The Scarab Path (84 page)

Too much, too much
, thought Che, but they were merciless
in imparting their knowledge, and she was sure that, for every word said, ten
thousand remained silent. She was being given only the gloss, a thin veneer of
a deep history that she sensed yawning like an abyss at her feet.

‘We
raised the first walls,’ Elysiath said proudly. ‘We first placed stone upon
stone. We were the
first
of all the kinden of the
world to know civilization.’ Even as she spoke, so the city of Khanaphes took
shape.
But on what river?
The marshes of the estuary
segued into lush forest. The fields were green and bountiful beyond the dreams
of the farmers Che had seen along the Jamail. Beyond the forests extended vast
plains of grassland where the Khanaphir drove back the nomad tribes, to install
their own horses and goats and aphids, to build their further towns.
Did they move the city because of some horror? How could this be?
They did not hear her questions, seeming absorbed in their own histories. ‘So
we grew great and greater,’ Elysiath Neptellian affirmed. ‘So the centuries
passed by, of majesty and expansion. So our teachers walked the paths of the
world, and we brought many kinden the benefits of our just rule. So we made
colonies elsewhere, even as far east as the Land of the Lake. In that way we
met others who had assumed the mantle of rulers, and we received their tribute
and taught them much, for they had much to learn. We were attaining our full
grandeur, the very heights of our power.’

‘And yet
all was not well,’ said Lirielle sadly, and Che felt a cold wind of grief and
loss wash over her. ‘For, even as our power grew, the land itself was betraying
us. That ancient sundering was still at work. Decade to decade, century to
century, the land gave back less. The forests succumbed not to the axe but to
time, the grasslands withered, rivers dried. The patterns of wind and weather
had been broken all those ages before, and the land was still changing to catch
up. Our greatest sorcerers looked into the past and the future and saw that,
despite all we had built, our land would grow only drier and drier, until the
plains became a barren desert littered with the skulls of our cities, until the
forests had retreated back to the sheltered Alim, until only the loyal river
Jamail traced a trail of green through the barren land.’ Che saw it all evolve
in her mind, the encroaching desolation. She saw the desert rise from the heart
of the plains like a devouring monster.
And what did the
Lowlands look like, once? Was it once green, as well? And will it, too, become
a desert?

‘We
spent many decades in debate over what might be done,’ came the man’s voice
again. ‘We put off the inevitable. Our dominion declined, became less and less,
the borders shrinking until only our sacred city remained of it. We would not
believe that all we had built must come to an end. It was bitter for us.’ And
Che felt the bitterness: his words resounded with it. ‘We, who had been masters
of the earth, were yet become victims of time. As the land became drier, we
could not bear to remain. Our skins cracked under the sun, so we became things
of the night, and then of the earth’s depths. We knew we could no longer remain
amongst our subjects.’

‘Yet we
would not abandon them.’ Elysiath said. ‘So we had them build this place, where
we would sleep, and from which we could still work our magics: our great ritual
that has been nine hundred years in the making and may last a thousand more for
all we know. And we selected those that bore a trace of our blood, or those
that were most open to us, and made them our chief servants, and their
children, and their children’s children, so that they would be able to preserve
our ways, and not fall into evil. Even then, our servants were gradually
drifting from away us, falling into the error that has now claimed almost all
of their kind. Which is why we have some interest, little child, in you.’

‘Me?’
Che started. She felt Thalric move beside her, and realized that, for him, her
voice was the only one to have spoken out loud. The rest – that incredible
history – had been played out in her head alone.
It is best
that way
. ‘But I’m not of your blood, or the Ministers’ blood, whatever
you mean.’

Elysiath
eyed her pityingly. ‘Of course you are not. Do not make the mistake of our
servants, who believe it is merely a bloodline that we value. No, it is the
ability to hear our call, to hear the old ways. You are of more use to us than
all the Ministers this last century has seen. You alone have been purified of
the taint of recent years.’

She saw
understanding of a sort in Thalric’s face.
I’m Inapt, yes.
So what?
But she did know what. It did not just mean she could no longer
use a crossbow or turn a key in a lock. It meant that she saw the world
differently. Her mind could stretch to different shapes.

