The Scarab Path

wings their full rein, ignoring Osgan's protest as his unwounded arm was almost wrenched out of its socket. Between the trees, Thalric spotted crude huts, barely more than platforms raised above the water and roofed with leaves. He saw movement too, spreading out to either side of them. They had been noticed.

'Khanaphes!' Thalric shouted out. 'Khanaphes!' hoping it would be enough to save them.

An arrow danced past him from behind, a hurried shot surely. He did not turn, continued towing Osgan through the water, knowing only from the man's curses that he was still alive. He had a brief glimpse of a silvery- skinned Mantis woman with bowstring drawn back, the arrow loosed instantly. There was no sound from behind, but from her very expression Thalric knew she had found her target.

He dragged Osgan on to a mud bank. They were sprawled at the edge of the village, no more than a cluster of spindly shacks gathered about a mound of higher ground cleared of vegetation. Knowing that nothing he could do now would matter, Thalric collapsed onto his back, feeling his muscles burn in protest. Osgan was wheezing and choking beside him, shuddering like a dying thing, but somehow still alive. He had sprouted no new arrows since, and Thalric could only hope that the assassins had not survived their clash with the Marsh's own killers.

He sensed movement nearby and pushed himself up on to his elbow. The Mantis-kinden were approaching, arrows nocked to their bows and spears levelled. These Marsh people were smaller than the Lowlander kinden that Thalric was familiar with, but they had the same poise, the same angular grace. Their faces had the same insular hostility, too. He held up a closed fist to them. 'We are friends — we are guests of the city of Khanaphes.'

They had formed a ragged horseshoe around the two Wasps, leaving open the path leading to the village. One of them, a woman looking older than the rest, jabbed her head in that direction, and Thalric let out a great sigh and struggled to his knees.

'Come on,' he told Osgan, but the man would not move.

'Can't …' he whined. 'No further …'

Two of the Mantids were there instantly, catching him by the arms and lifting him up, ignoring his screams as the sudden movement tore at his wound. Thalric pushed one of them aside, moving to catch Osgan. Then he was very still.

Osgan swayed, still supported by one of the Mantids, almost clinging to him. His injured arm was held tight to his chest, the bindings newly bloody. Thalric felt the tiny pinpoint of sharp pain that had come to rest under his jaw, assuming at first it was a spearhead, then knowing it for an arrow-point. He took a good moment, in lieu of any fatal attempt at action, to study their rescuers.

These were not the shaven-headed servants who had been poling the fishing boats up and down the river to Amnon's tune. They were not clad as Khanaphir menials, merely a little hide and chitin and fish-scale to cover their modesty. Their long hair was pale, bound back with rings of bone and amber.

'We are not your enemies,' Thalric said carefully. In his mind the sands of the archer's strength were running out. She must soon either take the arrow away, or loose it. 'We mean you no harm. Return us to Khanaphes and you shall be rewarded.'

Osgan gave a bark of pain, dragged without warning towards the village. Thalric twitched, poised on the point of the arrow and knowing that there were enough of them to make an end of him whichever way he turned. Without warning the archer took a step away, the point still unwavering. Thalric followed Osgan's halting progress, conscious that every arrowhead and spear was aimed at him. Ahead, Osgan gave out a horrified cry.

The mound of earth that the village was strung around was not empty, not quite. They had erected something there, that Thalric had not registered before, his first glance letting the crude canework merge into the struts and poles of the surrounding village. He blinked, trying to identify what it was. Osgan was struggling now, shrieking for them to let him go, but three of them continued propelling him towards it effortlessly.

It's a statue, Thalric realized, a statue reworked to the locals' resources. Just as they had not a coin's-worth of metal in their possession, even their weapons being made of bone and wood, so there was no stone to their statue, just a lattice of canes lashed together into a shape that seemed abstract at first. Until he stood directly before it, and the shifting angles and planes of it suddenly made a picture.

