The Scarab Path (7 page)

All of a
sudden she found she could not face it, not today. The thought of poring over
more ancient scrolls that she could barely understand, of another day’s
fruitless delving into an incompletely rendered past, was more than she could
bear. She searched her mind for the reason for this change, and found there
Stenwold’s offer of the previous night. At the time she had not cared, but
something had lodged there, waiting for the morning light.

‘Khanaphes,’
she said slowly to herself, and it was as if the word created a distant echo in
her mind. Ancient histories, old Moth texts: the city name would barely be
found in any writings that post-dated the revolution, but if the diligent
student dug deep into the writings of the old, Inapt powers, that name glowed
like a jewel, ancient even to those antique scribes.

She
needed to talk, but who could she talk to about Khanaphes?

Two dozen bemused students had turned up for the aviation lecture:
Beetle-kinden, Ant and Fly youths, all wanting to be pilot-artificers –
aviators
as the new word went. They were without a
teacher. So far all they had were some scribbled notes left on the chalkboard, instructing
them to fold flying machines out of paper. This was now what Che discovered.

She knew
where to look, as the avionics students did not, yet, though it took her a
fight with her courage to cross town to the new airfield and enter the hangar.
The shapes there, the winged things arranged in their untidy horseshoe pattern,
looked only predatory. The air was filled with the sounds of metal and cursing
artificers. It was a sharp reminder of her former self that she could have done
without. She had encountered this and beaten it before. Had she wanted she
could have shut herself away and never had to deal further with her affliction,
but that was not her way: she was still Beetle-kinden, and Beetles endured.
They were tough, both within and without.

‘Taki!’
she shouted, whereupon the little Fly-kinden pilot looked up, delighted.

‘That,’
she said, ‘is the first time in five days that someone’s addressed me properly,
instead of “Miss Schola”. I should never have told them my full name,
honestly.’

She was
looking well. Taki had also been crippled by the war, but in her case the
damage had been made good by artifice. Her beloved
Esca
Volenti
had been destroyed over Solarno, but here she was fine-tuning
the
Esca Magni
. It was the perfect fusion of
Solarnese know-how, Collegiate industry and Taki’s prodigious skills as a
pilot. She claimed it as the most agile flying machine in the known world. The
boast had been put to the test and so far never proved false.

‘It’s
good to see you again.’ Che eyed the opened innards of the machine, fought down
a brief stab of queasiness. ‘Something wrong here?’

‘Not
wrong, just could be made better. One of your fellows at the College came up
with an idea about air exchange, so I reckon I can get another few per cent
efficiency out of the rewinding gears.’ She grinned in the face of Che’s polite
expression, because she didn’t know what was behind it. ‘I want to try a
non-stopper to Capitas.’

‘Capitas
in the Empire?’ It was a stupid question, Che knew, but it leapt out before she
could stop it.

‘Where
else? They’re keen on their fliers up that ways. I’ve had an invitation.’ She
shrugged. ‘If not there, then there’s an exhibition in Helleron in a month’s
time, and I won’t miss that.’

The
Esca Magni
was sleek, hunched up from nose to cockpit,
then with a long sweep of tail. The two wings, silk stretched over a frame of
wood and wire, were currently folded back along her length. Beneath the nose
emerged the compact fist of a pair of rotating piercers, another Solarnese
innovation in the world of aviation. Taki, just three foot tall in her sandals,
sat on its hull like an empress, mistress of all she surveyed.

‘What?’Taki
asked her. ‘I know that look. What’s up?’

‘Taki …
have you ever heard of a place called Khanaphes?’

The Fly
gave her a surprised look. ‘Well, of course, but how did that come up?’

‘It’s
just that … people have been mentioning it.’

Taki
shrugged. ‘Well, why not? Big old place down the east coast from the Exalsee.
All a bit, you know, backward thataways.’

‘Backward?’

