The Scarab Path (45 page)

‘You
wished, I believe, to have words with me?’ the old man enquired. He was
standing at the nearest desk, a simple slab of stone with some half-furled
scrolls resting upon it.

Che
seized her courage in both hands, determined to crack the First Minister’s
shell. ‘What happened to the scholar, Kadro?’ she asked.

Ethmet
did not even blink. ‘We have been unable to locate him, I am sorry to say.’

Che
gritted her teeth. ‘It has been … suggested to me that he may have been asking
awkward questions, that the Ministers of Khanaphes may not have approved of his
researches.’

Ethmet’s
smile remained distantly polite. ‘I understand only that your compatriot was
given to asking his questions, impolitic or not, in unwise places. He was seen
much in the Marsh Alcaia, even out in the desert, where the writ of the
Khanaphir Dominion runs regrettably thin. In seeking such company it would seem
most likely that the manner of his researches, and not the subject of them,
proved the cause of his difficulties.’ He gathered up some of the scrolls and
made his patient way towards a flight of steps.

‘You’re
telling me that you gave no orders …’ Che trailed off.
In
the face of such denial, such a wall of denial, what can I say?

‘None at
all. Why should we?’ Ethmet replied, taking the stairs one at a time. Even in
those few words, Che had the absolute certainty that he was lying.
I can prove nothing, but Petri is right
. She was becoming
used to intuitions that arrived without logic, with nothing but an assurance of
their own truth.

She
followed him up the steps, trying to formulate the words that might trip him
up, expose the man behind the mask. Then he remarked, as blandly as ever, ‘I
understand that you have succumbed to the vice of Profanity.’

She
stopped, as thoroughly thrown as she had ever been, ice coursing through her
veins.
This trap has sprung the wrong way
. Ethmet
was not even looking at her, carefully filing the scrolls, one by one.

‘I …’
she began, her heart hammering. She waited for the guards to suddenly spring
out from their hiding places, but guards there were none, just herself and the
old man within the big, echoing chamber.

‘We make
it a crime,’ Ethmet continued, still at his deliberate filing, and she thought,
The First Minister does not do a clerk’s job. He has
brought me up here for some reason
.

‘I … I
know,’ she stammered. ‘What …What will you …?’

‘Do not
fear.’ He looked at her directly then. ‘It is a law that is enforced only
against those who are not … worthy.’

‘I do
not understand.’ And she genuinely did not understand. He was waiting for her,
testing her.

‘Word
has reached us, O Foreigner, of you and your unusual heritage.’

‘They
thought I was of the blood of …’ She could not bring herself to say it, but he
completed the thought for her.

‘Of the
Masters. But you are not.’ He was at the balcony rail now, hands resting on the
carved stone. ‘But you are
special
nevertheless, or
so we have been led to believe. Not for many ages has Khanaphes welcomed one
like you. The eating of Fir is a practice not forbidden, but restricted.
Through Fir do those of us bearing the blood hear the voice of the Masters.’

She
gaped at him. ‘But you don’t mean … you mean that … the Ministers? You?’

‘The sin
of Profanity is profane only when committed by the unrighteous who seek to
steal that which is given freely to those who deserve it.’

She
clenched her fists, utterly lost now. ‘Tell me what you’re talking about,’ she
urged him. ‘Just tell me … tell me something plainly, please.’ She had joined
him at the balcony’s edge, but his gaze did not even flick towards her.

‘You
know
,’ he said. ‘Am I plain enough in that?’

‘But I
don’t
—’ She stopped and, at last, followed his gaze down
to the tiled floor of the chamber. After a moment she said, ‘Oh.’

The
mosaic, the tiles of sepia and black and grey, swam before her eyes, and she
felt Ethmet take her arm to keep her from simply pitching over the rail. What
had been an abstract arabesque down below was suddenly recognizable, stylized
but familiar. The floor was a map.

