The Scarab Path (52 page)

I must find Che
.

It was
only a small detour, surely. To step through into the Place of Foreigners and
turn left to the Moth-fronted embassy, and not right towards the building
guarded by stone Woodlouse-kinden. It would require only a moment’s disloyalty.

And if she doesn’t believe me, either?
It seemed more than
likely. He had not exactly given her any reason to trust his unevidenced word.

And why do I care?
His instinctive response had grown rather
stale now.
I care because she is a clumsy, naive, foolish
Beetle-kinden girl, yet her regard matters to me. Because I find her company
easier than that of my own kind. At least with her, I do not feel the knife at
my back every moment
. He doubted that she felt the same way.

His
shoulders slumped, as he set off down the steps for the archway leading to the
embassies.
I have only ever had one virtue, and that one so
often pawned as to have become near-worthless. Still, I used to pride myself on
my loyalty. Therefore I shall make my report
.

Something
made him pause, as he passed through the arch: his Rekef senses had not quite
left him yet. Some part of him, though overlaid now with uncertainty, was still
living behind enemy lines. The quiet of the garden – the stillness of the pool
– was an illusion. He found his fingers twitching, baring his palms by purest
instinct.

He saw
them then, two shadows of the evening standing near the Collegiate embassy.
They were like statues, or the shadows of statues, dark instead of pale marble.
They watched him, and he watched them back, ready to use the archway as cover
if they were assassins come after him. Some small and detached part of him
thought, as he hesitated,
Is this the way of things now,
for me? Will it be assassins for breakfast? Will I wake to them each morning?
Is that what it means to be Regent? I would rather live the life of a spy. At
least spies sleep well sometimes
.

He was
no Fly-kinden or Spider, possessed of good night-eyes, but the light of the
sunset still greyed the west sufficiently, and it told him enough about their
build and stance to identify them as Ant-kinden.
The
Vekken, of course
.

He had
no wish to have any dealings with the Vekken, for a number of reasons. Their
customary stare of absolute antipathy was born of their city’s isolation, and
its recent history with the Empire. It was not usually
personal
.
On the other hand, if they knew that it had been his word that had prompted
them into their disastrous assault on Collegium, then he had no doubt that they
would kill him.

The
sight of them brought back a great deal that he could have done without, just
then. He remembered the neatly soulless city of Vek. Perhaps to a native it had
seemed bustling with cheer. He did not believe it. The sole impression he had
received was one of cold pride exemplifying all that was Ant-kinden and honed
to a brittle edge.

He
remembered their general boasting of her army, as it had marched past in its
perfect ranks. What came to him, across the bloody stretch of intervening time,
was a colossal arrogance. Such fierce and overweening confidence they had then
possessed, such joy in their anticipated victory: a city of soldiers making war
on a city of scholars.
And they had lost
. He had
been, at that point, in no position to appreciate Collegium’s victory, but the
details had come to him later, as they would come to any competent spymaster.
Collegium had won because of its own unique virtues: ingenuity and allies. Vek
had lost because of its bankruptcy on either front.

Thalric’s
lips were pursed tight He had been in no position to cheer the victors, because
he had left the Vekken camp by then. His mind recalled with perfect clarity the
severing of the ties that had bound him to the Empire. They had not been
cleanly cut, either, but crudely hacked until they parted, the blade running
red. Even the thought made his side twinge, a relic of the old wound that
Daklan had given him, the scar that bore mute testimony to when he should have
died.

Would the world be a better or worse place, I wonder
. His
bleak thoughts would not leave him. A lot of the man he had once been had died
on the point of Daklan’s knife. He had been so loyal, and every atrocity that
his hands had worked had been justified by the cause he served. He found that
he was frightened by the man he had once been.
If I met
him, that burning idealist, I would kill him if I could. Far too dangerous to
let him live
.

He
thought too much, these days.

