The Scarab Path (57 page)

Penthet
could fly, not strongly but enough. The beetles could manage a brief hop: a
frantic, buzzing barrelling through the air. It would have to suffice.

The
locust launched itself into the air, wings spreading into furious motion right
behind him, battering Amnon with their force. The beetles lifted more slowly,
clawing for height. One faltered, the bolts finding it an easy target, piercing
its underbelly in a dozen places and bringing it down. The other one took three
bolts but stayed in the air, in a single strained burst of effort that took it
down behind the Khanaphir lines. Amnon felt the shuddering impact as another
quarrel took Penthet in the abdomen.

Amnon’s
officers had already begun the retreat. With what discipline was left to them,
the Khanaphir forces were falling back. In places it was already a rout, but
the centre – the Royal Guard itself – was holding the Scorpions at bay, selling
their own lives at a ruinous cost to the attackers.

Behind
them, on the approach to the river Jamail, there lay farms and tributary
villages, herders’ hovels, dozens of little homes that had trusted to
Khanaphes’s protection. The army retreated through them at the best pace it
could, and the Scorpions, who might have harried them right up to the very
walls of the city, fell away to seize on this immediate chance to loot.

So it
was that the remnants of the army of Khanaphes regained its city. Half of the
men and women who had marched out that morning never came home.

Jakal came to him at last, that same night, after the host of Nem had
made its camp amongst the burned-out farmhouses, the ruined fields. When the
last prisoners had finally been tired of and slain or packed off for slaves,
when the bloodlust of the battle had simmered into an anticipation of the
morrow, she came to him, at last, naked save for a belt where a long dagger was
sheathed.

In the
gloom of his tent, by two guttering oil lamps, he could see her well enough.
The bluish light tinted her pale skin with an undersea glow. She was lean and
muscled, her breasts small, little of the feminine about her. Hrathen was more
used to slave women, Wasps or other kinden of the Empire. Jakal’s jaw jutted
with narrow fangs, her hands bore claws curving over thumb and forefinger.

Gazing
on her, he felt such a surge of arousal as he had never known. She was the
Warlord of the Many of Nem, on whose word the horde of Scorpion-kinden fought
and died. She had marked him out from the start: a constant teasing, backed
with steel, that had found all the gaps in his Rekef facade. Her eyes still
glinted with amusement at the victories she had won in her own personal
campaign.

‘Do you
not trust me, yet?’ he asked, looking at the dagger. She knelt beside him,
pressed one hand to his broad and hairless chest, pushing him back on to his
bedroll.

‘I will
never trust you, Of-the-Empire,’ she replied, ‘but this is our way. We are a
fierce people, after all, and couplings turn into killings sometimes. Claws,
daggers … perhaps I should take one of your crossbows into bed with me, to mark
today’s conquest.’

He had
reached for his own sword-belt, but she pounced on his arm, pinning his wrist
with her claws, gripping hard enough to draw blood.

‘What
need have you of steel?’ she demanded. ‘I know you are never unarmed,
Of-the-Empire, for your Art lives in your hands – the Art of both your kin.’
She drew his hand to her mouth, biting at it gently, the rank of her fangs
barely denting the skin. He felt her tongue lick his palm, as though exploring
where his Art came from. He could feel his palms warm with the sheer excitement
of it. She released his hand and laughed at him delightedly.

She is ready to kill me
, he thought, but that was no
revelation. She was equally ready to kill him at any time, for any reason. It
was how they lived, the Scorpion-kinden, and it meant he belonged.

She was
upon him in an instant and they wrestled briefly. He might have been the
stronger by some small margin, but she fought with more fire – the Warlord of
the Nem demanding nothing less than a complete surrender, pinning him down
beneath her and clasping him between her claws.

Her eyes
held his, and he thought:
Claws first, and then sting.
Always the way of it
. His death was now in the forefront of her mind,
being contemplated, and that did nothing but inflame him more.