Khanaphes
lay at the centre, she now saw plainly, but the extent of the map was large,
the world stretching away on every side. She found the Sunroad Sea, and from
that guessed at north, seeing nothing of the Empire, no Capitas, none of the
centres of Imperial Power.
But that city is where Myna
stands today, and that other one for Maynes
. Her eyes were drawn
westwards: Darakyon was a living Mantis Hold, and west of that lay Tharn, but
no Helleron. There were other cities marked, whose names she could not guess
at, of kinden that perhaps she had never heard of. The edge of the Commonweal
was picked out in a glorious detail beyond her own people’s modern knowledge of
it. She followed the unfamiliar lines of what should have been a familiar land.
There was a coastal city there that she knew must be marked ‘Pathis’, for the
name ‘Collegium’ was only five hundred years old. This map was from an age that
made close cousins of the Wasp Empire and her own home city – and infant
cousins at that. A map that had been scuffed by the feet of Khanaphir clerks
for …

‘How
long?’ she asked.

‘I
cannot say, save to say that the Scriptora was not young, when the Masters
ordained that a map of their world should be placed within.’ Ethmet’s voice was
soft and sad. ‘O Honoured Foreigner, you see it plain, do you not?’

‘I do,’
she said. This was not a map as she had once been used to, drawn from the
precise cartography of grids and measurements that the Collegium mapmakers
taught. There was no regular scale down there, and the lands around the Jamail
river were shown disproportionately large, but it all fell into place before
her eyes. It gave up its secrets with barely a struggle.

‘I have
never seen it,’ Ethmet whispered.

She
could not drag her eyes from the map. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I know
it as a map, for our older records speak of it as such, but I am not so blessed
as you. I have a touch of the blood of the Masters – in truth, enough to pursue
my duties as my fathers have done before me – but you are truly blessed.’

She
turned to him at last, tearing her gaze away from the inlaid patterns. ‘But the
Masters are gone, aren’t they? That pyramid out there is their tomb, their
monument. That’s what I …’ Had anyone actually told her that? ‘That’s what I
always thought …’

‘Oh, it
is indeed their tomb,’ he whispered, and suddenly he stood uncomfortably close.
‘But they are not dead. They shall walk their city once more, and in time they
shall call for you – and you shall go to meet them.’

‘There’s post waiting with your lunch, sir.’

Totho
nodded absently, brushing past the man. He was in a poor mood. He had spent a
restless night thinking towards some way of reclaiming Che, but reaching no conclusions.
He only hoped that Amnon was having better luck with his chosen Collegiate
woman.

Of course he is
, the little voice inside Totho – the one
he had been born with, that had started speaking to him as soon as he had been
old enough to realize what he was – piped up again. Amnon was big, handsome,
charismatic. He would not need to do much to get the woman to notice him. Life
had been kind to Amnon. Totho doubted the big man had ever had to work too hard
at getting anything.

I have had to work, though
. It felt bitter. Even in
Collegium, which prided itself on its industry, the dream was to become rich
enough not to have to work. That dream was inherited from the past, when
Beetles had worked and Moth-kinden had spent their time in idleness, living off
the sweat of their slaves. The dream was further honed by the effortless lives
of the Spider-kinden Aristoi, who had nothing better to do in life than
intrigue against one another.
Whereas I have had to work
for everything
. Delivered to an orphanage by unknown parents, tinkering
with mechanisms from the age of five, competing against dozens of others for a
College place that would have been his for the asking, if only he had been some
rich magnate’s son. Yes, he had worked: to get where he was now, he had not
only got his hands dirty, he had steeped them in blood to the elbows.

I rearmed the world, equipped it in my own image. I destroyed an
army. I halted the Empire, drove them out of Szar
. But he did not like
to think of Szar. He was not yet ready for that.
If I had
been some magnate’s son, I would have needed to do nothing, to secure my
future. To come this far I have had to wade hip-deep in bad choices and bad
deeds. And still she turns away from me
.

Lunch
was set out for him, but he spared it barely a look. There were some sealed
documents beside it, and a roll of cloth tape – and a Fly-kinden man. ‘You’re
post, are you?’ He raised an eyebrow.

‘Tirado,’
the man confirmed. ‘Message from Factor Meyr, your eyes only.’

