The Scarab Path

a good time to vanish. And now it appears I didn't vanish well enough.'

'With all the changes at the capital, they haven't even started cleaning house properly,' Thalric reassured him. 'Still, it's only a matter of time. I hear Solarno is nice, this time of year. Perhaps you're due for a holiday, assuming they don't hear about you shortly.'

Another sigh. 'What do you want, Thalric?'

'Information. There was an attempt on my life in Tyrshaan. What was the follow up?'

'They strung up three of Governor Vargen's men within days. Case closed.'

Thalric stifled a chuckle. 'And after that?'

'There's a very definite kind of … silence from that direction.'

Thalric nodded, satisfied. It meant that General Brugan had matters properly in hand. After public executions that would reassure the real wrongdoers, the Rekef would start their own covert investigation. It was a way of doing things he had used himself often enough.

'Anything else?' he asked, as if still talking to the racking. 'Don't hold out on me, now.'

'Everything's still upside down here in the South-Empire,' te Berro complained. 'Reliable news is hard to come by. They're still purging Tyrshaan.'

'Who hates me that much, te Berro?'

The Fly made an amused noise. 'Grief, man, who doesn't? They hate the Empress? They hate you. They worked for General Reiner? They hate you. They're just loyal Imperial citizens who remember too much about the war …'

'I get the message.' Thalric gritted his teeth, hearing again the truth that Osgan had already given him. I am now a foreigner in my own country.

'Well, we make good messengers.' The Fly appeared at Thalric's elbow and started filing scrolls with care. 'Not that I've got anything against reunions, but you're a dangerous man to be around. What happens now?'

The image came to Thalric of a rooftop garden in Myna, of te Berro saving his life with a well-placed arrow. 'I go south and I advise you to get yourself outside the Empire's borders while they change the guard. Maybe, when the next big war looms, they'll look to their old agents, especially those who have been making a life for themselves meanwhile in Solarno or the Lowlands. Until then, I'd keep my head well down, if I were you.'

Still not looking at him, te Berro nodded. 'A holiday on the Exalsee?' he mused. 'I think I've earned it.'

They were winched down the face of the Shalk quarry among descending bundles of mining supplies and a barrel of firepowder charges. The Empire's slaves crawled across the scaffolded rock-face, cutting and measuring, hacking and breaking. There was a scattering of Fly-kinden artificers there for the technical work but the rest were imported labour — Flies were physically and temperamentally unsuited to such hard toil. Instead, Shalk had inherited hundreds of the Empire's most robust. There were Ant-kinden and Beetles, prisoners from Szar and Myna, and everywhere the vast, lumbering shapes of the Mole Crickets. Almost half the adult population of Least Delve had been herded here after the Empire had taken the place twenty years ago. They were not a numerous people but their skill with stone was such that they were ruthlessly put under the whip wherever they were found. Back home at the Delve, their families — especially the children who lacked the Art to simply slip away into the earth — were closely held as strict surety for their parents' continued industry.

The air was so thick with dust that Thalric's party was forced to breathe through cloth. They observed the quarry's vertiginous workings through goggles that had to be cleaned and cleaned again to stop them silting over, and the air was painfully dry. Work in mines and quarries was the Empire's rod for its worst offenders, the final destination of those whose luck had entirely expired. Here, sharing the forced labour of the Mole Crickets, were the deserters, the prisoners of war, the traitors whose physical strength would now serve the Empire they had betrayed until it gave out on them and they died.

Thalric, surveying all this as their lift jerked and shuddered its way downwards, thought, I, too, could have been here, so easily. Certainly there were enough other Wasp-kinden toiling at the cliff face.

At the foot of the descent there was the pit, where the quarry had been extended further into the earth. The entire cliff face above was riddled with blast-holes and mineshafts. There had been a web of gold here once, long since exhausted, but now they had found rich seams of iron. Overlooking the quarry itself stood a squat, brooding ziggurat that housed more of the Shalk garrison, with the workers' pitiful huts corralled all around it.

Marger had been conscientious in his arrangements. There was a Slave Corps expedition setting out that was already waiting for them before the garrison. They would travel along the line of the ridge, stopping at each spring and waterhole to trade with the desert Scorpions, until they reached the river and the green edge of Forest Alim. There the slavers and Thalric's expedition would part company.

Thalric found surprisingly little curiosity in himself about his destination or his journey, even about the Lowlanders he was heading off to spy on. All that matters is that I'm moving further away. He felt the Empress as a constant pressure in the back of his mind, but he was now putting the miles between them, and there must come a point where her presence would fade.

You will come back to me, she had said. He shuddered, successfully hiding it in the rocking motion as the crude lift touched down. Marger and his people unloaded their supplies, and Thalric automatically shouldered a crate himself, without even thinking of his elevated position. When he realized, halfway across the quarry-pit and into the shadow of the garrison, he smiled to himself. O Regent, see how I escape you.

Twelve

The river Jamail was the child of the slanting sheets of rain that fell daily against the Morgen Range, the clouds emptying themselves over the dense forest and denying the arid Nem water and life. From a hundred channels deep inside the forest, coalescing from a forest floor that in the wettest seasons was actually submerged, arose the snaking Jamail that began its long, looping progress south, out of the woodland, cutting its course through the dry lands and bringing fragile abundance to those who claimed its banks. From Alim, the logging town up against the forest's petering edge, all the way downriver to the marsh delta, extended the Dominion of Khanaphes, as it had done since time immemorial.

Thalric had expected something rough from Alim. Researches had told him that, as the furthest-flung outpost of Khanaphir territory, it served as nothing more than a port for forest timber. He had expected only a collection of wooden huts and a pier, and was therefore surprised.

Forest Alim was dominated by what he first assumed was a fortress, but then revised as a fortified palace. It was ancient, partly overgrown by the forest's resurgence, looming over the waters from the river's far side. Beyond the wall, as the slavers approached, he caught occasional glimpses of colonnades and ornamented rooftops. A stone pier jutted into the young river, dominated by a great, broad barge half loaded with timber, while half a dozen smaller vessels huddled in its lee.

The slavers were not interested in this place: it was simply the point where they would turn around and head back to Shalk. As Thalric's band approached carefully, he noticed a little patchwork of fields on the near side of the river, divided and subdivided by irrigation dykes excavated outward from the river itself. The men and women working in the fields were solid, bald-headed Beetle-kinden and paid them no notice whatsoever. In the face of their stoic labouring, which seemed to admit nothing of time or progress, Thalric felt his mission, the entire Empire, being subtly dismissed. You are not important to us, they were saying. We shall work here and you shall pass, and we shall continue on.

Outside the walled palace, which Thalric guessed would house the garrison and administration from distant Khanaphes, Forest Alim consisted of a cluster of warehouses and a sawmill. Even these buildings were stone- walled, however, converted to their present purpose from whatever ancient rites they had been built for. Thalric had taken a quick look into the sawmill, where he watched men slicing trees into planks by hand, working with huge two-man saws, or with foot-powered circular blades. By Imperial standards it was laughable, but they worked fast and with no sign of tiring.

Marger, and the two Wasps in his team, had gone to enquire about securing passage downriver, and Thalric was left hoping that he would find something faster than that ponderous barge. Aside from a scattering of fishing