The
Vekken had clearly come to some decision, under his silent scrutiny. They made
a quick exit by the passage alongside the embassy, vanishing from his sight, if
not his thoughts. He made no attempt at pinning a motive on them. Ant-kinden
were all mad, he decided: living constantly in each other’s heads could not be
healthy. He had never met any Ant-kinden, of any city, that he had actually
liked.

He
turned aside for the Imperial embassy.
And why the
Woodlouse-kinden at the door? Do they mock us with our own slaves?
The
statues reminded him of Gjegevey, one of the Empress’s favourite tools. That
brought a whole new fleet of grim thoughts into port. He realized, standing
before the heavy-lidded stone stare of the Woodlice, that he had no idea where
his life was going now. He had lost hold of it. He had rejoined the Empire, but
it had not let him back in. He did not understand it any more.

‘Thalric!’
A hoarse whisper.

He
recoiled from the Woodlice statues, took three long steps away from the
embassy, eyes raking the gloom.

‘Thalric!
Here!’

The
stand of trees, with its burden that had so appalled Osgan, was hissing at him.
He was frozen, old instincts rusty, trying to pierce the shadows between them
with his gaze.

He
discerned the paleness of the Mantis statue, but there was something dark
lurking at its base. He had his hands palm-outwards as he approached, but they
dropped back to his sides once he saw what it was. He walked over to the very
trees, and leant in further, peering down.

He could
not imagine what it must have cost the man, to come here. It was not just the
wound – Osgan’s face was pale and sweaty with it – but the fear. He had forced
himself to crawl in among these trees until he sat at the very feet of the
Mantis statue. He was resolutely facing away from it, and yet every part of him
aware of it.

‘What
are you doing?’ Thalric demanded, despairingly. ‘You shouldn’t even be up yet.
Is it so important to get to a taverna that you’d kill yourself for it?’

Osgan
stared up at him, teeth bared. ‘Thalric, you mustn’t go inside,’ he managed to
get out. His breathing was ragged, and there was still fever in him from the
arm wound. It must have been all he could do to haul himself this far, and it
was not drink that had drawn this effort out of him. Thalric felt something
sharp-edged turn in his stomach.

‘Report,’
he said, as if he was still the Rekef officer, living in a straightforward
world.

Osgan
held his eyes. ‘A new officer’s flown in,’ he croaked. ‘Rekef … He’s taken
charge. Given orders …’

‘Orders?’

‘To have
you killed.’ Osgan clung to the Mantis effigy, grappling with its stone legs to
haul himself half-upright. ‘They’re waiting inside, right now … I overheard it
all. They’d forgotten about me, or they didn’t think I could move …’ Hooking an
arm about the stone waist, he sagged, just some drunkard making a fool of
himself.

Thalric
felt something building up inside him, a great rushing wave that cried out:
It’s happening again. It’s happening again
. He felt
Daklan’s dagger go in, the keen cleanness of the man’s strike.

He could
not keep himself from laughing. After all his recent brooding, the worst had
already happened. However hard he had tried to reattach himself to the Empire,
his knots had slipped, his bindings frayed. He laughed because he had suddenly
been cut free.

I am a dead man
. But it was still funny.

Osgan
stared at him, shivering. ‘Thalric, we’ve got to get out of here,’ he pleaded.

Thalric’s
grin was keen as a razor. ‘Of course we do,’ he replied. ‘You’ll know some low
dive where a couple of foreigners can hide up. I doubt there’s a drinking den
in this city you haven’t tasted.’

‘I know
… places.’ Osgan struggled to stand, and Thalric helped him up, slinging the
man’s good arm over his own shoulder.

‘Then
let’s go,’ Thalric said. ‘Suddenly I have no appointments.’

All the
leaden chains of doubt had just clattered to the ground with Osgan’s halting
words. From the bewildered ambassador he had become the hunted agent in a
hostile city. It was a role he felt infinitely more comfortable with.

