The Scarab Path (37 page)

‘You are
one of these Lowlanders, are you not?’ the big man said eventually.

‘From
Collegium, although I’ve travelled since then,’ Totho told him. He felt the
time since he had left Collegium as a physical distance, a desert that he could
never recross.

‘Collegium,
excellent.’ Amnon made a show of examining some of the weapons on the wall.
‘Will you advise me, then, on a matter regarding Collegium?’ His accent gave
the familiar name an exotic sound.

‘If I
can.’

‘How is
it with the women there?’ Amnon said, still not looking at him directly.

‘The …?’
Totho let the sentence hang.
Do I want to know what he
means?

‘It is
like this.’ Amnon turned to him, and his big, amiable face wore a defensive
expression for once. ‘One of the Collegium delegation has caught my eye. In
fact, I find her quite the most beautiful woman there is.’ He said it quickly,
without fumbling the words in any way. ‘I know she is not wed, or intended, but
I have not spoken to her of my feelings yet. I am not sure how things are done
where she comes from.’

Totho
felt a sinking feeling. ‘Is it … the ambassador?’ he asked.
No more rivals
, he thought.
And
certainly not this man, this absurd specimen of physicality
. He tried to
imagine competing with Amnon, with all his smiles and prowess and position.

‘It is
the woman Rakespear,’ Amnon announced, and Totho felt a wash of relief. He had
only a vague idea of who Amnon meant, but it was not Che and that was all that
mattered.

‘In
Collegium, one normally speaks to her father or her guardian’ –
and that worked well for me, didn’t it?
– ‘but there is no
reason not to speak with her direct, or to offer her gifts. I think you’ll find
that Collegiate women are probably quite forward compared to what you’re used
to.’

‘Good,’
said Amnon, and he was about to say something more when Corcoran came in, not
with the armour but escorting another guest. Amnon straightened to attention
immediately, and Totho recognized the robed figure of the First Minister
standing there with his quiet smile.

‘My
lord,’ Totho bowed to him quickly, ‘we had not expected you, but you are
welcome, of course.’

‘Of
course,’ Ethmet replied, glancing from Totho to Amnon. ‘I had heard our First
Soldier was to receive some gift today. It is very kind of you, Honoured
Foreigner, and I would see it presented, if I may.’

‘We
would be happy,’ said Totho, aware of a feeling of discomfort from Amnon.
Is he breaking some rule of theirs?
But Corcoran had done
his groundwork, surely, and presenting gifts to high officials was every bit a
part of Khanaphir life. Ethmet’s face offered no clues.

They
brought the armour out just then, four of his men manhandling the table on
which it was laid. The mere empty shell of it, cast to Amnon’s proportions,
made Totho feel dwarfed.

‘This is
forged in what we call aviation steel, that the Solarnese developed for their
flying machines,’ he explained, as the Iron Glove men buckled the arming jacket
on Amnon and then began to piece the armour onto him. ‘It’s very light, and
still very strong, but they had never thought of using the material for armour
until we came along.’ The mail undershirt was already on, and Totho relished
Amnon’s surprise at how light it was. ‘The mail rings are drawn from silver-steel
wire, and they’ll bunch on impact to block an arrow or a sword.’ Totho walked
around, observing as his people attached the metal plates, watching Amnon
slowly disappear, becoming something huge and metallic. It was a glorious
transformation, in Totho’s eyes. ‘The plates themselves are machined into
flutes, which makes them as strong as much thicker metal, and which also helps
deflect an enemy’s weapon. Every surface a blade might impact on is curved or,
where those curves meet, is an angled line. That means that you have the
absolute maximum of protection against attacks from any angle. With the mail,
and the jack beneath, the only weak points are the groin and armpit, although
there is fine mail even there.’ When the helm was lowered onto Amnon’s head,
they had to stand on the table to do it.

For a
long moment there was silence. Totho watched Amnon making small movements,
feeling the way the metal slid over metal. He looked like some creation of
artifice, some colossal war-automaton. They had stripped from him all human
frailties.

Then,
‘No,’ said Ethmet softly.

Amnon’s
helm turned quickly to face him.

‘First
Minister?’ Totho asked, uncertainly.