‘Not really
keeping pace with progress, you know.’ Taki made a vague gesture. ‘We get food
from them, trading through Ostrander. Now, Ostrander’s a strange place, and you
never saw it when you were over …’ She saw something in Che’s expression. ‘But
Khanaphes? What’s to say? Let’s get a drink and then you can ask your
questions.’

The Fly had never actually been there, was the first thing Che learned.
Taki’s life had always been fiercely centred on the airborne elite of the
Exalsee.

‘They
don’t have flying machines in Khanaphes?’ Che probed.

Taki
made a condescending noise. ‘They don’t have
machines
of any kind in Khanaphes, from what I hear. Like I said, backward.’ She looked
amused, her eyes flicking across the clientele of the taverna as though she
included them loosely in the same definition.

That
took a moment to sink in. ‘But they’re … I thought they were supposed to be
Beetle-kinden.’

‘Oh,
yes, yes they are. Not anything like your lot, though. I remember how Scobraan
went there once, for a bet …’ Her voice twitched for a moment, another
colleague dead in the war. ‘He said they’d never seen anything like his flier –
didn’t know what to make of it. Didn’t want to know, either. And he couldn’t
get it refuelled, of course, had to get it shipped back to Porta Rabi by boat.’

‘But
that doesn’t …’ Something odd moved inside Che. ‘And have they been settled
there long?’

‘Oh, you
might say that. Long enough to have founded Solarno.’

‘Seriously?’

‘Oh now,
this is long, long ago – and I’m remembering back to my school days for this,
too. They used to own halfway around the Exalsee, way back before anyone can
remember. But that was long before the Spiders and my own people came over – a
thousand years before, something crazy like that. Then I suppose they just …
got left behind. The way I hear it, they haven’t changed much since those days.
They still own a fair bit of territory up and down the river where they are.’

Che
digested these words, thinking:
the past.
It made no
sense: she
knew
Beetle-kinden even if she could not
quite claim to be one of them any more. It made no sense.
Something
doesn’t add up
. It gave her a strange sense of excitement.
Khanaphes – what might I learn there?

It
struck her then, and she actually jumped up, knocking back her chair. Taki was
in the air in an instant, wings a-blur and a knife in her hand. A few of the
other taverna patrons had gone for their weapons too. The war was not so very
long ago.

She sat
down, made herself give an apologetic wave around the room. Taki stood on her
chair back for a moment, wings flicking for balance, before consenting to sit
down.

A city
of Beetle-kinden without machines?

A city
of
Inapt
Beetle-kinden?

‘Yes,’
she said, thinking of Stenwold’s offer. ‘Oh, yes I will.’

Stenwold was enjoying an after-lunch bowl of wine in the College
refectory when someone came brushing past behind him, murmuring, ‘The Vekken
are after you.’

His
stomach sank and he looked back. ‘Which ones?’

His
informant, a natural history master, shrugged. ‘Who can tell? They all look the
same.’

This was
Stenwold’s chance to make himself scarce, but he did not seize it. ‘They’re
my
problem,’ he replied, whereupon his benefactor shrugged
and made a quick exit. Stenwold braced himself mentally for another taxing
encounter. His Vekken initiative which, in their mutual derision of it, had at
last provided Collegium and Vek with something in common. Yet nobody understood
how important it was. He was trying to do what Collegium should have done in
the first place, instead of relying solely on the strength of its walls and
assuming the Vekken had been defeated a generation ago. Stenwold was trying to
make sure that there would be no third Vekken war. He was trying to build
bridges. The result of his months of careful diplomacy was that the Vekken had
at last sent four men who claimed to be ambassadors, and were more probably
spies.

Two of
them located him soon enough after the tip-off, and came marching up to stand
before his table.

He
couldn’t even tell which two of the team they were. Ant-kinden all looked like
siblings, and the Vekken seemed to have sent four ambassadors who were
absolutely identical. They stared at him now as though they had just found out
he had sent assassins to kill their families.

