The Scarab Path (9 page)

But it
was Harbir who found
her
. After she had spent a
half-hour wandering at random through the coloured maze of the Alcaia, and
regularly dropping his name, a cowled Khanaphir woman approached her, tugged
once at her sleeve, and then retreated deeper into the gloom. Petri followed
meekly, again because she had nowhere else to go.

Harbir’s
tent was bigger than the Fisher’s, and inside it hanging drapes cordoned off
the man himself. Petri found herself in a surprisingly large space, empty save
for overlapping rugs on the floor. Two men stood by the door, bare-chested
Khanaphir Beetles with axes in their belts, whose stare did not admit to her
presence or existence.

‘You
have bandied my name a hundred times beneath the roof of the Alcaia,’ came a voice
from the tent’s hidden reaches. It was a male voice, but Petri could tell no
more than that. Even if this was the Arranger’s tent, it could have just been
another servant speaking.

‘I …
give you my apologies if I have caused any difficulties.’ She stumbled over the
words, which was poor, knowing the Khanaphir valued eloquence.

‘There
are many who come to me seeking a final arrangement,’ the man responded, with
the unhurried measure of someone fond of his own voice. ‘The wealthy speak to
me of their rivals, the bitter regarding those who have wronged them, the
desperate concerning those who have more than they. Honoured Foreigner, have
you been in our lands so long that you would be prepared to take part in our
pastimes?’

‘No …’
The word came out as a squeak, so she calmed herself and started again. ‘I only
wish to know, great Harbir, whether a friend of mine has been arranged … has
had an arrangement made about him.’

She
hoped she had remembered properly what little Kadro had said of the traditions
here. Amongst some assassins, she was sure, such a direct question would
transgress etiquette – perhaps fatally.

‘You
have not come empty-handed, expecting to bear away such a weighty answer?’ the
voice enquired, upon which she finally relaxed a little. She reached into her
purse and came out with a fistful of currency: Helleron Standards, the local
lozenges of metal stamped with weight and hallmark, even a few bulky and
debased Imperial coins.

There
was a slight sound that might have been a snigger. ‘And who is it that is so
fortunate as to have you solicitous after their health?’

‘Kadro …
Kadro of Collegium, the Fly-kinden,’ she replied. The words dropped heavily
into the tent and left a silence.

‘Please
…’ she said again, before biting off the words. The locals never said ‘please’.
Their indefatigable politeness danced around the word.

‘Go,’
said the voice.

‘Please
tell me!’ she managed, suddenly very aware of the two axemen by the tent-flap.

‘His
name has not been passed to me,’ said the unseen voice. ‘Now go.’

The
axemen had subtly shifted their stance, and Petri was suddenly very afraid. She
tripped on the rugs, stumbled, and was out of the tent before she realized it,
into the stifling alleyways of the Marsh Alcaia.

She
looked around her, having no idea what path might lead her out of this warren
of fabric. She had known she was intruding too far, but somehow had envisaged,
after a successful quest, that the way out would open before her. But her quest
was not successful, and no clear exit was to be seen. The one thing she could
not ask the locals was
How do I get out of here?

Petri
started walking. She tried to make her gait seem determined, as of someone who
frequented the Marsh Alcaia every day. But she was a foreigner, dressed like a
foreigner, wearing a head of hair like a foreigner. She no longer had any names
of power to awe the locals. She passed through avenue after cloth-roofed
avenue, each lined only with the openings of tents. People stopped to watch her
pass, and eyes from within the shadows picked out her movements. She was aware
of this scrutiny but did not stop, just kept walking to who-knows-where.

A man
fell into step alongside her. He was a Khanaphir Beetle, short, shaven-headed,
wearing a simple robe. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye and
found he was not looking at her.

‘Pardon
this no doubt unwarranted observation but you look like one who is seeking the
direction to where she should be,’ he said, smiling out at the canvas sky.

‘E-excuse
me?’ she stammered. She felt hope steal up on her, now, although she had no
reason for it.

‘I know
where you need to be, and I can assist you, Honoured Foreigner,’ said her
companion. She stopped and turned to look at him directly.

‘Please
help me,’ she said.