‘We
cannot accept this gift,’ the old Khanaphir declared. There was some
expression, at last, on his face. He was shaken by what he had seen. ‘We had
thought it was mere armour. This is not armour as we understand it.’

Amnon
wrenched off the helm, looking aggrieved. ‘But, First Minister, I like this
armour. It is lighter than my battlemail. I have never worn anything like it.’

‘No,’
Ethmet said again, ‘we regret that Khanaphes cannot accept this.’

‘But,
First Minister …!’ Amnon began again, till Ethmet turned on him sharply, his
glance alone quelling any argument.

‘The
Masters would not approve,’ he proclaimed, and Amnon’s face sagged. The
Minister’s expression was still stern as he turned to Totho again. ‘Trade us
your arrows and your swords, your shields and such things as we approve of, but
you are henceforth warned, O Foreigner. There are limits, in this city, to what
may be done, and the Masters’ will may not be crossed.’

‘I don’t
understand,’ protested Totho.

‘I think
you do.’ The man facing him now was a stranger, stripped of all the mild
patience of the First Minister. There was no compromise at all in that face and
Totho saw that Amnon was visibly frightened.
He could snap
the old man in half with one hand
, but things didn’t work that way, it
would seem.
What does this remind me of, that I have seen
before? Mantis and Moth, that is what it reminds me of. The strong whipped into
submission by the weak
.

As they
stripped the armour from Amnon, his expression remained resentful but cowed.
Whatever power Ethmet held over him, it was something that the First Soldier
would not provoke at any cost.
Who exactly are these
Masters of Khanaphir?
Totho wondered. A fiction, Corcoran had assumed –
some invention of the Ministers, to ensure their continuing power. Totho
himself had not been sure, until now.
Nothing but such a
deception could allow this old man to get away with it
.

‘I had
thought that the Honoured Foreigner might come on my hunt,’ Amnon muttered,
almost too quiet to be heard.

‘It is
not appropriate,’ Ethmet replied, as though Totho was not there. ‘Your hunt is
for dignitaries, not for merchants.’

The two
of them departed after that, the old man shepherding the huge warrior out of
the Iron Glove factora, leaving Totho quizzing Corcoran futilely in an attempt
to understand what it had all been about.

The boat cut through the water at a surprising pace, its shallow draught
moving cleanly and with almost no wake. Che huddled inside her cloak and felt
miserable.

‘I don’t
see why I have to join this circus,’ she complained. Her last few days had been
hectic – the Fir was still giving her occasional stabs of queasiness and she
had not come to terms with meeting Totho either – so the last thing she wanted
was to be dragged from her bed to go on some hunting expedition.

‘It’s in
your honour,’ Manny explained airily. ‘Or perhaps our honour.’

‘Berjek
didn’t have to come along.’

‘Master
Gripshod isn’t the ambassador.’

Che
shook herself irritably. The locals had come to fetch them two hours before
dawn, which had been a surprise to everyone except Mannerly Gorget. Manny
himself had been downstairs and ready, drinking hot spiked tea, having
neglected to tell anyone else of the arrangements he had made. It had meant a
bungled rush for Che and Praeda to get dressed, and then be bustled down to the
docks. They had reached the river to see the first bare streaks of dawn
kindling in the eastern sky.

The boat
that awaited them there was not what Che had expected. For a start it had no
mast, and it seemed very small. It was a long, slender craft that rocked
alarmingly when Manny transferred his bulk on to it, little more than an
oversized canoe. At both prow and stern the curving shape tapered and rose into
a stumpy carving of something that Che could not identify.

There
were two boat crew, standing fore and aft, and although they must already have
been waiting an hour they did not show it. Che, cowled and half-asleep, did not
get a proper look at them until they had cast off and were under way, each
standing upright to paddle with great strong strokes, alternating left and
right. Then, belatedly, she realized that they were not Khanaphir. They were
slender, with silver-grey skins, and though they had shaved heads and simple
tunics like Khanaphir servants, Che recognized their angular features instantly.

‘Mantis-kinden?’
she exclaimed, blinking herself wider awake.

