The Scarab Path (70 page)

If it
had been any other man, perhaps, but Totho was a favourite of the Grand Old Man
himself. It was well known that he and the big chief had built the Iron Glove
with their own hands. Whatever Totho did would be given the nod, no matter how
insane. Which left Corcoran out on the river, turning the bows of the
Fourth Iteration
towards the bridge.

They
were fighting up there. Totho was fighting up there.
And
maybe there’ll be some justice and he’ll get killed before I do
. There
would be a signal, but the
Iteration
had to be in
place by then.

‘Take us
in closer!’ Corcoran called, and the order was relayed down to the engine
rooms. ‘And get the smallshotters loaded and on the rail,’ he added, trying to
sound adequately military. His hands were clenched on that rail themselves
because otherwise they would be shaking.

The
Iteration
was a good ship, made to stand the perils of
hostile seas and hostile seafarers. In the river current it handled choppily,
the engines constantly adjusting to the water’s flow. Corcoran had the bulk of
the Iron Glove people aboard with him, both to handle the craft and to man its
armaments. They were short-handed even so. They had left a fair slice of their
crew on the Spider-kinden pirate that had tried to overhaul them on the way to
Khanaphes.

The
Scorpions on the bank were watching, fascinated, as the ship completed its
cumbersome turn and chugged towards the bridge. With its mast down and sails
stowed the
Iteration
might just have scraped under
its arches, in another breach of Khanaphir tradition.
That
lot can rot
, Corcoran thought.
If they’d had any
sense they’d have bought a job lot of snapbows off us, and they’d already be
chasing the Scorpions back into the desert about now
.

‘Keep us
steady!’ he called, as they neared the bridge. ‘Steady here.’

‘You
want the anchor out?’

‘No,
just keep us steady.’ He was not a sailor, either. Let his crew wrestle with
engines and rudders to fulfil his orders. If Totho didn’t have to make sense,
neither did he. He did not want to be anchored down, though, since the
Scorpions were not exactly powerless to retaliate.

They had
not seen the ship as a threat, he realized. There were masses of them gathered,
set on funnelling on to the bridge. The
Iteration
had turned to put its broadside towards them and the crew were clipping the smallshotters
to the rail. Tiny compared to the Scorpions’ own siege weapons, they could
shoot balls three inches across that would make a mess of a wooden hull, but
were even more useful against human targets.

‘Grapeshot,’
Corcoran ordered. His people industriously dropped bulging little paper sacks
into the weapons’ muzzles, each one a careful measure of firepowder and shot.

Might as well make the first one count
, Corcoran thought.
‘We’ll give it them all together,’ he shouted out. Then he started as a small
figure dropped on to the deck beside him.

‘Himself
says now would be a good time,’ Tirado told him.

Corcoran
nodded. ‘Let them have it on my mark!’ he cried, and then, ‘Three, two, one –
loose!’

The
combined shock of a dozen smallshotters detonating at once rolled the
Iteration
back in the water amid a bellowing of smoke and
fire. The fistfuls of lead shot tore through the massed Scorpion warriors,
ripping dozens of them apart. Corcoran was glad enough he didn’t have to
witness it. The aftermath, as the ship righted itself, was bad enough.

‘Load
and loose in your own time,’ he instructed his crew, seeing the Scorpion host
boiling and reeling from this new assault.
That will have
taken pressure off the barricades
. ‘You go back now and find out how
long he wants us here,’ he told the Fly, and Tirado kicked off from the deck,
darting upwards towards the bridge itself.

The
smallshotters were discharging independently, each at the speed of its own
crew, lashing at the Scorpions wherever they were thickest. There was some
return of crossbow bolts, but the distance defeated them, only a few coasting
far enough to bounce back from the ship’s armoured hull.

‘They’re
bringing up the big engines!’ someone called. Corcoran glanced up at the
bridge. Surely they were done by now? Surely Totho didn’t need them to stay out
here. Perhaps Tirado had been killed or hurt, or simply forgotten to deliver
the message.

