The Scarab Path (88 page)

The rain
was still coming fast, and hard enough to sting the skin. The Scorpion woman
was looking back, watching her people try to flee, fighting amongst themselves
to escape, pushing each other from the bridge or being carried away by the
roiling waters. When she turned back his way, her face was death.

‘Amnon!’
Totho shouted, and the Beetle just managed to regain his feet before she was on
him. She struck him across the helm with the shaft of her spear, hard enough to
stagger him, and then rammed the point into his unarmoured shoulder, drawing a
thick welt of blood. Amnon drove for her with his sword out, but she spun aside
and struck him across the back of the head, whirling her spear one-handed about
her. The claws of her off-hand lunged for him, but scraped off his armour.
Amnon cut back at her, making her jump away. He was moving too slowly, though,
and she was as swift as a Mantis. When safely at a distance, she stabbed at him
with her spear, when within his sword’s reach her claws raked for him. She
danced about him, never still, forcing him always to stumble after her.

She
lashed her spear across the side of his head, snapping him round and sending
him to one knee. Her claws pincered around his neck, digging into the mail
there. She twisted his helm back and poised her spear above the eye-slit.

Totho
shot her through the centre of the chest. The bolt passed straight through her,
and she shuddered once, but remained standing for some time before the spear
fell from her hand and she collapsed. He turned to face the other Scorpions. He
had surely broken some law of single combat, and no doubt they would come for
him now.

They
were backing off. Although there was only water beyond their end of the bridge,
they were backing off. Totho could not understand it until the Khanaphir
soldiers passed him.

They
were just the neighbourhood militia, untrained civilians with their spears and
shields, but they were enough. They swept the demoralized Scorpions ahead of
them like the river itself, furious and fierce, and when they had done their
work, the Jamail took over. So ended the Scorpion siege of the city of
Khanaphes, and the enduring memory Totho had of its conclusion was Praeda
Rakespear kneeling beside Amnon, trying to pull his helm free as she wept.

For a long time, Angved was too shaken to make any rational decision. The
words,
Well, now I’ve seen everything
, just kept
rolling round his head like a mindless mantra. At his back was the leadshotter,
half covered by a tarpaulin. By the time they had got that far, it and they had
been so thoroughly soaked that the effort had grown pointless.
The only problem with firepowder artillery is that you can’t
shoot in the rain, even if you would want to
. He knew that damp powder
would not have mattered if they had a row of trebuchets, but even then it would
be impossible to spot targets in this downpour. Loading would become a
nightmare of slips and errors.
I’ve never known rain like
this, never
. In the Empire, the serious rainfall tended to come late in
the year, but Angved had visited the Commonweal during the war, where up north
in the highlands it rained more, and even snowed. There had been nothing to
touch this, though.
An entire army swept away. Well, now
I’ve seen everything
.

His
Scorpion crew were crouching beside him, all bravado stripped away. Another
half-dozen Scorpions had been lucky enough to climb up on to the roof there,
which was now an island in the rising flood. He was accumulating Wasps, too.
The other engineers were abandoning their placements to find Angved, because
they were soldiers, and in times of chaos they looked for authority.

One of
the Slave Corps landed nearby at a skid, shaking himself. It must be a
nightmare to fly through this, but they had been trying to find Hrathen,
seeking orders.

‘Any
sign of the Captain?’ Angved asked.

The man
shook his head. ‘He was in that, last I saw.’ He was pointing somewhere, but
the rain veiled anything he might be pointing at. Angved knew he meant the
bridge. ‘The Khanaphir are driving what’s left of the Scorpion army into the
river. I saw no fliers. He must be dead.’

‘Right.’
Angved shuddered. ‘How’s the water level now?’

‘Steady,’
another of his engineers reported. ‘Not risen for a little while, so it must
have peaked. What in the pits are we going to do?’

‘I’m
assuming command as ranking officer,’ Angved said, loud enough to be heard. It
did seem to him that the rain was now lessening. ‘Listen to me and do what
you’re told, and we’ll get out of this yet.’

‘And for
what?’ one of the Wasps asked. ‘They’ll have us staked up on crossed pikes.
This is a total disaster.’

