The Scarab Path

comprehensible. She had become Inapt, unable to use — to even comprehend — all the machines and the mechanisms that her people loved so much. She was crippled in her mind and nobody would ever understand. There was a division between the races of her world: those who could, those who could not. Che had fallen on the wrong side of it and she could not get back.

It was worse now because of Tynisa. Of all the people in the world, Che could have spoken to Tynisa about it. Tynisa would have understood, would have helped her. Tynisa was gone, though, to Stenwold's fury. Che had not understood, at first, why Stenwold had reacted so angrily.

I drove her away.

And it was true. Not anything Che had done but the simple fact of her. In the end Tynisa had not been able to look at the sight of mourning Che without recalling whose blade had lanced Achaeos, whose hand had inflicted the wound that eventually killed him. Che did not blame her. Of course, Che did not blame her, but that did not matter. Tynisa had lived through the violent death of her father and come home to find herself a murderess. She had stayed as long as she could bear it, growing less and less at home in this city she had dwelt in all her life, unable to talk to Che, grieving a dead father, nursing a killer's conscience for all that Che tried to reach out to her. At the last she had fled Collegium. She had gone, and not one of Stenwold's agents could discover where.

Stenwold's rage, Che finally understood, had been over the undoing of twenty years of civilized education, over all the care and time he had spent in making Tynisa the product of Collegium's morality. In the end she had shown herself her true father's daughter. She had gone off, Stenwold felt sure, to lose herself in fighting and blood — chasing her own death just as Tisamon always had done.

Hooray, Che thought. Hooray for those of us who won the war.

The vast stacks of the library normally absorbed her. The Beetle-kinden claimed this to be the single greatest collection of the written word anywhere in the world. The Moths scoffed at them for this boast but nobody had performed a count. There were texts and scrolls here that dated back to before the revolution, to a period when the city bore a different name. They kept them in cellars whose dim lighting offered no impediment to Che. She had been searching for months, now, trying to find a cure to her affliction, a way of helping Achaeos's wretched shade.

All of a sudden she found she could not face it, not today. The thought of poring over more ancient scrolls that she could barely understand, of another day's fruitless delving into an incompletely rendered past, was more than she could bear. She searched her mind for the reason for this change, and found there Stenwold's offer of the previous night. At the time she had not cared, but something had lodged there, waiting for the morning light.

'Khanaphes,' she said slowly to herself, and it was as if the word created a distant echo in her mind. Ancient histories, old Moth texts: the city name would barely be found in any writings that post-dated the revolution, but if the diligent student dug deep into the writings of the old, Inapt powers, that name glowed like a jewel, ancient even to those antique scribes.

She needed to talk, but who could she talk to about Khanaphes?

Two dozen bemused students had turned up for the aviation lecture: Beetle-kinden, Ant and Fly youths, all wanting to be pilot-artificers — aviators as the new word went. They were without a teacher. So far all they had were some scribbled notes left on the chalkboard, instructing them to fold flying machines out of paper. This was now what Che discovered.

She knew where to look, as the avionics students did not, yet, though it took her a fight with her courage to cross town to the new airfield and enter the hangar. The shapes there, the winged things arranged in their untidy horseshoe pattern, looked only predatory. The air was filled with the sounds of metal and cursing artificers. It was a sharp reminder of her former self that she could have done without. She had encountered this and beaten it before. Had she wanted she could have shut herself away and never had to deal further with her affliction, but that was not her way: she was still Beetle-kinden, and Beetles endured. They were tough, both within and without.

'Taki!' she shouted, whereupon the little Fly-kinden pilot looked up, delighted.

'That,' she said, 'is the first time in five days that someone's addressed me properly, instead of 'Miss Schola'. I should never have told them my full name, honestly.'

She was looking well. Taki had also been crippled by the war, but in her case the damage had been made good by artifice. Her beloved Esca Volenti had been destroyed over Solarno, but here she was fine-tuning the Esca Magni. It was the perfect fusion of Solarnese know-how, Collegiate industry and Taki's prodigious skills as a pilot. She claimed it as the most agile flying machine in the known world. The boast had been put to the test and so far never proved false.

'It's good to see you again.' Che eyed the opened innards of the machine, fought down a brief stab of queasiness. 'Something wrong here?'

'Not wrong, just could be made better. One of your fellows at the College came up with an idea about air exchange, so I reckon I can get another few per cent efficiency out of the rewinding gears.' She grinned in the face of Che's polite expression, because she didn't know what was behind it. 'I want to try a non-stopper to Capitas.'

'Capitas in the Empire?' It was a stupid question, Che knew, but it leapt out before she could stop it.

'Where else? They're keen on their fliers up that ways. I've had an invitation.' She shrugged. 'If not there, then there's an exhibition in Helleron in a month's time, and I won't miss that.'

The Esca Magni was sleek, hunched up from nose to cockpit, then with a long sweep of tail. The two wings, silk stretched over a frame of wood and wire, were currently folded back along her length. Beneath the nose emerged the compact fist of a pair of rotating piercers, another Solarnese innovation in the world of aviation. Taki, just three foot tall in her sandals, sat on its hull like an empress, mistress of all she surveyed.

'What?'Taki asked her. 'I know that look. What's up?'

'Taki … have you ever heard of a place called Khanaphes?'

The Fly gave her a surprised look. 'Well, of course, but how did that come up?'

'It's just that … people have been mentioning it.'

Taki shrugged. 'Well, why not? Big old place down the east coast from the Exalsee. All a bit, you know, backward thataways.'

'Backward?'

'Not really keeping pace with progress, you know.' Taki made a vague gesture. 'We get food from them, trading through Ostrander. Now, Ostrander's a strange place, and you never saw it when you were over …' She saw something in Che's expression. 'But Khanaphes? What's to say? Let's get a drink and then you can ask your questions.'

The Fly had never actually been there, was the first thing Che learned. Taki's life had always been fiercely centred on the airborne elite of the Exalsee.

'They don't have flying machines in Khanaphes?' Che probed.

Taki made a condescending noise. 'They don't have machines of any kind in Khanaphes, from what I hear. Like I said, backward.' She looked amused, her eyes flicking across the clientele of the taverna as though she included them loosely in the same definition.

That took a moment to sink in. 'But they're … I thought they were supposed to be Beetle-kinden.'

'Oh, yes, yes they are. Not anything like your lot, though. I remember how Scobraan went there once, for a bet …' Her voice twitched for a moment, another colleague dead in the war. 'He said they'd never seen anything like his flier — didn't know what to make of it. Didn't want to know, either. And he couldn't get it refuelled, of course, had to get it shipped back to Porta Rabi by boat.'

'But that doesn't …' Something odd moved inside Che. 'And have they been settled there long?'

'Oh, you might say that. Long enough to have founded Solarno.'

'Seriously?'

'Oh now, this is long, long ago — and I'm remembering back to my school days for this, too. They used to own halfway around the Exalsee, way back before anyone can remember. But that was long before the Spiders and my own people came over — a thousand years before, something crazy like that. Then I suppose they just … got left behind. The way I hear it, they haven't changed much since those days. They still own a fair bit of territory up and down the river where they are.'