The Scarab Path (74 page)

‘You are
right. I will go to Praeda,’ he said. ‘I don’t know why I need a foreigner
about to tell me the obvious things, but you are right.’

Totho
arranged Amnon’s armour carefully so that it would be easy to don quickly in
the morning, and because he was badly in need of something to do just then.
Amongst other concerns, Tirado had not been able to find the first sign of Che
anywhere in the free half of the city.

When Che nudged him with her foot, he contracted into a ball and then sat
bolt upright, eyes wide and staring in the darkness.

‘I
wasn’t asleep,’ he said, automatically. She could see him looking wildly about,
fingers clawing at the slick floor. ‘Oh,’ he said at last, ‘here.’

‘That’s
right.’ Che stood back. ‘For a man who wasn’t asleep, you do a good
impression.’

‘We’re
still in the trap,’ he said bitterly and then frowned. ‘Are we?’

‘Only
because you were sleeping so soundly that I didn’t want to wake you.’

‘I can
hear … what can I hear? The echo’s changed.’

She was
impressed by that. ‘The echo’s changed because one of the doors is open.’ It
had been a long haul for her to get that far, a seemingly timeless eternity
down here beneath the earth. Those carvings were not intended to be read by
some Beetle-kinden freak who just happened to be Inapt. Achaeos would have been
able to make easy sense of them, but when she most needed his ghostly presence
he was gone, lost somewhere far away from her, or hiding deep in her mind. The
carvings had been a test, she was sure, and one that she did not deserve to
have passed. The task had called on something inside her that she had not even
realized she possessed – something that she surely had not possessed before
Achaeos’s death, and the catastrophic backlash that had maimed her mind.
Or perhaps he was guiding me after all, in ways too subtle for me
to tell
. It had been like practising Art-enhancing meditation, which she
had never been able to manage. Her concentration had not been up to that, but
then it had never meant life or death before.

She had
sat there in the dark, sealed room and pressed her mind into the places that
the builders had left, like picking a lock with a crude, improvised tool.
Whilst Thalric slept, she had laboured at it for hours, constantly slipping and
faltering, losing her train of thought, succumbing to distraction, until she
had taken hold of her mind with a grip of iron and just
done
it
.

Thalric
had stood and was now walking forward, hands extended. ‘What’s out there? What
do you see?’ he asked. ‘Can we get out?’

‘It
doesn’t seem to link up with anywhere we’ve already been, or not within sight
at least,’ she told him. ‘It … goes on for a long way. There’s a great hall,
high-ceilinged and vaulted, with alcoves all along it. I haven’t left this room
yet, to investigate, so maybe some of them are actually other passages. The
carvings are everywhere but I haven’t gone to look at them.’
In case the door closed again and I could not reopen it
.
She did not say that, but she saw him understand her.

‘I
suppose we start walking then,’ he suggested. ‘I shall put a hand on your
shoulder, like a blind man, shall I?’

He
managed it only after a little clutching at thin air, then touching her injured
shoulder first and making her wince. She set out slowly, trying to open her
mind to whatever other signs it could apparently now register. There might be
more traps, after all.

Their
soft footfalls echoed cavernously in the open space, even muffled by the slime:
it all seemed vastly too large for them. Che’s vision could just reach to the far
end of the hall, where there was a dais with something on it.
A throne? Down here?

‘What is
this place anyway?’Thalric murmured. ‘It seems too grand for sewers. Cool
enough to be a storeroom, but … the air’s damp. I can smell mould, a little.’

‘I think
…’ Her courage failed her for a moment and then she pressed on. ‘I think it’s a
tomb.’

A pause
while he digested that, and then said, ‘Well, that’s a cheery thought.’

‘They
never spoke of this place, or of the pyramid,’ Che remarked. ‘It was always
right there, in front of the Scriptora, at the very heart of the city, and they
just overlooked mentioning it as though it was invisible. Which means that it’s
important. I think the word the Khanaphir would use is “sacred”. They avoid the
subject out of respect.’

‘Respect
for what?’ Even hushed, their voices resonated down the length of the hall.

