Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Scarab Path

This is wrong — Wrong, of course it's wrong — I've been here before. This is the room in Myna …

She was feeling a bizarre doubling in her mind, of image over image. Thalric, with his blank Moth eyes, was trailing his hand across her breasts, whilst the other reached up for some tool of torture. Part of her was reacting with fear and revulsion, terrified of the pain and shame, but on another level she was watching everything as though from behind a pane of glass — or some clever Spider mirror that served as a window from one side. But this isn't the way it happened the first time. This isn't the way it happened last time .

First time? Last time?

How many times?

'Now,' said Thalric …

The interrogation room was filled with the sound of engines, the hiss of the steam boiler below and the whine and rumble of the tools above her. Wasn't I just here …? She could barely hear one word in three of the careful conversation that Thalric was having with the engineer, Aagen. But Aagen just left … It was some convoluted piece of Wasp politics involving the governor and the Butterfly-kinden Grief in Chains. She strained her ears to catch it. Any information would be useful.

Thalric had finished, telling Aagen, 'Now, dispatch it straight,' and the engineer left them swiftly. There was something wrong with Thalric's face. It was pallid, greying, changing. He was slighter than she remembered.

She felt the straps taut about her wrists and ankles. The mechanical drills and blades vibrated on their arms, spread above her like the limbs of a spider. Thalric had gone to the levers and was regarding them cautiously. She realized that he was not artificer enough to know how to turn the device off. And neither am I for that matter. So why do I say:

'The one at the end!' she shouted out to him. 'The red band!'

He turned to regard her, and his face rent her more than the knives could ever do: the pointed, grey-skinned visage of a Moth she had once known. His hand found another lever and pulled it, in a brutal, brief motion, and the tool assembly dropped three feet until it hovered right above her.

'The true interrogator,' he informed her, 'can extend a moment into a lifetime. He can stretch time as easily as flesh, denying the subject any chance of escape …'

'Achaeos?' Wrong, all wrong. I know it's wrong. I've been here before, and before that, and before that, and …

He reached up for the tools and she felt cracks all around her, her mind fragmenting into lens after distorting lens, one beyond the other, reaching further and further out. She stared up at the machinery above her. I don't know how this works. I don't remember how it works. I only remember that I once remembered .

And Achaeos could never know .

I dreamt this. This is my dream, one of many. What did he say?

What did he say in my dream?

That I was doing this to myself …

That I was …

That I was using him to torture myself .

That I was …

She opened her eyes.

From the steady lamps of that remembered cell in Myna to the dancing bluish flames of the tombs beneath Khanaphes: Che blinked, aware that she was lying awkwardly on one arm, and for a moment unsure where she was. She registered some cool, damp place where the stone beneath her was gluey with slime.

Now she remembered, the pieces falling into her head out of order: the Wasps, the halls, the carvings, the sarcophagi.

The Masters of Khanaphes.

She sat up suddenly, becoming aware of her surroundings. The vaulted halls seemed to lean in on her, each alcove hosting its own stone memorial.

Thalric …? But he was there. They all were. Strewn around her were three bodies, not dead but not sleeping either. Their eyes were open but unseeing, and they twitched and kicked in the grip of whatever memory or thought was tormenting them. Thalric kept pulling his hands in as though avoiding something, his expression racked and unrecognizable. The other Wasp's fingers flexed over and over as though he was in the midst of loosing his sting. Accius of Vek had an expression only of concentration, moving not at all save for the shivers that pulsed through his muscles. And what is he here for? What is his part in all this ?

She reached a hand out to Thalric, hoping he might wake, but his skin crawled under her touch. I must have been like this but a moment ago, with my mind sent back to the rack in Myna . What horrors would a Rekef spymaster's memory hold ? Felice's children? Surely he relives his murder of her children .

She belatedly became aware that she was being watched, that the three twitching bodies were not her only company. Then she remembered, and her heart skipped and lurched as she looked round.

She was there, looking as though she had been standing there for hours, waiting for Che to wake — and as though she could stand there for a hundred years if need be. There was a patience about her that would wear down stone. Elysiath Neptellian, Lady of the Bright Water, She whose Word Breaks all Bonds, Princess of the Thousand, the risen denizen of her own tomb. Her gravity and presence made Che feel as though she should kneel, that the mere existence of this woman was sufficient to make a slave of her. She fought off the feeling angrily, and noticed the faintest movement of the woman's mouth. It was not a smile, for a smile on that face would have been fearsome, but perhaps an iota of approval.

Che hauled herself to her feet, still barely reaching above the woman's waist, then realized that Elysiath Neptellian was not alone. Another gigantic figure had emerged from the gloom, and now walked ponderously to stand at her shoulder. He was a thick-waisted man with a fleshy face that spoke of all manner of terrible deeds, and no guilt at all. A second woman now sat on her own plinth, combing her hair in slow, careful strokes, while ignoring Che utterly. Their hair was magnificent, waves of blue-black that gleamed in the undersea light. Both the women wore it down to the waist, cascading in slow ripples down their backs and, like the men, they were clad in little more than a few folds of cloth. Had they been Beetle-kinden, they would have been fat, had they been any other kinden they would have been grotesque, but they carried their bodies with an absolute assurance, without admitting the possibility of ugliness or awkwardness or shame. They were beautiful, all three, and it was something that partook of their bodies and those cruel faces, but that went far beyond. They were royalty, by their very nature, and Che was the lowest of commoners.

She heard steps behind her, quiet but slow, and the apparition she saw, when she turned, sent her two stumbling steps away from it, almost falling over Thalric. His name surfaced in her mind irresistibly: Garmoth Atennar, Lord of the Fourth House, whose Bounty Exceeds all Expectations, Greatest of Warriors, had woken. He had donned the mail that had sat waiting on his throne through the ages. Armour plates of gleaming green-black and gold slid one over the other, boasting the meticulous craftsmanship of decades. The dark clasp of the open helm framed the pale features of a dead king. He stared down at her with a distant amusement, as she herself might have looked at some small animal meandering lost through the rooms of her home.

She tried to speak, but her voice betrayed her, cracking to a mere whisper in the face of them. She finally forced it out, hearing her words tremble. 'You are the Masters of Khanaphes.'

'We are some,' said Elysiath. 'Those that have awoken.' The man's hand rested on her shoulder, while the other woman continued to comb her hair, oblivious. 'You are not one of our slaves, though.' Her eyes regarded Che with arch humour. 'Some few are summoned to us, through some trace of old blood that they carry, or else through their own misplaced curiosity, but you have been called from far places.'