The Scarab Path (15 page)

They do things differently here
.

‘And
there we go,’ said Trallo.

Che
followed his gaze and caught her breath. The academics, too, were abruptly at
the rail, staring.

‘Khanaphes,
the majestic, the mysterious,’ said the showman, Trallo, as though he was
charging admission.

Ahead of
them, the river was flanked by squared pillars of stone four storeys high, vast
at the base and barely tapering as they reached up to support the sky. The
stone of the pillars was a dusty tan, while the statues set into their faces
gleamed white. They stood almost the entire height of the pillars, carved
seamlessly from marble, a man and a woman, barely clad and walking forward. The
sculptor had lavished infinite care on their colossal proportions, the man’s
body heavy and broad-waisted, the woman’s rounded breasts and hips, the flowing
cascade of long hair down both sets of shoulders. Their faces viewed the marsh
and the sea with cold beatitude. These were the countenances of a man and woman
who ruled everything they saw as far as the wave-stirred horizon and beyond.
Before that commanding, all-encompassing gaze the academics momentarily
quailed. Che felt a shiver go through her, witnessing such perfection in stone.
Those were beautiful faces, but they were appalling in their utter lack of
empathy. It was no failing of the sculptor, though: the hands that had shaped
them had carved and chipped to instil them with just such a coldness.

They
were certainly not Beetle-kinden. No trick of style could ever have transformed
them out of something so mundane. Che had never seen anyone or anything that
even approached them.

‘The
Estuarine Gate,’ Trallo announced, but she barely heard him. The blind stone
gaze seemed to follow the matchwood thing that was the
Lord
Janis
as it passed through the gulf between them and they saw Khanaphes
proper.

It was a
city built of stones – more so than any other place Che had seen. Houses raised
of tan masonry clustered thickly about both sides of the river, and beyond the
single-cell dwellings of the poor loomed the edifices of the wealthy. Avenues
flanked by pillars led off toward statue-adorned squares where great squatting
palaces faced one another, rising higher and higher, each surrounded by a
miniature city of smaller structures, and the gaps between them filled with
meaner dwellings and workshops.

‘Well,
rack me,’ Berjek Gripshod exclaimed softly. ‘Now look at that.’

The
Janis
pulled in skilfully at a dock near the gate, and the
crew tied up. With the gangplank down, Che led the way on to the wharves of
Khanaphes. Even the pier they were moored to was of stone.
How
many pairs of hands, how many years, to make all this?
And yet so little
of it looked recent. Time had laid its rounding hand on each surface and angle.

‘Look,’
said Berjek, and he sounded as though he was going to weep. Even the buildings
nearest to them, mere stone huts, were intricately carved. Some simply had
borders of angular, stylized images etched on to them, others bore whole panels
of complex, intricate, indecipherable work. Looking around, Che could not see a
single surface of stonework, even the pier beneath her sandals, that had not
somehow been illustrated.

‘We
should have brought more people,’ Berjek said hoarsely. This was hopeless. It
would take an army of scholars all their lives to record this. The city was its
own library.

Trallo
was meanwhile organizing the luggage, his two Solarnese hauling it down on to
the quayside. Che stepped aside from the academics, and the brooding Vekken,
and stared into the crowd. The docks were a continuous bustle, a dozen ships
unloading, the same number again preparing to cast off. There were men and
women of many different kinden there, together with a swarm of the ubiquitous
bald-headed Beetles. Her eyes had grown used, not so long since, to being wary
of crowds. Helleron, Solarno, Myna: the war had given her instincts that had
become stubborn guests.

As she
looked, so she found. The face leapt out at her, a moment’s eye contact across
the crowded docks, but that was not a face she was ever likely to forget. Not
five minutes after stepping from the ship, and her world was reverting to its
old faithless ways once again.

Thalric
.

The Black and Gold Path

The grand army of General Vargen had arrayed itself before the city of
Tyrshaan, black-and-yellow armour crossed with a sash of blue, the old badge of
the Kings of Tyrshaan that had not been seen during this last generation.
General Vargen, whose rank was self-given, and who was elsewhere known as just
another one of the traitor-governors, had decided to risk a field battle, not
trusting his forces to endure a siege. It was not necessarily a poor choice,
for Thalric had seen the siege train that the Imperial forces had brought with
them. Tyrshaan’s walls were neither high nor strong.

