real shout now, born of true knowledge. ‘There! There! There!’

The camp
seemed to explode with life. It seemed that Che was now the only still point in
it, the hub of a spinning wheel. The two Vekken were kneeling before their
tent, each buckling the mail hauberk of the other with absolute concentration.
There were half-dressed Dragonflies spilling from their painted tent with
spears and bows. The Spider-kinden woman stepped fully out, wearing a
nightdress of silk and with a rapier in her hand. She snapped out single words,
and her guards were hurrying past her.
To safeguard her
slaves
, Che realized. Her slaves were the most valuable thing at the
oasis.

The
first of the Iron Glove men was out now, half-armoured, helmed. There was a
slender weapon in his hands that Che barely registered at the time.

The raiders
arrived, breaking into a run as they neared the camp. There was something
monstrous in front, a shape that Che’s eyes could not piece together, rushing
across the ground in a sudden scuttle, with something high above it. Behind it
were men, huge men. She saw their blades first, great bludgeoning swords and
massive axes that they held in hands jutting with claws. They wore patches of
dark armour: hide and metal. Their skins were white.

Scorpion-kinden
. For a moment she could only think of old
Hokiak in Myna, but these were the wild version, the real thing, Scorpion
raiders from the desert.

There
was a rattle of crossbows as the Spider’s guards loosed their shots. Che saw at
least one of the attackers go down, then the tide was on them. The vanguard
thing was revealed as a scorpion longer than a man, its sting poised like a
fencer’s blade.

Trallo
knelt beside her, loosing a bolt from one small crossbow, then taking up a
second. ‘Someone load for me!’ he snapped, and to Che’s surprise it was old
Berjek who took the slack weapon and wound the string back.

The huge
scorpion lunged forward, and the Spider’s guards scattered out of its way.
Arrows seemed to spring off its carapace as the Dragonflies loosed, but it just
shook itself once and lunged forward again. This time it caught a man in its
claws. Che heard bones snap and then the sting darted in delicately, and
stopped his heart.

A huge
man loomed in front of her, drawing back his axe for a swing. The weapon was as
long as she was tall and she stalled, sword loose in her hand, unable to
strike. A crossbow bolt flowered in the giant’s side, slowed by his armour, and
he turned on Trallo instead, bringing the axe down. The Flykinden abandoned his
bow and darted up and away, the axe-head following him with surprising
deftness. Che lunged.

She had
not meant to. Her blade skidded and then dug in and she looked up into that
furious white face, with its monstrous, tusked underbite. Another shortsword
raked shallowly across the man’s ribs and he roared, turning with axe raised
high. As it went up, the second Vekken rammed his own blade into the Scorpion’s
armpit all the way to the hilt with effortless strength, and then the two of
them were moving on, wordless in their teamwork.

The
great scorpion had torn a gash in the Spider’s tent, and her guards had taken
up spears to keep it back. Abruptly there was a series of harsh snapping sounds
and the monster recoiled, claws raised high in threat. Che turned to see the
three Iron Glove men calmly reloading, slipping finger-length bolts into the
chambers of their snapbows.

Snapbows?

There
was no time to wonder. Another Scorpion-kinden thundered past, another giant.
They were
all
at least seven feet tall for sure. She
stumbled back, seeing the huge man take a sweep with his greatsword, catching
one of the Dragonflies and almost cutting the woman in half. The Scorpion
roared in defiance, and then his head snapped back, the fletchings of an arrow
jutting from between his eyes.

Abruptly
there was nothing to fight, and Che was wandering amid a trampled camp with her
sword in her hands. The Scorpions and their monster had fallen back into the
desert. She spotted them regrouping, assuming themselves unseen, two hills
away.

A lot of
people were looking at her, with expressions she lacked the strength to
analyse. She sat down heavily, feeling drained.

Achaeos?
She said it in her head, but there was nothing
but the echo of her own thoughts.
Achaeos, thank you, but
can you not give me more? Thank you for saving us all, but … But I love you and
it is hard for me, with you dead and so close
.

She
found that she was crying, the tears streaking down her cheeks. Without warning
the cold struck her, making her shiver uncontrollably. The sword fell from her
hand. The two Vekken ambassadors were nearby, watching her doubtfully. She did
not care. It was all too much. Her sobs escaped whether she tried to stifle
them or not.

Trallo
draped a blanket round her. It was hours from dawn but nobody would be getting
any more sleep. There were five bodies to bury, and as many dead Scorpions to
move from near the water. She heard the Fly give a businesslike sigh, steeling
himself to his task.

There
was no answer within her. Achaeos – or his ghost or her madness – had done his
work and left without a word.
Oh, you have grown cold,
since you died
. She felt like screaming for him to either stay and let
her know he still loved her, or leave her for ever – and who cared if the
Scorpions killed her? It was hard, it was so hard.

She was a prisoner in her own lodgings.

There
were no guards. She was not bound. The door was not locked. Still, Petri Coggen
felt her confinement as keenly as if the manacle was around her wrist. She had
felt a sense of doom weighing on her since they had brought her back from the
Marsh Alcaia.