‘For the
only thing that they reserve such a degree of respect for,’ Che said. ‘The
Masters. Their lost Masters who still dominate everything they ever do. The
Masters, who haven’t been seen since before the revolution. Not that the
revolution ever reached here.’
And when I myself dreamt of
the city’s past, when I took the Fir, I saw the square before the Scriptora and
the pyramid was not there. That was the city of the Masters, when they still
lived
. ‘The Masters of Khanaphes are dead,’ she said. ‘They’ve been dead
a very long time indeed, for all that the Ministers have kept their name alive.
And this is the last testimony to their rule. This is their tomb.’

‘Guarded
with traps,’ Thalric reflected. ‘I have heard of such things. There are people
who make a living out of cracking open tombs like this. The yolk inside is
often golden, I understand. Do you think we’ll find a king’s treasury?’

‘Would
you like that?’

‘I
wouldn’t object to filling my pockets, now it seems I’m freelancing again.’

A shiver
went through Che, an innate reaction of innate revulsion. ‘That’s
disrespectful,’ she chided, unsure precisely where this thought came from.

‘What
have these Masters done to earn my respect?’ he argued. ‘Aside from cripple
their own people until a rabble of Scorpions with a few siege engines can barge
in and level their city.’ Che had halted suddenly, so that he nearly ran into
her. ‘What is it? Don’t tell me now you’ve become a convert?’

‘I …’
She had wanted to say ‘look’, but that would have been meaningless. Instead she
said, ‘I see …’ For a moment she could find no further words for it. ‘Garmoth
Atennar,’ she said. ‘Lord of the Fourth House, whose Bounty Exceeds all
Expectations, Greatest of Warriors.’

‘Che?’
Thalric demanded, but she pulled forward out of his grip and knelt down,
smoothing slime away from the inscription.

‘That’s
what it says here,’ she whispered, ‘on his tomb.’

‘Che,
tell me what you see.’

‘There
is a great stone slab here, a giant block cut into … a coffin, it must be. And
on the side they have written those words. And on the top …’

It was
an effigy of a man, carved as if sleeping: ten feet from head to toe and
heavy-framed, cut in white stone with a skill and delicacy that Che marvelled
at – and had seen before. Those statues atop the pyramid, the giants who
fronted the Estuarine Gate, they were all of a kind with this man. His stone
features were proud, handsome and heartless, and Che was glad they had been cut
with closed eyes. Even a semblance of waking life might have seemed too much in
that perfect, imperious face.

‘Garmoth
Atennar,’ she repeated softly.

Thalric
felt his way forward, touched the statue and recoiled, his fingers trailing
strings of slime.

‘You
were right enough, then,’ he said. ‘So much for the Masters of Khanaphes. I
suppose all those people above are probably now waiting for the dead bastards
to come back and save them.’

‘Yes.
Yes, they are,’ Che replied, standing up and stepping back. There was a feeling
of loss, of tragedy, about this place, much more than could be lent to it by
the simple word ‘tomb’. It signified the death, unrealized and unacknowledged,
of an entire era of history, leaving only an unnaturally extended shadow of
itself, a mummer’s show enacted by increasingly uncomprehending slaves. There
was a chasm of time and place between herself and those aristocratic stone
features, one that she could never bridge.

‘Of no
kinden I have ever known,’ Che stated. ‘If his body was laid here within the
stone then the carving must be greater than life-size, but even so … Thalric,
if this is a tomb … people don’t usually build tombs with exits. We might still
be in trouble.’

‘The air
moves,’ he observed, and she was surprised she herself had not noticed it. His
blindness had obviously made him aware of things that she overlooked. ‘The air
moves, and is cool and moist. There is a way out of here, and it is to the
river – though why build a tomb with river access I do not know. Can you swim?’

‘I don’t
know.’

She saw
him smile at that reply. ‘I can swim. I can swim with you, if I have to. Lead
us to the river, and I will get us both out.’

She
turned towards the far end of the hall, towards the throne that she had dimly
noticed before.

Her heart
froze.

The
throne was occupied.

Sulvec landed on the roof beside the BeetleVastern, dropping immediately
into a crouch. Around them the other Wasps – Marger and the handful of soldiers
he still had left – were also setting down. Three of them were guiding a
foundering Osgan through the air, twisting his injured arm whenever he
faltered.

