The Scarab Path

me. You shall always return.'

'Let me come with you,' Osgan said. 'Please, Thalric. I'm dying here.'

'You're more likely to die on the road. This is Rekef business, Osgan. Stay here and keep to your cellars.'.

'Each time you find some way of getting out of this place, it gets worse for me,' Osgan complained, almost in a whisper. 'They hate me. They hate me because of you — and because of me. They know I've broken. You'll come back and find me gone, and nobody will even remember my name.'

'You're exaggerating.' Osgan was probably not exaggerating but Thalric couldn't agree to it.

'And what of you, anyway?' Osgan asked. 'You think you'll go back to your old ways, your old trade? You think they'll let you? Them?' Even his jabbing gesture towards the automotive looked crippled, his fingers crooked. 'They won't let you back in, Thalric. They won't forget who you are. What you were.'

Thalric glanced around, despite himself, seeing Marger watching him. The man bore his placid, accepting expression that Thalric had not yet been able to scratch. There had been no sense of complicity between them, no admission that they even lived in the same world. Thalric had wanted to protest, I am a major in the Rekef, but now he realized that he did not even know Marger's true Rekef rank. The 'captain' was army-issue, meaning less than nothing on a covert run like this.

'If you can't keep up with us, I'm not sure I can save you,' he warned. His Imperial conditioning raged at him: What is this? Mercy? Compassion? A strong man did not bow to such emotions. He had no duty to save Osgan from the results of his own dissipation. Better for the Empire that the man just vanished away, making room for someone who would be better at his job.

I am tainted. Thalric had seen too much, done too much. He had been born a true Wasp, but now he'd become some kind of halfbreed of the mind.

He turned back to the waiting automotive. 'Captain Marger,' he announced, 'one more for the journey.'

Marger hesitated over that, taking in the sight of Osgan. 'I wouldn't advise it,' he said. 'We'll be short of space and supplies.'

'Comfort is never a soldier's companion, and there are enough way stations to supply us.' Thalric felt as though he and Marger were facing up to each other in duel, looking for the other's weak points. 'This is Lieutenant Osgan and he's on my staff.'

Still, Marger was unhappy with the idea. 'This is a Rekef operation and he's no agent.'

'We already know our paths will be diverging, once we reach the city,' Thalric said reasonably. 'It will make more sense for me to have Osgan there with me than to have to call on you for assistance.' He held Marger's gaze, waiting to see if the man would stand firm, or fall back.

The final answer was a shrug, the man's easy acceptance reasserting itself. There had been a gleam in there, of Rekef steel, but this was not a battlefield Marger would choose to fight on.

'Your call,' he said again, then, 'We're just about loaded. Are you and your … staff ready to move out?'

Many Wasps wondered why Fly-kinden, who had the sky as their plaything, chose to live so much of their time underground. On the surface Shalk appeared merely a collection of little huts and mounds almost lost amid the sweep of the surrounding hills, and only anchored by the bulk of an Imperial garrison's barracks. Thalric knew that most of the town lay beneath, in a complex of narrow tunnels and broad chambers that were impossible to navigate unless one was both tiny and airborne. Military tacticians had often speculated on the difficulties of forcing an Imperial presence on the Fly-kinden, in the unlikely event that they decided to resist one. It would certainly be possible, but drastic measures would be called for and Thalric, having heard of the gas-weapon disastrously employed at Szar, thought it a good thing that the Shalken and their ilk were proving so compliant. Nobody would profit from a rebellion here.

Of course the Fly town itself was only half of it. Beyond the hills the land suddenly stopped and dropped, so the anatomy of the earth he stood on was exposed in stratified layers where the ground had simply fallen away as a result of some ancient cataclysm. It had since become the Empire's largest quarry and mining complex, with several thousand slaves working there day in and day out. If the insurrection had allowed these toiling wretches any reprieve, that was well and truly over now.

After they had docked their automotive at the garrison's stables, Thalric took Marger aside.

'Find me transport to Forest Alim from Shalk End,' he requested. 'We'll take the river from there to Khanaphes.'

'Shalk End?' Marger said. That meant the Shalk below them, the quarry and its slaves. It was certainly possible to shortcut to the plain below by descending the face of the mine workings, but not usual. 'Is there something I should know?'

If you were meant to know, you'd already have been told, Thalric thought, still with assassins in mind. 'I like a bit of variety, Captain,' he said. 'Besides, wouldn't you like to see the Empire's largest quarry in operation?'

Marger shrugged, predictably. 'I'll go lean on the foreman,' he replied.

Thalric nodded. 'Osgan, go find the Consortium and get enough supplies for a tenday for the six of us.'

The man started on hearing his name and seemed to wrestle with the words before agreeing.

'Good,' Thalric nodded. 'The rest of you, wait by the machine until we're ready.' He smiled at the Beetle and two Wasps and they regarded him cautiously. They had none of them decided precisely what he was, and he wondered what they might have already heard.

Which leaves me at liberty in Shalk. But he would have to be quick. No doubt Marger would be prompt enough in doing his job.

The garrison at Shalk was unusual at the best of times, but even more unsettled now since the insurrection. Its purpose had always been to safeguard the mines and the quarry, rather than to intimidate a naturally obsequious populace. The current military personnel were all new, the traitorous old guard having been rooted out or fled, or else died on the field before Tyrshaan. The staff, though, the underlings who kept everything running, were the same old faces. For most such garrisons they dragged Auxillians from halfway across the Empire, putting them among foreigners to limit any chance of betrayal.

The Shalken themselves were an exception, however. Where most other kinden were unwilling partners, slaves of the Empire with their families and home cities held hostage for their good behaviour, Flies and Beetle- kinden had proved willing subjects of the crown since the Empire's early days. The halls of the Shalken garrison were busy with diminutive forms — in the air and on the ground — of cleaners, messengers, scribes and servants. They went about their duties deftly, with the eternal pragmatism of their kind.

Thalric sought out the records office, where messages came in either for filing or passing on. The Fly-kinden had long made Shalk the South-Empire's great message hub, which had been difficult while the traitor governors divided up the South between them. Now everything was returning to business as usual, and the same faces were to be found at the same desks. All except one.

It had been a lucky piece of research, but Thalric liked to keep in touch with his old friends.

He spotted the man quickly, just another Fly-kinden sorting papers in a pool of sunlight under a window. Thalric made his way behind the man's desk, appearing to peruse a rack of scrolls thoughtfully, and in a low voice murmured, 'A strange place to find a lieutenant of the Rekef, one might think.'

The Fly did not pause in his work, did not even twitch. 'If one thought that, one might wonder whether it was common knowledge,' he said, as if speaking to the ledger he was marking.

'Not yet,' Thalric replied, and he heard the smallest sigh.

'Some of us fall despite our best endeavours, some of us rise despite our tribulations,' the Fly observed. 'For instance, I saw your name included on an execution list, shortly before I decided to retire.'

'You don't ever retire from the Rekef, te Berro.'

'No, they retire you instead.' Thalric heard the misery in te Berro's voice. 'Might one ask how it is that a dead man is now Regent of the Empire? I've followed your career with interest.'

Of course you have. For te Berro was a Rekef man, and that training did not sit idle. Even here, in hiding, he had clearly put himself in a position to gather information, even if he was doing so only for himself. It reminded Thalric of his own behaviour in occupied Tharn, when he had been acting as Stenwold's agent. Old habits like that didn't die.

'You must have jumped ship from Reiner's people, if you got to see that list,' Thalric noted.

'Oh, I was on the good ship Maxin a while previously. But then a high-up operation went sour and I judged it