‘We
called to you – as we call to all those with ears to hear. Some of them come to
us as we lie dreaming. Few indeed pass our tests.’

A dark
thought occurred to Che. ‘Kadro,’ she murmured, ‘the Fly-kinden from Collegium,
he went missing.’

‘He was
curious.’ The man at Elysiath’s shoulder nodded. ‘He had begun to understand. So
we called to him. We even met him at the pyramid’s summit. Sometimes, when we
awake, we miss the sky, even though it is only the stars of a cool night that
we can endure.’

‘He
failed the tests,’ stated Garmoth Atennar flatly, ‘and his companion took her own
life rather than attempt them.’

A shock
of anger went through Che, and she took an involuntary step towards the
armoured giant, though minuscule in the face of him. ‘You killed them!’

‘We?’ He
looked down on her with faint derision. ‘We who have the power of life and
death, and whose inescapable rule stretches from horizon to horizon?’ She met
his eyes then, but his stern face beat her down. There was no admission, in
that expression, of any kinship or shared humanity. He was the Master, she a
servant, the divisions of the world from before the revolution. She wanted to
shout and rage at him, but that reaction would have been as incomprehensible to
Garmoth Atennar as the Masters’ history would be to Thalric. A Fly and a Beetle
were dead, two scholars of the College and, to the immortal Masters, it was as
though they had been no more than a beetle, a fly, crushed unknowingly
underfoot.

‘And
me?’ she asked.

‘You
have passed our tests,’ Elysiath said. ‘You have heard our call. From your
distant home you sought us out, and now that challenge is behind you, and you
stand before us as a supplicant. Now reveal what you would have of us.’

Che
stared at them, and she was distantly aware of Thalric’s murmur, ‘Be very, very
careful what you ask.’ It was a needless warning. ‘I was sent here by my
uncle,’ she said. ‘As an ambassador.’

Elysiath
laughed again. It was a beautiful sound, but cold as winter. ‘You may have
believed that once,’ she said. ‘Do you still?’

‘I …’
Che stopped, feeling the world around her totter.
Do I? No,
Stenwold sent me. There was … I had reasons to investigate an Inapt Beetle city
…There is a perfectly rational explanation for my being here
. But she
found that she did not believe it, not standing before them now.
And you, Achaeos, you lured me here, to this place. You have
pulled my strings all the way, as well as tormenting my nights
.

Achaeos, since you died you’ve not been the man I knew
.

‘I had a
guide, to lead me here,’ she confessed slowly. ‘I … am haunted.’

‘We see
him,’ Lirielle said. ‘He stands at your shoulder. Have you come this far to be
rid of him?’

To be rid of him?
Her breath caught in her throat. This
final confirmation that what afflicted her was more than just a madness
crawling inside her brain sent a shock through her. More than that was her
instinctive recoil from the offer.
But it’s Achaeos …
She saw his lost, loved face again in her mind.
My poor
Achaeos. I can’t just discard him like a cape
. But then she thought of
the ghost, not the man: that lurking, looming grey stain with its continuous
demands.

‘How?’
she asked.

‘We need
only lend it a little strength,’ Lirielle explained. ‘It is too weak to exist
apart from you now, therefore it leans on you like a sick man. We shall help it
to stand alone, then it will be about its business and you shall be rid of it.’

‘But
what if I
am
its business?’ Che demanded.

Lirielle’s
expression suggested that this entire conversation was now boring her. She went
back to combing her hair.

Che
could feel the ghost hovering close, invisible to her but still present. She
recalled the Marsh, suddenly: its dragging her towards the Mantis icon, and its
shrieking denunciation of the Marsh people, how they had let the old ways lapse
so far.
Power: it was looking for magic, and why else if
not to free itself?
She should have considered more that he might want
to be free from her, as much as she wanted to be free from him.

She did
want to be free from him.

‘Please,’
she said, ‘do it.’

‘Che …’
Thalric was reaching out, but she shook him off.

‘Do it,’
she said again, grasping her courage with both hands.

Elysiath
sighed. ‘You are so impatient, with your mayfly lives,’ she said. ‘See, it is
being accomplished even while you demand it.’

