The Scarab Path

'I know where you need to be, and I can assist you, Honoured Foreigner,' said her companion. She stopped and turned to look at him directly.

'Please help me,' she said.

'Why, of course.' He smiled broadly. 'What you wish, of course, is to be in company with myself and my fellows. Who would not?'

She looked behind her and spotted the gathering of rogues that were his fellows. There were a full dozen of them, Khanaphir and silver-skinned Marsh folk, halfbreeds, and even a Spider-kinden woman from somewhere far, far off.

'No, please,' she whispered. 'I don't want to go with you. I just want to get out of this place.'

'Who would not want to leave here?' the Beetle agreed, still smiling at her. 'And what better companions to leave with than such stout fellows as we? We have a fine ship, too, which lacks only one of your elegance to complete her company. Surely you will be our guest.'

She understood then: slavers. The rogues were meanwhile drawing closer to her in a kind of casual saunter. Any one of them looked as though he could outrun her and they had broad-bladed daggers, short-hafted axes, sported spurs of bone.

'Please, I … I am a scholar of Collegium. I will soon be missed.'

'Then surely your friends will reimburse us for our hospitality,' replied the smiling Khanaphir. There was a dagger in his hand, its blade as bright as a mirror even here under cover of the tents.

She opened her mouth to protest again but he grabbed her tunic, twisting it at the collar and drawing her up on to her toes. His smile stayed robustly unchanged. Another of his men was abruptly close enough to take hold of her other arm.

'Please-!' she cried, just as a spear plunged so far into his chest that its leaf-shaped head emerged complete and red-glossed through his back. His eyes popped wide open but the smile, horribly, stayed quite intact as he dropped. Petri fell back and sat down heavily, staring.

They had found her at last. She saw their gold-rimmed shields inlaid with turquoise, their raised spears and drawn bows, the gilded and alabaster armour of the Royal Guard of Khanaphes.

The slavers made no attempt at fighting. At the sight of the Royal Guard, they took to their heels. Petri saw the three guardsmen holding bows calmly aim and loose, and heard the solid sounds behind her of arrows finding their mark. The lead guardsman was now approaching her, one hand held out to draw her to her feet. She saw it was their captain, Amnon, who had always terrified her. He was over six foot — very tall for a Beetle — but he seemed at least a foot taller still. He seemed larger than life, packed with energy and strength, bulging with muscles, with hands that could have crushed rocks: so fiercely alive and strong that she felt his presence as if he were a fire. She cringed away as he reached out, but he put her back on her feet one-handed, the other grasping a second spear behind his glorious oval shield.

'Honoured Foreigner Petri Coggen,' he said, grinning at her with white teeth, 'how fortunate that we found you.'

She could only nod. This was the First Soldier of Khanaphes, the Captain of the Royal Guard. He was everything she had been trying to escape from, to warn Collegium about. He was part of what had taken Master Kadro, she felt sure of it.

'Come, we will take you to your new rooms,' Amnon informed her, putting an arm about her shoulders. He made her feel like a mere child, like a Fly-kinden. He had come accompanied by only five men, but twice the number of slavers would not have dared face him, for he could have walked into the Marsh Alcaia on his own. Amnon was a legend here, and his position in the city was well earned.

At last his words got through to her. 'New rooms?' she asked timorously.

'Of course.' He drew a folded paper from inside his broad belt. It was the same letter from Collegium that she had left on the desk back in her lodgings. 'Your people are sending friends, so we must ensure that our hospitality is not wanting. We will prepare a proper welcome for them.' His smile was guileless, yet as savage as the sun.

Six

'I have travelled in more luxury, in my time,' said Mannerly Gorget. 'When they said we would be travelling on the White Cloud, I allowed myself to get excited. I hadn't realized they meant as freight.'

'You exaggerate,' Praeda told him. 'Also, the padding you bring to the ship should be luxury enough.' She had made herself comfortable, or at least as comfortable as possible, against a bulkhead. It was not actually the cargo hold they were in, but three compartments alongside it that had probably been originally intended for crew. By unspoken agreement, Che and Praeda had taken the bow, the men had taken the stern, and the middle compartment was where they habitually sat and complained about the arrangement.

Since the war, Solarno and Collegium had not been strangers. A two-way trickle of scholars and artificers had begun, all keen to learn or to profit from the shortcomings of the one city or the other. The sheer distance, and the intervening cities of the Spiderlands, sufficiently complicated the journey to still make most forms of trade uneconomical. There was a certain market, however, that had grown up very recently between them, and that was aptly represented by the White Cloud. Just as Spider Aristoi had been using Solarno as a holiday retreat for centuries, so the idea had grown up amongst the richest of the Collegium magnates. Solarno, that beautiful lakeside city, with its civilized comforts and entertainments, had become the place to go for a certain class of the very wealthy. Deep in the Beetle mind there had always been a sense of grievance with the world. Beetle-kinden felt themselves looked down upon. They came from old slave stock. They were unsubtle in their dealings. Compared with the elegant grace of the Spider-kinden, they felt like club-footed children. It was a thorn in the minds of all of them, especially those rich enough to discover that there were things that money could not buy. Solarno, lying outside the Spiderlands proper, had given them a place to go and flaunt their affluence. They would promenade alongside the glittering Exalsee, throng its tavernas, watch its excitable locals and pretend that, by doing what the Spider-kinden nobility did, they had become their equals. What the Spiders thought of it all was unknown, but Solarno was raking in money hand over fist. The White Cloud did not lack passengers for the return trip, either. The Spider-kinden who lived in Solarno were sheltering from the Dance, and it provided a backwater allowing them to play their games in safety. The introduction of Collegium into their lives, a whole city crammed with the naive and the adoring, had enlivened their social scene considerably.

Captain Parrols of the White Cloud was possessed of unusual acumen, himself a Helleren Beetle of dubious provenance. He had almost ruined himself to fit out this little airship with as much tawdry opulence as possible, but he had since made it all back and more, even with only a single round trip every month. The sort of people who took the air in Solarno could not afford to be seen looking cheap. Parrols had been less enchanted with the idea of carrying a grab-bag of academics on his ship, but he owed Drillen and so had grudgingly acquiesced. Their current station within the bowels of the vessel was testimony to the stalemate reached between Drillen's influence and Parrols's parsimony.

The Khanaphir Expedition of the Great College consisted of either three, four or six people, depending on your point of view. The fourth person was Cheerwell, and she found herself with an uneasy and ill-defined role. Although a scholar of the College, she was not present here as an academic. The other three had credentials, while she was merely a student with a colourful recent history. She had been given the over-large title of Collegiate Ambassador to Khanaphes, even though Stenwold could not furnish her with much idea of what such a grand personage might do. Khanaphes itself sounded a confusing and contradictory place, so she would have to think on her feet and try not to upset people. On a more mundane level, although she was not the expedition's leader and had none of the academic prestige, she seemed to have inherited most of the practical responsibility. When they reached Solarno, it would be her job to find locals prepared to take them further. She was positively looking forward to it, if only for the fact that being crammed here into the underside of an airship with three bickering academics was making her ill. She could barely eat, she slept badly, she constantly fended off Mannerly Gorget's half-heartedly lecherous advances. She worried all the time about what they might find in Khanaphes.

The academic contingent of the expedition was a triad of conflicting personalities who were either genuinely