The Scarab Path (90 page)

Thalric
tensed, hand poised to sting, and she saw Accius bring his sword up. Elysiath
laughed, as the Jamail might have laughed when it destroyed the Scorpions.
‘Your weapons are nothing here,’ she told them patiently. ‘Though our dominion
may have shrunk from the height of its greatness, you are within it now, for we
still rule these halls.’ The great pressure of their collective minds hung over
the three intruders. Che saw Thalric’s hand shake, his Art trapped within it.
Accius’s face was shiny with sweat, his sword motionless.

‘You are
not the first to come and steal our secrets,’ Elysiath said, raising a hand.
‘Nor shall you be the last to pay the price for it.’

‘Secrets?’

Che started
at the voice, for it belonged to the Vekken beside them.

‘Our
knowledge is our treasure, and no thieves shall take it outside these halls.’
Jeherian told him.

‘You
have kept no secrets here.’ Accius’s expression suggested that the worst had
befallen him, and he was meeting it joyously. ‘Slay me and you set your seal on
nothing. You cannot keep us from knowing.’

‘What
nonsense,’ Elysiath said scornfully, but Accius grinned, teeth gleaming
brightly in his dark face.

‘My
brother is at large in the city already. Not you nor all your servants shall
catch him. And what I know, he knows.’

A dead
silence fell between them, the great Masters regarding the defiant Ant-kinden
with what Che realized was dawning puzzlement. At last it was Jeherian’s
expression that changed, sagging with bitter weariness.

‘The old
Art,’ he acknowledged. ‘The old Art of the savages. It has been far too long
and we have forgotten too much, how they were in each other’s minds, the folk
of the Alim and the Aleth.’ Che saw realization ripple through them all,
stripping away their majesty and leaving a sad bewilderment behind. She found
that, despite their malevolence and their vast power, she still felt sorry for
them in some strange way – atavisms that remembered only ruling a world that
had long passed them by.

‘What
could we say?’ she said. ‘Who would believe us anyway? We will return to the
sun, and say nothing. There would be no profit for us in being dubbed liars or
madmen. We leave you to your rest. Do not think ill of us.’

The Masters
of Khanaphes regarded them stonily for a long moment, until Jeherian nodded
minutely and said, ‘Go.’

Che
would remember for ever the sight of them as she glanced back one last time:
beautiful by an alien aesthetic, huge and commanding and gleaming in that
bluish light. The immortal Slug-kinden, the Masters of Khanaphes.

She led
the way back. Thalric tried to at first, but he went off course over and over,
leading them in circles through the maze of halls by the light of Accius’s
quisitor’s lamp. The true path to the light was clear only to Che and, once
they had finally accepted that, she led them confidently until they found the
corpses.

There
were four of them there, three close by and one at a distance. Che had not
quite identified them when Thalric knelt down beside the middle one of the
three. She heard him take a long breath, and only then recognized the corpse as
Osgan’s.

‘Oh,’
she said. ‘I’m sorry, Thalric. Really I am.’

‘I left
him behind,’ Thalric said. ‘He was in pain, but I left him behind.’

‘We
should go,’ Accius said shortly, still very anxious. Thalric looked up at him
balefully and Che recalled how it was only because Accius had been abducting
her that Thalric had abandoned Osgan to his fate.

‘No
fighting, no disagreement,’ she ordered them flatly. ‘We leave here at once, or
the Masters may change their minds. Thalric, I’m sorry, but we should spend no
more time here than necessary.’

‘You’re
right, of course,’ he said, standing up. She took his hand and led them on,
past the final corpse, that was twisted, both face and body, into an attitude
of unbearable horror.

The
thought she had, crossing into the next hall, was,
We must
be close now. There is his armour on the throne
. She thought that until
she saw the head lift, and the dead eyes of Garmoth Atennar stared out at her.
Even then the others did not see, not until she flinched back against them,
dragging them round to watch the colossal metal-clad form stand up, sword in
hand.

‘Garmoth
Atennar,’ she declared. ‘Lord of the Fourth House, whose Bounty Exceeds all
Expectations, Greatest of Warriors.’ She could remember every word of it. ‘We
are leaving your realm.’

