The Scarab Path

One

He was Kadro, Master Kadro of the Great College of the city of Collegium, which was half a world away and no help to him now. A little Fly-kinden man, long hair going grey and face unshaven, waiting for the pitchest dark before beginning his work. Oh, I have striven all my life against the way my race is seen. The perception of Fly-kinden as thieves, as rogues, as a feckless, rootless underclass in any city you cared to name. He had thought that he was beyond that, Master Kadro the antiquarian and historian, who had stood before a class of twenty avid scholars and propounded his learning. He had stood on a box, certainly, so as to be seen over the lectern, but he had stood there nonetheless.

And here he was, skulking like a villain as the evening drew on and the city below him grew quiet and still. The farmers would have come in from their fields by now. They would be lighting the beacons along the great wall. They would eventually be going to sleep. Those sentries that remained would be blind to the night hanging beyond their small fires. Kadro, who could see in the dark as the locals could not, would then strike. It was a poor way for a guest to treat his hosts, but he was beginning to believe that his hosts had not been entirely honest with him.

We sighted the walls of Khanaphes today. After the wastelands it was a view to take the breath away. Golden stone raised higher than the walls of Collegium or of any Ant city-state – and with statues piled on that – architecturally bewildering but, given the people that live here, I suppose it’s not surprising. Huge buildings and broad avenues; every major building constructed vastly out of scale. For a man of my stature it was daunting – even for the locals it must make them feel like midgets. Beyond the walls, the strip of green that is the river’s attendant foliage runs north, a single channel of life in the desert.

Everyone apparently pleased to see us – especially pleased to see Petri – much polite interest in Collegium but a little standoffish, as though news of a city inhabited by their close kin was something they heard every other day. Evening of the first day, and we seem to have been absorbed – found a place and now genteelly ignored, as the life of Khanaphes moves around us like a sedate and well-oiled machine.’ Kadro reread it with a shake of his head. How little I knew, then. Crouching high above the plaza, with its great hollowed pyramid, he watched the torches of a patrol pass indolently by. He had not been noticed, either in absence or by presence. His heart was hammering. This sneaking around was not his trade. The deftness of the Fly-kinden, his birthright, had mouldered for a good long while before being given an airing now. He was lucky his wings still worked. How they would scoff at me, back home. Collegium born and bred, and living amongst the cumbrous, grounded Beetle-kinden all his life, he had almost forgotten that he was more than a pedestrian himself.

Now! he told himself, but still he did not go, locking into place instead, clutching flat against the stone like a badly rendered piece of sculpture. They were mad keen on their carvings here in Khanaphes. It was obviously the main outlet for all their stunted creativity, he decided. They could never leave a stone surface blank when they could chisel intricate little stories and histories into it. Histories that revealed nothing. Stories that hinted at everything. This whole city was just a maddening riddle created specifically to drive an aging Fly-kinden academic insane. And here was the culmination of his insanity.

It was totally dark now. There was a patchy spread of cloud above, too, which had recommended tonight to him: a rare occurence out here on the fringes of this nameless desert. Nameless in the eyes of Collegium, anyway. In a lifetime of poring over the oldest of maps, Kadro had seldom come across the city of Khanaphes. The name existed only in those ancient, unintelligible scrawls that the Moth-kinden left behind, after the revolution had forced them out. The maps of Beetle merchant venturers barely admitted to its existence, barely gave it credence or fixed location, as though some conspiracy of cartographers existed to deny that a city called Khanaphes had ever taken physical shape.

East, somewhere east, the stories ran: a city founded by the Beetle-kinden, and whose name, to those few academics who cared, was inseparable from legend and Inapt fancy.

And here he was, looking over this city, this great river Jamail with its acres of marshy delta and the desert that the locals called the Nem – all nothing but names to the academics of Collegium, until now.

It was the war, he knew, that had opened up so much more of the wider world to the Lowlands. Suddenly there had been a lot of new faces seen in the city, in the College even: Imperial diplomats and their slaves of many kinden, Solarnese Fly-kinden or the sandy-skinned near-Beetles they bred there, Spiderlands Aristoi, and even the occasional brooding Commonwealer. The world was bigger than it had ever been, and yet Kadro had found new territory still.