They had
given her servants, for the Khanaphir had been solicitous of her comfort to the
point of patronizing her. The foreign lady must have everything. The servants
cleaned her rooms and brought her food, and would have dressed and bathed her if
she had let them. They ignored her when she told them to leave her alone.
Shaven-headed Beetle men and women with fixed faces, they glided in and out of
her life like tidy ghosts.

They
made no attempt to stop her going out into the city. She had tried to escape
their attention, to get her letter out, but the servants had followed at a
respectful distance. She had tried running, but when she had stopped, wheezing
for breath, they had been there still, or others like them, standing patiently
by. There was no reproach in their faces, only polite concern for the stranger.
She had run until heat and exhaustion had brought her to her knees, but they
had been waiting there wherever she had run to, with slight smiles at her odd
behaviour.

As her
last resort, she had gone to the docks. Khanaphes traded all down the coast and
across the sea, so there were always ships.

The
first she had approached was a solid Khanaphir trawler. She had climbed halfway
up the gangplank, already reaching for her money, before she saw the expression
on the captain’s face. He
knew
her. He had been told
about her. Standing there at the rail, eyeing her with the polite disinterest
of his city, he informed her, without needing words, that there was no way she
was leaving the city on his ship.

So she
had then looked for foreign ships. Surely the sinister influence of the
Ministers could not be absolute. There would be ships out of distant ports, and
at this point she would take a berth for anywhere. Even the dubious hospitality
of the Spiderlands would be preferable.

She
found a Spider-kinden trader, all elegant swept lines. She looked around for
the captain, and saw her in conversation with a mild-looking Khanafir man. The
Spider glanced at Petri and gave a faint shake of her head. Petri stumbled
away, ran back down the quays. She did not care who stopped to watch the crazed
foreigner make an exhibition of herself.

There
was a broad-beamed cargo-hauler at the very end of the quays. Its crew was a
mongrel mixture, halfbreeds, Mantis-kinden, lean and sallow Grasshoppers. They
looked as disreputable as anyone Petri had ever seen. She rushed up to them,
noticing their hands drift instinctively for hilts and hafts.

‘Please,
I need passage out,’ she gasped. ‘I have money.’ She felt as though she was throwing
herself from the jaws of one monster into the pincers of another.

One of
the Grasshopper-kinden shouldered his way forward and crouched at the top of
the gangplank, elbows crooked over his bony knees. ‘Come up,’ he said. He had a
scar, jagged and twisted, down the side of his long face. In other
circumstances she would have been terrified of him.

She made
it up the gangplank, the villainous crew watching, narrow-eyed.

‘You
haven’t been in Khanaphes long,’ the Grasshopper captain observed.

‘Long enough.
Months now.’

He
laughed quietly, shook his head. ‘The blink of an eye. You have the city’s
interest, little helpless one. We have heard. There is no shipman who does not
know.’

She felt
a shudder go through her. ‘Please … I must leave.’

‘Anyone
who took you away from here, while you bear that mark, would never trade here
again, or ever be welcome. They carve their memories in stone here. They
never
forget. I could pass my ship on three times, and
neither she nor I could put in safely at this port again, nor my sons, nor
theirs.’

With a
wrenching despair she realized that the incongruous tone of this
vicious-looking creature was only sympathy.

‘They
will kill me,’ she whispered. ‘Please …’

‘They
might,’ he said. His shrug indicated that the incidence of death punctuated his
life as regularly as meals and sleeping. ‘Or they might
vanish
you. Or they might lose interest and let you go. But we cannot help you. You do
not have the money to compensate us for what we would lose.’

She left
his ship, with feet dragging. Her concerned retinue was already waiting.

At Porta Rabi, it felt like the edge of the world.

The
desert petered out into a scrub of sawgrass and thorns, and then the land fell
away completely in a tangle of vines. Stunted strees clung grimly to the cliff
edge, leaning at mad angles over the rocks far below. The cliffs were relieved
only the once, where the land slanted steeply down to a beach of broken stone.
It was there the intrepid Solarnese had built Porta Rabi. They had used the
pale grey stone of the cliffs, but the buildings were the same odd burlesque of
Spider styles, all pointed arches, tapering columns, grillwork screens, but all
looking slightly wrong. They had made a Solarno in miniature, a little stepped
crescent of buildings gathered about two long piers that went far enough into
the sea to allow big ships enough draught to moor there. Above, where the
cliffs took over, there was a reaching scaffold of wooden floors and
scaffolding, rooms and buildings suspended before the rockface, all of it
looking open-plan and half-built. Che identified this as Dragonfly-kinden work.
There was a sizeable presence of them here from Princep Exilla and, putting
aside their normal rivalries, the two kinden worked together to keep the port
open in this inhospitable corner of the world. Even so, Trallo warned them, the
streets were not safe after nightfall. The merchants who ran Porta Rabi retired
early to their well-guarded compounds, and everywhere else became lawless after
dark.