For as long as she could stave off sleeping, she had not slept. She knew
that, in her dreams, the other Khanaphes was waiting for her: Petri Coggen,
passable scholar, graduate of the Great College, Beetle-kinden student of the
past, and fugitive.

She did
not run, this fugitive. She hid in the Collegiate embassy – no, in the embassy
they had painted over as Collegiate, although it had the marks of the old Moth
tyranny underneath. Being a historian was becoming a curse, now that the
accumulated centuries of Khanaphes, the city where time had died, were rising
up to choke her with the dust of ages.

She
needed help, so she had gone to Che – but Che had her own worries. The other
academics regarded Petri with disdain. She could not speak to them more than
five words without stammering and shaking.
They did not
understand
. They looked at the carvings and the statues and the
colonnades, and they thought it was simply the past. They did not understand
that it was all still
alive
, the truth of it lurking
beneath the surface, glimpsed only from the corner of the eye.

She was
seeing a lot from the corner of her eye these days, after nights of resistance
to sleep. The world was alive with motion as the ghosts of old Khanaphes
whirled about her. Even when the servants came to her with food, she shied
away. She could not be sure if they were real or not. The servants of five
centuries ago would have looked no different, she knew.

She
needed help, but there was nobody here who could, and if she ventured out on to
the streets …

She had
not left her room in two days. The encroaching taint of history arisen had
crept even into the other parts of the embassy. The net of Khanaphes was
closing on her.

Sleep
was closing on her … She pricked herself with a
knife. She stripped the rugs away and sat on the cold floor. She twisted her
fingers in turn, searching for pain enough to keep her awake. She considered
driving the blunt blade through her foot. She held it poised, quivering, ready
to ram it down. She heard her own sobbing breath loud in her ears.

She
could not do it. She lacked the courage or the resolve or whatever mad quality
it was that enabled people to mutilate their own bodies. She let the knife fall
clattering to the stone floor.

The
claws of sleep rose again for her, eager to hook into her mind, and she had no
defences left. None.

In her
dream, Petri Coggen was outside, alone in the midnight streets of Khanaphes. It
was the same dream, or another segment of the same dream, as it thrust itself
slowly upwards from the depths of her unconscious. Each dream was another
lurching progression further forward. Each dream took her deeper into the city.

Now she
had arrived.

The
Scriptora rose behind her, a wall of darkness. She reached back to feel the
stone-carved scales on the columns that fronted it. The night was chilly, the
moon veiled in ragged cloud. The air was damp with the breath of the river.

In her
dream she could feel her awakening fear like the pounding on a distant door.
This was the hub of her nightmares. This was what kept her behind the safe
walls of the embassy.
Khanaphes was out to get her
.

In the
end, Che had not believed her. Che had not even given much thought to the
absent Master Kadro. The ambassador had other matters on her mind. Petri had
not even tried confiding in the other academics. She had just been clinging on,
day to day, waiting for when they would pack up and set sail for Collegium once
again, because surely they could not deny her passage then.

And each
night the dreams returned, and each night they grew worse, until now.

She
turned away from the hulking presence of the Scriptora to face the steps of the
pyramid. The pale statues at its summit regarded her with an impartial
coldness. She felt her feet begin to climb, taking her with them. It was
her
dream, but she had no control of herself.
I don’t want to see what lies within
. She knew with a
passion that whatever secret Kadro had unearthed would prove fatal, that a mere
glance would seal her doom, would cut her off for ever from the comforting
world of Collegium and the Lowlands. Still, her feet kept climbing, step by step
by step. She could hear her waking fears wailing, feel them battering at the
inside of her mind. In the dream, in her dream-mind, she remained placid, even
content, to be taking this journey. In the dream the never-ending carvings
almost made sense, and the city around her was rich and vibrant with a life
that the waking mind could not see. So it was in the dream, but at the same
time she knew it was a lie.

And she
stood atop the pyramid, but fought the impulse that would have her look down.
The shaft was at her very toes, while either side of her those majestic and
inhuman statues kept their eternal watch.