The ever-talking Solarnese had eventually got around to comparing maps, and there, lying at the edge of their world, had been the winding blue line of a river with a jewel at its mouth: Khanaphes.

He shifted on his high perch, digging fingers into the reliefs to keep his balance. They build high here, yet they never look up. Rents in the cloud passed bands of silver moonlight over the Scriptora, the big, brooding mausoleum that served Khanaphes as the seat of its administration. The ember glow of a rush-light was visible in one high window as some clerk continued working all hours for the implacable bureaucracy he served. Below the window rose great columns that supported the building’s facade, carved from huge slabs of stone to resemble scaly cycads. This was such a serious city, where nobody hurried and everyone was busy, and it was all just an act. He was sure of that by now. It was all to take one’s attention off the fact that there was something missing from the public face of Khanaphes. The city was intrinsically hollow. This city of contradictions. To find an outpost of what should be civilization all these miles east of Solarno, untouched by the Wasp Empire, untouched by the squabbles of the Exalsee or the machinations of the Spiders . . . and yet to find it untouched, also, by time.

Khanaphes has welcomed me, and yet excluded me. Petri does not feel it, but she was always a dull tool. There is a darkness at the heart of this city, and it calls for me. Last night’s entry. He should have left this journal with Petri, just in case. The heart of Khanaphes yawned for him, here overlooking this grand plaza. They liked their space, here. After they had won a victory against the Many of Nem, they had paraded their chariots all around this square, their soldiers and their banners, before immortalizing their own triumph on further expanses of stone. But who had they been parading for?

Not for the ministers, who had stood with heads bowed throughout; not for the common people of the city, who had been away at their daily tasks. It had been for the others. There were others. Kadro was convinced of that now.

They were spoken of so often that their name became meaningless, and therefore they were never truly spoken of at all, as if held so close to the face that they could not be focused on. Here was the heart, though. If Khanaphes was holding a secret, then it was here in the tombs.

In the centre of the plaza stood the pyramid. It was a squat thing, rising just thirty feet in giant steps, and was sliced off broadly at the top, to provide a summit ringed with huge statues. From his high vantage, a vantage that the structure’s earth-bound builders could never have enjoyed, Kadro could see that within the ring of statues’ silent vigil there was a pit, descending into a darkness that his eyes had yet to pierce. It was the great unspoken what at the centre of Khanaphes, and tonight he intended to plumb it.

A bell rang deep within the city, maybe a late ship warning the docks of its approach. The sound took up all of the night, low and deep as wells, for the bells of Khanaphir ships were as hugely out of scale as the rest of the city. Aside from the faint scratchings of crickets and cicadas from the riverbanks, there was no other sound in the darkness.

Petri would already be looking for him. By tomorrow she would be asking questions of their hosts, in her wellmeaning and perplexed manner. She would bumble about and make a mild nuisance of herself, and yet be utterly, patently oblivious to what was going on. That was good. It meant that, if something bad happened to him, if he was caught, then they would not suspect her of any complicity.

He hoped that was the case, anyway. He had no guarantees.

With a flicker and flare of his wings he coasted gently down to stand between two of the statues. The Khanaphir really loved their statues, and these were huge and strange.

It had been the expression on their white stone faces that had drawn him here in the first place. They know something. They were older than the rest, and bigger than most, and better made, and different. There was no man or woman in Khanaphes who could lay claim to those beautiful, arrogant and soulless smiles.

He now crouched between the pyramid summit’s edge and the pit. The same rush-light ember still glinted in a high-up window of the Scriptora, that diligent clerk hard at work. Or perhaps it was a spy, tracking Kadro in the darkness? The Fly-kinden huddled closer, trusting to the bulk of the statues to conceal him. They would have come for me, by now, if they knew. He had no choice but to believe it.