‘It is a
joy to be in a city where nobody ever looks up,’ Marger remarked, and Sulvec
shot him a venomous look.

‘Well,
if you feel that way, then perhaps I can arrange for you to be posted here
permanently.’ Since Sulvec had taken over the operation, he had felt a certain
sense of friction with Marger. The Beetle, ranking Rekef among the agents who
had accompanied Thalric here, was cooperative enough, but Marger had plainly
grown too used to his fake authority. Also, Sulvec suspected that he was
finding the business of turning on his former companion slightly straining. He
was Rekef Outlander, after all: he had not been properly hardened in the
Inlander fires.

Marger
just shrugged, in that irritating way of his, and went off to secure the
gasping Osgan. The prisoner was a liability to them, Sulvec knew, but there was
a chance that his suffering would cause Thalric sufficient concern to draw him
in. The Rekef never disposed of a potential tool until it was well and truly
broken. Indeed, sometimes the breaking of it was the point.

‘Report,’
Sulvec instructed.

‘All
quiet until maybe fifteen minutes ago,’ Corolly Vastern told him. ‘Then someone
comes pelting up the steps from the direction of the embassies, and just drops
straight inside, quick as you like. I marked him as Ant-kinden, which suggests
one of the Vekken, although he went so fast that I couldn’t be absolutely
sure.’

‘There’s
always the chance that he broke both his legs and is still lying at the
bottom,’ the Beetle suggested. ‘Not known for their airborne, the Ant-kinden.’

‘That
shaft is easily scalable, if you have the Art,’ Sulvec said, dismissing him.
‘So the Vekken are allied with the Collegiates?’

‘That’s
the way it looked, from the job on the embassy,’ Corolly confirmed with a
grimace. There had been few enough survivors to tell the tale.

Sulvec
took a long breath, staring up at the pyramid in the gathering dusk. ‘We will
have to make our entrance, and ensure that Thalric is dead. Or make him dead,
if he has the poor grace to be still alive.’ He became aware that his hands
were flexing nervously, so he clenched them into easy fists, trying to appear
calm to his men. He still recalled the way he had felt the previous night,
however he might try to explain it away. ‘We have to go in,’ he repeated,
looking at them each in turn. The other Wasps shuffled unhappily. Only Vastern,
who had not been there the night before, nodded readily.

‘We’ve
all seen the orders,’ the Beetle agreed. ‘Thalric must be dead at all costs. So
let’s kill him and get out of here while there’s still a city to get out of.’

Sulvec
fought down his feelings of dread. ‘Follow me over to the top of the pyramid.’
Before he could have second thoughts, he had called up his wings and coasted
over to the jumble of statues that ringed the pit. The irregularity of their
placing bothered him, random enough that he could not have sworn that there
were the same number and arrangement as before.
They must
have given up before they finished constructing this monument, whatever it is
.
But there was no real sense of absence, only an instinct that whatever pattern
the statues had been laid out in was one that his own mind could not grasp.

They had
all followed him, the other Wasps, even Osgan and his forcible escorts. The
prisoner dropped to his knees as soon as he was released, almost toppling
forward into the narrow abyss. He was whimpering, but not from pain.
He knows something about this place
, Sulvec thought.

‘What’s
down there?’ he growled, crouching by their wretched prisoner. Osgan ignored
him, trembling and sobbing quietly to himself, till Sulvec clutched his collar,
hauling the man up to face him. ‘You tell me what you know,’ he warned. ‘What’s
down there?’

Osgan
stared at him wildly, eyes red in a grey face. ‘The death that comes for
Emperors,’ he replied, quite clearly, and something stabbed deep inside Sulvec,
an echo of last night’s fear. He dropped Osgan, turning the gesture into an
angry one, his eyes challenging any of his men to make an issue of it.

Corolly
Vastern had caught them up, slogging his way on foot up the steps. ‘There’s not
a light on in the Scriptora again,’ he remarked. ‘It’s like they know we’re
here, and they’re trying to ignore us.’

‘You think
it’s a trap?’ Sulvec asked him.

‘I don’t
know what to think, but a trap could be the least of it,’ the Beetle replied.
‘Something got Gram and Dreker last night. If I could make a suggestion, sir?’