The Scarab Path (58 page)

The swifter she is dead, the sooner we can make the others leave
this place and return us to the Lowlands. To our own city
. Accius felt a
tremor of the old homesickness rack him momentarily, leaning on his comrade for
support.
This is a vile place, and we will be well rid of
it
.

Malius
stood up, stepping out of the room and on to the landing, to look down at the
bickering Beetles in the main hallway below. He was out of the room but not out
of Accius’s presence, and so he could feel his friend begin to prepare, removing
his armour, blacking his sword. The assassin’s knife would now be whetted for
Ambassador Cheerwell Maker. She would be found dead by one of the others. Then
they would leave.

Or, if they do not leave, we will cut them until they agree to
,
Malius thought with a spike of anger. He could feel Accius’s approval radiating
to him through the wall.

Below
him, the Beetles were still arguing. Their Flykinden slave had just flown in
with news that the Khanaphir army was returning.

‘And in
cursed poor shape,’ the little man was saying. ‘They got a bloody nose, and
then some. They’re all kinds of beaten up.’

They
were all of them down there: the old man, the fat man, the ambassador woman,
but their attention was focused on the other woman, the one who normally seemed
so admirably detached. Malius saw, with disapproval, that her creditable
reserve had broken down. She had her hands to her mouth, eyes locked on the Fly
in some kind of emotion that Malius found uncomfortably overstated.

‘I’m not
going,’ she insisted. ‘I’m not going.’

‘Praeda
…’ the ambassador started, but the other woman shook her head.

‘No, I
couldn’t … How could he
do
this to me? Men!’ She
rounded on the fat man, for want of another target. ‘This is
unfair!
How often I’ve been wooed by some fool – she prodded
him in the chest – ‘by some ignorant oaf, and I’ve not cared. It’s never
touched me, before.’

‘Now,
look …’ the fat one started, but she would not be diverted. Leaning on the
stone rail of the landing, Malius found himself perversely fascinated. All this
bared emotion, it was almost as if he could actually look into their minds. It
was as eye-catching as someone throwing a screaming fit in the street.

‘And now
he comes along,’ the woman complained, ‘and he … he was different. I thought:
there’s something special here. Because he wasn’t just some magnate’s son,
flashing his wealth, some scholar all full of himself, or a merchant
adventurer. He was
real
. He was genuine. He was
honest. And then, the moment he’s got my attention, he goes off to war and gets
himself killed.’

‘You
don’t know that,’ the ambassador protested.

‘Trallo,
did you see him there?’ the grieving woman asked.

The
pause the Fly allowed made the answer obvious. ‘Not as such, but there were a
lot of people about.’

‘If he’s
still alive, he would come here,’ the woman insisted.

‘He
might be thinking exactly the same about you,’ the fat man pointed out. ‘Bloody
women, honestly.’

‘He
would
come here,’ she said again, sitting down. ‘And I
will wait for him here. I’ll wait all night, if I must.’

Mad, all of them
, was Accius’s silent comment. He was
ready now for when the house went to bed. The ambassador would get her throat
cut, and thus the last tie holding the expedition to Khanaphes would be
severed.
It’s just as well the other woman’s lover is dead.
We might have had to kill him, then. Or her
.

Luck has been scarce recently
, Malius thought.
We were owed some
.

She felt the straps taut about her wrists and ankles, falling into that
familiar nightmare once again. Che did not need to open her eyes to know where
she was: the interrogation room in the Myna palace. It was the room that she
had personally witnessed being gutted by the resistance, every implement there
destroyed, but in her mind it remained whole and unassailable.

And he did not even use the machines on me
, she reflected,
half in and half out of the dream.
Yet still it haunts me.
How quickly would I have broken under torture, had he ordered it? And would
they ever have been able to put the pieces of me back together?

And she
opened her eyes, seeing above her the poised arms, the drills and saws and
files of an artificer’s trade now horribly suborned. The sound of the steam
engine was turned up, the noise that Thalric had used to hide his conspiracies.
She looked around for him now, for this was not the first time her dreams had
dragged her back here.