‘Try to
keep them busy,’ he shouted. He located one of the big leadshotters, and saw
that it was some way inland, taking advantage of its own better range. The
Iteration
was armoured, but it was designed to be proof
against the sort of pieces that another ship would carry. No ship had ever put
to sea with something as heavy as the Scorpion ordnance. A few hits near the
waterline would soon take care of the
Iteration
.

‘It’ll
take them a while to find the range,’ he said, hearing his own voice tremble.
Over the sporadic boom of the smallshotters he could barely be heard anyway.
The bulk of the Scorpion advance had scattered, seeking shelter from the
Iteration
’s salvos. The fighting above must falter,
surely, the grinding wheels of death no longer fed by a flow of fresh bodies.
Corcoran gritted his teeth, watching the Scorpion crews load their massive
weapons.

They
were quicker than he had assumed. He saw the gust of smoke from one leadshotter
and instinctively dropped to his knees.

A
tremendous column of spray spouted from the river, a full twenty yards past
them and astern.
They hurried their aim
, he thought,
and it was oddly reassuring to know that he had done enough damage to secure
the enemy’s attention. A second leadshotter roared even as he thought this, and
the water erupted a few yards off the bows, between the
Iteration
and the piles of the bridge. Corcoran clung to the rail as the swell rocked
them. Meanwhile, some of the smallshotters were loosing solid shot, trying for
enough range to trouble the Scorpion artillerists.

Tirado
dropped almost on to his shoulders, swerving in the air to make himself a
harder target. ‘Time to go,’ he announced. ‘Pull back to the docks, and be
thankful this river’s so wide.’

‘Stop
shooting and let’s get out of here!’ Corcoran shouted to the crew at the top of
his lungs. He had to repeat it twice, running down the length of the ship, before
everyone had pulled the smallshotters back and the ship’s engines started to
turn them. Another plume of water exploded nearby, but they had become a moving
target now, spoiling the enemy’s calculations.

But they’ll be ready for us the next time, won’t they just …

Above,
on the bridge, the latest Scorpion assault was falling back, unsupported, shot
through with arrows. Yet the host of the Many of Nem seemed barely diminished.

She woke up because he had stepped on her arm. The sudden pain, and
waking into utter dark, left her wholly bewildered. Che had no idea where she
was. Someone was apologizing to her but all reference escaped her. For a brief
moment she was nowhere, and had no idea even who she was.

Then she
remembered her Art: it was still not second nature to her. She let her eyes
gradually find their way, and saw Thalric a few paces away, looking frustrated.

‘Clumsy
bastard,’ she told him, and enquired, ‘I’ve been asleep?’

‘Unless
you’ve been snoring just to annoy me.’ He was not quite looking at her and it
took a moment to realize that it was because he could not, of course, see her.
Her voice, in the confined space, must be hard to pin down.

‘You
swallowed some of that herbal muck you were giving to Osgan,’ Thalric went on.
His eyes were very wide, futilely trying to stare the darkness down. ‘Because
of your shoulder. Then, after a while, you were sleeping. It’s been a long
night.’

‘And
then you trod on me,’ she pointed out. ‘How long has it been?’

‘I have
no idea.’ He was moving about the room again, feeling for the walls. ‘I used to
think I had a good sense of time, but there are no clues down here: no light,
no sounds. It’s been hours, anyway. It must be daylight outside.’

‘Thalric,’
she said, ‘what are you doing, exactly?’

‘Trying to
get a proper idea of this place – which has turned out to be surprisingly
difficult, and somewhat disgusting.’

‘Do you
want me to help you?’

‘I’ll be
fine.’

‘Only, I
can see in the dark.’

He
stopped abruptly, turning towards where she was. His expression was completely
unguarded. ‘Since when?’

Since you locked me in your heliopter after Asta –
but she
wasn’t going to say that. ‘It’s a Beetle Art, Thalric. Granted, it’s not
common, but it’s there.’

His lips
moved, but whatever he was going to say died there. Abruptly he sat down and
put his head in his hands.
How long has he been feeling his
way around this place? How many hours of going round and round?
She was
treated to a brief moment of Thalric in absolute despair. Then he lifted his
head, and he was already adjusting. ‘So tell me then,’ he said, ‘what do we
have?’