She
thrust herself down on to him, and he was more than ready to enter her. Locked
together, still grappling, his hands warm against her cool skin, in that moment
he abandoned the Empire, all the games and rules and weaknesses.

Later,
separated, they lay watching each other, as the watches of the night turned
towards morning. Scorpion-kinden did not slumber in one another’s arms. Jakal
had fallen back out of arm’s reach, perhaps close enough still that the claws
of her hands could scrape against those of his.

‘Let me
in,’ he said, barely more than a whisper. ‘What is it that I cannot understand
of your people? I want to be part of your world.’

‘Have I
not let you in, this very night?’ she asked him, amused.

‘I have
worked with your kinden for years, in the Dryclaw,’ he told her, feeling an
urgency about it. ‘You are not like them: they have been corrupted by the
Spiders, by the Empire. How is it you have not?’

‘They
forget their true enemies. They forget their past,’ she explained, with a
one-shouldered shrug. ‘They tell no histories, they keep no lore. We hold firm
to our histories here. Perhaps you had not thought of us as scholars?’ He saw
her fangs bared in a grin. ‘Our histories are our grudges, told by each
generation to the next. We hold to those grudges, and we would never let them
go. Let our cousins of the Dryclaw be seduced away from their past. We
remember.’

‘But
remember what?’

She eyed
him, still smiling. ‘And why would you know?’

‘Because
I would be a part of it. Your grudges are mine.’

‘So
besotted, Of-the-Empire?’

‘I will
kill you if you name me that again.’ The words came out flatly, but
sharp-edged. She paused a long moment, regarding him, turning his death over in
her mind once again, but the smile stayed put.

‘At last
you speak as we do,’ she said. ‘A warrior needs no more reason to shed blood
tomorrow than because the sun shines, but perhaps you should know our story, at
last. We
remember
. We remember to the time when the
desert was green. Long and long ago, when the desert was green and the cities
of the Beetle-kinden were strung across it like dew on a spiderweb. Long ago
when we lived in the dry fringes. When the whole world was ruled by the Masters
of Khanaphes, and we alone would not bow the knee.’

Hrathen felt
an odd feeling stir inside him, as though he was at the edge of a chasm,
looking down.
How many generations?
he wondered.
How much was ‘the whole world’ when that was true?

‘Year on
year, mother to daughter, and the slaves of the Masters tried to tame us. They
forced us to the very edge of the world, but we would not be their slaves. We
alone, of all the kinden of the world, would not surrender, nor would we flee
to seek other lands and other masters.’

Other lands and other masters?
Hrathen had never been a
student of history, but he guessed this must mean what they called the Bad Old
Days, those times in which the world had belonged to very different kinden:
Moths, Spiders.
Were these ‘Masters’ in fact Spider-kinden?
It sounds like their way
.

‘Then
the dry times came,’ Jakal went on, ‘and the green lands faded and the
Beetle-kinden departed. Year on year, mother to daughter, the land dried, and
the Beetle-kinden returned to their river, where it was always green. It was
not that they could not have survived in the drier lands, but that their
Masters could not, and where their Masters’ power failed, so they failed also,
for they were slaves always to their Masters.’ Jakal’s telling had started to
sound almost ritualized, recalled words told over and over, told to him now in
this tent in sight of Khanaphes’s walls. He sensed history all around them: the
clawed and brutal story of the Scorpion-kinden.

‘So we
came unto the lands that had once been green, and we came unto the cities of
the outer desert and the mid-desert, and all the things that the Beetles had
left behind. We took their metal and made swords from it. We took their wood
and made spears of it. Such was the wealth they had discarded that we yet mine
their cities for the commonplace treasures they have left behind. Only the
cities of the inner desert are barred to us, for there the Masters posted their
guardians, and those we may not disturb.’