She
waved one languid hand, and all eyes followed the gesture.

There
was something boiling and building in the air, grey and formless, writhing and
knotting. Motes of substance seemed to be drawn to it, flocking through the dim
air. It turned and twisted like a worm, as flecks of dusty powder fell into its
substance. Slowly it was growing a form, evolving from a blur into something
that had limbs, a head, the shape of a man.

‘Is
there …?’ Thalric was squinting, as if trying to make out something he could
not quite see. In another place, Che was sure, any number of ghosts would pass
him by, but here, where the darkness was layered with centuries, one on top of
another in an unbroken chain, the magic was getting even to him.

She
thought she saw bones and organs as the apparition formed. It was still
colourless, washed-out, still a shadow, a mere reflection in a dark glass. She
found that she now feared to set eyes on him. What would he look like after a
year in the void? Would it be Achaeos living she saw, or Achaeos dead?

Thalric
made a choking sound, and she knew he must now see it, or see something. His
lips drew back in a grimace, his hands spreading open to fight. Behind him the
Vekken stood expressionless and she could not know what he saw.

‘Is that
…?’ Thalric said. ‘What am I seeing? Isn’t that …?’

‘Yes,’
she confirmed, and looked back at the ghost, which was near complete, now – and
discovered that it was not.

They had
lent it enough of their strength, like a thimble filled from the ocean, for it
to become recognizable, and more of it was being filled out even as she
watched. She now recognized the tall, lean frame, and those sharp features that
were, in their cold arrogance, a match for the Masters themselves. He did not
wear the slave’s garb they had dressed him in to die, but instead his arming
jacket, its green and gold bleached grey. The sleeves were slit up to his
elbows to give play to the spines of his arms. Even the sword-and-circle brooch
that he had cast aside now glinted from his breast again.

‘Tisamon,’
Che gasped. ‘But … no! This is the wrong one. This isn’t him!’

‘Little
child, what you see is all the ghost there is. No other clings to you,’ the man
beside Elysiath declared, plainly amused. ‘Are you so particular?’

‘But …’
she protested, and the Mantis’s haughty features turned to regard her. ‘I don’t
understand.’

‘We see
in your past a great convergence of ritual,’ the man continued, sounding bored
again. ‘A magical nexus to which you and he were linked. When he died, you were
touching him in some way.’

‘But
where is Achaeos?’ she asked, but she already knew the answer. Gone. Gone
beyond, and utterly. Whilst this vicious, martial creature had clung on within
her mind, her lover had been like a candle flame suddenly snuffed. The
dream-Achaeos had told her,
You do this to yourself
.
She had used his memory as a rod and imagined that it was his hand that beat
her with it.

‘Oh.’
She sat down suddenly. The spectral Mantis was staring at them, each one in
turn. His eyes lingered long enough on Thalric to make the man tense.

‘What do
you seek, spirit?’ Elysiath asked him. ‘What holds you here still?’

Tisamon’s
pale lips moved, the words seeming to come from a great distance.
Where is my daughter?

‘Go seek
her,’ Elysiath said without interest. ‘She is no concern of ours.’

Where is she?
demanded the Mantis’s bleak, far-off voice.

‘You are
parted from the Beetle-kinden,’ the man told him. ‘If you cannot scent your
child, free as you are now, then you shall never find her.’

Tisamon’s
greyed eyes flashed briefly. Che thought it was resentment, but then she read
it as triumph.

She is among the Dragonflies
, the Mantis stated.
Far north and west of here
.

‘Go seek
her,’ Elysiath said again. ‘We give you leave.’

Che
thought of Tynisa, her near-sister, and daughter of this dead man. She thought
of what directions Tynisa’s life might turn under this ghost’s influence, how
it had already turned when he was alive. ‘Tisamon,’ she protested. ‘No …’

The
angular features stared down at her.
Stenwold’s niece
,
he identified her, as though he had not been riding inside her mind these many
months.
She needs me
. With that, he was stalking
away, growing less distinct with distance. She thought she detected
half-glimpsed shapes about him, the shadows of a shadow, that were those of
briars and thorns.