Vargen’s
men made a fierce spectacle at this distance, but Thalric had heard the scouts
and the spies report. There was a core of Wasp-kinden, mostly the garrisons of
Tyrshaan and neighbouring Shalk, that would fight to the death. Dying in battle
was preferable to dying in the fighting pit or at a public execution,
especially given how inventive the new Empress had become. The bulk of Vargen’s
force were Auxillians, though, who had less to gain from victory, less to lose
from defeat. Those solid blocks of armoured Tyrshaani Bee-kinden would see no
reason to throw themselves on to the pikes of the enemy on behalf of their
usurper lord. They now made dark squares against the tawny ground before the
city walls: halberdiers, crossbowmen and masses of the interlocking hexagonal
shields that the Tyrshaani favoured. The Bees were no match for the trained and
keen soldiers of the Empire, either singly or en masse. Their only battle
virtue was an implacability of spirit that Thalric suspected they would not be
deploying today.

Vargen
had placed a quartet of solid-looking automotives in the vanguard of his force,
but Tyrshaan had always been a backwater, and their boxy, six-legged design was
now twenty years old. By contrast, the punitive force had brought orthopters,
snapbows and mobile artillery.

‘I make
it five of theirs to four of ours,’ said a lieutenant next to him, peering
through a spyglass. ‘Not counting the Flies.’

‘Well,
who would?’ sniffed Colonel Pravoc, the Imperial commander. ‘So we outnumber
them four to five. Good.’ He gave Thalric one of his sickly smiles. Pravoc was
a lean man who looked as though he lived primarily off ambition and a joy in
the downfall of others. He had been chosen for this role because he was an able
battlefield commander, and because having a mere colonel sent to oppose him
would throw the self-made General Vargen into a rage. Altogether, Pravoc was a
man of few words and fewer compliments.

‘I trust
it all meets with your approval,’ he said, a flick of his fingers encompassing
the might of the Imperial army that was falling into place around them.

‘I’m not
here to approve,’ Thalric told him.

Pravoc’s
answering look said,
And why are you here?
but he
was too much concerned with his own future to say it. The presence here of the
Imperial Regent had inspired rather than shaken him. ‘They’ll be marching for
us soon, according to our spies.’

Thalric
shrugged. ‘I’ll leave you to your command, Colonel.’

He went
to look over the black and gold of Pravoc’s divisions: the usual array of light
airborne waiting behind shieldwalls of the medium infantry which were
supplemented, now, with snapbowmen. Those slender new weapons were about to
make a sorry mess of the Bee-kinden armour, Thalric decided. It was just as
well the Empire had suffered its crisis before the weapons had spread to the
provinces.

General
Vargen was not unique, of course. There had been a full score of provincial
governors, mostly in the East- and South-Empire, who had decided to strike out
on their own. A few had banded together to make little realms – Empirelets? –
Emporia? – of their own, but most had been stubbornly solitary. It had been the
succession that had provoked it, and Thalric was surprised it had not turned
out worse. Emperor Alvdan the Second had died with no legitimate children, nor
even a living bastard, having been so ruthless in dealing with potential
threats to his power that he had put into danger everything that his father and
grandfather had built. The rescuing hand, when it arrived, had been that of his
sister, now Empress Seda the First. That had not sat well with many, because in
the Empire men held power and women served. It was a tradition that went back
to when they had all been squabbling tribes stealing each other’s wives. There
had never been a woman soldier or merchant or chieftain, and certainly there
had never been a woman as ruler.

Seda had
done her groundwork, though, and her allies were formidable. In the end, the
central Empire including Capitas, Sonn and the neighbouring cities had bowed
the knee to her. The West-Empire was lost for the moment to rebellion among the
slave-races, and with it any dreams of conquering the lush expanses of the
Lowlands. That could wait, however. Men like Vargen could not.