They had a word here: reverence. It was not the word that the Collegium scholars thought they knew: here it carried tomes of unspoken fears. It was stamped on all the minds and faces of Khanaphes.

He peered down cautiously, into the black. The shaft fell into a gloom that even his eyes wrestled with. The Royal Tombs of Khanaphes, he told himself, and Kadro of Collegium will be the first outlander to enter there in a thousand years. The thought brought a rush of excitement that dispelled the fear.

He had always been a man to dig in strange places. Back in Collegium he had been a bit of a maverick, dashing all over the Lowlands to look at unusual rocks or talk to wizened mystics. There had always been method in his research, though, as he negotiated with grim Moth-kinden or bandied words with shrewd Spiders. There had always been a trail to follow and, although he could not have known at the start, that trail led here.

All around him the statues kept silent guard, and he even summoned courage enough to grin at them. If the Khanaphir had wanted to keep him out, they should have posted a living watch here. The white faces stared impassively out into the night over the sleeping city. Kadro hunched cautiously at the top of the steps, staring downwards. Fly-kinden had no fear of darkness or confining walls. They were small and nimble, and left to their own devices they built complex warrens of narrow tunnels, impossible for larger folk to navigate. There was a cold breath coming from that hole below him, though: chill and slightly damp, and he wondered whether the tombs connected to the river.

No matter. He had not dared this much only to fall victim to his own imagination. He shifted the strap of his satchel and took a deep breath. Into history, he spurred himself.

He glanced across the pit and saw one of the statues staring at him, its blind white eyes open at last, and now darker than the night sky behind. Something moved close by, and he gave out a hoarse shout and called up his wings to take flight, but by then it was already too late.

Two

It was all over before they arrived, the charred wood and ash gone cold, and just the smoke still drifting into a cloudless sky.

The sail-mill, the warehouse, the miller’s home, everything had been systematically razed. By the time word was rushed to Collegium by the neighbouring hamlet, it would already have been too late to stop it.

Stenwold stared at the ruins, his hands hooked in the belt of his artificer’s leathers. The miller and his family and staff would all be dead. This was the third attack to occur hereabouts and the pattern was dismaying in its precision.

Around him the guardsmen from Collegium were fanning outwards from the automotive, some with their shields held high and others with snapbows at the ready.

‘You think we did this.’

He looked around to see one of the Vekken ambassadors staring at him. The Ant-kinden’s expression was one of barely controlled dislike. The man’s hand rested on his sword-hilt as though he was waiting for a reason to slice Stenwold open. Stenwold was wearing a breastplate over his leathers and he was glad of it.

‘I don’t think anything as yet,’ he replied patiently. A lot of effort had been involved in there even being a Vekken here to talk to, and most of it was his work.

‘Yet you have brought me here for a reason,’ the man said. He was smaller than Stenwold, shorter, stockily athletic where the Beetle was broad. He would be stronger than Stenwold too. His skin was dark, not the tan of the Sarnesh or the deep brown of Stenwold’s own people, but a slightly shiny obsidian black. ‘You insisted on coming with us,’ Stenwold reminded him, ‘so we brought you.’ He bit back anything else. ‘Touchy’ was an understatement, with the Vekken. Stenwold’s men were moving cautiously further out. There was still enough cover left, in fallen masonry and half-standing walls, to conceal some bandits or . . . No bandit work, this. But who, then? Collegium had its enemies, more than ever before, but there was currently supposed to be a general peace. Someone clearly had not been informed.

He heard a scrape and scuff as the automotive disgorged its last passenger. His niece hesitated in the hatchway, looking unwell. She shook her head at him as he made a move towards her.

‘Just give me a moment,’ she said, as she eyed the wreck of the mill bleakly. ‘This is bad, isn’t it?’

‘Quite bad, yes.’ Seeing the officer of his guardsmen backing towards him, he said, ‘Che, would you look after our Vekken friend here while I see to something.’ He had not meant to put so much of a stress on the word, but it had come out that way.

Che dropped to the ground and staggered, before catching her balance. The journey had been hard on her.

