The Scarab Path (20 page)

‘Oh, I
was on the good ship Maxin a while previously. But then a high-up operation
went sour and I judged it a good time to vanish. And now it appears I didn’t
vanish well enough.’

‘With
all the changes at the capital, they haven’t even started cleaning house
properly,’ Thalric reassured him. ‘Still, it’s only a matter of time. I hear
Solarno is nice, this time of year. Perhaps you’re due for a holiday, assuming
they don’t hear about you shortly.’

Another
sigh. ‘What do you want, Thalric?’

‘Information.
There was an attempt on my life in Tyrshaan. What was the follow up?’

‘They
strung up three of Governor Vargen’s men within days. Case closed.’

Thalric
stifled a chuckle. ‘And after that?’

‘There’s
a very definite kind of … silence from that direction.’

Thalric
nodded, satisfied. It meant that General Brugan had matters properly in hand.
After public executions that would reassure the real wrongdoers, the Rekef
would start their own covert investigation. It was a way of doing things he had
used himself often enough.

‘Anything
else?’ he asked, as if still talking to the racking. ‘Don’t hold out on me,
now.’

‘Everything’s
still upside down here in the South-Empire,’ te Berro complained. ‘Reliable
news is hard to come by. They’re still purging Tyrshaan.’

‘Who
hates me that much, te Berro?’

The Fly
made an amused noise. ‘Grief, man, who doesn’t? They hate the Empress? They
hate you. They worked for General Reiner? They hate you. They’re just loyal
Imperial citizens who remember too much about the war …’

‘I get
the message.’ Thalric gritted his teeth, hearing again the truth that Osgan had
already given him.
I am now a foreigner in my own country
.

‘Well,
we make good messengers.’ The Fly appeared at Thalric’s elbow and started
filing scrolls with care. ‘Not that I’ve got anything against reunions, but
you’re a dangerous man to be around. What happens now?’

The
image came to Thalric of a rooftop garden in Myna, of te Berro saving his life
with a well-placed arrow. ‘I go south and I advise you to get yourself outside
the Empire’s borders while they change the guard. Maybe, when the next big war
looms, they’ll look to their old agents, especially those who have been making
a life for themselves meanwhile in Solarno or the Lowlands. Until then, I’d
keep my head well down, if I were you.’

Still
not looking at him, te Berro nodded. ‘A holiday on the Exalsee?’ he mused. ‘I
think I’ve earned it.’

They were winched down the face of the Shalk quarry among descending
bundles of mining supplies and a barrel of firepowder charges. The Empire’s
slaves crawled across the scaffolded rock-face, cutting and measuring, hacking
and breaking. There was a scattering of Fly-kinden artificers there for the
technical work but the rest were imported labour – Flies were physically and
temperamentally unsuited to such hard toil. Instead, Shalk had inherited
hundreds of the Empire’s most robust. There were Ant-kinden and Beetles,
prisoners from Szar and Myna, and everywhere the vast, lumbering shapes of the
Mole Crickets. Almost half the adult population of Least Delve had been herded
here after the Empire had taken the place twenty years ago. They were not a
numerous people but their skill with stone was such that they were ruthlessly
put under the whip wherever they were found. Back home at the Delve, their
families – especially the children who lacked the Art to simply slip away into
the earth – were closely held as strict surety for their parents’ continued
industry.

The air
was so thick with dust that Thalric’s party was forced to breathe through
cloth. They observed the quarry’s vertiginous workings through goggles that had
to be cleaned and cleaned again to stop them silting over, and the air was
painfully dry. Work in mines and quarries was the Empire’s rod for its worst
offenders, the final destination of those whose luck had entirely expired.
Here, sharing the forced labour of the Mole Crickets, were the deserters, the
prisoners of war, the traitors whose physical strength would now serve the
Empire they had betrayed until it gave out on them and they died.

Thalric,
surveying all this as their lift jerked and shuddered its way downwards,
thought,
I, too, could have been here, so easily
.
Certainly there were enough other Wasp-kinden toiling at the cliff face.

