The Scarab Path (50 page)

He stood
up, rising from amongst his followers, and saw the Imperials falter for a
moment, just a moment, at the sight of this great dark-armoured monster. He had
become a colossus of dark steel, a machine of destruction. He now saw that
there were closer to fifteen Wasps, mostly dressed in Slave Corps uniforms, of
bitter memory. They were lightly armoured, with the short Imperial stabbing
swords and a few crossbows, and almost all of them had one hand free: Wasps
never lacked for weapons. In their centre was the halfbreed, that bastard mix
of Scorpion and Empire, who now gazed up at Meyr and put a smile onto his
malformed jaw.

The
forces were not so very uneven, after all. The Wasps had the advantage of
numbers, whereas the Iron Glove equipped its adherents with more care.
Scorpions all around them had stopped to watch, eager to see some blood shed
before nightfall.

The
Wasps were professional soldiers, veterans of battles and skirmishes and
brawls. The Iron Glove handful was a mix of mercenaries and merchants, trained
but not nearly so well blooded.

Meyr
took a deep breath. ‘Ready bows,’ he instructed.

‘Behind
and above!’ Faighl cried out, and even as she got the words out, Meyr felt
something punch into the small of his back.

He felt
a brief moment of warmth as the Wasp sting boiled away off the ridges of his
armour. ‘Eyes front!’ he bellowed, for the fight was upon them.

Two of
his people went down instantly, distracted by the Wasp stings from behind and
then shot from the front. There were at least three Wasps on the ground in
return, lanced through with snapbow bolts that cared nothing for armour. The
halfbreed leader shouted out a command and then they were moving in close with
their swords.

Faighl
placed her back to Meyr’s, sniping up at one of the airborne Wasps and bringing
him down with a single shot, trusting to the giant to guard her from the main
assault. The Mole Cricket leant out over the heads of his followers, snapping
his great axe forward with all the length and strength of his arm. The heavy
head of it caught a Wasp slaver in the chest before the man even realized he
was within Meyr’s reach. Ribs snapped like sticks and his suddenly limp body
was swept sideways into the next man, living and dead tumbling over in a tangle
of limbs.

A couple
of the Iron Glove had got their shields in place before the Wasps hit them. One
was a Solarnese artificer, a hammer in his other hand making a slaver’s helm
ring before a sword jabbed up over the shield’s rim and caught the artificer in
the throat. The other shieldman was a renegade Maynesh Ant, who held firm. His
shortsword never ventured forth but he danced left and right with his shield,
successfully holding off three Wasps as they tried to overrun him. When they
pushed him back, Meyr’s thundering axe hacked into them, lopping the head clean
off one man and forcing the other two to stumble back.

This will not last another minute
: the unhappy knowledge
came to Meyr with certainty. He had lost near half his people already. The
Wasps were spreading out around them, while more were taking to the air.
Flexibility and mobility had always been the Imperial way, in battle and in
skirmish.

He felt
Faighl die, the woman slamming against him, head rebounding from the small of
his back. A moment was all he could spare to mourn her. He felt he had barely
known her, although they had worked together for months. A sword-blow was
turned by his legplates, a sting coursed across his shield.

The
Ant-kinden before him reeled away. The halfbreed Imperial had hold of him, one
clawed arm hooked over his shield. The other hand, empty, rose as if to stab
down at the man’s exposed face, but then fire bloomed from it, snapping the
Ant’s head back. Meyr roared and hacked at the enemy with his axe, but the
halfbreed dived and rolled out of the way, and abruptly it was all over. They
had now pulled away to form a circle out of his reach, and at his feet, Meyr
saw his fellows.

The
Wasps had killed them all in less than a minute. Faighl and the others, loyal
servants of the Iron Glove, they had not stood a chance. Meyr glowered now at
the Wasps, at their halfbreed leader. He saw more than that. He looked beyond
them at the Scorpions, all lovingly fingering their spears and knives. The
blood and the violence had been like food and drink to them.

With the
bodies of his followers strewn at his feet, he met the gaze of the halfbreed.
The man was smiling slightly, and Meyr tensed for a gesture, the smallest sign
that would signal the attack.

