The Scarab Path (61 page)

‘And
what would have happened then?’ he demanded. They were almost nose to nose now,
an inch from drawing swords. ‘I beat them in the end, Che. I beat the Empire,
in Szar. What would have happened there, if I had just snuck off and left?’

The
moment teetered in the balance, the weights of recollection dropping. Che had
been in Myna, of course, and she had heard the news from Szar, in more detail
than she needed. It had been a great victory against the Empire, but nobody had
felt much like celebrating it, not even the Szaren.

‘Szar?’
she began. She had not seen the twisted bodies of the Wasp garrison, but there
had been no shortage of description. An entire force of thousands, with their
slaves and servants and Auxillians, dead in a single night, and in agony. The
last she had heard, there was still a whole district of their city that the
local Bee-kinden did not enter, for fear of the coughing sickness that might
still come to cull them. They said that the air still smelled of sour death,
there, when the wind was in the wrong quarter.

‘Che …’

‘Szar.
That was
you?
’

His face
was that of a man who would do anything just to retract a few words. ‘Che, you
weren’t there. There was nothing else …’

She was
retreating from him, back to the doorway, staring at the creature that wore her
friend’s face. He called her name again, but at the mere sound of it she fled
from him, leaving him in the darkness of the pump room, her skin crawling at
the thought of what he had done.

Amnon summoned him soon after. The defeat on the field had not managed to
stifle his fierce energy. Totho felt tired just looking at him.

‘You
called for me, First Soldier,’ the artificer said, feeling in no mood for this
now. No mood at all.

‘You are
still in the city,’ Amnon observed.

‘Is that
it? Is that why you sent for me?’ Totho demanded. ‘Yes, I am still in the city.
My people are still in the city. So what are you going to do about it? Shed a
little blood early, before the Scorpions come for the rest?’

‘I will
make use of you, if you will let me,’ Amnon suggested. ‘Totho, will you walk
the walls with me?’

‘Walk
the …? Why?’

‘Because
I need to understand,’ the big Khanaphir said. ‘I need to know what to do,
Totho, and I need your wisdom to guide me.’

‘Wisdom?’
Totho managed to say, strangled by the need to laugh at the word. ‘I’ve
precious little wisdom, Amnon.’

‘I’ll
take anything I can get,’ Amnon said, quite seriously. ‘Will you do this one
thing for me before you go?’

‘Of
course,’ Totho replied, finding that he meant it. He liked Amnon: there was
some trace of commonality between them, despite their disparate cultures and
histories. Both of them, at this moment, were where the metal met.

Khanaphes
was gripped by panic. Totho saw people cowering inside their homes, saw groups
of soldiers rushing here and there, seemingly with no aim at all. Passing over
the great span of bridge that linked the two halves of the city, they heard a
hollow knocking sound, distant and harmless save for the plume of dust that
rose beyond the walls. Amnon started, but Totho put a hand out.

‘That
wasn’t an attack. There’s been no attack yet.’

‘They
are raiding all the farms, burning the fields,’ Amnon spat. ‘Also they know
that by making us wait, they also make us fear.’

‘And by
launching a few rocks over the city they’ll make you fear even more,’ Totho
agreed. ‘They want you shaken up by the time they meet you hand to hand.’

‘No,’
Amnon said firmly, ‘they simply want us to fear. That is their sport, to know
that the good people of my city live in terror of them for this interval of
time, before the end comes.’

From the
lofty arch of the bridge they could see the city’s soldiers atop the walls. Totho
took his telescope out automatically, panning its lens across the battlements.
The Khanaphir sentries were rushing back and forth, and then he noticed a
sudden haze of dust rising from between the great stones of the wall. The sound
of the leadshotter’s discharge came a moment later.

The
walls of Khanaphes had stood a long time. They were tall and thick, built of
massive slabs of rock, curving slightly as they rose. There was a walkway along
the top to allow two men to walk abreast, with stone steps leading up to the
parapet every two hundred yards. Those walls would have seemed a remarkable
piece of engineering even two centuries ago, let alone whenever they had
actually been built. Totho knelt as he reached the top, pressing a hand to the
stone to feel the grain of it. In his mind were the fortress designs that
Drephos had sketched out on scrap paper, in order to resist a siege by modern
weapons. They were all planes and edges, thrusting out into the besieging force
to give the widest arc of shot, and slanted to let the enemy’s weapons glance
off them.