‘Maybe
not,’ Angved said.
There’s one thing left that could turn
this from a footnote in the histories into an Imperial triumph. After all, who
gives a spit about a few dead Scorpions or whether some backwater city gets
sacked or not? You just have to step back from things to see what’s really
important
. ‘Genraki,’ he beckoned.

‘Chief.’
The sodden Scorpion looked more oppressed by the rain than by the death of so
many of his fellows. They were not a sentimental breed.

‘You
took to the artillery business fine, didn’t you? You enjoyed it?’

The
Scorpion nodded cautiously.

‘Now
things have gone sour for your lot here, but the Empire can always use an
Auxillian engineer or two. We need to get back to the Empire, quick as you can.
Get us there and you and your men will get paid, rewarded. Which is more than I
can say about anything that might happen to you around here.’

Genraki
nodded again. ‘Away from this city,’ he agreed. ‘Away from the Masters’ anger.’

‘Whatever.’
Angved felt for the satchel containing his precious samples, his notes and
calculations. ‘And don’t think the Empire will forget about this place. I’ve a
feeling the black and gold might be back in sight of here sooner than you
think.’ He looked around at the doubting faces of the other Wasps. ‘Just you
follow my lead,’ he told them. ‘I’ll pull us from the fire yet.’
They’ll make me a major for this, at the least, which will give
me a nice packet to retire on
.

‘Get us
to the Empire,’ he told Genraki. ‘Guide us through the desert. You’ll be well
paid for it, and if you want to stay on there, we can find work for you –
engineers or Slave Corps, your choice.’

He
grinned. Life was looking up. Even the rain was stopping.

‘It’s another dead end.’

Sulvec
flinched at the words. ‘Look again.’ His voice came out as a croak. ‘You must
be wrong.’

‘I
checked, sir. I looked everywhere. It’s not the way out.’

‘Then
find the way!’ Sulvec shouted at him. They listened to the echoes of his voice
pass back and forth down the hall. In their waning lamplight, the Wasps’ faces
looked pale and drawn. Sulvec’s eyes were very wide, as though trying to scoop
up as much of the failing light as they could. A muscle tugged at the corner of
his mouth. ‘How can we be lost?’ he whispered. ‘Where have all these tunnels
come from?’

‘We’ll
have to go back, sir. We must have taken a wrong turn.’

‘So many
tunnels, all dark and covered with slime … so many of them.’ Sulvec swallowed
convulsively. ‘We’ll go back. We must have missed a turn, that’s all. We’re
probably just a hundred yards from the entrance.’ He ignored the expressions of
his men which said,
A hundred yards of solid rock
.
‘Get moving!’ he snapped at them. ‘And bring
him
along too.’

He
kicked out at Osgan’s collapsed form, which had been keeping up a steady,
ragged whimpering. The two soldiers looked at their leader with revulsion that
was only half-concealed.

‘Sir,’
one of them said, after a moment, ‘he’s going to die anyway. He’s stabbed
through the gut. I’m amazed he’s not gone already.’

‘He’s
not gone yet because I still have a use for him,’ Sulvec spat out. ‘Now just
bring him.’

‘Sir,’
the soldier said again, ‘can’t we leave him? What’s the point of dragging him
around this place? I mean, can’t we finish him off?’ They were Rekef men, but
there were limits.

Sulvec
snarled at them. ‘What’s this? Bleeding hearts in the Rekef? Think this is Collegium,
do you? You’re taking my orders, and my orders are to bring him.’ Sulvec felt
as though the world was falling away from him, here in this horrible darkness.
Marger had not come back. Thalric had not come back. They had seen no living
thing since the fight, and yet the darkness beyond their lamps had seemed to
throng with monstrous, massive shapes. He needed Osgan. He needed Osgan because
as long as he had Osgan in his power, Osgan who would scream and writhe at
Sulvec’s whim, he was not helpless. Osgan was his hold on the world.

‘Sir—’

‘One
more word,’ Sulvec shrieked at him. ‘One more word and I’ll make you envy him!’
There were tears in his eyes, for his men were on the point of mutiny. He felt
his fingers flex and curl with the need to hurt something. He settled for
kicking Osgan again, drawing a choked cry. ‘Now bring him.’ He watched as they
levered the mortally wounded man up between them, the strain causing Osgan to
gasp and retch. The stricken man’s face was nothing but a haggard mask of pain,
and Sulvec smiled to see it.
While I have you, I have
control
. Osgan sobbed wretchedly, wailing each time they shifted his
weight.

