The Scarab Path (36 page)

She
stood back a pace, looking him up and down. That face, which a moment ago had
been as full of mystery as a stranger’s, had that familiar half-bewildered
expression that brought back long-ago days in the Great College.

‘I can’t
believe it,’ she said. ‘I can’t believe it’s you. Look at you!’ The sight of
him unleashed a whirl of memories. ‘I thought they must have killed you,’ she
continued. ‘I was sure they must have found you out. I never heard anything
more …’ A cold thought came to her. ‘You’re not …?’

‘With
the Empire? I am not,’ he said firmly. He was trying to smile at her, but a
lifetime of hiding his hurts and joys was making it hard for him. ‘And the man
who found out what I had done was no normal Imperial officer.’ He made an
awkward gesture at the table. ‘Eat, please. Will you eat with me?’

‘Of
course.’ She sat herself down hurriedly, hands moving rapidly to the food under
urgent directions from her stomach. She glanced back towards the two men who
had shepherded her into the room. ‘How did you go from the Empire to these Iron
Glove people anyway? Are you turned merchant now?’

As he
sat opposite her, a smile broke through at last. It made his face look
unfamiliar: a hard thing born from the years since they had left Collegium, not
something of the boy she had known at all. ‘Che, I
am
the Iron Glove,’ he replied.

She
frowned at him, bolted a mouthful of fish and said, ‘I don’t understand.’

‘A year
ago I fled the Empire with my … business partner. We came to settle in Chasme,
and started work. Now we’re the biggest artificing house around the Exalsee,
and expanding every day. The trading is secondary. It’s the research, the
manufacture, that’s the point.’

‘And you
sell … weapons?’ Che recalled.

‘We sell
war.’ From his expression, it was a reflexive answer, and perhaps one he would
not have given her if he had thought it through. ‘Weapons, armour, machinery,
with Exalsee innovation, Lowlander craft and Imperial methods. We’ve built it
up, Che –
I’ve
built it up – and we’ve only been in
Chasme for a year and a bit.’ His face was desperate for some validation from
her.

‘You
always did like your weapons,’ she said and, although that was not it, her fond
smile seemed to satisfy him. ‘And that’s why you’re in Khanaphes now?’

‘There’s
a market,’ he said, and she heard behind the statement things left unsaid.
He could not have come all this way just to meet me
. But
her memory snagged on that letter, the one Achaeos had found, in which all of
Totho’s soul had lain scraped bare.

‘I
suppose I was lucky that you came along, in the Alcaia.’ She said the words
lightly, but she watched, and saw the beat, the moment’s hesitation in his
reaction.
Or you were seeking me out, or you were watching
me …?
‘Hold on a moment.’ She paused, the fork halfway to her lips.
‘Where’s Trallo?’

‘What’s
Trallo?’

‘A
Fly-kinden. He was with me in the Alcaia …’ A sudden chill struck her.
Did they kill him? Had I abandoned him?
She had been so
concerned with her own surroundings, with this man from her past, she had not
wondered what had happened to Trallo.

‘He …’
She saw Totho frown. ‘He was yours?’

The
chill increased. ‘What did you …? Tell me you haven’t hurt him, please.’

‘No, not
hurt …’ His face remained without expression. ‘There was a Fly, but he fled,
when we took you from the Empire. I was sure he was on their side.’

She gave
that one a long pause, trying it from all angles, and finding that it would not
fit, no matter how she turned or forced it. ‘The Empire?’ she finally said, in
a small voice. ‘It was natives, Totho.’ She could not bring herself to mention
her foray into Profanity. ‘The people who attacked me were natives.’

‘Then
they must have been in the Empire’s pay,’ he insisted. ‘I took you from the
hands of the Empire. A Wasp – and not just any Wasp …’ She had held up a hand,
but he barrelled on, determined to convince her. ‘It was that man who had you
captive in Myna. Their Rekef man. I took you from him though. I rescued you.’

He
looked for approval, but she sank her face in her hands. She was suddenly
feeling ill. ‘Totho,’ she said quietly, ‘what have you done? Have you killed
him?’

‘The
Iron Glove trades with the Empire,’ Totho replied slowly, ‘and this Thalric is
their ambassador here. I merely took you from him … by force. I did not kill
him.’