At the
foot of the descent there was the pit, where the quarry had been extended
further into the earth. The entire cliff face above was riddled with
blast-holes and mineshafts. There had been a web of gold here once, long since
exhausted, but now they had found rich seams of iron. Overlooking the quarry
itself stood a squat, brooding ziggurat that housed more of the Shalk garrison,
with the workers’ pitiful huts corralled all around it.

Marger
had been conscientious in his arrangements. There was a Slave Corps expedition
setting out that was already waiting for them before the garrison. They would
travel along the line of the ridge, stopping at each spring and waterhole to
trade with the desert Scorpions, until they reached the river and the green
edge of Forest Alim. There the slavers and Thalric’s expedition would part company.

Thalric
found surprisingly little curiosity in himself about his destination or his
journey, even about the Lowlanders he was heading off to spy on.
All that matters is that I’m moving further away
. He felt
the Empress as a constant pressure in the back of his mind, but he was now
putting the miles between them, and there must come a point where her presence
would fade.

You will come back to me
, she had said. He shuddered,
successfully hiding it in the rocking motion as the crude lift touched down.
Marger and his people unloaded their supplies, and Thalric automatically
shouldered a crate himself, without even thinking of his elevated position.
When he realized, halfway across the quarry-pit and into the shadow of the
garrison, he smiled to himself.
O Regent, see how I escape
you
.

The river Jamail was the child of the slanting sheets of rain that fell
daily against the Morgen Range, the clouds emptying themselves over the dense
forest and denying the arid Nem water and life. From a hundred channels deep
inside the forest, coalescing from a forest floor that in the wettest seasons
was actually submerged, arose the snaking Jamail that began its long, looping
progress south, out of the woodland, cutting its course through the dry lands
and bringing fragile abundance to those who claimed its banks. From Alim, the
logging town up against the forest’s petering edge, all the way downriver to
the marsh delta, extended the Dominion of Khanaphes, as it had done since time
immemorial.

Thalric
had expected something rough from Alim. Researches had told him that, as the
furthest-flung outpost of Khanaphir territory, it served as nothing more than a
port for forest timber. He had expected only a collection of wooden huts and a
pier, and was therefore surprised.

Forest
Alim was dominated by what he first assumed was a fortress, but then revised as
a fortified palace. It was ancient, partly overgrown by the forest’s
resurgence, looming over the waters from the river’s far side. Beyond the wall,
as the slavers approached, he caught occasional glimpses of colonnades and
ornamented rooftops. A stone pier jutted into the young river, dominated by a
great, broad barge half loaded with timber, while half a dozen smaller vessels
huddled in its lee.

The
slavers were not interested in this place: it was simply the point where they
would turn around and head back to Shalk. As Thalric’s band approached
carefully, he noticed a little patchwork of fields on the near side of the
river, divided and subdivided by irrigation dykes excavated outward from the
river itself. The men and women working in the fields were solid, bald-headed
Beetle-kinden and paid them no notice whatsoever. In the face of their stoic
labouring, which seemed to admit nothing of time or progress, Thalric felt his
mission, the entire Empire, being subtly dismissed.
You are
not important to us
, they were saying.
We shall work
here and you shall pass, and we shall continue on
.

Outside
the walled palace, which Thalric guessed would house the garrison and
administration from distant Khanaphes, Forest Alim consisted of a cluster of
warehouses and a sawmill. Even these buildings were stone-walled, however,
converted to their present purpose from whatever ancient rites they had been
built for. Thalric had taken a quick look into the sawmill, where he watched
men slicing trees into planks by hand, working with huge two-man saws, or with
foot-powered circular blades. By Imperial standards it was laughable, but they
worked fast and with no sign of tiring.

Marger,
and the two Wasps in his team, had gone to enquire about securing passage
downriver, and Thalric was left hoping that he would find something faster than
that ponderous barge. Aside from a scattering of fishing boats, the only vessel
of any stature was a narrow, open craft, piled with cushions at one end to seat
a privileged passenger, and equipped with eight oars and a single mast. It had
been left unattended, as though the simple status of its owner was sufficient
to see off any unwanted attention. Thalric was even considering whether it
might be worth making off with, if nothing else presented itself.

