The Scarab Path

halves of the city, they heard a hollow knocking sound, distant and harmless save for the plume of dust that rose beyond the walls. Amnon started, but Totho put a hand out.

'That wasn't an attack. There's been no attack yet.'

'They are raiding all the farms, burning the fields,' Amnon spat. 'Also they know that by making us wait, they also make us fear.'

'And by launching a few rocks over the city they'll make you fear even more,' Totho agreed. 'They want you shaken up by the time they meet you hand to hand.'

'No,' Amnon said firmly, 'they simply want us to fear. That is their sport, to know that the good people of my city live in terror of them for this interval of time, before the end comes.'

From the lofty arch of the bridge they could see the city's soldiers atop the walls. Totho took his telescope out automatically, panning its lens across the battlements. The Khanaphir sentries were rushing back and forth, and then he noticed a sudden haze of dust rising from between the great stones of the wall. The sound of the leadshotter's discharge came a moment later.

The walls of Khanaphes had stood a long time. They were tall and thick, built of massive slabs of rock, curving slightly as they rose. There was a walkway along the top to allow two men to walk abreast, with stone steps leading up to the parapet every two hundred yards. Those walls would have seemed a remarkable piece of engineering even two centuries ago, let alone whenever they had actually been built. Totho knelt as he reached the top, pressing a hand to the stone to feel the grain of it. In his mind were the fortress designs that Drephos had sketched out on scrap paper, in order to resist a siege by modern weapons. They were all planes and edges, thrusting out into the besieging force to give the widest arc of shot, and slanted to let the enemy's weapons glance off them.

'Tell me,' Amnon asked him, 'will we hold? They tell me that the Masters would never let the walls of Khanaphes fall. What do you tell me?'

Totho went to the ramparts and the sight beyond struck him hard, although it must strike any Khanaphir observing it that much harder. The Many of Nem were encamped outside, a squalid mess of tents and lean-tos against a horizon thick with smoke. They had laid waste everything that lay within a day's ride, pillaged everything worth taking. They must expect a quick siege, otherwise they will starve.

The artillery positions were well ensconced within the front ranks of the Scorpion horde. Clearly the Scorpions, or their Imperial masters, knew how vulnerable unattended engines could be. There was a bank of ten leadshotters, positioned quite tightly. Through his glass Totho could recognize the model as an old Imperial make that had first seen service before the Twelve-year War. It would still do the trick though.

Three rounds? No, the Khanaphir walls were too thick and solid. Twelve rounds? Perhaps, yes. The stones were not properly mortared, not as a Lowlander Beetle would have built them. They were not hard, either. With a dagger's blade he could scratch deeply into them, turning stone to sand by his own tiny industry. How accurate were the Scorpion artillerists? Twenty rounds then, at most.

'Your walls will not hold,' he declared, and the shudder of fear that ran through the men around him made him feel like some doomsaying prophet. 'Unless they lose the use of their engines, or are very short on ammunition, your walls will crack and then fall.'

Another single leadshotter boomed out its plume of smoke, and Totho felt the faint vibration as the shot hammered into stone. It was obviously a day of idle practice for the Scorpions, since the war host was still reassembling after a day's hard looting. If we had the full army of the city with us now, perhaps we could have broken them, Totho thought. They had already left too many dead on the field, though, and hope and morale now lay out there amongst the broken weapons and the corpses. The Khanaphir did not have it in them to sally out and attack their besiegers.

'What can we do?' Amnon asked softly.

'I don't know,' Totho said. 'I'd suggest surrender but, given the enemy, I don't think that's an option.'

Later, Totho sat in the Iron Glove factora, listening to the sounds of his men packing up everything for their departure. Soon they would come for the crate he was sitting on, down here in the cellar. For now it provided a quiet place to think: about Amnon and about Che, and about what Che had said.

What if …? It was a poisonous game. It was a game for weak people who would rather not live with the decisions they had made, or who had made no decisions at all and had found a bad end by following the river's flow.

I have always made my own decisions. It seemed a fragile thing to be proud of but he clung to it. His past was like a string of beads, each representing a point where he could have chosen otherwise. Should I have stayed with Stenwold and Che rather than running away? That begged the question of 'What if Salma had gone to Tark alone, without Totho's help?' and it was unanswerable at this remove. But if I had stayed, I would have done something I would regret. I would have killed Achaeos, or else got myself killed. I could not have borne the two of them together.

The next bead was, 'What if I had not saved Salma, by selling myself to the Empire?' Salma would be dead, no what-ifs about it. But then Salma had died anyway, on some bloody battlefield. So it became just another choice he had made and that he would have to take responsibility for. Which led to Che's question of whether he could simply have taken off the shackles and fled.

It has always been so easy for Che, so clear-cut. He did not have the words to explain to her how he had found a place for himself under the black and gold flag, at the side of the maverick Colonel-Auxillian. There was nowhere in the world that was home to me, until I met Drephos. He could not pretend ignorance of her likely reaction to all he had done. He had done it, in fact, to try to exorcize himself from her influence. Che, his nagging conscience, his residual sense of right and wrong, just a gnat in the face of Drephos's comforting philosophy of technological advance.

But, even then, I helped. Another straw to cling to. He had saved Che from the interrogators once more, and alone this time, without any killer Mantis or Mynan resistance to help him. He had passed the snapbow plans to the Lowlands, arming Stenwold and his allies with the fruits of Totho's own invention. He had liberated Szar.

He had liberated Szar. In doing so, he had saved the Mynan resistance, created the Three-city Alliance. He had remade the map. He, Totho, the halfbreed.

Yet she hated him for it. Even this great Right had become a wrong. And if I had killed them all with a blade, like Tisamon? Would that be right, then? It was the means, the coldly efficient means, that so horrified the woman. He could eviscerate as many Wasps as he wanted on the battlefield, but woe betide him if he preferred to use his brain.

We use whatever tools are given to us. I am no great warrior, but is that what she'd prefer? To have me dead alongside Salma, sword in hand?

Perhaps that was indeed what she would prefer. A dead Totho of unstained character would be easier for her to file away and forget.

He heard boots on the steps leading to the cellar, and Corcoran peered down at him. 'Sir,' the Solarnese man enquired, 'how's it going down here?'

'How's the ship?' Totho asked him from his seat on the remaining crate.

'Every bolt tightened, ready to go, sir,' Corcoran reported, taking the last few steps down. 'The lads are wondering when we're moving out. Those Scorpions won't wait for ever before kicking this place in like an egg.'

'We should leave here,' Totho said.

Corcoran regarded him dubiously. 'Well yes, sir, that was the idea.'

'What will happen to the city, after we're gone?' asked Totho.

Corcoran stared at him. 'Same thing as if we were still here. It's not as though it was ever going to be much of a market for us. Come on, chief, give us the word. We'll leadshot their gate down, if they won't open up for us.'

Totho rested his head in his heads. 'Corcoran …'

'Sir?'

'Are we doing the right thing, do you think?'

'By leaving? Absolutely. Staying about would be a bloody stupid thing to do, sir.' The Solarnese was beginning