The inner desert?
Hrathen shivered again. Nothing lived in
the inner desert, of course. Even the Scorpions could not survive there. That
had been the Imperial understanding, at least. It had not been considered that
fear of something
worse
might keep them away.

Once Khanaphes is dust
, he thought,
I
shall go there and view these cities
, But it was a hollow boast because,
in absorbing the Many’s history, he was adopting their strictures too.

‘Yet
still,’ Jakal watched him carefully, ‘still our enemies kept to the river, and
held all the land that was still green, and penned us up in the dry lands, year
on year, mother to daughter. Until the strangers came from the north and
brought us many weapons, and showed us how to take those green lands from the
Masters’ servants. And we smote the servants of the Masters and tore down their
walls, and slew them, women, men and children, each and every one,’ and she
said it sweetly, very sweetly indeed, and he loved her for it.

We have lost control
.

Malius’s
gloomy response came back.
We never had it.

We cannot remain long in this city
, Accius told him.
This war of theirs has no relevance to us
. The Vekken were
sitting side by side on one of the beds in their room, in their customary
silence. The movements of the Collegiates, their babble and clumsiness,
intruded on them through the closed door.

It has been claimed that the Empire is behind the attackers
,
Malius reminded him.

I am not convinced. I can see no gain for the Empire
.

We are not best placed to know what the Empire seeks
.

Accius
sighed inwardly.
They talk and talk of leaving
. He
referred to the Collegium delegation, who had been packing their belongings
frantically, but yet never seemed to make any definite plans. The implication
was clear.

A poor deception then: they intend to stay
.

Denying us our chance to return home
.

Home
, Malius echoed, and his inner voice was wretched.
But we cannot give up all hope
.

Could we even find home, if we left this city on our own?
They compared maps, mind to mind, trying to stitch the borders of
where-they-were to those of where-they-knew. But Vek had lived in isolation for
such a long time, it barely acknowledged Helleron and Tark, let alone the
Exalsee.
We are lost. Only by staying with the Collegiates
can we ever hope to reach home. We could put a blade to their throats and force
them to guide us, if need be
. Accius was warming to the idea.
Or we could take their Fly-kinden slave and force him, instead.
Fly-kinden are pliable
.

A plan
, Malius admitted.
But what
would we tell the Court, after we found our home again? What have we
accomplished? What have we discovered?

That Collegium seeks common cause with the Empire!
was
Accius’s prompt response.
That our enemies gather against
us
. Another thought followed swiftly on:
They
pretend to leave, but they must wait here to betray the local Beetles to the
Empire. Perhaps that is what they have promised, in return for Imperial help
against Vek
.

Plausible
, agreed Malius. Feeling the other man’s alarm at
the thought, he fed him caution in return.
We must
accomplish what we have set out to do. We cannot return empty-handed. We must
attempt to spoil their plot
.

We care nothing for this city
, Accius argued.
In fact, we hate it. This is a crude, loud, chaotic place
.

Still, it is being attacked by our enemies. In following our
course of action, we deprive our enemies of their advantage. We must kill the
ambassador, as we planned
.

Accius’s
mind signalled frustration.
She seems to be able to appear
and disappear like a Moth-kinden. Whenever she is present, others watch her.
That Fly slave has his eyes on her often, yet at times even he cannot find her,
or that is what he claims
.

That is what he claims
, Malius echoed.
We no longer have the time to do this properly, like soldiers. We
must resort to other facets of our training. They fight their battles even now.
We must be expedient
.

I understand you
. Accius signalled his preference for a
simple killing, out of sight and without subtlety, but he felt Malius holding
firm and ultimately knew the other man was right. They were not, after all,
diplomats by profession, nor were they wholly soldiers. They could fall back on
other resources, if need be, and that need had made itself amply apparent.

She is here, in this building, right now
, Malius told him,
building his confidence.
She has returned to her fellows.
Tonight she shall sleep in her own bed. I shall watch out for the others and,
when she is settled, you must make your move. It must be swift
.