‘I know
of your words with my peers,’ he boomed. ‘Even as our slaves have diminished,
so has the foolishness of the Masters grown. Not mine, though, and I care not
if you have a hundred listeners. They shall know first-hand the fate that
awaits trespassers into these halls.’

The
might of his mind oppressed them, but Che found it weaker now that he was
alone. She could shrug it off with ease, ward it off from the others, thinking:
Is this magic? Am I a magician now?

Garmoth
Atennar took one great stride forward. His sword dropped towards her
ponderously and Thalric pushed her out of its path. His stingshot struck shards
from the Master’s Mantis-crafted armour. Garmoth changed his grip on the sword
and swung it in a scything blow towards him, but Thalric took flight briefly
and avoided it, leading the sword point upwards. Accius darted in and rammed
his sword into the huge man’s knee.

Che
expected Garmoth’s armour to fend off the blow easily, but the Mantis plate
crumpled at once, cracking like fire-warmed paper. With a grating roar, Garmoth
collapsed to his knees, and Accius slit his throat, stepping back to avoid the
huge body as it toppled to the floor in a cacophony of metal.

In the
echoes of that crash, that seemed to go on and on, Che waited for
repercussions, but the other Masters made no further appearance. Perhaps they
slept already. Perhaps they were as heedless of their fellow as they had been
of their servants.

‘Rusted
through,’ Thalric observed. She blinked at him, realized he meant the armour.
‘Look,’ he pointed, ‘the backplate is cracked without a blow being struck. This
was no good place to store armour.’ He laid a hand on one of the massive
pauldrons, and half of it came away without effort.

‘Greatest
of warriors,’ she whispered.
Was he genuinely so, in his
day? Or did he rely merely on the awe he was held in to win his battles for
him? What have we slain here today?
She felt they should move the body
to the pedestal where he had lain for so long, but the three of them could not
have managed it, even with Accius’s strength.

He had awoken several times, but retained only a sketchy memory of each
occasion: aware that he was in the infirmary of the Scriptora, and that she was
beside him. When he moved, he felt as if every bone and joint had been under
the hammer. Amnon, the First Soldier of Khanaphes, opened his eyes.

They had
not given up on him, he saw, for this was one of the little rooms reserved for
Ministers or people of importance. His soldiers, most of whom had suffered
worse than he, would be tended in the communal infirmaries of their barracks,
or in converted storerooms. There would be more than enough work today to keep
all Khanaphes’s cutters and salvers busy.

He
remembered, in fits and starts, that the city still stood, that the Scorpions
had been washed away, that he had held the bridge just long enough. He squeezed
the hand that he found in his, startling his companion from her doze as she sat
beside the bed.

‘Hello,
Praeda.’

She
looked haggard and he guessed she had not slept much these last few days. She
bit her lip, watching him, and he levered himself up to a sitting position,
determinedly ignoring all the complaints of his body. ‘Don’t tell me I look as
bad as that,’ he chided.

‘I am so
angry with you,’ she said tightly. Her grip on his hand became painful. ‘I
can’t believe just how angry I am.’

‘You
have every right to be.’

‘Don’t
be
reasonable
about it now!’ she snapped. ‘You have
no right to be reasonable now, after what you did. You were going to die, you
and those other idiots. You were going to stay behind and die. What … What sort
of a way is that for anyone to behave?’

‘It is
what the First Soldier of Khanaphes does, if it is needed,’ said Amnon calmly.
‘It is what the Chosen of the Marsh people does. For Totho and Meyr, I cannot
say why they did it, and perhaps they cannot either. How long have I slept?’

‘It’s
now evening of the day after the battle.’

‘And
what do the healers say about me?’

‘Damn
the healers. I stitched your wounds myself,’ she informed him. ‘We know our
medicine in Collegium.’

‘So what
do
you
say about me?’

‘That
you’re a cursed fool. And you got off lightly. I saw your armour after they’d
cut it off you. It looked like someone had thrown it off a cliff and then put
it into an industrial grinder. They should have taken you out of it in pieces.’

‘You
sound disappointed,’ he noted.

‘Because
you won’t
learn
,’ she said bitterly. ‘I know you
soldiers, you’ll remember that you won and that you survived, and you’ll call
it glory, and you’ll do it again.’