‘You
know, for a logging town, they don’t seem to fell many trees,’ observed the
Beetle-kinden Rekef man, who had been staring into the forest for some time.
Their seat near the quay gave them a good view of the darkness between the tree
trunks.

Thalric
glanced at him curiously and the prompt died on his lips as he saw it – so
obvious that it had escaped notice. ‘No stumps,’ he concurred. ‘No cut trees at
all. Not the sound of an axe, nothing beyond the sawmill.’

The
Beetle nodded. His name was Corolly Vastern and he was old enough to have been
a veteran before the Twelve-year War. He was strong, though, with his kind’s
long-reaching endurance. His face settled into a slight smile, calculated from
long practice to dispel any Wasp ire towards an inferior race. ‘I’ve been
watching for a while, and all the wood comes from deeper in. These Beetles’ve
got it worked out so they don’t even need to cut their own.’

There
was a steady trickle of outsiders heading into Alim. They were not Khanaphir
but men and women with skin the rich colour of teak. Some kind of long-limbed,
loping Ant-kinden, they appeared bearing wood. Chains of them bore whole trees
aloft out of the forest, from who knew what distance, or floated them down the
river towards the sawmill. Thalric saw Khanaphir scribes carefully noting the
arrival of each group on their scrolls. No money changed hands and he wondered
if these forest Ants were slaves of Khanaphes in some way. It occurred to him
belatedly – and it oddly disturbed him – that he had no idea at all what
precise kinden these forest-dwellers were. They were at the borders of the
Empire, but the forest of the Alim was an utter unknown. Imperial expansion had
been so rapid that their own scouts had barely been able to keep track of it.

Osgan,
lying back, began to snore softly, though for once it was not due to drink – or
not entirely. Thalric had been keeping an eye on him, and the man had barely
taken a sip at his hip-flask. It was the unaccustomed pace that had worn him
out.

‘Major
Thalric …’ Corolly began, in a subtly different tone.

‘I
know,’ Thalric interrupted. ‘The Khanaphir sitting over there, he’s been
watching us for almost twenty minutes now. Maybe it’s just that the locals are
curious.’

‘Don’t
know about that,’ Corolly muttered. ‘In fact, that’s the one thing they aren’t.
Six men of the Empire turn up on their doorstep, and nobody even turns a head
to look. Except him.’

‘Well,
then,’ said Thalric, ‘let’s force the matter, shall we? I’ll go and ask some
directions of a local.’

‘Directions?’
the Beetle said, a tilt of his head indicating that the only meaningful
directions here were up the river or down.

‘Something
similar.’ Thalric stood up, casting his eyes over the quay again. They were
loading the barge with more planks, teams of Khanaphir labourers sweating and
hauling as they sang a low, rhythmic tune with words he could not follow. He
sauntered over towards the watcher, expecting the man to suddenly find urgent
business elsewhere. Instead he stood his ground, so Thalric had a chance to
examine him properly. He was not young, although these Khanaphir were difficult
to age, what with their bald scalps and dark, sun-creased faces. He wore a
white robe that fell from one shoulder, leaving half of his chest bare. Thalric
noted a respectable quantity of gold: rings, amulets, pendants, even gold
tassels on his robes. At Thalric’s approach, he only nodded politely.

‘Excuse
me,’ Thalric said. ‘I don’t suppose you know who owns that boat over there?’

The man
smiled at him as if he had been handed a compliment. ‘Of course I do, Honoured
Foreigner, for it is mine.’

Caught
off balance, Thalric blinked. ‘Then you are …’

‘O
stranger, I have been waiting here for you to ask me to carry you to Khanaphes.
If your need is so great, there was no need to be reticent.’

‘How did
you know?’ Thalric asked, through gritted teeth. His agent’s senses were
abruptly alert, feeling great wheels moving invisibly around him. The spy in
him was compromised, his mission open knowledge.
Escape.
Fall back
. Except there was no falling back here, because the mission
had not even started.

The old
man’s smile remained the same faintly puzzled piece of politeness as before, as
if Thalric’s tension had passed him by unremarked. ‘Where else would a party of
foreigners of such distinction wish to go?’ he asked. Trying to read the man’s
face was exactly like trying to read a good spy, a spy who might or might not
be working on the right side.