Instead,
the man grinned openly as he stepped back three paces, letting a Scorpion pass
him to his left, and another to his right. All his men kept widening their
half-circle, until it was the Many of Nem that Meyr faced, and not the Empire.
The Scorpions all wore the same hateful smile as their half-caste cousin. Step
by step they closed in on the giant, pausing just out of the reach of his axe.

So, we are weak, in their eyes
. Meyr found, belatedly,
that he despised them. They had signed themselves over to the Empire, and they
did not even know it.

One of
them hurled a spear, almost without warning. Meyr got his shield up, felt the
strength of the missile rattle against the aviation steel. Something else,
perhaps a hand-axe, rebounded from his pauldron, striking from behind.

They
came for him then. Without a war cry, with nothing but a glitter of raised
weapons, they descended like ravenous beasts.

‘I spit
on you all,’ Meyr roared at them, and then let himself fall into the earth.

That night, around the fires, Jakal came to find Hrathen. She crouched
beside him, one sharp elbow knocking aWasp slaver away and clearing a space.
She did not spare the unseated man a glance.

‘You are
very clever, Of-the-Empire,’ she began.

‘Am I?’
he said, carefully neutral. Her presence, suddenly so close, had fired his
pulse a little.
Is it that I genuinely admire her, or
simply because I cannot have her?
he asked himself.

‘Walk
with me, great conqueror,’ she said, standing again. ‘We will talk of your
deeds.’

It is because she challenges me
, he thought.
She cares nothing for rank, nothing for the Empire. She is the
pure savage, and she would cut my throat in a moment – will do so, when I am no
longer of use
.

And the
thought came back,
And she would do the same with any other
here, and so I am one of them
. It was bittersweet, that thought. The
Rekef in him jeered at it, but that part of him whose actions had seen him
brought in for treason, that man understood. He launched himself to his feet
and followed her off into the dark.

‘What
would you hear of my deeds, O Warlord?’ he asked her, trying to match her tone.
Away from the fires, he could not see her face clearly but he knew she was
smiling.

‘I shall
tell you of them. You are a cunning creature, Of-the-Empire. You knew that the
giant would escape my people.’

He
shrugged. ‘I was a slaver for the Empire. You learn about the Art of the lesser
races. I knew that some of his kinden could walk within the earth.’

‘How do
you ever keep them enslaved?’ she asked.

‘Many
don’t have the Art. Most have kin that don’t. For every runaway, every act of
rebellion, we punish those we still have.’ He spread his clawed hands. ‘That
man bought his freedom with the blood of his people. He’s unusual. They’re
clannish, the Mole Crickets, and most of them just offer their backs to the
lash and get on with their work.’

She gave
a brief laugh. ‘So your generosity gave the giant to my people.’

‘And if
they had killed him, they’d have thanked me,’ Hrathen said. ‘And if we’d gone
for him and he’d escaped, we’d look weak. Do you disapprove?’

‘No. I
love cleverness. There are chieftains stronger than I, more skilled, more
savage, but none is more clever, Of-the-Empire, remember that.’

‘Must
you call me that?’ He surprised himself with the complaint. It was a weakness,
to seek to avoid the name, but it jabbed him like a stone in his boot every
time she used it. Perhaps it had surprised her, too, for she paused, appearing
nothing but a darkness within the night. He sensed her staring back at him.

‘What
else am I to call you? That is all you are, to me: you are the Empire’s
halfbreed hand.’ She sat down, looking back at the fires, at the hasty tents of
her people. ‘So tell me, Of-the-Empire, tell me of yourself – if there is more
than that.’

He
joined her carefully, within arm’s reach of her. Now that his eyes were growing
used to the dark, he saw how the distant wash of the oil flames gave her pale
skin the faintest touch of blue fire.

‘I was a
slaver for a long time, working the Silk Road mostly,’ he said. ‘Then I was a
Rekef man, keeping an eye on the slavers. It looked like that was all I’d ever
be, travelling up and down the Dryclaw with the Scorpion-kinden—’

‘I know
of them,’ she interrupted dismissively. ‘The tame ones, we call them.’

He
digested that, nodding. ‘Then the war came,’ he continued. ‘War with the
Lowlands. First strike was against an Ant city-state off the Silk Road, an army
moving through the desert to get there. Throwing money at the Scorpions to act
as guides. Suddenly I was important: the Rekef were leaning on me, wanting the
Scorpions this place or that.’