‘Well,
get out until I’ve finished eating,’ Totho snapped, deciding that cocky
Fly-kinden annoyed him. Some of them seemed to think that rules and authority
didn’t apply to them. The Fly looked put out, but he stepped down from the
table and flitted out through the door. Totho sat down, pushing the food away
despite his recent words. The papers were all manifests, he could look those
over later. He broke each seal, to be sure, then laid them to one side.

The tape
was another matter, a little spark of daylight showing through the clouds that
were on his mind. He reached into his pouch and took out one of the Iron
Glove’s newest artifacts. It was hand-sized, and looked mostly like a very
small drum with a winding handle, as though someone had decided that even a
drum was too complex to learn to play, and had therefore invented an automatic
one. Where the handle joined the drum there was a spidery little arrangement of
teeth and tiny pins.

Totho
took the reel of cloth, a woven strip barely an inch across. It was an ugly
piece of work, the threads jumbled together without pattern, looking like some
clothier’s reject remnant. With the utmost care, he fed the end of it into the
teeth of the machine until it caught. He then wound it through a few inches,
listening carefully. The sound that echoed from the drum was almost too faint
to hear. Patiently, Totho fiddled with it, turning the clamps to increase the
space inside the drum itself. In this small exercise of his skill, he had
forgotten about Che or Amnon, or all the rest of it. The intricacy of the device
itself consumed him.

He wound
the cloth back, and then began winding it forwards again, letting the delicate
pins brush against the rugged fabric, and their vibrations carry down to the
drum itself. Into the room, small and distant-sounding, came a voice.

It was a
voice Totho knew well, after two years’ association and more. It was the voice
of the senior partner of the Iron Glove, and the man after whom the entire
enterprise was named.

‘Hello,
Totho,’ said the scratchy tones.

‘Hello,
Dariandrephos,’ Totho replied, even though there was nobody there to hear him.
A sense of wonder still came to him, although they had been using these
similophone tapes for two months now. It was the secret of the Iron Glove. Only
he and Drephos possessed the drum-like similophone ears, and so far Drephos had
the one weaver, the machine that took the sound of his voice and wove it into
cloth. He was working, however, on a model that was portable.

The
winding handle carried the tape further, projecting Drephos’s voice, dry and
tendays old, into the factora in Khanaphes. Totho was careful to keep his speed
steady, so as to pitch the man’s voice right. When the first similophone tape
had been heard, he had been left in stitches, making Drephos squeak and drawl
as he tried to match the pace.

‘First,’
came the tiny voice, ‘you should know that the Empire has made some advances in
retroengineering the Solarnese-style aeromotives that we sold them. I
understand that they will be in a position to upgrade their Spearflight models
within the next two months, at this rate. Our new design of rotary piercer has
exceeded expectations to the extent that I am uncomfortable with allowing them
onto the market without consideration, and I would value your input when you
return, which I trust will be shortly. Matters with the Empire are likely to
reach a head soon, one way or another.

‘Less
importantly, our fourth factory assembled and test-fired the first greatshotter
design yesterday. The results were remarkable, but the damage to the prototype was
such that it required complete disassembly: the barrel integrity does not stand
up to the pressures generated. I am loath to look for new materials right now,
but aviation steel, in the thickness required, does not offer the absorbent
flexibility …’

Totho
let the details wash over him, considering each, letting them settle in his
mind.
This
was the important thing. In such a wash
of technical minutiae he felt happy, as he always had, and such imprecise
calculations as the affections of Cheerwell Maker could be temporarily shunted
aside. At this late age, in this foreign land, he had found for himself a
surrogate father. Oh, Dariandrephos was a monster, for certain: he had no
conscience, no humanity, no regard whatsoever for any who could not contribute
to the world of artifice. He would destroy Khanaphes without a thought if he
needed to, because he considered the city a waste of stone and wood and flesh.
Drephos was all these things, but he was a man whose priorities struck a chord
in his protégé – and he valued Totho. For the sake of Totho’s artificing
Drephos indulged him like a spoilt child, even when Totho’s preoccupations went
beyond the older halfbreed’s comprehension.