She was
surprised at the relief she felt.
Thalric had been there,
in the tent:
the bright figure with hands of fire. She had been rescued
from her rescuer.
And how many people were following me,
and keeping track of me, when I went to commit this crime against the
Khanaphir?
How could she have missed so many spies and agents following
on her heels?

‘There’s
no reason for you to have known, but he worked for Stenwold during the war,’
she said. ‘It’s … complicated.’

‘He’s
the same man that enslaved you, tortured you,’ Totho argued stubbornly.

‘It’s
complicated,’ said Che again. ‘That’s all. I had better go and see just what
sort of a diplomatic mess has happened in my absence – whether they’re
searching the city for me.’ She shook her head, seeing his suddenly aggrieved
expression. ‘Or could you at least send someone to my embassy to let them know
I’m safe, and then I can finish dinner.’

He made
a signal, and one of his men went running from the hall. In that same moment
she felt uneasy with him. She could reconcile the face, the voice, but not the
man.
What has he become, after all this time?
In all
his designing and making, he had reinvented himself into this man of authority,
dark-armoured, close-faced, hard-edged.

‘It’s
good to see you again,’ she told him, but was not sure, looking at Totho, how
much she was still seeing of her old friend, or what had been brought in to
replace what she had once known.

‘So what happened to you?’ Marger asked, eyeing Thalric’s bruises.

‘Diplomatic
incident,’ Thalric replied shortly. He had stormed back into the embassay only
a few minutes ago, knowing that one of the Rekef would be with him as soon as
they could decide who best to send.

‘With
the Lowlanders?’

‘No,
with the locals. Tell me about the Iron Glove.’

Marger
took the two statements in, and made the connection without comment. ‘What’s to
say?’ Another in his long series of shrugs. ‘Trading cartel from the Exalsee,
weapons and armour, operating out of Chasme. They’ve done well for themselves
over the last year.’

Thalric
leant back in his chair with a disappointed sigh. ‘Come on, Marger, I knew that
much myself.’
Talk to other Rekef men, and it feels as
though I’m debriefing some enemy agent I’ve turned
. It was ludicrous,
considering his business, but he missed the trust and the certainty of honest
spywork.

Marger’s
expression offered nothing but wide-eyed sincerity. ‘What do you mean?’

Thalric
sighed. ‘You’re thinking of me as a courtier, Captain Marger. You’re thinking
of the Regent, some fop who’s never done a day’s work for the service. I didn’t
get my Major’s rank through family or favour. I earned it. I know full well
that if a group like the Iron Glove was muscling in on your area of operation,
you’d get briefed.’

For a
long time Marger kept his usual easy smile, no more than the puzzled junior
officer. Then it collapsed, and he gave a single hard-won nod. ‘Well then,
Major, we didn’t know they were here, but it seemed likely enough for me to
hear something. Nothing certain, mind, since they’re tight with their
information. They travel all over the Exalsee and beyond, in those helms and
that black armour, and they manufacture arms that are strong, cheap, top
quality. For special customers they offer more than that, new designs that have
the Imperial artificers in fits. The Exalsee is already ahead of us, in some
branches of artifice, and the Iron Glove is keeping ahead of them, too.’

Thalric
digested this. ‘And we trade with them? We should do.’

‘As of
recently, we do,’ Marger confirmed. ‘It’s difficult, though. We want their
schematics, their plans, but they’re only prepared to sell us the finished
articles. Reverse-engineering is always time-consuming, especially at the level
of complexity that the Iron Glove are working at. And there are … other
complications.’

‘Tell
me.’

Marger
shrugged again, but it was a shrug from the heart. ‘Like I said, they’re
secretive, and we don’t know for sure who’s running the cartel. Only … there
are rumours.’

Thalric
made an impatient gesture.

Marger
grimaced. ‘You must have heard of the Colonel-Auxillian? That mad halfbreed
artificer who captured Lans Stowa and Falme Dae and Tark? Official records have
him dead, along with the rest of the garrison at Szar, but … the rumours keep
coming back that it’s him …’

Thalric
was thinking hard now. The armoured man had got the blows in, but he had
lowered his guard in order to do it: he had let Thalric know who he was, and
his armour alone marked him as a man high in the Iron Glove hierarchy. Where
did Stenwold’s renegade artificer fit in, though? Where had he gone after
Helleron?

