Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Scarab Path

The Shalken themselves were an exception, however. Where most other kinden were unwilling partners, slaves of the Empire with their families and home cities held hostage for their good behaviour, Flies and Beetle-kinden had proved willing subjects of the crown since the Empire's early days. The halls of the Shalken garrison were busy with diminutive forms — in the air and on the ground — of cleaners, messengers, scribes and servants. They went about their duties deftly, with the eternal pragmatism of their kind.

Thalric sought out the records office, where messages came in either for filing or passing on. The Fly-kinden had long made Shalk the South-Empire's great message hub, which had been difficult while the traitor governors divided up the South between them. Now everything was returning to business as usual, and the same faces were to be found at the same desks. All except one.

It had been a lucky piece of research, but Thalric liked to keep in touch with his old friends.

He spotted the man quickly, just another Fly-kinden sorting papers in a pool of sunlight under a window. Thalric made his way behind the man's desk, appearing to peruse a rack of scrolls thoughtfully, and in a low voice murmured, 'A strange place to find a lieutenant of the Rekef, one might think.'

The Fly did not pause in his work, did not even twitch. 'If one thought that, one might wonder whether it was common knowledge,' he said, as if speaking to the ledger he was marking.

'Not yet,' Thalric replied, and he heard the smallest sigh.

'Some of us fall despite our best endeavours, some of us rise despite our tribulations,' the Fly observed. 'For instance, I saw your name included on an execution list, shortly before I decided to retire.'

'You don't ever retire from the Rekef, te Berro.'

'No, they retire you instead.' Thalric heard the misery in te Berro's voice. 'Might one ask how it is that a dead man is now Regent of the Empire? I've followed your career with interest.'

Of course you have . For te Berro was a Rekef man, and that training did not sit idle. Even here, in hiding, he had clearly put himself in a position to gather information, even if he was doing so only for himself. It reminded Thalric of his own behaviour in occupied Tharn, when he had been acting as Stenwold's agent. Old habits like that didn't die.

'You must have jumped ship from Reiner's people, if you got to see that list,' Thalric noted.

'Oh, I was on the good ship Maxin a while previously. But then a high-up operation went sour and I judged it a good time to vanish. And now it appears I didn't vanish well enough.'

'With all the changes at the capital, they haven't even started cleaning house properly,' Thalric reassured him. 'Still, it's only a matter of time. I hear Solarno is nice, this time of year. Perhaps you're due for a holiday, assuming they don't hear about you shortly.'

Another sigh. 'What do you want, Thalric?'

'Information. There was an attempt on my life in Tyrshaan. What was the follow up?'

'They strung up three of Governor Vargen's men within days. Case closed.'

Thalric stifled a chuckle. 'And after that?'

'There's a very definite kind of … silence from that direction.'

Thalric nodded, satisfied. It meant that General Brugan had matters properly in hand. After public executions that would reassure the real wrongdoers, the Rekef would start their own covert investigation. It was a way of doing things he had used himself often enough.

'Anything else?' he asked, as if still talking to the racking. 'Don't hold out on me, now.'

'Everything's still upside down here in the South-Empire,' te Berro complained. 'Reliable news is hard to come by. They're still purging Tyrshaan.'

'Who hates me that much, te Berro?'

The Fly made an amused noise. 'Grief, man, who doesn't? They hate the Empress? They hate you. They worked for General Reiner? They hate you. They're just loyal Imperial citizens who remember too much about the war …'

'I get the message.' Thalric gritted his teeth, hearing again the truth that Osgan had already given him. I am now a foreigner in my own country .

'Well, we make good messengers.' The Fly appeared at Thalric's elbow and started filing scrolls with care. 'Not that I've got anything against reunions, but you're a dangerous man to be around. What happens now?'

The image came to Thalric of a rooftop garden in Myna, of te Berro saving his life with a well-placed arrow. 'I go south and I advise you to get yourself outside the Empire's borders while they change the guard. Maybe, when the next big war looms, they'll look to their old agents, especially those who have been making a life for themselves meanwhile in Solarno or the Lowlands. Until then, I'd keep my head well down, if I were you.'

Still not looking at him, te Berro nodded. 'A holiday on the Exalsee?' he mused. 'I think I've earned it.'

They were winched down the face of the Shalk quarry among descending bundles of mining supplies and a barrel of firepowder charges. The Empire's slaves crawled across the scaffolded rock-face, cutting and measuring, hacking and breaking. There was a scattering of Fly-kinden artificers there for the technical work but the rest were imported labour — Flies were physically and temperamentally unsuited to such hard toil. Instead, Shalk had inherited hundreds of the Empire's most robust. There were Ant-kinden and Beetles, prisoners from Szar and Myna, and everywhere the vast, lumbering shapes of the Mole Crickets. Almost half the adult population of Least Delve had been herded here after the Empire had taken the place twenty years ago. They were not a numerous people but their skill with stone was such that they were ruthlessly put under the whip wherever they were found. Back home at the Delve, their families — especially the children who lacked the Art to simply slip away into the earth — were closely held as strict surety for their parents' continued industry.

The air was so thick with dust that Thalric's party was forced to breathe through cloth. They observed the quarry's vertiginous workings through goggles that had to be cleaned and cleaned again to stop them silting over, and the air was painfully dry. Work in mines and quarries was the Empire's rod for its worst offenders, the final destination of those whose luck had entirely expired. Here, sharing the forced labour of the Mole Crickets, were the deserters, the prisoners of war, the traitors whose physical strength would now serve the Empire they had betrayed until it gave out on them and they died.

Thalric, surveying all this as their lift jerked and shuddered its way downwards, thought, I, too, could have been here, so easily . Certainly there were enough other Wasp-kinden toiling at the cliff face.

At the foot of the descent there was the pit, where the quarry had been extended further into the earth. The entire cliff face above was riddled with blast-holes and mineshafts. There had been a web of gold here once, long since exhausted, but now they had found rich seams of iron. Overlooking the quarry itself stood a squat, brooding ziggurat that housed more of the Shalk garrison, with the workers' pitiful huts corralled all around it.

Marger had been conscientious in his arrangements. There was a Slave Corps expedition setting out that was already waiting for them before the garrison. They would travel along the line of the ridge, stopping at each spring and waterhole to trade with the desert Scorpions, until they reached the river and the green edge of Forest Alim. There the slavers and Thalric's expedition would part company.

Thalric found surprisingly little curiosity in himself about his destination or his journey, even about the Lowlanders he was heading off to spy on. All that matters is that I'm moving further away . He felt the Empress as a constant pressure in the back of his mind, but he was now putting the miles between them, and there must come a point where her presence would fade.