Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Scarab Path

'This wasn't really how I thought we'd end up,' said Thalric quietly.

'We haven't ended up yet,' she told him.

'Only a matter of time. The air can't last for ever.'

'What happened to the old resourceful Thalric then?' she asked him, feeling suddenly annoyed that he was just sitting there. 'Don't the Rekef teach you to be ready for anything?'

'The old resourceful Thalric is currently blind, slimy and trapped in a cell underground with no possible way out,' he said, 'and very, very tired. Some of us here haven't been getting our beauty sleep.'

'Not that it would do much good, in your case.' She wiped away slime from more of the carvings, feeling the thick gunge caking her sleeves. It had a feel to it that was familiar, but unpleasantly so. She hunted the memory down, associating it with guilt, panic, danger … 'Hammer and tongs!' she spat. 'Thalric, this is Fir.'

'What now?'

'This slime, it's Fir. This is the forbidden elixir of Khanaphes, that the Ministers will kill you for sampling.' And that the Ministers themselves eat gallons of . 'This is their link with the Masters, they claim. There must be enough down here for everyone in the city to go out of their minds on.'

'Are you suggesting we spend our last few hours drugged into a stupor?'Thalric asked her acidly.

'No, but don't you see …' But he doesn't see. He doesn't understand what Fir is. So, do I? Fir, the drug that somehow opened one's mind to the past, that the Khanaphir underclasses swore let them look on the faces of the Masters, that the Ministers thought opened a direct link by which they could hear their Masters' voices. Did she still believe that there were Masters yet, or that there ever had been?Yet the Khanaphir believed. Ethmet believed. Was their entire culture built on hallucinations derived from this slime? No, there has to be something more to it than that .

'I've been knocking on the walls,' he said. 'No echo anywhere. I've even tried my sting against them. That slimy stuff smells vile when you burn it. The stone underneath barely warmed.'

'I think I need to read these inscriptions,' she decided. 'Give me your cloak.'

He frowned at the dark, but shrugged the garment off without question, holding it out blindly until she took it from him. She began scrubbing at the walls, clearing away the Fir that had turned those crisp carvings into illegible smears.

'Since when,' Thalric said after a moment, 'can you read that gibberish? Since when can it even be read?'

'It's a long story.'

'Well, I didn't have any other plans.'

She stopped, gazing back at him. He was still sitting in the middle of the floor, head turned vaguely in her direction. Something of his normal expression was gone, that hard mockery that was usually there when he spoke to her. Hashe really given up hope? She realized it was far simpler than that. Just as her face was invisible to him in the dark, so he had not considered that his was not invisible to her. This was Thalric caught unawares, without his customary armour. She took the chance to study him: the years of hard deeds, of bitter loyalty, all the betrayals that could be traced on his face. Each had put its grip on him, twisting and turning to fit him to the mould, yet finally he had not fitted. At the end, after the scars and the fingerprints, there was still a core that was only Thalric. Only a man who truly knows himself could have come out of all that still recognizing himself in the mirror .

'What?' he asked suspiciously, into the silence. She felt suddenly ashamed, as though she had been spying on the spymaster.

'Just looking at the carvings,' she claimed, although her voice held no conviction. 'Look, if you want a conversation, why don't you talk? I've had enough of you interrogating me.'

He gave an amused snort and she was surprised at how familiar it sounded. How well do I know him? Sometimes it seems that I know him even better than my own family. My life has been riddled by the holes left by his passing, like some kind of grub .

'You could tell me, for a start, why the Regent-general of the whole Empire is currently buried alive in a nowhere city out here on the Sunroad Sea,' she said. 'Because I myself don't understand it. Life just keeps giving you chances, and you waste every one of them. You were the big man of the Empire, after the war, so how did this happen?'

For a long time he remained quiet, while she kept on industriously cleaning up the carvings. Fragments of their meaning drifted loose into her head, but nothing that she could string together.

'The Empress,' he said at last, slowly. 'The Empress Seda the First. And if you ask me how that happened, well, I wasn't there at the time. An Empress? Nobody had ever heard of such a thing: a woman in charge of the Wasp Empire.'

'Well, we know about your people's attitudes towards women,' Che said primly. 'Although you've had your share of women agents, haven't you? The Rekef, at least, isn't so blinkered.'

'Mistakes, all of them,' he said darkly. 'Arianna tried to kill me, and I actually did kill Scyla, or at least I'm as sure of that as I can be. No, I've not been the luckiest man with women.'

'You were married, though, weren't you? I thought you told me that once? What happened to her?'

'She was only too glad to yield place to the Empress,' Thalric replied, with a brief laugh. 'Not that she'd have had much choice, but we hadn't seen each other in years. I had a son, too. I still have, I suppose. The union was all for the Empire, and part of my duty. I was never that interested. It was just something you're supposed to do before you go off and die in the wars. I'm sure the woman was compensated.'

'I'll never understand your people — or like them, frankly,' Che remarked.

'Well, maybe I'll join you in that, seeing as they seem to want me dead yet again. Maybe it's her . Maybe she's decided I'm now surplus to requirements.' Thalric grimaced sightlessly. 'While the provinces were in rebellion she needed a man as a figurehead that her people could be reassured by. That was me, at the time, but now the Empire's pretty much together again. Maybe it's as simple as that.' He paused in thought. 'But in that case she could simply have had me executed, or assassinated, when I was last in the capital. It wouldn't be hard for her to do away with me. There'd be no reason to go about it like this, snuffing me out in some distant corner of the world.'

'What's she like?' Che asked. When he did not reply, she urged, 'Come on, tell me. The woman who rules an Empire, what's she like — your new match?'

Still he did not answer, and she turned from her work to look at him. His expression was far away, somewhere that he did not want to be.

'Thalric?' she prompted, and his eyes flicked towards her.

'You really want to know?' he asked. 'The best-kept secret in the Empire?You want to know about Seda?'

'It doesn't look likely that I'll get a chance to gossip about it much,' she pointed out. Do I really want to know? she asked herself: something in his face had disturbed her.

'The Empress … Seda the First,' he said, and she had now lost her chance to avoid the knowledge, whatever it would be. 'She is not quite eighteen yet, younger than you by a year or two. She was eight when her father died, Alvdan the First, and she told me how she'd lived in fear of death ever since. She was the only sibling of the new Emperor to survive his coronation. He kept her around because making her afraid was one of his pastimes. That's how she tells it.'

Another pause. Che kept scrubbing away diligently.

'I wasn't there when the Emperor died,' Thalric said. 'In fact I was imprisoned in the cells beneath the arena, where they keep the fighters and the animals. When I found out about what she had become, the Empress, I searched out someone who could tell me exactly how it had happened, because it seemed clear to me that something had gone very badly wrong indeed.'