‘They
call them the Marsh People,’ Praeda informed her. ‘They seem to be attached
somehow to the city, under its control, though the relationship between them
and our hosts seems complex. We’re going out into the delta now, you see. It’s
their place.’ She spoke distractedly, something else clearly on her mind.

They had
just passed between the great pillars of the Estuarine Gate, and Che carefully
did not look back at the morass of cloth that was the Marsh Alcaia. ‘I didn’t
realize the Khanaphir had subject peoples,’ she said. ‘The city’s not exactly
cosmopolitan.’

‘And
more than just the Marsh-dwellers,’ Praeda confirmed, ‘but they keep to their
places. I’ve been asking to go upriver, to see some of the other settlements.
The Dominion of Khanaphes has at least four disparate kinden within it, I
believe.’

‘What
keeps them in line?’ Che said softly, almost to herself. She looked up again at
the nearest Marsh-dweller, silhouetted against the lightening sky. The Mantis
woman did not glance down, but kept paddling strongly, stroke after stroke.
What do they get out of this servitude? Who can manage to hold
Mantis-kinden in thrall?

The Moths could – Achaeos’s people
. The thought came
automatically, and she knew she was touching the secret again, hearing the
pulse of Khanaphes’s hidden heart. The Moths were a sorcerous, Inapt race,
whereas the Khanaphir were not … or at least that was the face they showed to
the world.

The
river beyond the gates was swathed in mist: white curtains of it rose from the
waters, cloaking the banks and muffling the deep ratcheting of the crickets and
the boom of a distant cicada. Abruptly they were within it, and the world had
been left behind, only the pale and ragged sheets of the mist itself coursing
over and around them.

‘We’re
not just going out alone are we?’ Che whispered. ‘Aren’t there supposed to be
more of us?’

‘They’ll
be waiting for us further out on the river,’ said Manny, with slightly hollow
confidence.

‘Do we
have any idea what we’re supposed to be hunting?’ asked Praeda. Even she
sounded slightly nervous.

‘Fishing,’
Manny said dismissively. ‘After all this, it’s only fishing. So I intend to get
a decent look at the local fauna while everyone is fooling about with nets and
things.’

There
was a slight sound from the forward Mantis, which might have indicated humour.
Che looked up abruptly to see a definite smile being fought off the woman’s
face. Her stomach sank, knowing that Manny’s research had not been as thorough
as he thought.

Something
loomed ahead in the clearing mist, and Che made out a greater boat, a broad
barge that was ten times as long as their little punt, equipped with a bare
mast and a canopy to keep off the sun that would soon be burning the mist away.
Che saw several robed figures standing at the rail, watching them with polite
interest. She recognized Ethmet and a few of the other Ministers, obviously
come to watch the sport.

‘Why
aren’t I on that boat?’ she asked.

‘Ah,
well,’ said Manny, in a tone that admitted guilt even while he was choosing his
words. ‘We were given the choice, of course, but I reckoned we’d see nothing
from up there.’

‘Manny,
are we …
participating
in this hunt?’ Praeda asked
him.

‘Well,
not so much – not unless you wanted to. I just wanted to make sure we were
close enough to the water to see what was going on, get a decent look at the
wildlife.’

There
were other boats now skimming along the side of the barge. Che saw that they
were tiny, barely five feet long and with a single Mantis-kinden poling or
paddling them, poised with impossible balance as they scudded across the river.
Those craft were not of wood, but merely bundled reeds, and where the bunched
reeds were lashed together, at front and rear, they formed the original of the
wooden carving that her own boat was capped with. She turned to point this out
to Praeda, but the woman was already bent over the boards of their own craft,
examining its construction.

‘Fascinating,’
she said finally. ‘You realize there are no nails in this boat at all?’

‘Don’t
be foolish,’ Manny sneered. ‘What’s holding it together then?’ He shifted his
place and the craft rocked alarmingly. The Mantis crew accommodated the
movement with a slight shift of balance, as though it had all been rehearsed
between them and Manny the previous day.

‘Rope,’
Praeda revealed. ‘Just rope, passed round and through and round again. It must
shrink in the water, to hold everything together. But it’s perfect Inapt
boatbuilding. The techniques must be centuries old.’