The Scarab Path

her companions very concerned. When our search parties finally found her, she was with the Imperial ambassador and his clown.'

I am not drunk any more. Indeed he felt abruptly, coldly sober. Totho wrestled a polite expression on to his face, glad that Amnon was being too introspective tonight to notice. 'Is that so?' he asked.

The big man nodded. 'It is not safe, to venture so far as she did,' he said.

It is not, Totho silently agreed. I was asking myself what I want here. What I undoubtedly want is to make sure that Che does not fall into the hands of the Empire. Surely that is what I want, and on the heels of that, came the wretched thought, And how many rescues will it take, to make her mine?

In her dream, Petri Coggen found herself standing at the door of the embassy, looking out at the Place of Foreigners. A breeze brought cool air from the river, but the sky above was almost cloudless.

This isn't right.

In the dream there was a strange feeling laid on her, of calm and acceptance. As it enveloped her like a blanket, she took three steps out towards the pond and its benches. Deep inside her something flinched. That part of her trying to wake was thrashing, fighting, but buried very deep. The numbing calm they had laid upon her was smothering it.

This isn't right. Still that note of discord. This is not the Place of Foreigners. There was enough awareness left to her to force her head around, to look closely at her surroundings. It was a dream, but she knew it was a dream, and that behind this dream there lurked something much worse. Somewhere, out beyond her sight, they were waiting. She could feel the leaden weight of their attention.

The statues in the garden of Honoured Foreigners were now watching her. As the moonlight caressed them, it touched not cold stone but cloth and flesh. Deep inside, a shiver of horror went through her — because if these statues could live, then why not others? — but her outer calm was barely cracked, staring at them.

They made no move, just stood in their places, but she saw them shift slightly, and their eyes tracked her as she crossed the garden. The Moth-kinden watched her with inscrutable patience, the Spiders with arch disdain. From his hiding place within the foliage, the eyes of the Mantis warrior gazed with narrow suspicion. Other kinden, some that she had never known in life, stared down on her, as their names were dredged from her memory: long- limbed Grasshoppers, hunchbacked Woodlice, poised and beautiful Dragonfly-kinden.

No Ants, no Beetles, not even a Khanaphir. But in the dream she understood that. It was because they were so very lowly: who would waste the fine white stone on a statue of Petri Coggen or any of her relations? They were the servants, the minions, the countless running hordes, whose myriad deaths and births passed unmarked season to season. These, here, were the nobility.

She turned away from their scathing looks and found herself facing the grand arch that led into the Place of Government, towards the Scriptora and the pyramid with its eternal watchers.

And tonight the statues have come to life. The struggling part of herself was rising to the surface fast now, howling for her to wake up. Here in her dream there were things that she did not want to see. Her feet were moving her forward, a pace at a time, with a sleepwalker's slow inevitability. She felt the collective gaze of the foreign ambassadors prickling against her back, but none made a move to help her.

Help me, and yet there was no help, and her traitor feet kept taking her, pace by pace, towards that arch ahead. She tried to close her eyes against it, but this was a dream and she could not block it out.

All I wanted to do was leave, she wailed in protest, and the answer, in crystal- clear tones, came back to her.

We do not wish you to leave.

But what about what I want? Except that was beyond the point. She remembered then that she was a slave, that all her race were slaves, and that this dream came from the far past, when what any Beetle-kinden woman wanted carried no more weight than a grain of sand.

But we have broken from all that! The revolution …

But it was a dream from the past, and the revolution had never happened, and besides: this was Khanaphes where her people carried their shackles inside their minds every day, and were joyful about it.

She was now at the arch and stepping into its shadow. The steps of the pyramid rose before her. If she craned her gaze upwards she could see the first hint of white stone.

No!

She made a sudden, furious effort to wrest herself away from the dream — and abruptly she was falling, lurching from her bed in a tangle of sheets, and striking the floor with a cry of panic that must have woken half the embassy. She stayed motionless but trembling, waiting for some revenant left from the dream to rise up from within her mind and recapture her. Then she heard footsteps, and people suddenly shocked into wakefulness were shouting at one another.

I must tell Che, she thought. She's the only one who might understand.

Che had not gone outside since the hunt. The rooms of the embassy had become her shell, the blather of the academics her unseen shield.

She had not seen Achaeos's agonized form again since the hunt, either. She imagined it still hanging there inside the wicker cage of the idol, haranguing the Mantis-kinden for their lack of proper faith.

I am running out of places to turn. She felt that the world was waiting for her to step outside, yet some sense, previously unknown, kept feeding warnings to her. Seen out of the window, the day gone by had been piercingly bright, cloudless, like all Khanaphir days. But when she turned away and closed her eyes, her mind embroidered the unseen sky with louring grey, a towering thunderhead of storm. Something is about to happen! The feeling made her head ache, made everyone seem suspicious in the way they looked at her. In the corners of her eyes, those indecipherable little carvings that marched their endless rounds in every room, along every wall, seemed to jump and gibber. The scholarly pedantry of Berjek and Praeda seemed rife with double meanings, hidden secrets. She clung to their presence, though, for anything was better than being alone. Berjek was intent on his studies and nothing more, therefore no good company, while Praeda had her own worries, remaining quiet and thoughtful, as though something was eating at her mind.

Where now? There was one 'where now' left to her, but the thought made her heart tremble. She had skulked in the shadows of this problem all this time, and was not sure that she could take up a lance and strike to the heart of it. To do so would, at the very least, destroy any standing she retained as an ambassador.

Berjek and Praeda reached some kind of impasse in their discussion, and she sensed them turn towards her. She opened her eyes, to see that the sky beyond the windows was already darkening. 'What?' she asked.

'We are in need of your services,' Berjek said. 'As an ambassador, they may listen to you.'

'What do you want from them?' Che asked blankly; their words had passed her by.

She saw Praeda make an exasperated face. 'Che, we need this code-book of theirs, the one for their carvings,' she said. 'There is supposed to be a book containing a translation — a meaning — for these symbols. Berjek and I agree that this is more than idle decoration. There is information encrypted here, but we can't read it, so we need the book.'

'It's one of those things where they clam up as soon as you mention it,' Berjek said glumly. 'They just change the subject, ever so politely.'

'Sacred,' remarked Che, and they stared at her.

'What a peculiar notion,' said Berjek at last.

'It is a very old word,' Che said softly, 'but it's the right word.' She saw him bursting with questions but she held a hand up. 'Don't ask me,' she warned. 'I don't want to talk about it. I don't even want to think about it. I cannot explain it in any way that you would understand.'

Berjek rolled his eyes and was about to say something very sharp, but then a drum began sounding out in the garden, a simple, low beat. The three Collegiates exchanged frowns.