But it
was not Thalric, at the levers. It was a slighter man, in grey robes, and she
did not need him to turn around to recognize him. Turn he did, though,
regarding her coolly with those white eyes, and she cried out, ‘Achaeos!’

‘Why do
you make me do this?’ he asked, his hands hovering over the controls. She was
fully in the dream, now, and no escaping. It had all become terribly real in
such a short space of time.

‘Let me
go!’ she begged him, wrenching at the straps. ‘Achaeos, let me go!’

‘Not
this time,’ he said. His voice was quiet but she could hear it clearly over the
whine of all the drills and the rumble of the steam. ‘Che, look at us.’

‘Achaeos
– what is it? Why are you doing this?’

‘Because
you force me, Che,’ he explained.

‘Just
tell me what you want me to do,’ she said quickly, tripping over the words.
‘I’ve tried! I’ve tried to follow you when you appear to me. I’ve gone
everywhere you led me.’

‘You do
not understand,’ he said. ‘You do not understand at all. What do I want, you
ask me? What do you think I want?’

‘
I don’t know! Tell me!
’ she shrilled, for the drill arms
were descending jerkily now, under his ministrations.

‘What do
you
want, Che? Freedom? To be let go? Do you think I
would do this if you were not forcing me?’

The
wrongness, the discontinuity of the situation, tried to speak to her, but the
drill was very close, glittering within her vision, and it took all of her
attention. She squirmed and twisted, trying to shift herself from underneath
it.

It
dropped, and she screamed—

And she
woke.

The
darkness of Khanaphes at night. The cool air from the river. There was no sound
of distant battle, or of nocturnal assault by the Scorpions. The city was not
yet under siege. She took a deep breath, still shaking.

I cannot survive many more of those nightmares
. And,
following from that:
What if I do not wake next time, as
the drill comes down?

The
slightest sound then, and she went cold all over because there was someone in
the room with her. She was instantly and absolutely sure of it.
Achaeos?
she wondered, but the ghost had never announced
itself by sounds – just a smudge in the air, or the harsh, authoritative voice
in her head.

Her Art
penetrated the darkness, leaving her with that muted grey clarity that must
have been how
he
always saw the world. Her heart
caught, on seeing the cloaked figure crouching by the window.

‘Oh, you
have gone too far now,’ she berated him, sitting up. ‘Thalric, what …?’ And
then her horrified pause as he stared through the darkness, towards her voice –
because, of course, she had not seen him since matters had fallen foul with the
Empire.
Which of your flags are you flying tonight,
Thalric? Is it the black and the gold once more?

‘If
you’re here to kill me, you’ve missed your best chance,’ she told him, sounding
remarkably calm even to herself. She had a sword within easy reach of the bed,
a habit learned from her uncle. He could sting her before her hand reached it,
of course. She heard a ragged release of breath.

‘I need
your help, Che.’

He was
not quite looking at her, just vaguely in the direction of the bed. She kept
forgetting how the Wasps possessed no Art against the darkness. Seeing him more
clearly, he looked as though the intervening days had not been kind to him. His
clothes were creased and torn, and he was unshaven, hollow-eyed. He stayed
close to the window, one hand reaching out towards the sill, as if ready to
jump.

She
swung her legs off the bed. In her flimsy nightshirt she would be just a shape
in the dark to him, but he still made her feel self-conscious. She pulled on a
tunic, telling herself it was against the chill.

‘Help?’
she asked him. ‘Help against what?’

‘The
Empire,’ he said, and she laughed at him. She had not meant to, and she saw his
hurt expression, unguarded because he thought she could not see it.

‘I’m
sorry, Thalric, but—’

‘I
know,’ he said flatly. ‘I lose track myself, of whether they want me dead or
alive. I certainly lost track this time, but now I know they want me dead. I
don’t know for what reason, but the orders must come from high up. I need your
help, Che, because there’s nobody else I can turn to.’

