Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Scarab Path

'Tell me what will happen. The Masters … are silent.'

Totho saw different expressions at war in Amnon's face: compassion and anger in bitter feud.

'We stand firm. We will stand until there is none left to stand, and only then we will fall,' he said. 'I am no seer to tell the future. The Masters have never spoken to me . All I can do is set an example for my soldiers, as the first into the breach, the last to walk away. And these foreigners are contributing as well, despite the welcome they have received from you. We would be lost already had it not been forTotho and his followers.'

Ethmet blinked rapidly, and Totho realized with horrible embarrassment that the old man was crying, the tears running freely down his lined face. 'I am sorry,' he said, and it was not clear whether he referred to his treatment of Totho or of Amnon. 'I am so sorry.'

There was a whoop from the barricades and Totho heard the creak and twang of the Mantis bows, the shouts of surprise from the Scorpions beyond. He was reaching for his snapbow but, by the time he had a magazine in place, the attack was over, the Scorpions startled into retreat.

Ethmet had clenched his hands together over his chest. 'What can I do?' he whispered. 'What can I do?'

'If this bridge falls then you must lead all you can out of the city,' Amnon told him. 'It does not matter where to. Have them sail out to the sea. Have them flee towards the eastern plains. Anything but stay here within these walls.'

'Leave … Khanaphes?' Ethmet gaped. 'Leave our city?'

'It will not be our city at that point.'

'But this is the Masters' city,' Ethmet protested. 'They would never let it fall. They would never abandon their people …'

'If they ever lived at all then they have left us now,' Amnon replied harshly, a man trying to convince himself.

'No, I have heard them …' And Ethmet's tone was the same.

Amnon shook his head tiredly. 'Go home, First Minister. I have told you what you must do, if the worst comes to the worst, but I cannot make you do it. Go home, and we shall bleed here for as long as we can, and hope that the Scorpions run out of food or bloodlust before we ourselves run out of blood.'

Ethmet nodded, still trembling. He nodded and turned and tottered off down the bridge, and even Totho felt a fragment of sympathy for him.

'You go home too,' he told Amnon.

'I'll sleep here-' he began.

'And Praeda? Don't you think she wants to see you tonight?' Totho felt a catch in his throat, but he forced the words out anyway. 'If … if … if I could go to Che tonight, and if she would have me, I would. I wouldn't care what happened here. I would go and … kiss her, and lie with her, if she'd let me.' He was shaking, without warning or precedent, as he unlatched the last of Amnon's buckles. As the greave fell free, he did not rise, but pressed his hands against the stonework of the bridge for strength. 'If … if I could, that is what I would do.' In that other dream worldwhere things worked out for us, for me … where some cursed thing in this whole wasted world actually went right for me .

As he stood up, Amnon clapped a hand to his armoured shoulder. The big warrior was Ethmet's reverse, looking suddenly as young as Totho, even younger.

'You are right. I will go to Praeda,' he said. 'I don't know why I need a foreigner about to tell me the obvious things, but you are right.'

Totho arranged Amnon's armour carefully so that it would be easy to don quickly in the morning, and because he was badly in need of something to do just then. Amongst other concerns, Tirado had not been able to find the first sign of Che anywhere in the free half of the city.

When Che nudged him with her foot, he contracted into a ball and then sat bolt upright, eyes wide and staring in the darkness.

'I wasn't asleep,' he said, automatically. She could see him looking wildly about, fingers clawing at the slick floor. 'Oh,' he said at last, 'here.'

'That's right.' Che stood back. 'For a man who wasn't asleep, you do a good impression.'

'We're still in the trap,' he said bitterly and then frowned. 'Are we?'

'Only because you were sleeping so soundly that I didn't want to wake you.'

'I can hear … what can I hear? The echo's changed.'

She was impressed by that. 'The echo's changed because one of the doors is open.' It had been a long haul for her to get that far, a seemingly timeless eternity down here beneath the earth. Those carvings were not intended to be read by some Beetle-kinden freak who just happened to be Inapt. Achaeos would have been able to make easy sense of them, but when she most needed his ghostly presence he was gone, lost somewhere far away from her, or hiding deep in her mind. The carvings had been a test, she was sure, and one that she did not deserve to have passed. The task had called on something inside her that she had not even realized she possessed — something that she surely had not possessed before Achaeos's death, and the catastrophic backlash that had maimed her mind. Or perhaps he was guiding me after all, in ways too subtle for me to tell . It had been like practising Art-enhancing meditation, which she had never been able to manage. Her concentration had not been up to that, but then it had never meant life or death before.

She had sat there in the dark, sealed room and pressed her mind into the places that the builders had left, like picking a lock with a crude, improvised tool. Whilst Thalric slept, she had laboured at it for hours, constantly slipping and faltering, losing her train of thought, succumbing to distraction, until she had taken hold of her mind with a grip of iron and just done it .

Thalric had stood and was now walking forward, hands extended. 'What's out there? What do you see?' he asked. 'Can we get out?'

'It doesn't seem to link up with anywhere we've already been, or not within sight at least,' she told him. 'It … goes on for a long way. There's a great hall, high-ceilinged and vaulted, with alcoves all along it. I haven't left this room yet, to investigate, so maybe some of them are actually other passages. The carvings are everywhere but I haven't gone to look at them.' In case the door closed again and I could not reopen it . She did not say that, but she saw him understand her.

'I suppose we start walking then,' he suggested. 'I shall put a hand on your shoulder, like a blind man, shall I?'

He managed it only after a little clutching at thin air, then touching her injured shoulder first and making her wince. She set out slowly, trying to open her mind to whatever other signs it could apparently now register. There might be more traps, after all.

Their soft footfalls echoed cavernously in the open space, even muffled by the slime: it all seemed vastly too large for them. Che's vision could just reach to the far end of the hall, where there was a dais with something on it. A throne? Down here?

'What is this place anyway?'Thalric murmured. 'It seems too grand for sewers. Cool enough to be a storeroom, but … the air's damp. I can smell mould, a little.'

'I think …' Her courage failed her for a moment and then she pressed on. 'I think it's a tomb.'

A pause while he digested that, and then said, 'Well, that's a cheery thought.'

'They never spoke of this place, or of the pyramid,' Che remarked. 'It was always right there, in front of the Scriptora, at the very heart of the city, and they just overlooked mentioning it as though it was invisible. Which means that it's important. I think the word the Khanaphir would use is "sacred". They avoid the subject out of respect.'

'Respect for what?' Even hushed, their voices resonated down the length of the hall.

'For the only thing that they reserve such a degree of respect for,' Che said. 'The Masters. Their lost Masters who still dominate everything they ever do. The Masters, who haven't been seen since before the revolution. Not that the revolution ever reached here.' And when I myself dreamt of the city's past, when I took the Fir, I saw the square before the Scriptora and the pyramid was not there. That was the city of the Masters, when they still lived . 'The Masters of Khanaphes are dead,' she said. 'They've been dead a very long time indeed, for all that the Ministers have kept their name alive. And this is the last testimony to their rule. This is their tomb.'