‘And who
did you betray?’ she asked, keen as a razor, enough to make him pause for one
second, thinking:
Is she Rekef? Is this the reckoning for
me, here and now?

‘To run
with your kinden, even the “tame ones”, one must live like you, share your
values,’ he explained. ‘When the time came that they seized on the hand that
fed them, I did not restrain them. Perhaps they could not have been restrained,
anyway. Imperial supplies began disappearing. It was only a matter of time. If
they hadn’t gone on to hatch this plan, I’d be on crossed pikes by now.’

‘Yes,
this plan.’ After that she was silent for a long time and, although he opened
his mouth to speak several times, he could not find the words.

Eventually
she sighed. ‘Your Empire thinks us stupid,’ she said, and then, ‘I had the
omens read, today, from the blood spilt on the sand.’

He had
nothing to say to that, so he waited for her to elaborate.

‘The
haruspex told me that we would advance like the desert wind, that we would
break the walls of Khanaphes and scourge them from the city’s streets.’

‘That
sounds a good omen.’

‘Does
it?’

He gave
her time to explain but she said nothing, and her melancholy was now infecting
him. Eventually he said, ‘I don’t … we don’t have omens and such in the Empire.
Even amongst the Dryclaw tribes. I don’t know what you mean.’

She
laughed softly. ‘Oh, the desert storm is a terrible thing, but where does it go
to, when the wind is blown out? When the sand has settled again, where shall we
be? The world is changing, Of-the-Empire. The Khanaphir do not realize it, and
so they will be destroyed, but the world is changing. As for us, what do we
build? What do we craft, save weapons? What do we create? And now we have your
Empire to our north, and we look upon the tame ones and we can see our future.
How long will it be before the Nem is no longer ours to rule? Perhaps I am the
very last who can truly call herself the Warlord of the Many.’

He said
nothing to this, because he could deny none of it.

‘But in
these last days we are strong,’ she said, and with that she had banished her
mood back to where it could not be heard or seen. ‘And if the grave-marker of
my people shall be the ruin of Khanaphes, so be it. Let them look upon those
broken walls and know that once the Nem was free.’ He saw the faintest movement
of her face turning to him with its distant phosphorescence. ‘You will never be
one of us, Of-the-Empire, but I think you will never be of the Empire either.
Men like you are cast simply for moments when the desert storm strikes. And
then they are cast away. And then cast away, remember that.’

Next morning found Hrathen out of sorts, Jakal’s words still echoing
faintly inside his head. All around him the war-host of the Many was
mobilizing, buckling on their armour and forming into their mobs. Their cavalry
was already harnessed and ready. Riders with long lances sat in offset saddles
strapped on to great scorpions that had been plated with armour, clattering
forth with claws agape and stings raised high. Lesser beasts were put in pairs
or fours to draw the Nemian chariots with their jagged-hubbed wheels, each
beast with its outer claw sheathed in metal, like a shield. The chariots were
traditional, light, chitin-built things for shock assaults, but now, behind the
charioteer, they carried two crossbowmen apiece.

The
great mass of the host went on foot, and it surged and quarrelled and milled as
it formed up into marching order. There was a discord to them that he had not
witnessed before: someone had drawn lines and boundaries about their naturally
chaotic exuberance. That someone was Hrathen himself. While once they had all
been warriors, now he had sieved them, divided them. Some of them were checking
over the leadshotters, now drawn by animal carts and the Imperial automotives.
Some carried their crossbows, standing distinctly apart from the rest. Others
were simple soldiers with greatsword and halberd and axe. There was barely a
shield amongst them, these hard, close-quarters traditionalists. Their place
would be to bleed for the Nem when the battle was joined.

These
were a people who possessed little, and put it all into their wars. Metal was
not so scarce in the desert, for they melted down the wealth of past ages, from
the Nem’s ruined cities, to make their sword blades and axe heads. They
scavenged armour of a dozen different styles then stretched and mauled it to
fit their larger frames. Wood was harder to find, but they hunted the desert
locusts, in their season, for the strong chitin shafts of their legs. A
thousand insects had been trapped and killed to make hafts for the forest of
halberds that Hrathen saw waving and weaving amid the host’s advance guard.