The Scarab Path

'This river is life, basically,' Trallo was saying. 'This river is Khanaphes and all the other towns north of it. This is the line of green through the desert that everyone here needs to survive.'

Something caught Che's eye, something too rigid and angular to be natural. Between the ferns and the articulated trunks of horsetails, she saw huts — a rabble of little straw-roofed hovels lifted out of the water on stilts. She caught a glimpse of people, and then a boat gliding through the shallow channels, half-obscured by the green. A moment later it cut out on to the river behind the Lord Janis, a long, low boat with a high bow and stern, constructed only from reeds and rope. A woman with silvery-grey skin was effortlessly poling it near the bank. Almost unsurprised, now, Che recognized her as a Mantis-kinden. She looked anxiously at the Spider sailors, but none of them paid the native the slightest attention.

They do things differently here.

'And there we go,' said Trallo.

Che followed his gaze and caught her breath. The academics, too, were abruptly at the rail, staring.

'Khanaphes, the majestic, the mysterious,' said the showman, Trallo, as though he was charging admission.

Ahead of them, the river was flanked by squared pillars of stone four storeys high, vast at the base and barely tapering as they reached up to support the sky. The stone of the pillars was a dusty tan, while the statues set into their faces gleamed white. They stood almost the entire height of the pillars, carved seamlessly from marble, a man and a woman, barely clad and walking forward. The sculptor had lavished infinite care on their colossal proportions, the man's body heavy and broad-waisted, the woman's rounded breasts and hips, the flowing cascade of long hair down both sets of shoulders. Their faces viewed the marsh and the sea with cold beatitude. These were the countenances of a man and woman who ruled everything they saw as far as the wave-stirred horizon and beyond. Before that commanding, all-encompassing gaze the academics momentarily quailed. Che felt a shiver go through her, witnessing such perfection in stone. Those were beautiful faces, but they were appalling in their utter lack of empathy. It was no failing of the sculptor, though: the hands that had shaped them had carved and chipped to instil them with just such a coldness.

They were certainly not Beetle-kinden. No trick of style could ever have transformed them out of something so mundane. Che had never seen anyone or anything that even approached them.

'The Estuarine Gate,' Trallo announced, but she barely heard him. The blind stone gaze seemed to follow the matchwood thing that was the Lord Janis as it passed through the gulf between them and they saw Khanaphes proper.

It was a city built of stones — more so than any other place Che had seen. Houses raised of tan masonry clustered thickly about both sides of the river, and beyond the single-cell dwellings of the poor loomed the edifices of the wealthy. Avenues flanked by pillars led off toward statue-adorned squares where great squatting palaces faced one another, rising higher and higher, each surrounded by a miniature city of smaller structures, and the gaps between them filled with meaner dwellings and workshops.

'Well, rack me,' Berjek Gripshod exclaimed softly. 'Now look at that.'

The Janis pulled in skilfully at a dock near the gate, and the crew tied up. With the gangplank down, Che led the way on to the wharves of Khanaphes. Even the pier they were moored to was of stone. How many pairs of hands, how many years, to make all this? And yet so little of it looked recent. Time had laid its rounding hand on each surface and angle.

'Look,' said Berjek, and he sounded as though he was going to weep. Even the buildings nearest to them, mere stone huts, were intricately carved. Some simply had borders of angular, stylized images etched on to them, others bore whole panels of complex, intricate, indecipherable work. Looking around, Che could not see a single surface of stonework, even the pier beneath her sandals, that had not somehow been illustrated.

'We should have brought more people,' Berjek said hoarsely. This was hopeless. It would take an army of scholars all their lives to record this. The city was its own library.

Trallo was meanwhile organizing the luggage, his two Solarnese hauling it down on to the quayside. Che stepped aside from the academics, and the brooding Vekken, and stared into the crowd. The docks were a continuous bustle, a dozen ships unloading, the same number again preparing to cast off. There were men and women of many different kinden there, together with a swarm of the ubiquitous bald-headed Beetles. Her eyes had grown used, not so long since, to being wary of crowds. Helleron, Solarno, Myna: the war had given her instincts that had become stubborn guests.

As she looked, so she found. The face leapt out at her, a moment's eye contact across the crowded docks, but that was not a face she was ever likely to forget. Not five minutes after stepping from the ship, and her world was reverting to its old faithless ways once again.

Thalric.

Part 2

The Black and Gold Path

Nine

The grand army of General Vargen had arrayed itself before the city of Tyrshaan, black-and-yellow armour crossed with a sash of blue, the old badge of the Kings of Tyrshaan that had not been seen during this last generation. General Vargen, whose rank was self-given, and who was elsewhere known as just another one of the traitor-governors, had decided to risk a field battle, not trusting his forces to endure a siege. It was not necessarily a poor choice, for Thalric had seen the siege train that the Imperial forces had brought with them. Tyrshaan's walls were neither high nor strong.

Vargen's men made a fierce spectacle at this distance, but Thalric had heard the scouts and the spies report. There was a core of Wasp-kinden, mostly the garrisons of Tyrshaan and neighbouring Shalk, that would fight to the death. Dying in battle was preferable to dying in the fighting pit or at a public execution, especially given how inventive the new Empress had become. The bulk of Vargen's force were Auxillians, though, who had less to gain from victory, less to lose from defeat. Those solid blocks of armoured Tyrshaani Bee-kinden would see no reason to throw themselves on to the pikes of the enemy on behalf of their usurper lord. They now made dark squares against the tawny ground before the city walls: halberdiers, crossbowmen and masses of the interlocking hexagonal shields that the Tyrshaani favoured. The Bees were no match for the trained and keen soldiers of the Empire, either singly or en masse. Their only battle virtue was an implacability of spirit that Thalric suspected they would not be deploying today.

Vargen had placed a quartet of solid-looking automotives in the vanguard of his force, but Tyrshaan had always been a backwater, and their boxy, six-legged design was now twenty years old. By contrast, the punitive force had brought orthopters, snapbows and mobile artillery.

'I make it five of theirs to four of ours,' said a lieutenant next to him, peering through a spyglass. 'Not counting the Flies.'

'Well, who would?' sniffed Colonel Pravoc, the Imperial commander. 'So we outnumber them four to five. Good.' He gave Thalric one of his sickly smiles. Pravoc was a lean man who looked as though he lived primarily off ambition and a joy in the downfall of others. He had been chosen for this role because he was an able battlefield commander, and because having a mere colonel sent to oppose him would throw the self-made General Vargen into a rage. Altogether, Pravoc was a man of few words and fewer compliments.

'I trust it all meets with your approval,' he said, a flick of his fingers encompassing the might of the Imperial army that was falling into place around them.

'I'm not here to approve,' Thalric told him.

Pravoc's answering look said, And why are you here? but he was too much concerned with his own future to say it. The presence here of the Imperial Regent had inspired rather than shaken him. 'They'll be marching for us soon, according to our spies.'