‘Tell
me,’ Amnon asked him, ‘will we hold? They tell me that the Masters would never
let the walls of Khanaphes fall. What do you tell me?’

Totho
went to the ramparts and the sight beyond struck him hard, although it must
strike any Khanaphir observing it that much harder. The Many of Nem were
encamped outside, a squalid mess of tents and lean-tos against a horizon thick
with smoke. They had laid waste everything that lay within a day’s ride,
pillaged everything worth taking.
They must expect a quick
siege, otherwise they will starve
.

The
artillery positions were well ensconced within the front ranks of the Scorpion
horde. Clearly the Scorpions, or their Imperial masters, knew how vulnerable
unattended engines could be. There was a bank of ten leadshotters, positioned
quite tightly. Through his glass Totho could recognize the model as an old
Imperial make that had first seen service before the Twelve-year War. It would
still do the trick though.

Three rounds?
No, the Khanaphir walls were too thick and
solid.
Twelve rounds?
Perhaps, yes. The stones were
not properly mortared, not as a Lowlander Beetle would have built them. They
were not hard, either. With a dagger’s blade he could scratch deeply into them,
turning stone to sand by his own tiny industry. How accurate were the Scorpion
artillerists?
Twenty rounds then, at most
.

‘Your
walls will not hold,’ he declared, and the shudder of fear that ran through the
men around him made him feel like some doomsaying prophet. ‘Unless they lose
the use of their engines, or are very short on ammunition, your walls will
crack and then fall.’

Another
single leadshotter boomed out its plume of smoke, and Totho felt the faint
vibration as the shot hammered into stone. It was obviously a day of idle
practice for the Scorpions, since the war host was still reassembling after a
day’s hard looting.
If we had the full army of the city
with us now, perhaps we could have broken them
, Totho thought. They had
already left too many dead on the field, though, and hope and morale now lay
out there amongst the broken weapons and the corpses. The Khanaphir did not
have it in them to sally out and attack their besiegers.

‘What
can we do?’ Amnon asked softly.

‘I don’t
know,’ Totho said. ‘I’d suggest surrender but, given the enemy, I don’t think
that’s an option.’

Later, Totho sat in the Iron Glove factora, listening to the sounds of
his men packing up everything for their departure. Soon they would come for the
crate he was sitting on, down here in the cellar. For now it provided a quiet
place to think: about Amnon and about Che, and about what Che had said.

What if …?
It was a poisonous game. It was a game for weak
people who would rather not live with the decisions they had made, or who had made
no decisions at all and had found a bad end by following the river’s flow.

I have always made my own decisions
. It seemed a fragile
thing to be proud of but he clung to it. His past was like a string of beads,
each representing a point where he could have chosen otherwise.
Should I have stayed with Stenwold and Che rather than running
away?
That begged the question of ‘What if Salma had gone to Tark alone,
without Totho’s help?’ and it was unanswerable at this remove.
But if I had stayed, I would have done something I would regret.
I would have killed Achaeos, or else got myself killed. I could not have borne
the two of them together
.

The next
bead was, ‘What if I had not saved Salma, by selling myself to the Empire?’
Salma would be dead, no what-ifs about it
. But then Salma
had died anyway, on some bloody battlefield. So it became just another choice
he had made and that he would have to take responsibility for. Which led to
Che’s question of whether he could simply have taken off the shackles and fled.

It has always been so easy for Che, so clear-cut
. He did
not have the words to explain to her how he had found a place for himself under
the black and gold flag, at the side of the maverick Colonel-Auxillian.
There was nowhere in the world that was home to me, until I met
Drephos
. He could not pretend ignorance of her likely reaction to all he
had done. He had done it, in fact, to try to exorcize himself from her
influence. Che, his nagging conscience, his residual sense of right and wrong,
just a gnat in the face of Drephos’s comforting philosophy of technological
advance.

