The Scarab Path (77 page)

‘We do
not admit to slavery. Where our respect has been earned we serve with honour,’
Teuthete stated flatly. ‘My people cannot be slaves.’

Except to that honour
, Totho completed for her, but he
left the words unsaid.

They
drank. The Empire’s purloined finest was smooth on the tongue, fiery in the
throat, with an aftertaste of apricots.

‘We have
no illusions here about the morrow,’ said Amnon. ‘That is why I sent Praeda
away. Not all battles can be won.’

Totho
cast a look back at the monumental barrier that was slowly taking shape at the
foot of the bridge. ‘Amnon, about your plan …’

‘You
have a comment?’ Amnon’s smile was edged.

‘Just to
say … when the call comes for everyone to run for the east shore, well, I’ll be
right behind you.’

‘Will
you now?’

Totho
shrugged. ‘Well, it’s true I’ve not got a woman or a city’s love to live for,
and it’s true that the woman that
I
love has
vanished, and is probably dead by Imperial hands. And that she’ll never know
what I’ve done here to try and make her approve of me. But even though you have
so much to live for and I so little, yes, I shall be right at your back when
the moment comes. You know what I mean.’

‘I do,’
said Amnon solemnly, ‘and I am grateful.’

‘And I
shall be at your back,’ Meyr told Totho.

‘There’s
no need—’

‘What?
You can be an idiot, and not I?’

Amnon
laughed quietly. ‘We are four fools. No, three fools and one too honourable
woman. What would anyone think of us, sitting and drinking like this?’

‘Who
cares what anyone thinks?’ Meyr asked.

Totho
smiled weakly. ‘A man of Collegium once said that the only parts of us to dodge
the grave are the memories we leave behind with others.’
So
if you live, Che, remember me this way: the man who tried to save a city, not
the killer of thousands
.

There was a high, tooth-jarring buzz coming from one of the abandoned
buildings that had been swamped by the Scorpion camp. It had begun around
midnight and two hours before dawn it showed no signs of letting up. Most of
the Scorpions nearby had been evicted by its constant irritation, shambling off
to find somewhere else to sleep. Others had wanted to go and silence the noise.
The problem was that, in the single lit window, they could see one of the foreigners
crossing backwards and forwards. This noise was their doing, perhaps preparing
some weapon to inflict on the Khanaphir. To interfere with them might bring
down Jakal’s wrath. Threat of superior force was one of the few strictures they
held sacred.

Eventually
they elected a spokesman, by democratic application of superior force. The man
chosen was Genraki, most promising of the new-minted artillerists. His use of
artillery to settle personal feuds had already been noted and approved of. It
was therefore reckoned less likely that Jakal would have him killed if he did
something wrong.

Genraki
entered, stooping, through the building’s kicked-in door. It was a decent-size
two-storey, this one, where some Beetle family of means had lived, enjoying
their view of the river. The thought amused him, for it was about time the
Khanaphir knew fear and hardship. They had lived behind the safety of their
walls for long enough. Genraki loved the Empire, for everything it had given
his people. They had always possessed claws to cut flesh; now they had a fist
to break stone.

The
noise, that skull-boring sound, came from above, and he padded up quietly,
taking a moment to peer around the corner, from the head of the stairs. There
were two Wasps there, and one of them was Angved. They were hunched over some
small mechanism, looking duly impressed.

Genraki
cleared his throat and Angved glanced up.

‘What is
it?’ he asked, speaking above the sound. ‘Hrathen wants me?’

‘What is
this sound, chief?’ Genraki asked him. ‘Nobody else can sleep.’

Angved
smirked at that. ‘A little experiment of mine.’

This
close, Genraki thought he could feel his ears shake under it, not particularly
loud but terribly insistent. ‘Must it go on so long, chief?’ The title was
based on the authority that the Warlord and the Wasp leader gave the old man,
for he was clearly a chieftain of his own tribe of artificers.

‘Well,
that’s the whole point. How long have we had so far?’

The
other Wasp, also an artificer, checked some small device. ‘Three hours fifty-seven
minutes.’

‘Shut it
off at four hours,’ Angved decided, to Genraki’s relief. If he had retreated
from this place without some result the others would not have been pleased with
him. Angved was ushering him into the next room.