She
clambered to her feet, feeling her shoulder twinge, peering about. Her
Art-sight leached the colours, turning Thalric’s skin pallid and his clothes
drab. She suspected there were few enough colours in their surroundings to
begin with.

‘It’s a
room maybe twelve paces to a side,’ she decided. ‘The ceiling’s about the same
extent high. A cube, then, but the walls slope slightly inwards as they go up.
There’s an archway in each wall. Trapezium-shaped.’ She stopped.

‘And no
doors,’Thalric finished for her.

‘And no
doors,’ she echoed. ‘There are just … the archways just have stone behind them.
And one … one of them’s been blocked off by the trap.’

‘I felt
carving on the walls,’ he said weakly.

‘It’s
the usual old Khanaphir script,’ she said. Even with her Art-enhanced eyes it
was hard to discern it. She moved to one wall, using a sleeve to wipe at it. At
the first touch she made a horrified noise and flinched back. ‘There’s
something on the walls.’

‘Yes,
there is,’ said Thalric, with some satisfaction. ‘Every cursed surface here is
coated with it. It’s made my explorations a real joy.’

I can’t see it
, she realized, but then logic reasserted
itself. There was a thin layer of transparent slime coating the walls, coating
the floor too – at least from the state of her clothes and the sounds her
sandals made. As there was no light to gleam off it, it was completely
invisible, even to her. It showed only in a blurring of the carvings beneath.

And why go to the trouble of writing all of this here, in this
little room of death?
Of course, the Khanaphir engraved these things
everywhere, but she could tell just by looking that this script was the real
old hieroglyphs, not the meaningless babble that was all the modern masons
could manage. Someone had deliberately put a message here, for those with eyes
to see and minds to understand it.

‘This
wasn’t really how I thought we’d end up,’ said Thalric quietly.

‘We
haven’t ended up yet,’ she told him.

‘Only a
matter of time. The air can’t last for ever.’

‘What
happened to the old resourceful Thalric then?’ she asked him, feeling suddenly
annoyed that he was just sitting there. ‘Don’t the Rekef teach you to be ready
for anything?’

‘The old
resourceful Thalric is currently blind, slimy and trapped in a cell underground
with no possible way out,’ he said, ‘and very, very tired. Some of us here
haven’t been getting our beauty sleep.’

‘Not
that it would do much good, in your case.’ She wiped away slime from more of
the carvings, feeling the thick gunge caking her sleeves. It had a feel to it
that was familiar, but unpleasantly so. She hunted the memory down, associating
it with guilt, panic, danger … ‘Hammer and tongs!’ she spat. ‘Thalric, this is
Fir.’

‘What
now?’

‘This slime,
it’s Fir. This is the forbidden elixir of Khanaphes, that the Ministers will
kill you for sampling.’
And that the Ministers themselves
eat gallons of
. ‘This is their link with the Masters, they claim. There
must be enough down here for everyone in the city to go out of their minds on.’

‘Are you
suggesting we spend our last few hours drugged into a stupor?’Thalric asked her
acidly.

‘No, but
don’t you see …’
But he doesn’t see. He doesn’t understand
what Fir is. So, do I?
Fir, the drug that somehow opened one’s mind to
the past, that the Khanaphir underclasses swore let them look on the faces of
the Masters, that the Ministers thought opened a direct link by which they
could hear their Masters’ voices. Did she still believe that there were Masters
yet, or that there ever had been?Yet the Khanaphir believed. Ethmet believed.
Was their entire culture built on hallucinations derived from this slime?
No, there has to be something more to it than that
.

‘I’ve
been knocking on the walls,’ he said. ‘No echo anywhere. I’ve even tried my
sting against them. That slimy stuff smells vile when you burn it. The stone
underneath barely warmed.’

‘I think
I need to read these inscriptions,’ she decided. ‘Give me your cloak.’

He
frowned at the dark, but shrugged the garment off without question, holding it
out blindly until she took it from him. She began scrubbing at the walls,
clearing away the Fir that had turned those crisp carvings into illegible
smears.

‘Since
when,’ Thalric said after a moment, ‘can you read that gibberish? Since when
can it even be read?’