But, even then, I helped
. Another straw to cling to. He
had saved Che from the interrogators once more, and alone this time, without
any killer Mantis or Mynan resistance to help him. He had passed the snapbow
plans to the Lowlands, arming Stenwold and his allies with the fruits of
Totho’s own invention. He had liberated Szar.

He had
liberated Szar. In doing so, he had saved the Mynan resistance, created the
Three-city Alliance. He had remade the map. He, Totho, the halfbreed.

Yet she
hated him for it. Even this great Right had become a wrong.
And if I had killed them all with a blade, like Tisamon? Would
that be right, then?
It was the means, the coldly efficient means, that
so horrified the woman. He could eviscerate as many Wasps as he wanted on the
battlefield, but woe betide him if he preferred to use his brain.

We use whatever tools are given to us. I am no great warrior, but
is that what she’d prefer? To have me dead alongside Salma, sword in hand?

Perhaps
that was indeed what she would prefer. A dead Totho of unstained character
would be easier for her to file away and forget.

He heard
boots on the steps leading to the cellar, and Corcoran peered down at him.
‘Sir,’ the Solarnese man enquired, ‘how’s it going down here?’

‘How’s
the ship?’ Totho asked him from his seat on the remaining crate.

‘Every
bolt tightened, ready to go, sir,’ Corcoran reported, taking the last few steps
down. ‘The lads are wondering when we’re moving out. Those Scorpions won’t wait
for ever before kicking this place in like an egg.’

‘We
should leave here,’ Totho said.

Corcoran
regarded him dubiously. ‘Well yes, sir, that was the idea.’

‘What
will happen to the city, after we’re gone?’ asked Totho.

Corcoran
stared at him. ‘Same thing as if we were still here. It’s not as though it was
ever going to be much of a market for us. Come on, chief, give us the word.
We’ll leadshot their gate down, if they won’t open up for us.’

Totho
rested his head in his heads. ‘Corcoran …’

‘Sir?’

‘Are we
doing the right thing, do you think?’

‘By
leaving? Absolutely. Staying about would be a bloody stupid thing to do, sir.’
The Solarnese was beginning to sound unnerved.

‘But it
would be the right thing,’ Totho murmured, almost to himself. ‘That’s how
she’d
see it.’

They
heard a heavy, slow tread above them. Meyr the Mole Cricket was negotiating the
steps.

‘Here
you both are,’ the big man said, the gloom of the cellar no barrier to his
sight. ‘What’s this?’

‘Meyr,’
Totho said, standing, ‘do you think we should leave?’

The Mole
Cricket was now halfway down the stairs, hunching forward, yet with his back
and shoulders still brushing the cellar ceiling. ‘I think we should,’ he said
carefully, but in a tone that invited further comment.

‘And what
do you yourself want to do?’ Totho asked him.

‘My
people are slow to anger,’ Meyr said ponderously. ‘We lack the fire to make us
proper fighters. Still.’ He let the word sit there for a moment. ‘Still, I
would very much like to kill some Scorpions and Wasps. Very much so.’

And is that right? Is it right that Meyr blames himself for the
death of Faighl and the others, and now wants vengeance? How good the Wasps are
at teaching us their own motivations
.

‘Come
on, now,’ said Corcoran nervously, looking from one to the other.

‘Send a
message to the
Iteration
,’ Totho decided, ‘and tell
them to stand ready. Corcoran, go yourself, have them load the smallshotters
and warm the engines over.’

‘Because
we’re going?’ the Solarnese said, without much hope.

‘Have
every fighting man armed and armoured by dawn tomorrow. Meyr, you’re in charge
of that.’

‘Right,’
the Mole Cricket rumbled.

‘I have
a conversation with Amnon to finish – and one he’s not going to like,’ Totho
explained. ‘When I get back, I want to see every Iron Glove man ready for war.’

He found Amnon up on the walls, of course. The Scorpion leadshotters had
been idly throwing shot at the stones, or over them and into the city. Totho
took a moment, on gaining the battlement, to spy out a leadshotter crew with his
glass and assess their technique. The Scorpions themselves were the very
essence of brutality, but he could pick out Wasp-kinden overseeing them and the
savages were swifter and more practised than he would have thought.