Sulvec
took up the lantern and led the way back down the hall, peering ahead and yet
not really looking, not wanting to see what the lantern might reveal. That was
another use for Osgan. The prisoner was an anchor to slow their progress, so
that the things in the dark had time to get themselves out of sight.

When I see daylight again
, Sulvec thought grimly,
I will rip him open. I will pull his organs out of him. I will
gouge out his eyes. That’s only fair, after he and that bastard Thalric dragged
me down here
.

Osgan
was suddenly quiet, and a tremor of fear ran through Sulvec.
He’s dead? He can’t be dead. Not yet. I’m not done with him yet
.
He whirled around to face the two soldiers, half expecting to see that they’d
cut the suffering man’s throat. Instead, he found himself looking into Osgan’s
face. It had been transformed. The expression written there had gone beyond
fear of anything that Sulvec might do to him. It was almost blissful in its
terror, the look of the man who sees the thing he most dreads come to pass, and
knows he need not dread it any more.

‘He’s
coming,’ Osgan whispered.

Sulvec
flinched away from him, and the soldiers let go, dropping Osgan to his knees.
He knelt there, arms wrapped about his bloody stomach, dragging in halting
breaths, and just staring.

The
soldiers were already spread out, palms aimed at the darkness. ‘Something’s
coming,’ one of them said.

‘Nothing’s
coming!’ Sulvec insisted, although he did not believe it. ‘Nothing! You’re
letting a dead man get to you. Pick him up!’

‘Sir,’
said the soldier, and then he died.

Sulvec
saw it happen, as a sudden line of red across his throat, the flash of a blade
outlined in blood, and the man dropped. The other soldier loosed a stingshot
into the dark, then again and again, backing away from something Sulvec could
not see. Sulvec opened his mouth to yell at him, but then the second soldier
was dead too, twin sprays of blood from head and body and he had fallen away
into the darkness.

Osgan
was laughing, the sound twisted into a hideous cackle by the pain he was
suffering.

Sulvec
backed off, but he was backing off from nothing he could see. ‘Show yourself!’
he ordered. ‘Let me see you.’

And then
there was someone there, standing between the two corpses. Sulvec did not
understand how he could have missed him. A tall, slender man with pointed
features, a Mantis-kinden of the Lowlands with a claw on his hand. Sulvec could
see him clearly although the lamps were almost out. Whatever illuminated the
Mantis shone on nothing else.

He
advanced in a delicate stalking movement that made no sound. The light on him
fell from one side, and Sulvec could see only whatever that ghost-light
touched. The rest of him was made of darkness that even the lamplight could not
dispel.

Sulvec
loosed a stingbolt at him, but the Mantis seemed untroubled. The Rekef man
tried to draw his sword, but his hands were shaking too much. He backed off,
further and further away from the discarded lamps of the dead soldiers. His own
flickered and died, its fuel spent.

The
Mantis reached Osgan and stared silently down at him until the wretched Wasp
was able to lift his head.

A voice
came cold and clear to Sulvec. The Mantis’s lips moved.
I
remember you
.

Osgan
made a great shuddering sound that was part sob, part laugh. ‘I knew …’ he got
out, with the greatest of efforts, ‘you’d come. They said … you were dead … but
I knew …’

You sat beside the Emperor
, came the Mantis’s distant
voice.
You had your knife, little scribe. Would you have
fought to defend your master?
Osgan’s strangled response was wordless,
incoherent, but the Mantis said,
Yes, I think you would
.

His off
hand, the arm jagged with barbs, rested on Osgan’s shoulder.
I shall give you more, at least, than these your kin
.
There was a moment of understanding, dying man to dead one, and the spectral
blade speared down just once, precise and final.

Sulvec
saw something seep out of Osgan’s tortured frame, saw the racked and twisted
man relax at last, muscle by muscle. The long release of breath he heard was
without pain, was at peace. It was Osgan’s last. He swayed and pitched on to
his side, and Sulvec knew for sure he was dead.