The Scarab Path

'Apparently there's going to be a hunt of some kind,' Manny reported. The other Collegiates looked up from their breakfast in mild interest. 'Their big fellow, Amnon, came round yesterday while you were all out,' he went on. 'We're all invited. In fact it's in our honour. I, for one, am looking forward to it.'

'Are you sure you're feeling well?' Berjek asked him. 'This hunt, presumably it will involve some manner of exertion — running around or that kind of thing. Not your favourite pastime at all, I would have thought.'

'Very funny.' The fat man gave him a sour look. 'I am a natural historian and a cartographer, do not forget. Neither of which I can do much about while sitting idly here in this city. I want to go out and make a few sketches, and this hunt sounds like the best chance I'll get — anyway, it's on the river and so all I'll have to do is recline in a boat while some local beauty fans me with a frond or something.'

'Some local bald beauty,' Berjek pointed out.

Manny's expression remained supremely unconcerned. 'I happen to find that quite attractive.'

'Are you planning to deflower the entire female population of Khanaphes before we're done here?' Praeda asked testily.

'They don't object.'

'They've probably been warned that their families will be executed if they don't indulge the important foreigners,' she said. 'That's the only way I can account for it.'

'Trallo, what sort of hunt is this likely to be?' Berjek turned to the Fly. 'Dangerous?'

'Could be, if you get too close,' Trallo replied. He had been idle recently, his work in Khanaphes already done, and Che suspected he might soon ask for his pay and take his leave. 'They usually put the spectators out in mid- river where they can watch safely, while the real business goes on in the shallows or on the shore. Of course, they'll respect you all the more if you ask to take part.'

Petri Coggen appeared just then, bleary-eyed. Che studied her with a matching expression. Her own dreams had been bad again, too, but Che remembered only fragments. When she awoke the ghost was boiling in the air beside her bed and, in conjunction with her latest nightmare, she had not been able to suppress a scream. Its seething frustration was palpable: she could feel its thoughts, and they were all contempt and rage at being trapped, and all directed at her, for keeping it so.

'I'm sorry!' she had cried out to it. 'Please, tell me what to do!'

But instantly it had been gone, just as Trallo had burst in, half-dressed and with a crossbow in his hands.

I can't take much more of this, she thought. This city that had promised so much had betrayed her, and she was falling apart.

Praeda and Berjek were heading out into the city again. Che was still not quite sure what they were looking for, and she guessed that neither were they. Once they were out of the door, Manny laughed vaguely. 'She might come over all Mistress Detached, but I know something she doesn't. Remember that party at the, what's the place called?'

'The Scriptora,' Che supplied.

'Right. Their man Amnon, he had some interesting questions to ask me.'

At the mention of the name, Petri shuddered, but Manny was too concerned with his story to notice.

'He was asking me, you see, whether our Praeda Rakespear had a man back home.' He smirked. 'I think he thought that she and I might be … you know, but when he found out we weren't, he was asking if there was anyone else. I think our big dumb brute has taken a liking to the Cold One.'

'And you wouldn't have encouraged him in that at all?' Trallo tried to sound stern, but could not hide his grin.

'Perish the thought.' Manny winked.

Tiring of this conversation, Che caught Petri's eye and jerked her head towards the next room.

Out of earshot of the others, she said firmly, 'Today, Petri.' It had been several days since she had first made her request, and she knew that Petri was trying to put her off.

'I'm really not-'

'Today,' Che repeated quietly. She sat down on a canvas-covered stool. 'You are not the only one of us this city is destroying.'

'You don't understand.' Petri actually knelt before her. 'This thing, it is banned by the Masters … the Ministers, I mean. It is illegal. What would they think if they found you …? They call the very practice 'the Profanity'.'

In Che's mind the ghost howled again, and Achaeos's blank eyes held only hatred. She could feel her hands shaking, ever so slightly. I will break, she decided, if I cannot claw some release from this city. 'I don't care,' she told Petri. 'Let that be my worry.' The words tasted foul in her mouth.

'But the people … you must see, the people who practise Profanity, they are criminals, outlaws, outcasts. If you venture among them, they might just cut your throat.'

'I am looking for mystics, whatever shabby oracles and seers this place can throw up,' Che said stubbornly, 'not for some den of murderers.'

'They take their mysticism very seriously here. If the guard caught them, they would be executed. It is … a vice, an illegal pleasure. Fir, they call it.'

'Fear?'

'Fir,' Petri pronounced it more carefully. 'But it is not like taking some Spiderlands drug, or exotic women, or that kind of vice. There is … a whole under-society based around it, and they are mad, unpredictable. They might kill you on the spot — you can never tell. Kadro, he was good with such people, but he still didn't like to go looking for the Fir-eaters.'

Che clenched her fists in frustration. She felt as though she was already experiencing withdrawal from some drug, cut off from a normality that she had breathed and eaten and slept with for twenty years. I cannot be doing what I am now doing. I am Cheerwell Maker, scholar of the Great College, citizen of Collegium, niece of Master Stenwold Maker. I am no criminal. Give me some other way to turn!

'But they are mystics, or at least they talk like mystics do, about the past, and … impossible things,' Petri continued hoarsely. 'I do not know who else there is.'

'Then take me to them,' Che demanded, before she could change her mind.

The man Petri found was a starved-looking Khanaphir. He was bare-chested and Che could see each of his ribs distinctly beneath that taut skin. It was clear that sustenance came second to some greater love in his life.

They met him at an 'open house' near the docks, meaning a place where the locals offered drink and other services to foreign mariners, so that they would not be tempted to venture any further into the city. The place was crowded, squalid, the outer shell of an older building fitted out with as many benches and tables as possible. Solarnese and Dragonfly and Spider-kinden sat shoulder to shoulder, and argued and drank and brawled.

The lean man hunched forward towards the two Beetle women. His eyes were cavernous, hollowed. 'I hear you seek something this place here cannot provide,' he said. Che had to strain to catch the words.

Petri glanced nervously at Che and then nodded, her hands clutched each other anxiously on the tabletop. 'Something special,' she explained. 'I know … someone I know said you could find it for us.'

There was a bleak cynicism in the thin man's eyes. 'Be careful what you seek. The Profanity is not for all palates. It is not for foreigners.'

'Do not presume to know who I am,' Che interrupted. The words came from within her, yet no conscious thought had formed them. As she snapped them out, she found herself pincering the man's bony wrist with her fingers. His recoiling twitch whiplashed down his long arm, but her grip held tight.

'What do you want?' He was afraid now, not of them but of something else, something she could not see.

'You know what I want.' Che's heart was racing. She felt as though she was hurtling downhill, and sometimes she was in control and sometimes she was just falling forwards. Something had come over her, some sharp inspiration. Could that be Achaeos's ghost, speaking through her?

The lean man bit his lip, staring at her. 'This other … no, but you …Who are you? Where do you come from?'