‘Why, of
course.’ He smiled broadly. ‘What you wish, of course, is to be in company with
myself and my fellows. Who would not?’

She
looked behind her and spotted the gathering of rogues that were his fellows.
There were a full dozen of them, Khanaphir and silver-skinned Marsh folk, halfbreeds,
and even a Spider-kinden woman from somewhere far, far off.

‘No,
please,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t want to go with you. I just want to get out of
this place.’

‘Who
would not want to leave here?’ the Beetle agreed, still smiling at her. ‘And
what better companions to leave with than such stout fellows as we? We have a
fine ship, too, which lacks only one of your elegance to complete her company.
Surely you will be our guest.’

She
understood then:
slavers.
The rogues were meanwhile
drawing closer to her in a kind of casual saunter. Any one of them looked as
though he could outrun her and they had broad-bladed daggers, short-hafted
axes, sported spurs of bone.

‘Please,
I … I am a scholar of Collegium. I will soon be missed.’

‘Then
surely your friends will reimburse us for our hospitality,’ replied the smiling
Khanaphir. There was a dagger in his hand, its blade as bright as a mirror even
here under cover of the tents.

She
opened her mouth to protest again but he grabbed her tunic, twisting it at the
collar and drawing her up on to her toes. His smile stayed robustly unchanged.
Another of his men was abruptly close enough to take hold of her other arm.

‘Please—!’
she cried, just as a spear plunged so far into his chest that its leaf-shaped
head emerged complete and red-glossed through his back. His eyes popped wide
open but the smile, horribly, stayed quite intact as he dropped. Petri fell
back and sat down heavily, staring.

They had
found her at last. She saw their gold-rimmed shields inlaid with turquoise,
their raised spears and drawn bows, the gilded and alabaster armour of the
Royal Guard of Khanaphes.

The
slavers made no attempt at fighting. At the sight of the Royal Guard, they took
to their heels. Petri saw the three guardsmen holding bows calmly aim and
loose, and heard the solid sounds behind her of arrows finding their mark. The
lead guardsman was now approaching her, one hand held out to draw her to her
feet. She saw it was their captain, Amnon, who had always terrified her. He was
over six foot – very tall for a Beetle – but he seemed at least a foot taller
still. He seemed larger than life, packed with energy and strength, bulging
with muscles, with hands that could have crushed rocks: so fiercely alive and
strong that she felt his presence as if he were a fire. She cringed away as he
reached out, but he put her back on her feet one-handed, the other grasping a
second spear behind his glorious oval shield.

‘Honoured
Foreigner Petri Coggen,’ he said, grinning at her with white teeth, ‘how
fortunate that we found you.’

She
could only nod. This was the First Soldier of Khanaphes, the Captain of the
Royal Guard. He was everything she had been trying to escape from, to warn
Collegium about. He was part of what had taken Master Kadro, she felt sure of
it.

‘Come,
we will take you to your new rooms,’ Amnon informed her, putting an arm about
her shoulders. He made her feel like a mere child, like a Fly-kinden. He had
come accompanied by only five men, but twice the number of slavers would not
have dared face him, for he could have walked into the Marsh Alcaia on his own.
Amnon was a legend here, and his position in the city was well earned.

At last
his words got through to her. ‘New rooms?’ she asked timorously.

‘Of
course.’ He drew a folded paper from inside his broad belt. It was the same
letter from Collegium that she had left on the desk back in her lodgings. ‘Your
people are sending friends, so we must ensure that our hospitality is not
wanting. We will prepare a proper welcome for them.’ His smile was guileless,
yet as savage as the sun.

‘I have travelled in more luxury, in my time,’ said Mannerly Gorget.
‘When they said we would be travelling on the
White Cloud,
I allowed myself to get excited. I hadn’t realized they meant as freight.’

‘You
exaggerate,’ Praeda told him. ‘Also, the padding you bring to the ship should
be luxury enough.’ She had made herself comfortable, or at least as comfortable
as possible, against a bulkhead. It was not actually the cargo hold they were
in, but three compartments alongside it that had probably been originally
intended for crew. By unspoken agreement, Che and Praeda had taken the bow, the
men had taken the stern, and the middle compartment was where they habitually
sat and complained about the arrangement.

