The Scarab Path (42 page)

He
spotted the dark-and-light of an Imperial uniform up ahead. ‘Report!’ he
shouted again, shouldering forward through the gawping crowd. Once he got clear
of the scrum, the story was written plain ahead of him, although it took him a
moment to take it in.

Those
ravages time had begun in one of the ruined buildings of Gemrar, an instant’s
work had completed. What had previously been a sound enough shell of a
building, a small dome-roofed structure with three intact walls, was now a
broken eggshell, punched in upon itself, so flattened that very little of it
still stood stone upon stone. Hrathen went close enough to see, in the bluish
lamplight, what must have been at least three bodies lying torn apart within.
He glanced back along the line of devastation, into the mouth of the leadshotter,
still wisping smoke. Lieutenant Angved, the engineer, had arrived by now and,
true to his trade, was inspecting the weapon for damage, heedless of the
carnage nearby.

There
was a Scorpion standing near the device, Hrathen saw, who looked defiant, and
pleased with himself. That was all Hrathen needed to see to complete the
picture.

‘Where
is the Warlord?’ he asked.

‘At your
elbow, Of-the-Empire.’

He had
not sensed her, though she was standing very close. She wore only a long hide
hauberk, but she had her spear to hand and her helm on. He felt those red eyes
studying him coolly.

‘Do you
regret giving us these weapons now, Of-the-Empire?’ she asked him. He amused
her, Hrathen knew. He was Scorpion enough to touch on her world, but she found
the Empire and its ways tedious, pointless. When in her company, he almost felt
he agreed.

‘I am
only glad that I have given you some enemies to turn them on,’ he told her. ‘A
man has a right to use his strength. If his strength is in the mind, then so be
it.’ He gestured at the siege weapon and its victims. ‘This is no business of
mine.’

‘That he
took your weapon, does that not anger you, O possessive Empire?’ Beneath the
rim of the helm, she was smiling through her fangs.

‘It is
yours, given to you and your people. If he took it from you, then the theft is
yours to punish,’ Hrathen said, trying to match her grin. She put him off
balance, and he knew it was because his Scorpion side – his rapacious father’s
side – wanted her. She was no whore like the Empress, though, who ruled through
others’ weakness. Jakal was strong and would seek only strength. She would
yield herself to his strength, or else he would force her, or she would kill
him.
And now she drives me to the second of those, or
perhaps the third
.

‘So
glib,’ she berated him. ‘You change your colours, Of-the-Empire, but the
black-and yellow-stain lies ever underneath.’ She turned away suddenly, calling
out, ‘Genraki!’

The
Scorpion that Hrathen had picked as the culprit came forward. He stopped a safe
distance from Jakal, obviously not entirely sure of his own daring now.

‘You
have long warred with the Friends of Hierkan,’ Jakal observed.

Genraki
merely nodded, keeping a hand close to the hatchet on his belt.

‘Are the
Friends of Hierkan here to witness? Do they wish to match weapons with
Genraki?’

There
were enough glances cast at the staved-in house for Hrathen to suspect that the
man had done his work well.

Jakal
spread her arms, walking over to inspect the ruin of a ruin, stepping up on to
cracked and tumbled stones, heedless of the bloody jumble beneath. ‘See these
stones I stand on now?’ she addressed her people. ‘The walls of Khanaphes are
made only of such stones.’

They
went absolutely silent, all of the watching Scorpions, and Hrathen found his
heart catching in his chest at the sheer simplicity of it.
How
many challengers to her authority has she killed, how many conspiracies has she
rooted out, that she leads them so deftly?
He knew it was more than
that, more than just the same brute force that prevailed in the Dryclaw. The
Many of Nem had begun to recognize the true value of their leaders and their
elders. They followed Jakal through respect and belief in her, and not only
because she could put a spear through any one of them.

But she could
. The knowledge excited him, and he forced
his thoughts back to business.
I am Captain Hrathen of the
Imperial Slave Corps, of the Rekef
. His heritage, his despoiled blood,
surged within him, testing the bounds of his duty.

He found
Angved still checking out the leadshotter. ‘Report,’ he said.

‘No
damage that I can see.’

‘I don’t
mean the machine.’

