The Scarab Path

though there might be an ambush waiting. Now he stepped in and found himself a seat on the horizontal shaft of the pump.

'Would that help? Probably not,' he replied, his shoulder-plates scraping as he shrugged. 'The Empire never changes, as I should know well.'

'You were wrong about Thalric,' she told him, before she could stop herself.

'Was I?' There was no admission of it in his face. 'You think he hasn't betrayed you, just because you haven't found out about it yet.'

'The Empire wants him dead,' she said.

'The Empire has wanted him dead before. And then it calls, and he comes like a trained cricket. He's spent the last four months sleeping with the Empress.'

The thought cut her more deeply than she expected. She had known it, of course, but had steered her mind deftly away from it, every time. 'You've done your research.'

'He hurt you,' Totho said simply, 'so I found out what I could. We in the Glove have sources in the Empire. You'd have to walk a long mile before you found a man as untrustworthy as Thalric.'

She could feel a wave of anger rising in her, hearing the man attacked behind his back. Nothing but the truth, surely, and yet because it was a truth Thalric himself owned to, with his chequered past so openly admitted, she felt that she should be defending him.

'New topic, Totho?' she said. 'Unless all you wanted to do is come here and complain about Thalric.'

She saw his lips purse, but then he said, 'I can get you out of Khanaphes. You and your friends.'

She stared at him, waiting for the catch. He, however just waited for her response, looking down at his hands as they rested on his knees.

He got that from Uncle Sten, she thought, and asked, 'How? They say the Scorpions have engines watching the river.'

'My ship is the Fourth Iteration, and she's fast enough to dodge leadshots, tough enough to shrug a few off before suffering. She's a Solarnese corsair with a reinforced hull. She even has some smallshotters for the rails. She can leave as soon as the Khanaphir lower the gates, and for us they'll lower the gates because they want rid of us. Even with the Scorpions outside their walls.'

She stood up, with desperate hope. 'Take Berjek and Praeda,' she said. 'Please, take them away from here.'

'No,' he said.

'Totho …'

'I will take you,' he said. 'I will take you, and with you, anyone you wish — save for Thalric. I will not leave here without you.'

'Totho, the city's under siege now. What will you do here, if you don't leave? Don't be a fool.'

'I'll just have to make sure the Scorpions lose, then, won't I,' he said.

'You are a fool,' she decided. 'You'd risk your life, your followers …'

'Yes, I'm a fool. One among many.'

'But why?'

'You know why.' He was on his feet suddenly and she shrank back from him. 'Che, you don't need to ask that question. I will stay, if you stay. I will also leave if you will leave with me. That's because I love you. You know that I love you. That I always have, since we were students and you were copying down my answers in class.'

'You're right. I didn't need to ask,' she replied, and then: 'I wish I hadn't.'

He took the blow, rolled with it. 'I never knew what you saw in the Moth,' he said, 'but I knew what you missed in me. I've tried, Che, to make something more of myself. I've tried to patch the defects that nature gave me. I'm still a halfbreed, but I'm a magnate now. I've money, prospects. They'd kiss my feet in Helleron, if I walked in under Iron Glove colours. My hand is on the tiller of artifice.' He looked into her face, forcing her to avoid his gaze lest it scorch her. 'And I can see, though — I can see it's not enough. So tell me what you want me to be, Che. Tell me what it is I'm still missing. Or is it the blood? It didn't seem to matter to you, of all people, that I was a half- caste.'

'It's not your heritage,' she said. 'Do you really think I care about that?'

'No,' he said, fiercely. 'No, I don't. I really don't. So tell me what it is that's wrong with me.'

'Oh, Totho,' she sighed, 'all this time you've been trying to make yourself into what you think I might want … but I can barely see the friend I once knew, let alone anything beyond. You've built yourself a suit of armour for the inside as well as the out. Just listen to you now!' She felt suddenly frustrated with him. 'You're bargaining for my affection with the lives of my friends, yet you spent most of the war working for the Empire.'

'To save Salma!' he put in hotly, but she came back just as hard.

'Was it?' she demanded. 'Was that what it was? And did they never give you a chance to leave them, after that? Totho, you rail at Thalric for all the things he has done, and, yes, he has done terrible things, but at least he tried to divert his course away from them. You have just moved towards and towards. Totho, tell me you could not have escaped from the army, if you had wanted.'

'And what would have happened then?' he demanded. They were almost nose to nose now, an inch from drawing swords. 'I beat them in the end, Che. I beat the Empire, in Szar. What would have happened there, if I had just snuck off and left?'

The moment teetered in the balance, the weights of recollection dropping. Che had been in Myna, of course, and she had heard the news from Szar, in more detail than she needed. It had been a great victory against the Empire, but nobody had felt much like celebrating it, not even the Szaren.

'Szar?' she began. She had not seen the twisted bodies of the Wasp garrison, but there had been no shortage of description. An entire force of thousands, with their slaves and servants and Auxillians, dead in a single night, and in agony. The last she had heard, there was still a whole district of their city that the local Bee-kinden did not enter, for fear of the coughing sickness that might still come to cull them. They said that the air still smelled of sour death, there, when the wind was in the wrong quarter.

'Che …'

'Szar. That was you?'

His face was that of a man who would do anything just to retract a few words. 'Che, you weren't there. There was nothing else …'

She was retreating from him, back to the doorway, staring at the creature that wore her friend's face. He called her name again, but at the mere sound of it she fled from him, leaving him in the darkness of the pump room, her skin crawling at the thought of what he had done.

Amnon summoned him soon after. The defeat on the field had not managed to stifle his fierce energy. Totho felt tired just looking at him.

'You called for me, First Soldier,' the artificer said, feeling in no mood for this now. No mood at all.

'You are still in the city,' Amnon observed.

'Is that it? Is that why you sent for me?' Totho demanded. 'Yes, I am still in the city. My people are still in the city. So what are you going to do about it? Shed a little blood early, before the Scorpions come for the rest?'

'I will make use of you, if you will let me,' Amnon suggested. 'Totho, will you walk the walls with me?'

'Walk the …? Why?'

'Because I need to understand,' the big Khanaphir said. 'I need to know what to do, Totho, and I need your wisdom to guide me.'

'Wisdom?' Totho managed to say, strangled by the need to laugh at the word. 'I've precious little wisdom, Amnon.'

'I'll take anything I can get,' Amnon said, quite seriously. 'Will you do this one thing for me before you go?'

'Of course,' Totho replied, finding that he meant it. He liked Amnon: there was some trace of commonality between them, despite their disparate cultures and histories. Both of them, at this moment, were where the metal met.

Khanaphes was gripped by panic. Totho saw people cowering inside their homes, saw groups of soldiers rushing here and there, seemingly with no aim at all. Passing over the great span of bridge that linked the two