The Vekken was staring at her, but if her discomfort meant anything to him, it was lost in a generic expression of distaste for all things Collegiate.

‘Do you think . . .?’ His look did not encourage discussion but she pressed on. ‘Do you think someone could be causing trouble between our cities?’ In the absence of a reply, she added, ‘We are west of Collegium here, and Vek is the closest port.’

 ‘As I said, you believe this is our work,’ the Vekken said flatly.

‘Che, get back in the automotive,’ Stenwold said suddenly.

‘You too . . .’ He looked at the Vekken and obviously could not put a name to him. The Vekken squared off against him, wanting to see whatever was being hidden from him.

‘Now!’ Stenwold shouted, and then everything went to pieces. Without a sound, there were men popping up from all sides, their crossbows already clacking and thrumming.

Every shadowy corner of the mill’s wreck that could afford a hiding place was disgorging attackers. One of Stenwold’s soldiers was down in that instant, another reeling back with a bolt through the leg. All around was the sound of missiles blunting themselves against shields, or rattling off the automotive’s armoured hull.

‘Pull in!’ the officer shouted. ‘Protect the War Master!’

‘Uncle Sten!’ Che cried. She was already halfway back inside the automotive, an arm reaching out for him, when she noticed the Vekken ambassador was sprawled on his back. A moment later he was lurching to his feet, but he had a bolt embedded up to its metal fletchings in his shoulder.

His sword was out, offhanded, but he did nothing but stand there in plain view. She rushed over to him, got her hand on his shoulder.

He cut viciously at her. If not for his wound, he might have lopped her arm off at the elbow. She retreated, seeing him loom over her with blade raised, at that moment prepared to kill her without another thought. She was an enemy of his race and had dared to touch him. He must really have been what passed for a Vekken diplomat, however, because he let something stay his hand.

‘Get inside the automotive!’ she urged him. ‘Please!’

‘I am in no danger,’ he replied, and she thought she had misheard him at first, barely catching the words over the shouting. Stenwold collided backwards into the automotive’s side with a curse, as a soldier thrust him back, one-handed.

There was a bolt lodged through the man’s left arm, and with his other hand he pressed his snapbow into Che’s grip.

‘Take it and use it. Come on, Master Maker!’

‘Wait!’ Stenwold crouched lower. ‘Wait – look at them!’

The attackers had mostly stopped shooting now, and instead were forming up a line of shields, preparing to rush in and finish the job. Meanwhile the automotive’s driver was pointedly letting the steam engine whine and rumble, as if trying to get the idea of escape across. Che looked down at the snapbow, glinting fully loaded in her hands.

If only I could. But it was a deadweight, useless to her. She dropped it into the automotive’s waiting hold.

‘Look at them!’ Stenwold was shouting, pointing for the benefit of the Vekken envoy, and Cheerwell suddenly realized what he meant. The line of attackers, who were moving in even as the Collegium guard tightened around the automotive, were all Ant-kinden. Specifically, they were Ant-kinden of Vek.

‘They are a detachment from Tactician Akalia’s force,’ the Vekken – their Vekken – explained. ‘They are merely obeying their last order, which was to harass Collegium in any way possible.’

‘But they shot you!’

‘My people are skilled soldiers.’ The Vekken sounded insulted. ‘I had no time to announce my presence to them before they commenced their ambush.’

Stenwold was shouting now. ‘Then tell them you’re here, you fool!’

‘They are already aware,’ said the Vekken, as another volley of crossbow bolts drove the Collegium men further back towards the vehicle. ‘They have advised me to leave before they begin their shield-charge.’ Stenwold reached for him in frustration, but then thought better of it. ‘Tell them that the war is over. You’re an ambassador – Vek is sending ambassadors to Collegium, for Waste’s sake!’

 ‘I do not have authority to countermand a Tactician’s order.’

At that moment Stenwold was physically shoved further into the shelter of the automotive’s hatch by the injured soldier. ‘Tell them!’ he roared desperately. ‘Don’t you think that if your King was here he would order them to stop?’

