Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Scarab Path

'The city hangs in the balance,' she whispered. 'The Scorpions assault the bridge, and only a tiny few hold them off. It is the end for Khanaphes, it must be.'

'This is a grave disappointment,' said Elysiath. 'Have our servants fallen so low that they will allow our enemies into the city?'

'It does not seem possible,' agreed the man beside her, his tone unhurried, conversational. 'The vagabonds of the Nem should not have been able to pass the walls. That suggests treachery within.'

'Our people have turned away from us while we slept,' Lirielle agreed. 'They flee rather than fight. They are no longer what they once were.'

'How can you say that?' Che glared at them. 'They are dying for you right now!' Totho is dying. He could be dying even now .

They looked at her patronizingly. 'They have indeed grown weak. How dare they abandon half the city,' Elysiath said sternly. 'They deserve all they get. They should have trusted in our walls.'

Thalric laughed at them. The sound of his derision broke across their pontificating like a dash of water, shocking them with its irreverence.

'Your walls?' he sneered. 'Your walls fell in a few brief hours to Imperial leadshotters.' The faces of the Masters remained quite composed, but Che could still detect the slight uncertainty in their eyes that showed they did not recognize the word.

'Leadshotters,' Thalric repeated slowly. He had seen it in them too. 'Siege engines. Machines. Old relics of my own people, but great big magic to your poor citizens, because they've been living in the Bad Old Days for the last few centuries.' He took a deep breath and she felt his hands tighten on her shoulders. 'And, from what you've been saying, that's your fault. You've kept them back. You've kept them ignorant. You've kept them yours . '

'How dare you speak to us thus, O Savage,' Elysiath demanded. Her voice was not angry but cold enough to cut to the bone. 'Utter another word and we will send your mind into a darkness so deep that you will never be found.'

Che expected Thalric to say more but, looking back at him, she saw him grimace, baring his teeth. Whatever he might normally believe, in this dark tomb beyond anything he knew, he believed in that threat.

'And what will you do to me?' Che asked them. 'Tell me, O Masters of Khanaphes? When I speak the same truths?'

'What is this insurrection?' the man said, almost good-naturedly. 'Savages may babble their nonsense, but we discerned merit in you. Our people have grown weak. There is no more than that.'

'A leadshotter …' She stopped because she now realized she could no longer explain it as she once had, '… is a great engine that throws stones hard enough to shatter a wall. The Wasp Empire in the north possesses hundreds of them. My city has many stationed on its walls. The Ant city-states of Accius and his cousins, they field dozens each. Helleron must make more than a thousand crossbows a year in its factories. There are automotives for freight and for war. On the seas there are armourclads, metal ships that float. In the air they have heliopters and orthopters and ships of the air.' The image of these ravening hordes of progress was making her dizzy, slightly ill just to think of it. 'Look in my mind. I can no longer understand what I remember, but look there. See it all. I gift you with five hundred years of artifice.'

They had gone very still. She could feel them taking up the lifeless stones of her memory with their cool, slimy fingers, turning them over and over. Thalric put his arms around her, hugged her to his chest. She wondered if it was a gesture for her reassurance or his own.

'The world has moved on,' she said. 'Everywhere but here.'

'The Moths have fallen,' observed Lirielle. 'What is this?' Despite it all, there was such mourning in her voice that Che felt sorry for them.

'But the rabble of the Nem …' the man began, and trailed off, any confidence ebbing from his voice.

'They will not stand still for ever,' Che said. 'Clinging to whatever life the desert could give, fighting each other for a few scraps, they have been slow to change, but all it took was a prod from the Empire, and they are now inside your city.'

For a long moment the Masters stared at one another, trying to cling on ponderously to what they had believed, in the face of all they had now seen. They don't know what to do , Che realized. They slept too long .

'You will help, surely,' she pressed them.

Elysiath turned a haughty look on her. 'So much is lost, it hardly seems worthwhile to salvage what is left.'

'But they're your people,' Che insisted.

'They have bitterly disappointed us,' the man stated. 'They have squandered all we left them.'

'They have forgotten all I taught them of war,' rumbled dark Garmoth Atennar from behind them.

'But they're now calling out for you!' Che told them. 'They pray to you. They invoke your aid.'

'Do they?' Elysiath actually cocked her head to one side, listening in some way that Che could not imagine. She smiled faintly. 'Ah, yes, they do. How faint they sound. Ah, well.'

'"Ah, well"?' Che protested. 'Don't you see what that means? It means that they believe in you still. To them, after all these centuries, you are still the Masters of Khanaphes. You are what they have lived for, and now you are the reason why they are all going to die. You still have a responsibility to them. They are your servants.'

'Responsibility? To the slaves?' Elysiath echoed, as though the concept was remarkable.

'You said they'd failed you,' Che told her. 'They haven't. They're fighting for you even now, as we speak. They're bleeding and dying for you, for your city. The first city, remember? The city you built so long ago. They're giving their lives to preserve it from the Scorpions, who will soon turn it into one more desert ruin, and put an end even to the memory of you. And perhaps they'll come down here. If there are enough of them, or if the Empire tightens its hold, then maybe even you won't remain safe. Your tests and traps cannot hide you for ever.'

The man was frowning, as though he had eaten something distasteful. Lirielle toyed with her comb. 'But what can we do?' she said.

'It would be such a waste of our power to intervene,' the man mused. 'The cost would be terrible. It would set us back so much.'

'What were you saving it for?' Che asked him.

'The revivification of the land, of course,' he replied. 'The reversal of the change that the great cataclysm brought about. To bring green back to the desert, that is our great purpose.'

Che blinked at that, at the sheer hubris of it, for she could not imagine that even the Masters could even start to accomplish such a thing. Are they just living empty dreams then, despite all their power ? 'And who will then profit from this,' she pressed them, even so, 'if your own people are gone?'

The man gave a petulant frown. 'It will demand a great effort, hardly worth it, surely, to preserve so little.'

'So much effort,' Lirielle agreed, as though just combing her hair for so long had exhausted her.

'They're dying ,' Che said, reaching the end of her ability to explain herself to them. 'As we speak, they're dying.' Totho is dying. Oh, I am so sorry, Totho .

'I would rather have slept,' said Elysiath, surly. 'Jeherian, will you lead us?'

The man beside her nodded wearily. 'So much lost,' he said sadly. 'Ah, well.'

Che started, as someone moved past her. Without a sound, another of the Masters stepped forward to join Elysiath and the others, a great bulky man whose lustrous hair fell down past his shoulders. Looks were exchanged between them all. Even as Che noted him, she saw another woman come padding from the darkness beyond them, as tall and voluptuous as the rest, the necklace about her throat bearing a kingdom's ransom in precious stones. Next, another two came, hand in hand, to stand nearby. Then, at last, Che saw what she had long imagined. On the nearest sarcophagus, the crowning statue stirred, stretching languorously, without visible transition from cold stone to live flesh. Thus do the Masters of Khanaphes sleep out the centuries .