Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Scarab Path

While the others settled in a taverna under the watchful eyes of the two Solarnese, Che followed Trallo to the dockside to see about arranging passage. Standing there, with the grey sea stretching, windlashed, to the far horizon, she felt dizzy at the thought of how far she had come.

'What sea is this?' she asked, touching Trallo's shoulder. She was past the edge of all her maps. Was this the same sea that washed Collegium's wharves? 'Where does it go?'

He smiled up at her. 'This is the Sunroad Sea, and they say it goes all the way to where the sun comes from, if you could but sail that far.' He added, 'We'll have passage on that ship,' and pointed out a sleek Spiderlands felucca, two-masted and painted gold and blue. 'She's the Lord Janis out of Portoriens — that's the furthest east in the world that the Spider-kinden claim, the very eastern limit of their satrapies. And you know what?' He was grinning widely now. She shook her head slowly to show she did not know, and he finished it gleefully. 'You know what? That's west of here.'

Che felt weak at the knowledge. The Lowlanders tended to assume that the Spidlerlands just extended as far as they needed to go. She was standing at the shore of a whole new ocean, being jostled by sailors and traders of a dozen kinden out of who-knew-what distant ports. This was not Collegium's wilful ignorance of the Empire's ambitions, or the self-spun mystery of the Spiderlands, or the deliberate isolation of the Commonweal. This was far . She found herself searching the crowd suddenly for a familiar style of dress, a brooch or a sword-hilt whose style she recognized. There were Solarnese there, in their flowing white, but no more. She was the only representative of the Lowlands, at the docks of Porta Rabi. She was all the world she knew.

Trallo put a hand to her elbow. 'Steady now,' he said kindly. 'It was the same for me, when my dad brought me here the first time. Around the Exalsee we mostly look west and south to the Spiderlands where our ladies and lords come from. It was a shock for me, too.'

The captain of the Lord Janis was now coming towards them, and Trallo nodded respectfully to her. 'Here,' he said sidelong to Che, 'you know why Spider-kinden always name their cities and their ships after men, don't you?'

Che mustered a small smile. 'Why?'

''Cos they're both ruled by women,' Trallo answered, and then he bowed before the Spider-kinden captain as she arrived.

She dreamt she was on board ship. She was on board ship, of course, rocking in her cramped bunk, above Praeda, as the Lord Janis steered wide of the cliffs and reefs of the Stone Coast. As she dreamt now, though, she left the cabin and clambered aloft. The crew was gone and the sky above was starless. The skeleton of the rigging was without sail. Only one man stood on deck, stood at the rail and stared out to sea, grey-robed and narrow-shouldered. The ship itself was dead still, the waves all about frozen into jagged teeth.

'Achaeos,' she said, and in the dream it was. He turned to her, and she saw his white eyes, his grey skin, and she ran forward.

She stopped close to him, but not close enough to touch. She remembered that harsh, commanding voice, its angry, distant tones.

'What is it?' she asked. 'Please, Achaeos, tell me what I have to do.' There was a scowl building on his face, piece by piece. The sight made her cower away from him.

He had always been a gentle man who seldom raised his voice. He had never struck her. In her dream she thought he would strike her, on the deck of the stilled ship.

'What is this?' he demanded. 'In dreams? Must you dredge my memory up in dreams? Is this what I have become, just a knife for you to prick yourself with?'

'I don't understand,' she said, but a wind had struck up along with his reproach, tugging now at the empty rigging. She had to shout it again. 'I can't put you down! You won't let me!'

He shook his head. When he spoke again, his voice was the wind, just as the voice of the haunted forest Darakyon had been the myriad sounds of the leaves. You put yourself on the rack of my memory. You turn the wheel yourself .

'That's not true!' she shouted at him. 'It's not fair. I want you alive, but I can't have you alive, and nor will you be dead! What can I do? Do you want me to follow you?' Standing there beneath that featureless sky, she wondered if she might already have done. Is this death, this petrified sea?

The wind died abruptly, leaving nothing but the two of them staring at each other. 'I am dead and gone, Che,' he said, and it was once more the voice of the man who had loved her, against all the dictates of history and his own people. 'Do not raise me up like this to injure yourself. I am gone. Just let me go.'

He made to turn away and she rushed at him, determined to hold him in her arms. For a moment she had the cloth of his robe in her hands, but then he was gone, and the rail was gone too, and she was falling with a shriek towards the razor-sharp claws of the frozen ocean …

Waking, suddenly, for once she remembered exactly where she was. She slipped from the bunk, felt herself swaying in time with the ship's pitch and yaw. Praeda muttered something and turned over, looking pale with her face sheened in sweat. All the Collegium academics had turned out to be poor sailors, and the Vekken were keeping to their cabin so obstinately that the same was probably true of them. The sea along this craggy coast did not rest easy, but Che had found herself proof against it. She dressed in her tunic and cloak, and pattered barefoot out into the walkway running between cabins. Around her the wood of the ship creaked and shifted, and she found it an oddly comforting sound, a created thing behaving in the way it had been intended.

Up above, it was cold but the change was refreshing to her. There was a handful of sailors still at their duties, Spider-kinden all and mostly men. If not for the dream, she might just have watched them work. They did everything with such conscious elegance, as though they had stayed out here not to work the ship but to perform for Cheerwell Maker. It was not the killing grace of the Mantis-kinden, but something more showy, and which they took more joy in.

She scanned the rails, finding nothing, no smear nor smudge of him. The sails billowed and the waves rolled the ship up on to their backs, and then sloughed it down the other side. The sky above boasted stars and a slice of the moon, save to port where the cliffs ate out a deeper darkness, unrelieved by anything.

She took a deep breath of the sea air, feeling the deck shift beneath her feet, her toes flexing automatically for balance. Below, the others would still be sleeping fitfully, groaning, or staggering off to be ill. Che, who had suffered the airships and the automotive, had at last found a vessel she was comfortable with.

But of course . The Lord Janis was built by the Inapt, crewed by the Inapt, and it therefore carried her along with it smoothly, while it dragged the others by force. She smiled at that, despite all her worries. Of all the rest, only Trallo had been weathering this rough sea well, and she guessed that it was sheer experience, in his case. He had made such trips so often that the sea held no more terrors for him.

The ship changed its tack noticeably, slanting away from the cliffs. Ahead, along the dark and starless line of the land, Che could see a red spark high enough to challenge the moon.

'What is it?' she demanded of the nearest sailor. He looked at her mockingly at first, but swallowed some flippant answer and said, 'The Light of Suphat.'

'The what?'

'A great fire atop a tower, that warns us where the rocks are.'

'A lighthouse,' she realized.

He shrugged. 'Stay above decks, lady, you shall see two more along the cliffs, named Amnet and Dekkir. When we have passed Dekkir, which shall be near dawn, we shall be within reach of the harbour of Khanaphes.'