The idea of second-guessing the Monarch of Vek was obviously beyond consideration for this particular Vekken.

He just stood there, staring at Stenwold with patent loathing.

The guardsmen had now raised a cordon of shields around him and Cheerwell, with snapbowmen ducking down behind it to reload, then up again to shoot. Che noticed that there were a good few Vekken dead as well, as the bolts tore through their shields and armour both.

‘Well?’ Stenwold demanded. ‘Can’t you admit to logic, just this once?’

‘Your men are the only ones still shooting,’ the Vekken observed.

Stenwold forced his way out of the automotive again.

‘Put up your bows!’ he called. ‘Hold!’

The Collegium soldiers waited tensely, the snapbowmen with their weapons still levelled above the shields of their fellows. The Vekken force mirrored them, big shields steady, crossbows loaded and aimed. There was a long, fraught pause while Stenwold caught his breath.

‘We cannot go on like this,’ he declared at last. The Vekken ambassador eyed him as though he was mad.

‘Put up your bows,’ he said again without anger, sounding only tired.

The officer repeated the order with obvious reluctance and the barrels of the snapbows lifted.

‘What is going on?’ Stenwold asked.

‘As I have said, these men were given their last orders before Tactician Akalia’s force was defeated.’ That defeat was obviously a bitter memory for the Vekken.

‘And now?’

 ‘They will seek further instructions, on the off chance that their orders will now be changed.’

‘Off chance?’ Stenwold exploded.

The Vekken’s expression suggested that attacking Collegium agriculture was an eminently appropriate thing for bands of Vekken soldiers to be doing.

‘And are there any more of these soldiers?’

There was a pause while the Vekken remained silent, obviously communing mind-to-mind with his kinsmen.

‘Yes,’ he replied at last. As Stenwold drew breath to speak he said, ‘I have suggested, as an officer of Vek, that this band recommend they too seek new orders. I have no absolute authority, however, and they may disagree with my assessment.’

And you secretly hope they will. Stenwold felt an urge to strangle the man. He cautioned himself: Diplomacy, remember. He had tried so hard, so very hard, to make things work. He had started with this premise: they are people, just as we are, but he should have known better. Since then he’d had plenty of cause to remember that Ant-kinden were not remotely like the sort of people he understood.

The Vekken were now attending to their wounded. ‘Do you want me to provide them with doctors?’ Stenwold asked, seeing the opportunity for a peace offering.

‘They require no Collegiate doctor,’ the Vekken ambassador snapped, without hesitation.

‘At least let us attend to your wound then . . .’

The look he received was poisonous. ‘My own people will tend to me in due course. For now, should we not be returning, as you have solved your mystery?’

Stenwold took ten minutes’ respite from diplomacy, as the automotive began to rumble its way back to Collegium, to think every vile thought he could about both the city of Vek and its bloody-minded inhabitants. After that satisfaction he leant forward to address the envoy again.

‘Do you at least see now, though, why your presence in our city is so necessary? Misunderstandings occur so very easily, between our people. Surely you must understand that there is no need for this violence, not any more?’

There was no hint of understanding in the Vekken’s face, in fact no expression of any kind. Stenwold sighed again.

‘You are here in Collegium for a purpose.’ A purpose other than spying on us, surely, he added to himself. ‘Master Maker,’ the Vekken replied, ‘we are here for now, but how long do you think your plan will work? We are here because you have spoken so many words that some within our city have become curious. We know that your people hate us. We know that support for you in your ruling body wanes. Matters will soon resume their natural course. What do you hope to accomplish?’

It was a surprisingly long speech, for one of his kind.

Stenwold sat back and reflected. The Vekken initiative had been his idea, true, and almost a single-handed effort. He had traded a lot of the prestige he had accumulated during the war for this chance at a lasting peace.

And he’s right, the bastard. He sees it very clear. It wouldn’t take much of a shift of opinion in the Assembly to have us rattling our spears again.

The Vekken was looking at him without expression, except for a tiny wince of pain each time the automotive jolted. The studied loathing still evident in his eyes presaged the future.