He wasn’t
at
Helleron
. The
recollection came suddenly, like a splash of cold water.
He
was the one that Scyla replaced, because the boy had run off to... Tark
.
Tark, where the Colonel-Auxillian Dariandrephos had been practising his
siegecraft.

‘Send to
the General,’ he told Marger, who looked suspicious at the instruction. ‘Get
some clerk to dig out names of the artificers who were assisting the
Colonel-Auxillian.’
Am I right?
He knew he was
right, but he had no evidence.
Drephos had survived or, if
he hadn’t, someone who worked with him did
.

Oh, my armoured friend, I shall have you yet – if I have to use
the Empire to beat you to death
. The thought brought a rush of
satisfaction, soothed both the bruises and his damaged pride.

Marger
was still looking at him. ‘Actually, Major …’

‘What?’

‘I’ll be
sending to the General as soon as I can get a messenger, but my report is
incomplete. I need your help to complete it.’

‘Of
course, just ask.’ In that moment, Thalric felt confident enough to be unassailable.

‘You
have been somewhat on your own recognizance,’ Marger said. ‘I understand that
you were sent here because of your familiarity with the Lowlanders in general,
and now it would seem that we extend that to certain individual Lowlanders that
are here. I need to know what your plan of action is, so that the General can
endorse it, and so that you and I won’t trip over each other.’

And there’s a good question, for which I have no answer
.
‘I am still gathering information,’ Thalric remarked.

‘You
seem to have established a rapport with the Collegiate ambassador,’ Marger
noted. ‘I can see the benefit of that. Do you intend to seduce her?’

The
question stopped Thalric dead, both in thought and action, leaving him looking
at Marger with a half-framed expression on his face. At the same time something
stirred inside him, that might have been anticipation, and the automatic
answer:
Why not?

‘You’re
direct, Captain,’ he said, expecting and receiving a shrug in return.

‘She
seems young for an ambassador,’ Marger said. ‘Inexperienced. It is easy enough
to keep track of the others, but she seems to appear and disappear almost at
random. If you were able to establish some kind of a hold on her, it would
serve us well.’

‘I’ll …
consider it,’ said Thalric, his throat unexpectedly dry. In his mind the face
that loomed before him was not Che’s but that of the Empress.
What word will wing its way back to Capitas now? When she draws
me back there eventually, what other treasons will I have committed?

Amnon arrived shortly after Che had left, which spared Totho the burden
of too much introspection. She had not quite warmed to him yet, but it had been
two years, and the circumstances of their last meeting had hardly been
conducive to fond memories. She had assumed he was dead, while he himself had
done his best, in that time, to discover where she was and what she was doing.
The resources of the Iron Glove stretched to a little spying, and Drephos had
tolerated his eccentricities.

The
Captain of the Royal Guard sauntered in with a broad smile. His sheer robust
energy made Totho feel tired.

‘So, we
are ready for my fitting then,’ the big man began, with an enthusiasm that was
almost childish.
It doesn’t matter how strange these
Khanaphir are, everyone loves a new toy
, thought Totho. Corcoran had
picked out the First Soldier as the man they should primarily impress, in order
to further the Glove’s influence in Khanaphes. He was loved by the people, high
up in the city hierarchy, and yet he was a hands-on commander always to be found
in the front rank. It made him an ideal customer.

‘My
people are unpacking the armour even now,’ Totho told him, once he had led
Amnon to a room they set aside for testing. There were weapons on the walls,
breastplates and helms displayed on armour trees. He imagined this man would
want to try out his new mail as soon as he had put it on.

‘I see
you’re wearing your own, still,’ Amnon observed. ‘Is it so light?’

Totho
could not suppress a slightly shamefaced smile. ‘It is new, so I’m wearing it
as much as possible to get used to it. It’s not the weight, so much, just the
way I need to move in it.’

Amnon
nodded approvingly. ‘Armour and mounts and women, you have to get used to them
all,’ he said. He started to say something else, but paused to rethink. In a
man normally so positive, the hesitation caught Totho’s attention.