The Scarab Path

He shook his head. When he spoke again, his voice was the wind, just as the voice of the haunted forest Darakyon had been the myriad sounds of the leaves. You put yourself on the rack of my memory. You turn the wheel yourself.

'That's not true!' she shouted at him. 'It's not fair. I want you alive, but I can't have you alive, and nor will you be dead! What can I do? Do you want me to follow you?' Standing there beneath that featureless sky, she wondered if she might already have done. Is this death, this petrified sea?

The wind died abruptly, leaving nothing but the two of them staring at each other. 'I am dead and gone, Che,' he said, and it was once more the voice of the man who had loved her, against all the dictates of history and his own people. 'Do not raise me up like this to injure yourself. I am gone. Just let me go.'

He made to turn away and she rushed at him, determined to hold him in her arms. For a moment she had the cloth of his robe in her hands, but then he was gone, and the rail was gone too, and she was falling with a shriek towards the razor-sharp claws of the frozen ocean …

Waking, suddenly, for once she remembered exactly where she was. She slipped from the bunk, felt herself swaying in time with the ship's pitch and yaw. Praeda muttered something and turned over, looking pale with her face sheened in sweat. All the Collegium academics had turned out to be poor sailors, and the Vekken were keeping to their cabin so obstinately that the same was probably true of them. The sea along this craggy coast did not rest easy, but Che had found herself proof against it. She dressed in her tunic and cloak, and pattered barefoot out into the walkway running between cabins. Around her the wood of the ship creaked and shifted, and she found it an oddly comforting sound, a created thing behaving in the way it had been intended.

Up above, it was cold but the change was refreshing to her. There was a handful of sailors still at their duties, Spider-kinden all and mostly men. If not for the dream, she might just have watched them work. They did everything with such conscious elegance, as though they had stayed out here not to work the ship but to perform for Cheerwell Maker. It was not the killing grace of the Mantis-kinden, but something more showy, and which they took more joy in.

She scanned the rails, finding nothing, no smear nor smudge of him. The sails billowed and the waves rolled the ship up on to their backs, and then sloughed it down the other side. The sky above boasted stars and a slice of the moon, save to port where the cliffs ate out a deeper darkness, unrelieved by anything.

She took a deep breath of the sea air, feeling the deck shift beneath her feet, her toes flexing automatically for balance. Below, the others would still be sleeping fitfully, groaning, or staggering off to be ill. Che, who had suffered the airships and the automotive, had at last found a vessel she was comfortable with.

But of course. The Lord Janis was built by the Inapt, crewed by the Inapt, and it therefore carried her along with it smoothly, while it dragged the others by force. She smiled at that, despite all her worries. Of all the rest, only Trallo had been weathering this rough sea well, and she guessed that it was sheer experience, in his case. He had made such trips so often that the sea held no more terrors for him.

The ship changed its tack noticeably, slanting away from the cliffs. Ahead, along the dark and starless line of the land, Che could see a red spark high enough to challenge the moon.

'What is it?' she demanded of the nearest sailor. He looked at her mockingly at first, but swallowed some flippant answer and said, 'The Light of Suphat.'

'The what?'

'A great fire atop a tower, that warns us where the rocks are.'

'A lighthouse,' she realized.

He shrugged. 'Stay above decks, lady, you shall see two more along the cliffs, named Amnet and Dekkir. When we have passed Dekkir, which shall be near dawn, we shall be within reach of the harbour of Khanaphes.'

After the ship had passed the Light of Dekkir, and after dawn had come, sluggish, to the Sunroad Sea, the land had changed, the cliffs falling smoothly away until the Lord Janis made its smooth progress across a shoreline of sand. The beach ran inland as far as the eye could see, and Che realized it was the desert, the true desert.

'How can it be so dry, right next to the sea?' she asked. There were odd defiant clumps of gorse and thornbushes, and a big ridge-shelled beetle was carefully collecting the dew that had condensed across its carapace. Other than that, life seemed to have abandoned the place.

'Dry means no rain, that's all,' Manny Gorget pointed out. He was leaning heavily on the rail, still looking green despite the easier going. 'Find me a map and I'll show you where the rain stops. It's all in the wind and the landscape. Salt water's no substitute.' When he could be persuaded to talk on his subject, he was quite competent.

Che turned to Trallo, who had been making some arrangements with the captain. 'Have you been there? The desert?'

'Just the once.' His smile was thin-lipped. 'Not nice. And you have to pick a time when the Scorpion-kinden aren't on the warpath.'

'But how can they live out there? How can anything survive?'

'Bella Cheerwell, you have to look cursed hard to find a place where nobody lives. People find a way, always. Now, Sieur Gorget, would you go roust your fellows? We're going to be coming up on the city soon and, frankly, if you visit Khanaphes, you should see it from the seaward side.'

'What happens when we arrive?' Che asked him, as Manny lurched off unsteadily against the ship's swell.

'I find out how welcome we are, to start with,' Trallo said. 'They're odd fish, these Khanaphir. They're quiet as you like, hard-working, polite, and if they don't like you, you might as well turn around and go away, because you'll never change it no matter what. So I'll take a sounding, as the sailors say, and find out how best to stay on their good side.'

'I'm glad we've got you along,' she told him.

'The labourer is worth his hire,' he said. 'I'll see about letting word trickle to the Ministers, about you being an ambassador. Until they come to you, you mustn't try to push in on them.'

'I've no intention of it. All I really need to do is make sure Master Gripshod and the others get to study the place, and they can probably do that just by standing and looking.'

'Hmm, two things,' Trallo said. 'First, don't poke and pry until I give the all-clear. They are a very private people, the Khanaphir. Second, don't call him that.'

'What?'

'Master Gripshod — or Master anything. Local customs, local rules. They keep the word 'Master' for other purposes, and it's got nothing to do with people like us.'

He was quite serious. She waited for him to elaborate, and he shrugged.

'I'm not saying that I understand it. I've been to Khanaphes a score of times and I still don't understand the place. But, take my word for it, find some other way to make introductions.'

She was below when the Lord Janis began to tack, but she felt the change in the timbers, and ran up on deck to see.

The desert had turned green. While her back was turned the land had been colonized by a vast expanse of reeds and spidery-rooted trees and huge arthrophytes twice as high as a man, all sprouting from a maze of little water channels. The Lord Janis was taking in sail, slowing down, and Che saw that it was angling for a broad watercourse that cut through the marsh ahead, a river in its own right.

The others were assembled on deck by now: the three academics standing forward of the mast, the two Vekken sullenly behind it. Che went to join Berjek Gripshod, watching the riot of vegetation pass by on the port side.

'The Jamail delta,' Trallo clarified for them. 'Goes on for miles. Once a year they dredge the main channel clear of silt, but it still moves around a bit. It all does. They say nobody but the natives can find their way in there from day to day.'

The channel itself was wide enough for five ships like the Janis to have sailed in abreast. It was a truce with nature, for beyond those carefully maintained borders the greenery ran mad. There were flies and dragonflies near man-size quartering the air over the water, and she saw something huge and brown and slimy-looking surface to peer at the ship with goggling eyes.