The Scarab Path

polite disinterest of his city, he informed her, without needing words, that there was no way she was leaving the city on his ship.

So she had then looked for foreign ships. Surely the sinister influence of the Ministers could not be absolute. There would be ships out of distant ports, and at this point she would take a berth for anywhere. Even the dubious hospitality of the Spiderlands would be preferable.

She found a Spider-kinden trader, all elegant swept lines. She looked around for the captain, and saw her in conversation with a mild-looking Khanafir man. The Spider glanced at Petri and gave a faint shake of her head. Petri stumbled away, ran back down the quays. She did not care who stopped to watch the crazed foreigner make an exhibition of herself.

There was a broad-beamed cargo-hauler at the very end of the quays. Its crew was a mongrel mixture, halfbreeds, Mantis-kinden, lean and sallow Grasshoppers. They looked as disreputable as anyone Petri had ever seen. She rushed up to them, noticing their hands drift instinctively for hilts and hafts.

'Please, I need passage out,' she gasped. 'I have money.' She felt as though she was throwing herself from the jaws of one monster into the pincers of another.

One of the Grasshopper-kinden shouldered his way forward and crouched at the top of the gangplank, elbows crooked over his bony knees. 'Come up,' he said. He had a scar, jagged and twisted, down the side of his long face. In other circumstances she would have been terrified of him.

She made it up the gangplank, the villainous crew watching, narrow-eyed.

'You haven't been in Khanaphes long,' the Grasshopper captain observed.

'Long enough. Months now.'

He laughed quietly, shook his head. 'The blink of an eye. You have the city's interest, little helpless one. We have heard. There is no shipman who does not know.'

She felt a shudder go through her. 'Please … I must leave.'

'Anyone who took you away from here, while you bear that mark, would never trade here again, or ever be welcome. They carve their memories in stone here. They never forget. I could pass my ship on three times, and neither she nor I could put in safely at this port again, nor my sons, nor theirs.'

With a wrenching despair she realized that the incongruous tone of this vicious-looking creature was only sympathy.

'They will kill me,' she whispered. 'Please …'

'They might,' he said. His shrug indicated that the incidence of death punctuated his life as regularly as meals and sleeping. 'Or they might vanish you. Or they might lose interest and let you go. But we cannot help you. You do not have the money to compensate us for what we would lose.'

She left his ship, with feet dragging. Her concerned retinue was already waiting.

At Porta Rabi, it felt like the edge of the world.

The desert petered out into a scrub of sawgrass and thorns, and then the land fell away completely in a tangle of vines. Stunted strees clung grimly to the cliff edge, leaning at mad angles over the rocks far below. The cliffs were relieved only the once, where the land slanted steeply down to a beach of broken stone. It was there the intrepid Solarnese had built Porta Rabi. They had used the pale grey stone of the cliffs, but the buildings were the same odd burlesque of Spider styles, all pointed arches, tapering columns, grillwork screens, but all looking slightly wrong. They had made a Solarno in miniature, a little stepped crescent of buildings gathered about two long piers that went far enough into the sea to allow big ships enough draught to moor there. Above, where the cliffs took over, there was a reaching scaffold of wooden floors and scaffolding, rooms and buildings suspended before the rockface, all of it looking open-plan and half-built. Che identified this as Dragonfly-kinden work. There was a sizeable presence of them here from Princep Exilla and, putting aside their normal rivalries, the two kinden worked together to keep the port open in this inhospitable corner of the world. Even so, Trallo warned them, the streets were not safe after nightfall. The merchants who ran Porta Rabi retired early to their well-guarded compounds, and everywhere else became lawless after dark.

They came in close to midday, but the cool air off the sea worked against the pounding sun. The port was seething: a dozen ships moored at the piers. Most had sails furled about their rigging-webbed masts, but one possessed the stout funnels of a steamer, and another was constructed of copper metal and had neither sails nor a visible engine. The largest of the ships had triple rows of holes along each side, and Trallo explained that if the wind dropped it had slaves to row it. Che recalled the human commodity she had recently travelled alongside, and hoped they were bound for a better future than that.

While the others settled in a taverna under the watchful eyes of the two Solarnese, Che followed Trallo to the dockside to see about arranging passage. Standing there, with the grey sea stretching, windlashed, to the far horizon, she felt dizzy at the thought of how far she had come.

'What sea is this?' she asked, touching Trallo's shoulder. She was past the edge of all her maps. Was this the same sea that washed Collegium's wharves? 'Where does it go?'

He smiled up at her. 'This is the Sunroad Sea, and they say it goes all the way to where the sun comes from, if you could but sail that far.' He added, 'We'll have passage on that ship,' and pointed out a sleek Spiderlands felucca, two-masted and painted gold and blue. 'She's the Lord Janis out of Portoriens — that's the furthest east in the world that the Spider-kinden claim, the very eastern limit of their satrapies. And you know what?' He was grinning widely now. She shook her head slowly to show she did not know, and he finished it gleefully. 'You know what? That's west of here.'

Che felt weak at the knowledge. The Lowlanders tended to assume that the Spidlerlands just extended as far as they needed to go. She was standing at the shore of a whole new ocean, being jostled by sailors and traders of a dozen kinden out of who-knew-what distant ports. This was not Collegium's wilful ignorance of the Empire's ambitions, or the self-spun mystery of the Spiderlands, or the deliberate isolation of the Commonweal. This was far. She found herself searching the crowd suddenly for a familiar style of dress, a brooch or a sword-hilt whose style she recognized. There were Solarnese there, in their flowing white, but no more. She was the only representative of the Lowlands, at the docks of Porta Rabi. She was all the world she knew.

Trallo put a hand to her elbow. 'Steady now,' he said kindly. 'It was the same for me, when my dad brought me here the first time. Around the Exalsee we mostly look west and south to the Spiderlands where our ladies and lords come from. It was a shock for me, too.'

The captain of the Lord Janis was now coming towards them, and Trallo nodded respectfully to her. 'Here,' he said sidelong to Che, 'you know why Spider-kinden always name their cities and their ships after men, don't you?'

Che mustered a small smile. 'Why?'

''Cos they're both ruled by women,' Trallo answered, and then he bowed before the Spider-kinden captain as she arrived.

She dreamt she was on board ship. She was on board ship, of course, rocking in her cramped bunk, above Praeda, as the Lord Janis steered wide of the cliffs and reefs of the Stone Coast. As she dreamt now, though, she left the cabin and clambered aloft. The crew was gone and the sky above was starless. The skeleton of the rigging was without sail. Only one man stood on deck, stood at the rail and stared out to sea, grey-robed and narrow-shouldered. The ship itself was dead still, the waves all about frozen into jagged teeth.

'Achaeos,' she said, and in the dream it was. He turned to her, and she saw his white eyes, his grey skin, and she ran forward.

She stopped close to him, but not close enough to touch. She remembered that harsh, commanding voice, its angry, distant tones.

'What is it?' she asked. 'Please, Achaeos, tell me what I have to do.' There was a scowl building on his face, piece by piece. The sight made her cower away from him.

He had always been a gentle man who seldom raised his voice. He had never struck her. In her dream she thought he would strike her, on the deck of the stilled ship.

'What is this?' he demanded. 'In dreams? Must you dredge my memory up in dreams? Is this what I have become, just a knife for you to prick yourself with?'

'I don't understand,' she said, but a wind had struck up along with his reproach, tugging now at the empty rigging. She had to shout it again. 'I can't put you down! You won't let me!'