Since
the war, Solarno and Collegium had not been strangers. A two-way trickle of
scholars and artificers had begun, all keen to learn or to profit from the
shortcomings of the one city or the other. The sheer distance, and the
intervening cities of the Spiderlands, sufficiently complicated the journey to
still make most forms of trade uneconomical. There was a certain market,
however, that had grown up very recently between them, and that was aptly
represented by the
White Cloud
. Just as Spider
Aristoi had been using Solarno as a holiday retreat for centuries, so the idea
had grown up amongst the richest of the Collegium magnates. Solarno, that
beautiful lakeside city, with its civilized comforts and entertainments, had
become
the
place to go for a certain class of the
very wealthy. Deep in the Beetle mind there had always been a sense of
grievance with the world. Beetle-kinden felt themselves looked down upon. They
came from old slave stock. They were unsubtle in their dealings. Compared with
the elegant grace of the Spider-kinden, they felt like club-footed children. It
was a thorn in the minds of all of them, especially those rich enough to
discover that there were things that money could not buy. Solarno, lying
outside the Spiderlands proper, had given them a place to go and flaunt their
affluence. They would promenade alongside the glittering Exalsee, throng its
tavernas, watch its excitable locals and pretend that, by doing what the
Spider-kinden nobility did, they had become their equals. What the Spiders
thought of it all was unknown, but Solarno was raking in money hand over fist.
The
White Cloud
did not lack passengers for the
return trip, either. The Spider-kinden who lived in Solarno were sheltering
from the Dance, and it provided a backwater allowing them to play their games
in safety. The introduction of Collegium into their lives, a whole city crammed
with the naive and the adoring, had enlivened their social scene considerably.

Captain
Parrols of the
White Cloud
was possessed of unusual
acumen, himself a Helleren Beetle of dubious provenance. He had almost ruined
himself to fit out this little airship with as much tawdry opulence as
possible, but he had since made it all back and more, even with only a single
round trip every month. The sort of people who took the air in Solarno could
not afford to be seen looking cheap. Parrols had been less enchanted with the
idea of carrying a grab-bag of academics on his ship, but he owed Drillen and
so had grudgingly acquiesced. Their current station within the bowels of the
vessel was testimony to the stalemate reached between Drillen’s influence and
Parrols’s parsimony.

The
Khanaphir Expedition of the Great College consisted of either three, four or
six people, depending on your point of view. The fourth person was Cheerwell,
and she found herself with an uneasy and ill-defined role. Although a scholar
of the College, she was not present here as an academic. The other three had
credentials, while she was merely a student with a colourful recent history.
She had been given the over-large title of Collegiate Ambassador to Khanaphes,
even though Stenwold could not furnish her with much idea of what such a grand
personage might do. Khanaphes itself sounded a confusing and contradictory
place, so she would have to think on her feet and try not to upset people. On a
more mundane level, although she was not the expedition’s leader and had none
of the academic prestige, she seemed to have inherited most of the practical
responsibility. When they reached Solarno, it would be her job to find locals
prepared to take them further. She was positively looking forward to it, if
only for the fact that being crammed here into the underside of an airship with
three bickering academics was making her ill. She could barely eat, she slept
badly, she constantly fended off Mannerly Gorget’s half-heartedly lecherous
advances. She worried all the time about what they might find in Khanaphes.

The
academic contingent of the expedition was a triad of conflicting personalities
who were either genuinely enthused by the project or indebted in some way to
Jodry Drillen. Che was not sure which criterion applied to whom. Their leader
was a staid old man called Berjek Gripshod. He had been better known to her
simply as Master Gripshod since before Che started her studies, but she
understood there to have been a first name attached to him at some point. He
was a College Master who cared nothing for politics, therefore Stenwold had
chosen him as a historian who would not twist the revelations of Khanaphes to fit
his own pet theories. Drillen, for his part, had chosen him as a man whose
academic and political reputations remained unsmudged: someone that people
would listen to on his return. Those were his good points, at least. He was in
his mid-fifties, hair grey and thinning, dignity etched over his face in deep
lines. He had a desert-dry humour and no interest in conversing with people
outside his own discipline. College students said the best way of attracting
his attention was to have been dead for three hundred years.