‘Tell
me, Genraki,’ he said, ‘this rock oil your people use, how common is it?’

‘Not so
common that it is everywhere, but we know all the places to find it. Where it
is found, there is much of it. More than all the tribes need.’

Angved
digested this. ‘It burns for a long time, doesn’t it?’ he said.

‘That is
why we use it,’ Genraki confirmed.

‘It’s
been running that little makeshift engine for hours,’ the artificer mused.
‘Your people trade, don’t they?’

Genraki
shrugged. ‘When we have the patience. We would trade oil for more leadshotters
and weapons,’ he added, with a fanged grin.

‘You may
just have got yourself a deal.’

Above
their conversation, the whining buzz stopped, at long last. Genraki could
almost feel the whole camp relax with it. Angved’s expression was complex: one
he could not entirely read but dominated mainly by greed.

There
were swift footsteps on the stairs and one of the other Wasps came up, half
running, half flying. ‘Captain wants you, Lieutenant,’ he told Angved.
‘Khanaphir have been busy overnight. Time for us to match them.’

Angved did not rush to attend on Hrathen. As soon as he presented
himself, the tide of mundane war would descend on him, and he would have his
hands full with jobs more befitting an apprentice than an experienced
battle-artificer.
Can’t we just let the Scorpions get on
with it?We’ve given them half the city, so surely they can take it from here
.
But Hrathen was in charge, and it was clear which of his bloodlines the
halfbreed had chosen to support.
I hear he’s sleeping with
that hideous Jakal creature
. Angved shuddered. He himself had never been
one to take advantage of the women of lesser peoples. Even if he had, he
wouldn’t have started with Scorpion-kinden.
Only among
Thorn-bugs are there any uglier people in the world
, he decided,
or more dangerous to sleep with. And the Captain definitely gets
his looks from the wrong side of the family
. Better, maybe, that the man
forced himself on the fanged horrors here rather than good Wasp women back
home.

Am I fooling myself about this rock-oil?
The Nem was
largely unexplored, unexploited. The Empire’s internal squabbles had set back
its timetable for subjugating the world, or there would have been black and
gold all the way to Khanaphes by now, and Jakal’s people would have become
either Auxillians or history.
And maybe I should be
grateful that, with all the fuss back home, I’m the first serious artificer to
come here and make this discovery
. He was a man growing old for the
army, yet still only a lieutenant. If he kept this all to himself, and if it
was what he believed it to be, then ‘Major Angved’ had a nice ring to it. A
comfortable retirement position running some research workshop in Sonn,
perhaps? He could afford to be pushy, provided his new currency was as pure as
he thought.

He had
only told one of his crew about his discovery, and already he was considering
whether he might have to kill him. Here, among the Scorpions, it would be easy
to hide such an act.
This is much bigger than I had thought
.
An idle curiosity was giving way to a real fire of ambition.

He found
Hrathen at last. ‘Reporting for duty,’ he said, banishing such thoughts for the
moment. The Scorpion woman was nearby, watching them with arms folded. Her
expression was sceptical and Angved guessed that she had been expecting more
progress.
Half the city in just two days, and still she’s
hungry
.

The
halfbreed nodded to him. ‘We take the bridge today,’ he stated. ‘I’ve decided.
Enough of this attrition.’

Angved
waited.
Empty posing
, he thought,
to impress his woman. Well, let him
.

‘I want
you to get a leadshotter on to the roof of one of these three-storeys,’ Hrathen
told him, straight-faced.

Angved
raised an eyebrow. ‘I’m not even sure that’s possible.’

‘
Make
it possible. Have some locals haul it up the stairs.
Build a hoist, anything. When you’ve got the right elevation, start making
calculations to hit the barricade without damaging the bridge.’

‘That
will call for a great deal of accuracy,’ Angved said.

‘Then
that’s what you’ll give me,’ Hrathen snapped.

Angved
kept his expression carefully neutral, wondering whether it was yesterday’s or
last night’s performance that had shown the man up in front of Jakal.

‘We
could try using the scrap-shot,’ the artificer suggested, ‘if we can get the
range. That way, no danger of weakening the bridge.’

