Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Scarab Path

There were almost a score of them soon, male and female, looming from the dark to join their kin, their grave and beautiful faces all marked with expressions of concern. Che expected chanting. She was waiting for them to enact some ritual, as Achaeos had said the Moths did. It took her a long moment of frustrated silence until she realized that they were already at work.

Each of them was looking up, towards the vaulted ceiling, up towards the embattled city of Khanaphes and the sky beyond. Each and every one of them was sharing in the same act of concentration, staring at some great focal point she could not imagine. She knew she should hate them for their callous detachment, but there was such grief and loss evident on those noble faces that it nearly broke her heart.

What have I driven them to? she wondered. What is this, that they sacrifice here?

Pictures blurred and stretched in her mind again, taking her back to the city above.

'Would you look at what they've done,' Hrathen said. 'How much effort went into that?'

'So they've brought some more stone to fill the breach,' Jakal replied dismissively. 'It will not stop us. An act of desperation.' She jabbed a thumb-claw towards a nearby Scorpion. 'Call my guard together.'

'We knew they were working on something, and now it looks like they've built the world's biggest single-use nutcracker.' They were standing on a rooftop overlooking the bridge and the river, Hrathen with his telescope to his eye. 'The archers, all the rest, are running for the second barricade.'

'Bring it down,' Jakal told him. 'Use one of your petards. Or move one of the engines up on to the bridge.'

'No need for the sweat,' Hrathen said. 'All that effort, and we'll still crack it in less than a minute.' He signalled to one of his own, one of the few Slave Corps soldiers left. Of late, the Khanaphir archers had become very good at shooting them down. 'Fly to Lieutenant Angved,' he instructed. 'Tell him to sight on that blockage and bring it down.'

'Yes, sir.' The man kicked off and made a short dart over the rooftops to where Angved and his leadshotter were waiting.

Jakal regarded Hrathen with a slight smile. It was not a fond look, for Scorpion faces did not lend themselves to fondness. There was fire in it, though: anticipation of victory had set light to her.

'You'll go in yourself now?' Hrathen asked her.

'Their archers have fled. I shall destroy what warriors they have left. You should bring your engines up to the bridge's crest, so that we can destroy their second wall.' Her understanding of artillery and its uses was increasing by leaps and bounds. 'My warriors must see me fight. They must remember why I am Warlord.'

'Then they will see me fight alongside you,' Hrathen said. 'The engineers can manage without me.'

She looked at him for a long moment, then shook her head. 'Your Empire breeds fools,' she said. 'If my warriors obeyed my words as swiftly as yours obey you, I would not need to shed my blood for them. Still, you shall have the chance to prove yourself, if you so wish.'

'Why do you go, then?' he asked her. 'It's not as though your host is short one more warrior.'

Her smile was scornful. 'I am Warlord because I am the best. I slew many to take the crown, and there are many who would slay me for it in turn. If I did not fight they would all take up arms against me. I too must shed the blood of the Khanaphir, but I shall choose when I shed it. I am not destined to become mere prey for arrows. My people shall see me take the bridge itself, and they shall remember.'

'They shall see us take the bridge.'

'Are you strong enough?' she asked him. 'Does your blood run so pure? You may just as well remain behind. My people would not care.'

It stung like a slaver's lash. 'I have the strength of my father's kinden and the guile of my mother's,' he told her, 'as you will soon see. Perhaps it will be I who will challenge you.'

That made her smile. 'I would welcome it.' Below, in the ravaged street, a company of Scorpions had assembled, huge men and women loaded with scavenged armour. A dozen of them stamped and rattled, waiting impatiently. Jakal had chosen them carefully, Hrathen knew, from among the most vicious and bloodthirsty of all her people, thus keeping her potential enemies close to her.

She descended to join them and they greeted her with a roar of approval. Today was their day. The day their Warlord had delivered their ancient enemy to them. Hrathen followed as they struck out for the bridge, after sending back an order to have one of the leadshotters brought up after them.

Not a great day for the Empire , he thought. Probably not even a footnote in the Imperial histories, but I shall know. I shall know that I was true to my father's bloody-handed kinden, at the end. The desolation of Khanaphes shall be my legacy to my people .

The archers, and a scattering of Royal Guard, were still in sight, fleeing towards the end barricade. Amnon faced the new-formed wall of loose stones and squared his shoulders. Meyr crouched close to him, a hulking, brooding shadow, and in his hands he had a rough-ended beam from the construction works, ten feet long. Totho checked that his snapbow was charged. I had feared I might run out of ammunition today , he considered. That seems unlikely now .

Another thought struck him, that Drephos would be proud now: not of Totho but of the armour. Field-testing complete: the aviation plate can be considered worth its considerable cost. We three are the proof of that . He was amazed how quickly Amnon had adapted to it, but then the man was a warrior born, and Beetles took easily to wearing a second shell.

If we had come with twenty men in full mail, we would have held against anything the Scorpions or the Empire could throw at us , he thought. We could have held off the world .

'They'll bring a petard up to blow the barricade down,' he warned the others. 'We won't have long before we must fight again.'

'We won't need long,' Amnon told him. 'Just enough time so they can complete the works, close up the breach at the far end. That is all the time we need to buy them.' Totho wondered what Praeda Rakespear was doing right now, whether she had realized that Amnon was not coming back to her. He wondered whether Amnon had left people ready to restrain her, to stop her running up here. Probably he had: it was the sort of thing the big man thought of.

He spotted the plume of grey smoke, and knew immediately what it meant. Leadshotter on a rooftop . There were words in his mind to warn the others, but he had no time to give actual voice to them before the missile struck the barricade.

The noise passed by him, the physical force overriding it. A piece of broken rock hit his chest like a sledgehammer, his feet skating from under him, so that he slammed down on his back. The air was all dust, with stone fragments pattering all about them. Gasping for breath, he could not get to his feet yet, but he tried to peer through the drifting white veil, to see what had been done.

The new stones had fallen, forming a broken pavement between him and the barricade, and the Scorpions were coming through the breach. He realized even then that their artillerists would have preferred a second shot, to widen the gap, but the warriors already on the bridge had been so long denied this chance that nothing could have held them back. They surged in along with the stone-dust, as Meyr and Amnon met them at full charge.

It would have been suicide but for the mail. It could have been suicide anyway. There were enough weak points — throat, armpit, groin — that one spear or blade could have ended either of them. They thrust themselves into the thick of the Scorpion weapons, and Totho saw Amnon take a dozen blows, and Meyr twice that number. Each rebounded from the dented plate, frustrated by its fluted curves that turned the strongest blow aside. Amnon's sword descended repeatedly, chopping indiscriminately at the enemy. Meyr laid about himself like a mad thing, crushing the Scorpions, flinging them from the bridge with great swipes of his club. They tried to drag him down, to get under his reach, but Amnon killed them as they came, shield high and sword never still.