The
engineer looked up at him, and there was a tightness around his eyes. ‘I don’t
know what to say, sir. It’s a four-man job to move and load this thing, yet
apparently he did it on his own.’

‘A good
student, then?’

‘Not my
best, I would have said.’ Angved shook his head. ‘I can’t believe they’re going
to let him get away with it.’

‘Look at
what he’s accomplished,’ Hrathen pointed out. ‘He’s ended a feud, he’s proved
himself strong and wily. Why should they punish Genraki when he’s exactly what
they want?’

Genraki
himself was returning to them, with a couple of others following in his wake.
‘I shall return the machine, Lieutenant,’ he said to Angved, with a surprising
deference. The engineer nodded, faking a smile, and the three Scorpion-kinden
made light work of wheeling the leadshotter away.

‘They
learn fast,’ Angved observed. ‘You were right on that, sir. They’re not
disciplined, and it’s difficult to get a decent speed up, because they always
want to watch the shots, see the damage and have a bit of a talk about it, but
they’re strong and they’re tough. Make good Auxillians, is my report.’

Hrathen
nodded, wondering again if that was why they were here –
and
if not, what then?
‘But you’re not comfortable with them,’ he finished.

‘Permission
to speak freely, sir?’

‘Go
ahead.’

‘Are
you
comfortable with them?’ Angved enquired. ‘I know it’s
the fashion to call people like these savages, but with
these
people it’s true. It’s not that they’re stupid, it’s just … they have no rules.
Shedding blood means nothing to them, either their own or anyone else’s. I
can’t even understand how they survive from generation to generation. How do
their children even live to full growth?’

‘You
want to know?’

‘I want
to understand, sir.’

‘When
she’s close to term, the mother leaves the camp, goes off and fends for herself
in the desert,’ Hrathen told him, remembering. ‘She stays there two, three
years – a Scorpion child learns fast, grows fast. By then it can walk, run,
fight with the other children. Then she comes back to the camp and gives the
child to the tribe, and it has no mother or father from that day. They hold
their children in common, and soon enough nobody recalls ancestry. No families,
Angved – nothing to stand between the individual and the group.’

‘That
sounds harsh, sir.’

‘Life
is
harsh. Life in the Dryclaw or the Nem is harsh. If a
child was linked to its mother, it would become a weapon against her. Their
best chance for survival is anonymity: it breeds strength, self-reliance.’
Hrathen smiled, and he saw Angved pale at the sight of those underslung tusks
in a Wasp-kinden face. ‘It breeds a callous disregard for others, but think how
much effort the Empire puts into teaching us something the Scorpions learn for
free.’

Angved
remained carefully silent after that.

Hrathen
chuckled. ‘Just teach them to destroy,’ he said. ‘Teach them to break walls
with the leadshotters, to break men with the crossbows. Then we will take them
to Khanaphes and simplify the maps – one less city in the world.’

‘Why,
though?’ Angved asked. ‘What’s the point? Why does the Empire want Khanaphes
gone?’

‘Think
like the Scorpions,’ Hrathen told him, not unkindly. ‘We do it because we can.’

Hrathen sought out Angved the next morning, finding him not at the
leadshotters, amidst the noise and the smoke and the curses, but hidden away
beneath a lean-to of chitin over wood. The engineer was cooking something, or
at least heating something in a small pan.

‘Not
deserting your post, is it?’ Hrathen asked, looming. Angved looked up at him,
unalarmed.

‘At the
moment we’re just working on speed, Captain, seeing if these brutes can manage
faster than a shot every twenty minutes. They already know what they’re doing,
but they lose focus so quickly.’ The engineer shrugged. ‘My lads out there can
shout at them without me needing to strain my throat, so I decided to do a
little investigating.’

‘Really?’
Hrathen knelt by him. ‘Beyond your brief, isn’t it?’

‘Engineers
and Slave Corps both, we think for ourselves,’ Angved replied, meeting
Hrathen’s small, yellow eyes. ‘This rock-oil of theirs, they use it just for
lighting, yes?’

‘What
else is there?’ Hrathen asked. The engineer smiled at that.