She had
her sword in her hands now, not to wield but for the comfort it brought her.
She padded towards him, seeing his eyes track her approach with difficulty.
Little enough of the moonlight got in at her window.

How strange to see him so helpless
. He sat himself back on
the windowsill, within arm’s reach of her – a man at the end of his resources
but not defeated, never that. He had a wild look to him, the patient Rekef
officer cast off for the moment, and she thought,
This is
how he looked in Myna
– a man with nowhere else to go, and all the more
dangerous for it.
He will make some other Wasps pay for
putting him here again
, she thought, and it was oddly comforting.
So he is on my side again. At least I know
.

‘What do
you need?’ she asked. ‘If I can help you, I will.’

The
sudden smile surprised her.
He thought I would cut him
loose. And why not? Do I need these complications, when everything else is
falling apart?
Despite the thought, she knew she would not turn him
away.

‘Osgan’s
on the run with me, and he needs medical help. We’re holed up in a drinking
den. I need … What I need is just someone who has the freedom of the city, to
come and go. Someone to fetch for me and tell me what’s going on. Above all,
someone I can trust.’

‘Major
Thalric, are you trying to recruit me?’ she asked with a slight smile, then
collected her satchel, which held some basic medicines in it. When she turned
to him again, his expression surprised her in its thoughtfulness.

‘I have
just described an agent’s work, haven’t I?’ he said. ‘No matter how hard I try,
the old instincts just won’t leave me alone.’ He shrugged. ‘Just as well, for
I’ll need them. Ready?’

She felt
an odd leap of excitement at the thought, something she had been missing since
the war.
But I hated all of that, surely
. She had
served as her uncle’s agent, therefore plunging into the invisible otherworld of
the spymasters. Since the war’s end, her life had been better in so many ways,
and yet …

‘So long
as it doesn’t interfere with my duties or endanger other people,’ she told him,
‘you have my services, Master Thalric.’ It seemed a small enough promise to
make.

‘We
should leave now,’ he said, ‘so I’ll show you where Osgan and I are lying low.
We can talk there, securely. Shall I meet you downstairs, outside?’

‘No
need,’ she told him. She had her cloak on, now, and sandals, so she was ready
to go. ‘Lead on.’

He let
himself fall backwards out of the window, his wings quickly catching him. She
followed, pausing, with a knee on the sill, to look out over the silent city.

She let
her wings carry her through the window and into the air, clumsy beside Thalric
yet able to follow where he led.

Behind
her, in her room, the door was pushed open once the sound of voices had faded.
A figure crept in, and found the empty bed. A brief dialogue of puzzlement
passed between the intruder and his kinsman, before the Vekken stalked over to
the window and stared out, baffled and frustrated, at the night.

There
was a sudden commotion behind him, somewhere within the building, and Malius’s
immediate command:
Hide!

It should have been a simple job.

Vollen
had gone over the details both with the newcomer Sulvec and with his Rekef
commander, the Beetle-kinden Corolly Vastern. This covered the second stage of
the Rekef operation in Khanaphes. Although Thalric, maddeningly absent, was
still the primary target, they had some Imperial obligations to the force that
would appear outside the city’s walls soon enough.

Vollen
himself had gone off to creep around some of the unoccupied embassies, enough
to satisfy himself that each was built to a similar plan.
Mustn’t
show favouritism to any of the ambassadors
, he supposed. What it meant,
in fact, was that his job was that much easier. He had never seen inside the
Collegiate embassy, but now he knew for sure he did not need to.

They had
gone over the complement of the Collegiate delegation, so in his mind there was
a concise list.

‘It’s
very simple,’ Sulvec had explained. ‘It is better for the Empire if word does
not reach Collegium of what has happened until much later. Certainly not word
brought by their own people. Therefore …’ He had made a dismissive gesture with
one hand, which had abruptly ended up with it raised and open, facing Vollen.
Therefore kill them
.

Sulvec
had spared him seven soldiers. The Rekef force inside Khanaphes was not large,
but that should be enough.