He put
both hands on hers, and his mind was abruptly full of all those who had not
survived or won: Dariset and Kham and all his Royal Guard, the elite of the
Khanaphir fighting forces now pared down to a fragile handful. And of course,
Totho’s foreigners, the Fly, the sailors, the loyal giant Meyr. ‘No,’ he said
hollowly, ‘never glory. That I lived was due to chance – chance and Totho’s
armour and his help. That we won was … I cannot explain it. The glory belongs
to the dead.’

Tears
shone in her eyes. ‘Amnon, I love you. You made me love you. You just gnawed
and gnawed away at me until I caved in. So promise me you’ll never do anything
so stupid again.’

He took
a deep breath. ‘I am guilty, as you say, but it is a promise I cannot make.
Would you think the same of me if I were merely to stand by while those I loved
– or those you loved – were harmed? Surely you would not.’

She
gazed at him sadly for a long time. ‘I suppose not,’ she said at last.
‘Although it’s hard to live with it, you’d not be the same man if you did. You
selfish bastard.’

He
managed a smile at that, but then he glanced past her, and she turned to see a
shadow hovering in the doorway: it was a stooped old Khanaphir who looked as
sleepless as any of them.

‘First
Minister,’ she named him, and Amnon said, ‘Ethmet.’

‘They
told me,’ said the old man, ‘that you were well, Amnon.’

‘I
live,’ Amnon confirmed.

Ethmet
looked very old, standing there. The burden of the city’s reconstruction would
weigh on his shoulders. ‘Your banishment …’ he began quietly.

Amnon
nodded. ‘I had not forgotten.’

‘Amnon,
if it were my decision … but the Masters have spoken. You went against their
tenets when you adopted the foreigners’ ways.’

‘And so
I lived, when so many others died. And so I held the bridge, with the
foreigners, who shed their blood for us. But that doesn’t matter, does it?’

‘Amnon,
I am sorry—’

‘Dress
it up as the Masters’ will if you want,’ Amnon interrupted. ‘I care not. I am
banished, so be it.’

‘There
is a chance,’ said Ethmet, holding a hand up. ‘If you were to ask forgiveness
of the Masters, if you were to repudiate the foreigners, I think that you might
yet be taken back. The Masters are just.’

‘Are
they?’ Amnon said heavily. ‘Consider this: if I were a man to beg forgiveness,
then I would not have held the bridge until the waters came, and the only thing
the river would then have achieved would be to wash all our corpses into the
Marshland. So no, I ask no forgiveness. I apologize for none of my actions. I
held the bridge and, if I am banished for that, then I shall go like a man. I
shall go with Praeda Rakespear to her far country, where perhaps they
understand things better than you or your Masters.’ He saw the leap of joy on
Praeda’s face, and knew it was something she had wanted to ask him, and never
dared.

‘Please,
Amnon,’ Ethmet whispered, ‘your city needs you …’

‘My city
needed me and, needed, I came. Now I have done what was required of me. Now it
seems what my city needs is a man who will bow the knee, and I will not. You
have set the price for my actions, and I shall pay it, as I have always paid my
debts. Now we must both part on our own quests: I for a new city, you for a new
First Soldier.’

Ethmet
hovered in the doorway a short while longer, wringing his hands but without
words, and then he skulked away.

This has been a disaster
: it was Totho’s
personal assessment. Drephos would find something positive in it, of course.
Drephos would see the whole Khanaphir expedition as an extended field-test to
destruction: the ship, the armour, the people … He would be pleased, overall,
with the performance. Drephos did not care about money, so long as he had
enough, and the Iron Glove would not be bankrupted by this petty conflict.

Still, no market in Khanaphes, and the
Iteration
sunk with most of her crew, Tirado dead, Meyr dead, and also
Meyr’s people from the Nemian expedition
. Still, Totho knew that he was
merely dressing the books now, that the true disaster was a personal one.
And Che gone, too
. Lost to a Rekef knife, no doubt. They
had hunted her down one night, and he had not been there to save her. That
being so, the final disaster was:
I survived
. He had
not meant to. His armour had been too proof, his instincts too cowardly. He had
lived when all his fellows had died, save only Amnon himself. He wondered if
Amnon felt as wretched as this.