‘It’s a
slow-burning stable mineral oil, sir. That’s useful for engineering, and there
are pools of it all over, probably entire lakes of it underground. Would they
trade it, do you think? For more weapons?’

‘I don’t
see why not. Like you say, there’s no shortage of the stuff.’ Hrathen, no
artificer, shrugged the idea off. ‘Are they going to be ready?’

‘It’s up
to them, now. I’m keeping the artillery under my thumb, but the crossbows are
already out there – the warriors we taught are teaching the others, as best
they can. It’s not difficult, to point a crossbow. That’s why we like them.’

Hrathen
nodded, standing up straight. It had been like watching a slow-building
rockslide, seeing the Scorpions take to the crossbows. The weapons were old
Imperial Auxillian standard issue kit, second-hand and almost obsolete, but for
the Many of Nem they had been a revolution.

Jakal
had ordered her two advisers to examine them first. The old man, with his
fetishes and charms of cogs and gears, had climbed all over them, muttering to
himself, testing the action on the weapons, thrumming the strings with his
thumb-claw. He had reported that they were good, a worthy armament for the Host
of the Nem. Next, the young man, wearing a cloak of clattering chitin shards,
had walked round the wagons with his eyes closed, trailing one hand near them.
He had then announced that the land believed it was well time for the city of
Khanaphes to be broken open like an egg.

Scorpion-kinden
made bad archers, and Hrathen knew it well. It was their claws, arching over
forefinger and thumb, that got in the way, snagging or even severing a
bowstring as the arrow was loosed. Those few of the locals who still preferred
the bow had cut notches into their claws to hook the string with, but they were
poor shots even so. Most reverted to throwing axes, spears and javelins.

The big,
pincered hands of the Scorpion-kinden could manage a crossbow, though. They
were still slightly clumsy with it, but they were strong enough to re-cock
their weapons without the bracing and ratcheting the makers had intended. Once
the crossbow was loaded they could pull a trigger as well as anyone. Eyes that
had learned to foresee the flight of a spear could adjust to the swift shiver
of a crossbow quarrel. There were hundreds of them, now busy eating through the
stock of bolts that Hrathen had brought with him. Hundreds more were crafting
new quarrels, with more and more confidence, out of chitin and wood and
pillaged metal. There were not enough crossbows to go round, but about half the
Scorpions were unable to use them anyway, crippled by their Inapt heritage.
These would become the shock troops, the warriors of the traditional way, using
greatsword and halberd and double-handed axe. There was a new fighting nobility
emerging, though, and it brandished a crossbow.

We have brought a revolution
, Hrathen reflected, and was
slightly awed by the thought. The population of Gemrar had doubled in the last
tenday, was set to double again. Allied tribes had been summoned out of the
mid-desert, eager to have their part in the destruction of their age-old foe.

‘Why do
your people hate Khanaphes so?’ he had asked Jakal once.

‘Of-the-Empire,
you try so hard to be Of-the-Scorpion, but you will never succeed,’ she had
replied, with a cruel smile. ‘So we are told that our ancestors fought with
theirs when this land was yet green, when these broken cities still thrived. So
we are told that, of all the peoples in their Dominion, only we did not bow the
knee to their Masters. So we are told all of this. What other reason do we need
but that we can, and that they are there?’

‘Jakal
means to leave in a tenday,’ he told Angved now. ‘Enough time?’

‘We can
practise on the road, when we camp,’ the engineer said. ‘They’ll be rough but
they’ll be ready, as we say.’

‘Good.’
Hrathen passed his eyes over the camp, not quite looking and yet finding. He
saw the dark armour of a small knot of men and women. A stab of annoyance pricked
him.
We should do something about them sooner, rather than
later
, he thought.

They
were traders, he understood – the only traders who had dared to come into the
Nem to deal with the Scorpions, men and women in dark leathers or dark metal,
and with that defiant open gauntlet emblazoned on their tabards.

‘Since
when do you tolerate merchants?’ he had asked Jakal.

‘Since
they show us they are strong,’ she had replied. ‘Is Of-the-Empire jealous?’ He
knew she was leading him on, and part of him knew that he was letting her. She
was drawing a reaction from him, and it would eventually lead to a coupling or
a blood-letting. He was uncomfortably aware that the choice would be hers.