‘Whatever
you have to do,’ Hrathen replied. ‘Have the rest of your artificers make
grenades. You know the type: clay pots, wax stoppers, fuses. Fill them with
oil, or with firepowder and nails.’

‘I’m not
sure our troops here will be able to use them effectively. Not on the enemy at
least.’

‘They’re
not for Scorpions. I’m committing the Slave Corps soldiers as grenadiers. Any
fool can drop a pot.’

And usually when you least want them to
. ‘I’ll put my
people on it,’ Angved agreed. ‘We should have a decent stock by mid-morning,
after you’ve warmed people up.’

‘Between
that and the crossbows, we’ll be on the far side before dusk,’ Hrathen
declared. He was saying it to Jakal, and Agved saw the Scorpion Warlord shrug
and turn away. Hrathen’s expression, momentarily exposed, was comical.
She has him on a leash
, Angved realized.
This is why you can never really trust halfbreeds
. He
supposed he felt sorry for the man, torn between Imperial orders and trying to
be a Scorpion savage at the same time.
What will they do
with him when we’re done here?Will he want to stay on and live with the
barbarians? Will the Rekef get rid of him? Will the Scorpions, for that matter?

Not my problem
, the artificer reminded himself.
I just need to get out of Khanaphes with my hide intact, and then
I can give the Empire a prize that will make all the loot of Khanaphes look
like dross
.

Sulvec’s hand clenched on the knife hilt and the blade twitched in
Osgan’s shoulder, making his victim shriek again. The sound echoed cavernously
in the underground hall, turning into something truly nightmarish as it baffled
its way about the distant vaulted walls.

‘Come
on, Thalric!’ Sulvec shouted, his voice blurring amongst the returning echoes
of the scream. ‘You went to some lengths to keep this man alive. Don’t waste
all that effort now!’ He was shouting just to keep himself steady: inflicting
pain on another provided a reliable mantra for the avoidance of doubt and fear.
There were plenty in the Rekef who did not get their own hands dirty, who
always had others to do the cutting and slicing for them. Sulvec was made of
sterner stuff, or at least that was his self-assessment. All around him, his
men were gathered, Marger and the survivors of the Rekef force that had come
into Khanaphes with him, seven agents whose pale faces and strained expressions
belied their Rekef training.

Weaklings
. Sulvec sneered inwardly, although he could feel
what they could feel. It had begun with that wave of fear atop the pyramid, and
the hooks of it had never left them. These slimy, hollow halls beneath the
earth were no place for honest Wasp-kinden. They were built too huge, vacant
yet full of a devouring dark that waited just beyond the reach of the guttering
lanterns. When the final cackling echo of Osgan’s cry came back, Sulvec could
not definitively label it as such. It could just as easily be something vast
and mad gibbering to itself somewhere far off within these endless chambers.

And so
he inflicted pain, because it made him feel better.
I hold
the knife, therefore I am in control
. It was not a deep cut he
inflicted, but he was an old hand at this. The knife’s tip was carefully
inserted between the bones of Osgan’s shoulder joint, so that the slightest
tremor would be unendurable agony. Osgan was sobbing, shuddering, fighting to
keep desperately still. If he tried to bolt for freedom the pain would have
shocked him out of consciousness.

‘Thalric!
I know you’re out there!’ Sulvec bellowed. Marger and the others were waiting
in a circle round him, with lanterns some distance beyond them both ways. They
had turned the wicks up high, so that for Thalric to get within sting range, he
would be in their light. Still, he could come from anywhere, at any time.
Sulvec was putting on the pressure but Thalric was no fool. If he wanted to
make a fight of it, then he would undoubtedly take a few of them with him.
Which is why I’m here in the middle
, Sulvec decided.

He
opened his mouth to shout again, but the echoes were getting to him. They made
something unpleasant of his voice, as though someone were lampooning him from
the darkness.
I’m glad the Khanaphir are going to get
theirs. Nobody who builds a monstrosity like this deserves to live
. Yet
at the back of his mind hovered a persistent worry telling him that this did not
look much like the rest of Khanaphes above. There was no guarantee precisely
what
hands had created this lightless abyss. That started
the imagination going, and it did not take much to start him wondering what
else might be roused by his calls and Osgan’s cries.
What
if things live down here?