Vargen,
like all his peers, had not believed that Seda’s rule would hold. He had staked
his future on her grip failing, on more and more turning against her. She was,
after all, only a woman.

Thalric
chuckled bitterly over that attitude. He, of all men, knew Seda, and how she
had grown up with a knife at her throat every minute of every day and night,
the only surviving relative of the paranoid Emperor Alvdan. It had taught her a
certain outlook: Seda had become a woman of iron and Thalric would not want to
cross her. If he had his time again, he would make sure he had nothing to do
with her. The offer she made him had seemed too good to be true. Only now, when
he was too close and had learned too much, did he understand how it was exactly
that. How many men envied him: Imperial Regent, most important man in the
Empire, and even sharer of the Empress’s bed? It meant nothing, however. It
meant that he was a mere figurehead, a man for the Empress to parade in front
of those who expected to see a man close to the seat of power. He had no power,
only an awful knowledge. He knew Seda now, when it was too late.

He was
here to oversee the extinction of the traitor Vargen and the return of another
piece of the Empire into the proper hands. He was here, as a sign of the
Empress’s favour, to inspire Pravoc and the rest, and to remind them that they
were fighting for the true Imperial bloodline.

The
thought made him twitch.

He was
also here because, lately, he had seized any opportunity to be out of the
presence of the Empress herself. He was a man in his middle years, a veteran of
the battlefield in his youth, a veteran of the games of the Rekef for two
decades and more. His skin bore the burns and scars of his history like medals.
He had survived where others had fallen. He had killed with his blade and his
sting and his bare hands, started and quelled rebellions, tortured women and
slain children, hunted and been hunted. He had done all of this and Seda was
still just a slip of a girl, barely of age, yet he feared her like nothing
else. His skin crawled at the thought of her.

He heard
a horn sound, way out on the plain, as Vargen’s host began its slow advance. He
saw the dust start to rise from hundreds of feet, as compact formations of
Beekinden started to trudge forward. To left and right, Vargen’s Wasps moved
out in loose order, ready to take to the air, and behind and around them was a
great mass of Flykinden from Shalk, Vargen’s other conquest. They were not
reckoned a dependable asset on a battlefield, Fly-kinden, but these wore
striped leather cuirasses and carried bows. Thalric suspected that Vargen was
depending on them to pin down the Imperial airborne until the crossbows of the
Bee-kinden could be brought to bear.

That
prompted a smile: Vargen’s tactics were sound, his politics less so. Thalric
had already seen the little figure of the Shalken ambassador skulking into
Pravoc’s tent, confirming that the Flies always knew where their best interests
lay. At a certain point in the battle they would vanish like last night’s bad
dream, leaving Vargen exposed on both flanks. Thalric had no doubt of their
commitment, just as he had no doubt that their abrupt disappearance would come
only when the battle turned against Vargen. Fly-kinden had an impeccable sense
of survival, and the skill was in knowing how to use it to one’s own advantage.

He next
heard the orthopters starting up their engines. Pravoc had only a dozen of
them, but they were all new-built Spearflights, which were swiftly becoming the
workhorses of the Imperial air force after their achievements over Solarno.

And didn’t we lose Solarno? And since when did we ever have an
‘air force’?
But progress was the watchword, now. Battles against men
like Vargen were small change in the pocket of history. Every strategist within
the Empire knew that one day they would be turning towards the Lowlands again,
looking for a more worthy adversary. The battle of Solarno had at least taught
them that mechanized air power was a solid part of their future.

The
fliers lifted off in an almost simultaneous leap, their pilots casting them low
over their own troops, and then reaching for height as they turned to approach
the enemy. There went a new breed of Wasp soldier: the warrior-artificer who
lived at speeds Thalric could barely imagine.

The
flying machines now banked over the insurrectionist army, and a little cloud of
the more optimistic enemy airborne rose to try and confront them. Thalric
barely heard the first explosive as it landed, saw only the plume of dust and
smoke arise over the army’s right flank. The steady, slogging Bee-kinden
advance faltered there as a hole was punched into one of their tightly packed
squads. The battle had started.