‘Masters
…?’ He made a motion at the table, offering chairs. They stared at the seats as
though they were venomous, then turned the same expressions on him. His Vekken
initiative had been worth it, if just for this. He had always known the dislike
of his own people for the city of Vek, inspired by two repelled attempts at
conquest, but he had not guessed at the reciprocal loathing felt by the Vekken
because of Collegium’s successful resistance. They hated the Beetle-kinden and,
because they could not see how mere Beetles could resist the might of an Ant
city-state, they feared them also. Stenwold was working as best he could to
disarm that enmity but there was a lifetime of ingrained distrust to overcome.

‘We are
aware of your plans,’ one of them said, and then paused as if waiting for him
to admit everything.

He
looked at them blankly. ‘I have many plans,’ he said at last. ‘Which ones do
you mean?’

‘You are
gathering allies,’ said the same one, speaking with the flat courage of a man
who expects his hosts to have him killed. ‘You are sending to another Beetle
city to secure them.’

That
gave Stenwold pause, but he was good at handling surprises and just drained his
wine bowl while he pondered,
Now that’s interesting. If
they
think that, then who else does?

‘Your
silence indicates admission,’ said the same ambassador. They had an identical
expression of dislike etched onto their mirror-image faces, but no more than
that. As with all Ant-kinden, the real feelings were expressed inside their heads,
secret among their own kind.

‘You’re
talking about the Khanaphes expedition?’

‘So,’
the Vekken said, all their fears confirmed.

‘What of
it? It’s simply an academic expedition to study a city of our cousins …’ He was
about to ask them if they would not be similarly interested, in his position,
but they would never be in a similar position, because any other Ant city was
automatically their enemy.

‘So you
say,’ said the Vekken. ‘But we see more.’

‘Please
sit down,’ he suggested, but they would not. They continued standing there with
their hands near their sword-hilts, waiting for the worst. He had a sudden
dizzying thought of what it must be like for these envoys, surrounded by those
they
knew
to be their avowed enemies, while deprived
of the comforting voices of their own kin that they had lived with all their
lives: just the four of them cut off and alone in an alien sea.

‘What do
you want?’ he asked them patiently.

‘Warmaster
Stenwold Maker is sending an expedition,’ declared one of the Vekken crisply.
‘He tells us it is peaceful and that no harm is meant. He will not deny a
Vekken presence, therefore.’

They
waited for his furious objections as he stared at them, mind spinning. They saw
a military purpose in everything, and that purpose forever turned against Vek.

At the
thought, it was all he could do not to laugh, but that would not have been
diplomatic.

‘If you
want to go, I shall make the arrangements,’ he agreed.

They
betrayed nothing in their faces, but he knew he had caught them out. They did
not know whether to rejoice at defeating him, or curse at themselves being
defeated.

He only
wondered what they would make of Khanaphes.

Greetings and
salutations of the Great College to my good friend Master Kadro.

It has occurred
to me that you may think we do not allow sufficient importance to your
far-flung mission.

Similarly,
communicating as we do by such inadequate means, your discoveries to date – as
opposed to your renewed requests for funding – have not been communicated to us
here so well as I am sure you would prefer.

As the first
College Master to study such a fascinating people as the Khanaphir, I can tell
you we are all agog to learn what you have discovered, and to assist in
furthering your studies.

So it is that
no less a man than War Master Stenwold Maker, whose decisive role in the recent
war cannot have escaped your attention, has proposed that we send some further
members of the College to assist you in your labours.

Rejoice, then!
For an ambassador of Collegium, none other than War Master Maker’s own niece,
shall be travelling to assist you, be the distance never so far. She shall take
with her certain other academics who have expressed an interest – as who would
not? – in the vital work you are doing. They shall of course bring equipment
and funds to assist you, and they will be keen to hear from you regarding your
theories and evidence.

I do hope you
can arrange for them, with the Khanaphir authorities whoever they might be,
appropriate lodging and similar conveniences.

Your most
dutiful friend and sponsor
Master Jodry Drillen,
of the Assembly of that most enlightened city of Collegium.