It was a mantis, an openwork sketch of a mantis rendered in three dimensions, its killing arms raised high above them. The chamber of its body was large enough to fit a man, and Thalric knew this because the bones of the last occupant were still inside, buzzing with flies and dripping with a few lingering maggots. Osgan was still kicking vainly and crying out, and Thalric knew that somehow this thing, this idol, had become Tisamon in his mind, that what he was fighting against was more within his own head than outside it.

'What is this?' Thalric demanded, his throat suddenly dry. 'Do you kill the guests of the city so close to its walls?' The Khanaphes card was the only one he had to play, but he had put it on the table three times now without eliciting any interest. Now, at last, an old Mantis woman stepped between him and the idol. Uncomfortably close, she rested one forearm on his shoulder, so he felt her fighting spines dig slightly into his neck.

'You are ignorant,' she said, and it took him a moment to unpick her accent. 'You are from far away and know nothing.'

'I know that they will send people to look for me — that my absence will stir the city up, and my own people as well.'

'Do not threaten us on our sacred ground,' she warned him, voice still soft but the spines jabbing him briefly. 'The city shall not come here, and you were hunted here by other foreign hands. There shall be no search to find your bones. We have made our pact with the Masters: any that cross this far are ours. It is our right.'

Another bloody thing the locals could have told us: that their tame servants have murderous relatives just a short walk away!

'I will fight,' Thalric said. His understanding of even the Lowlander Mantis-kinden was limited, so he had little to work with. 'Let me fight for our freedom. Choose your best, if you will.'

The old woman smirked. 'Your death shall not be at our hands, foreigner. Your blood shall be drunk by the earth, and by the avatar. Your comrade first, though. We must shed his blood while he still has it.'

They were opening up the wicker casing of the effigy. Osgan had collapsed, all his limbs drawn in, shuddering and lost to his own terrors. And perhaps that's a mercy. Thalric made a sudden lunge back from the woman, feeling the barbs of her arm gash his flesh. He tried to put a hand out towards her, with some wild idea of holding her hostage, but someone struck him with a spear-shaft behind his knees as another glanced from the back of his head. He joined Osgan on the ground, reeling. Around them, the Mantis-kinden had begun a soft humming, barely audible save that they were all doing it, a slow tune, but a gradually building one.

'Osgan,' Thalric said, hunching closer. 'Osgan, snap out of it!'

The former quartermaster gave a great gasp, staring upwards at the latticed idol above them. 'We're going to die,' he said.

'Then die like an Imperial Wasp soldier, not like a Flykinden coward!' Thalric spat at him.

'You don't understand,' Osgan said hollowly. 'You didn't see.'

Thalric opened his mouth to make some harsh comment, but the Mantids had stopped humming.

Someone else had entered the clearing.

As she walked into the village, Che barely saw the Mantis-kinden. The guttering, flickering grey fire of Achaeos was all that was worthy of her attention. Then her mind broadened to include the wicker idol and her mind was briefly racked with memories and images, some that she owned and some that were alien to her. This is the thing that Tynisa would never speak of. She saw it with Inapt eyes, and she saw it running with death, quivering with a thousand years of adoration and sacrifice. It spoke of skulls to her, it leered blood, so that she flinched back from it even as the ghost surged forward.

Then she saw the Mantids, brought into sharp focus as their leader pointed towards her. It was a Mantis woman standing before the idol, and Che did not notice the two Wasp prisoners before her, only that old woman silhouetted before the empty effigy's power.

'The land has been generous to us today!' the old Mantis cried out. 'Take her and bring her here!'

A dozen of the Mantis-kinden were instantly in motion, falling on Che with expressionless faces, with hungry eyes. She raised her hands to ward them off, and the old woman suddenly screamed.

Inches from laying hands on her, they stopped. She saw their reserve crack, surprise and shock taking hold, expressions not native to Mantis faces. They were looking back to see their leader on her knees, covering her face. Before her was Achaeos's blurred ghost.

The Mantis warriors could not see it, Che realized, but their leader could. Despite everything she had been