The Scarab Path

transformed. The expression written there had gone beyond fear of anything that Sulvec might do to him. It was almost blissful in its terror, the look of the man who sees the thing he most dreads come to pass, and knows he need not dread it any more.

'He's coming,' Osgan whispered.

Sulvec flinched away from him, and the soldiers let go, dropping Osgan to his knees. He knelt there, arms wrapped about his bloody stomach, dragging in halting breaths, and just staring.

The soldiers were already spread out, palms aimed at the darkness. 'Something's coming,' one of them said.

'Nothing's coming!' Sulvec insisted, although he did not believe it. 'Nothing! You're letting a dead man get to you. Pick him up!'

'Sir,' said the soldier, and then he died.

Sulvec saw it happen, as a sudden line of red across his throat, the flash of a blade outlined in blood, and the man dropped. The other soldier loosed a stingshot into the dark, then again and again, backing away from something Sulvec could not see. Sulvec opened his mouth to yell at him, but then the second soldier was dead too, twin sprays of blood from head and body and he had fallen away into the darkness.

Osgan was laughing, the sound twisted into a hideous cackle by the pain he was suffering.

Sulvec backed off, but he was backing off from nothing he could see. 'Show yourself!' he ordered. 'Let me see you.'

And then there was someone there, standing between the two corpses. Sulvec did not understand how he could have missed him. A tall, slender man with pointed features, a Mantis-kinden of the Lowlands with a claw on his hand. Sulvec could see him clearly although the lamps were almost out. Whatever illuminated the Mantis shone on nothing else.

He advanced in a delicate stalking movement that made no sound. The light on him fell from one side, and Sulvec could see only whatever that ghost-light touched. The rest of him was made of darkness that even the lamplight could not dispel.

Sulvec loosed a stingbolt at him, but the Mantis seemed untroubled. The Rekef man tried to draw his sword, but his hands were shaking too much. He backed off, further and further away from the discarded lamps of the dead soldiers. His own flickered and died, its fuel spent.

The Mantis reached Osgan and stared silently down at him until the wretched Wasp was able to lift his head.

A voice came cold and clear to Sulvec. The Mantis's lips moved. I remember you.

Osgan made a great shuddering sound that was part sob, part laugh. 'I knew …' he got out, with the greatest of efforts, 'you'd come. They said … you were dead … but I knew …'

You sat beside the Emperor, came the Mantis's distant voice. You had your knife, little scribe. Would you have fought to defend your master? Osgan's strangled response was wordless, incoherent, but the Mantis said, Yes, I think you would.

His off hand, the arm jagged with barbs, rested on Osgan's shoulder. I shall give you more, at least, than these your kin. There was a moment of understanding, dying man to dead one, and the spectral blade speared down just once, precise and final.

Sulvec saw something seep out of Osgan's tortured frame, saw the racked and twisted man relax at last, muscle by muscle. The long release of breath he heard was without pain, was at peace. It was Osgan's last. He swayed and pitched on to his side, and Sulvec knew for sure he was dead.

The Mantis looked up and his eyes, one lit and one shrouded in shadow, found Sulvec.

'Now,' he said, as the lamps went out.

Che sagged back into Thalric's arms, mind still full of the swollen river, even though the images had now left her. Looking up at the assembled Masters, she saw not one of them was looking at her. They did not even mean to show me, she thought numbly. I just got carried along, when they looked. What have I seen? I cannot take it in.

'What?' Thalric was demanding. 'They haven't done anything. What's happening, Che? What's wrong?'

She stepped away from him, feeling a tug of resistance and then release. 'Do not ask me,' she said. 'I cannot say. I don't have words for what I've seen. Oh, Thalric, I can't hope to make you understand.'

There was a great sigh from the Masters, and she knew that they had finished. A great burden of sorrow was upon them, their faces disfigured by the dregs of effort. Some simply walked away. Many lingered as though, having awoken, they were unsure what it had been for. Only one was missing: armoured Garmoth Atennar had absented himself, perhaps to take his huge sword to the Scorpions in person.

'Such waste of our resources,' said Jeherian bitterly. 'We should be angry with our servants for putting us to this, but I cannot find the will to care.'

'But what happened?' Che asked them. 'How did you do it? Such a ritual, brought to bear so swiftly!' Words of Achaeos recurred to her. 'I know the Moths would never have attempted it.'

'No,' replied Elysiath, 'but they, like most kinden, are brief and impatient. What you saw was not the making of a ritual, but the breaking of one. It is very simple.'

'Not to me, it's not,' Che insisted. 'Please, you must tell me what you did.'

Elysiath sighed, her shoulders slumping as though the very act of having to explain herself to Che required more effort than she could countenance. 'Little child,' she said, 'we have told you.'

'Yet it is important she understands,' Jeherian put in, surprising Che. 'We have told you how, when we foresaw the changes these lands would suffer, we came to the decision to absent ourselves from the harsh surface above, and to work our great ritual from these our halls. Our ritual is for the restoration of the land, the balance that was broken by that great earthquake and cataclysm so long ago. For nine hundred years we have maintained it, and so we shall for millennia to come, if need be, however long our work may take. For we foresaw that the only way to break the drought was to hurry it to its ultimate ends, spur it on to its worst excesses. Of a dry land we have made a desert, watered only by the deep wells, and by the faithful Jamail.'

'You made the desert?' Che asked, astonished.

'By our will it has not rained in these lands for centuries past. It rains over the Forest Alim, where the clouds break on the mountains, and thus the Jamail does not run dry, but from over our city and dominion, we take the rain and hide it from the world, for year after year.'

'That's monstrous,' Che protested in a small voice. She could not conceive of it.

'Who may presume to judge our actions? We who live longer, see further. Without us, the land would dry and dry, over the ages. Instead we have brought that drought before its time, and hold it while the rain gathers, forcing it to burn too bright, to consume itself in its own heat. We have broken our ritual just to save our idiot servants. We have set ourselves back two hundred and seventy-five years of rain.'

Che could not speak. The man smiled, arrogant beyond the dreams of emperors.

'When we shall unleash that hoarded rain, when we have finally gathered sufficient of it, we shall transform the entire world. We shall strike a blow whereby we shall reverse the cataclysm. The land shall be green again, and we shall rule it directly once more.'

His words washed over her, and she swayed under their impact. They were madness and yet, revealed to her by the Masters of Khanaphes, she knew that they must be the truth. Here was a magic a thousand years in the making, and accumulating still, and of such power that the Moth-kinden themselves could not have dreamt of it.

'The rain has washed the Scorpions away?' Thalric's voice broke in on them, an outsider intruding. 'I understand nothing of this.' The Masters' expressions clearly told him: Of course you don't.' Tell me one thing,' he went on, and they looked at him without interest as he asked, 'What will you and your people do when the Empire gets here?'

'Your Empire does not interest us,' said Lirielle. 'Mere children and their toys.'

'But you seem to have realized now what those toys can do,' Thalric insisted. 'A pack of barbarians with a little artillery has nearly destroyed your city. The Empire-'

'We can see your Empire in your mind,' Elysiath silenced him at once, 'like a child's chalk drawing of power. They will come, you assume, and seek to command Khanaphes, to make it part of your dominion.' She stretched expansively. 'It would be tiresome to have to destroy your Empire, and distracting. I imagine, therefore, that we will