Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Scarab Path

There was a Scorpion standing near the device, Hrathen saw, who looked defiant, and pleased with himself. That was all Hrathen needed to see to complete the picture.

'Where is the Warlord?' he asked.

'At your elbow, Of-the-Empire.'

He had not sensed her, though she was standing very close. She wore only a long hide hauberk, but she had her spear to hand and her helm on. He felt those red eyes studying him coolly.

'Do you regret giving us these weapons now, Of-the-Empire?' she asked him. He amused her, Hrathen knew. He was Scorpion enough to touch on her world, but she found the Empire and its ways tedious, pointless. When in her company, he almost felt he agreed.

'I am only glad that I have given you some enemies to turn them on,' he told her. 'A man has a right to use his strength. If his strength is in the mind, then so be it.' He gestured at the siege weapon and its victims. 'This is no business of mine.'

'That he took your weapon, does that not anger you, O possessive Empire?' Beneath the rim of the helm, she was smiling through her fangs.

'It is yours, given to you and your people. If he took it from you, then the theft is yours to punish,' Hrathen said, trying to match her grin. She put him off balance, and he knew it was because his Scorpion side — his rapacious father's side — wanted her. She was no whore like the Empress, though, who ruled through others' weakness. Jakal was strong and would seek only strength. She would yield herself to his strength, or else he would force her, or she would kill him. And now she drives me to the second of those, or perhaps the third .

'So glib,' she berated him. 'You change your colours, Of-the-Empire, but the black-and yellow-stain lies ever underneath.' She turned away suddenly, calling out, 'Genraki!'

The Scorpion that Hrathen had picked as the culprit came forward. He stopped a safe distance from Jakal, obviously not entirely sure of his own daring now.

'You have long warred with the Friends of Hierkan,' Jakal observed.

Genraki merely nodded, keeping a hand close to the hatchet on his belt.

'Are the Friends of Hierkan here to witness? Do they wish to match weapons with Genraki?'

There were enough glances cast at the staved-in house for Hrathen to suspect that the man had done his work well.

Jakal spread her arms, walking over to inspect the ruin of a ruin, stepping up on to cracked and tumbled stones, heedless of the bloody jumble beneath. 'See these stones I stand on now?' she addressed her people. 'The walls of Khanaphes are made only of such stones.'

They went absolutely silent, all of the watching Scorpions, and Hrathen found his heart catching in his chest at the sheer simplicity of it. How many challengers to her authority has she killed, how many conspiracies has she rooted out, that she leads them so deftly? He knew it was more than that, more than just the same brute force that prevailed in the Dryclaw. The Many of Nem had begun to recognize the true value of their leaders and their elders. They followed Jakal through respect and belief in her, and not only because she could put a spear through any one of them.

But she could . The knowledge excited him, and he forced his thoughts back to business. I am Captain Hrathen of the Imperial Slave Corps, of the Rekef . His heritage, his despoiled blood, surged within him, testing the bounds of his duty.

He found Angved still checking out the leadshotter. 'Report,' he said.

'No damage that I can see.'

'I don't mean the machine.'

The engineer looked up at him, and there was a tightness around his eyes. 'I don't know what to say, sir. It's a four-man job to move and load this thing, yet apparently he did it on his own.'

'A good student, then?'

'Not my best, I would have said.' Angved shook his head. 'I can't believe they're going to let him get away with it.'

'Look at what he's accomplished,' Hrathen pointed out. 'He's ended a feud, he's proved himself strong and wily. Why should they punish Genraki when he's exactly what they want?'

Genraki himself was returning to them, with a couple of others following in his wake. 'I shall return the machine, Lieutenant,' he said to Angved, with a surprising deference. The engineer nodded, faking a smile, and the three Scorpion-kinden made light work of wheeling the leadshotter away.

'They learn fast,' Angved observed. 'You were right on that, sir. They're not disciplined, and it's difficult to get a decent speed up, because they always want to watch the shots, see the damage and have a bit of a talk about it, but they're strong and they're tough. Make good Auxillians, is my report.'

Hrathen nodded, wondering again if that was why they were here — and if not, what then? 'But you're not comfortable with them,' he finished.

'Permission to speak freely, sir?'

'Go ahead.'

'Are you comfortable with them?' Angved enquired. 'I know it's the fashion to call people like these savages, but with these people it's true. It's not that they're stupid, it's just … they have no rules. Shedding blood means nothing to them, either their own or anyone else's. I can't even understand how they survive from generation to generation. How do their children even live to full growth?'

'You want to know?'

'I want to understand, sir.'

'When she's close to term, the mother leaves the camp, goes off and fends for herself in the desert,' Hrathen told him, remembering. 'She stays there two, three years — a Scorpion child learns fast, grows fast. By then it can walk, run, fight with the other children. Then she comes back to the camp and gives the child to the tribe, and it has no mother or father from that day. They hold their children in common, and soon enough nobody recalls ancestry. No families, Angved — nothing to stand between the individual and the group.'

'That sounds harsh, sir.'

'Life is harsh. Life in the Dryclaw or the Nem is harsh. If a child was linked to its mother, it would become a weapon against her. Their best chance for survival is anonymity: it breeds strength, self-reliance.' Hrathen smiled, and he saw Angved pale at the sight of those underslung tusks in a Wasp-kinden face. 'It breeds a callous disregard for others, but think how much effort the Empire puts into teaching us something the Scorpions learn for free.'

Angved remained carefully silent after that.

Hrathen chuckled. 'Just teach them to destroy,' he said. 'Teach them to break walls with the leadshotters, to break men with the crossbows. Then we will take them to Khanaphes and simplify the maps — one less city in the world.'

'Why, though?' Angved asked. 'What's the point? Why does the Empire want Khanaphes gone?'

'Think like the Scorpions,' Hrathen told him, not unkindly. 'We do it because we can.'

Hrathen sought out Angved the next morning, finding him not at the leadshotters, amidst the noise and the smoke and the curses, but hidden away beneath a lean-to of chitin over wood. The engineer was cooking something, or at least heating something in a small pan.

'Not deserting your post, is it?' Hrathen asked, looming. Angved looked up at him, unalarmed.

'At the moment we're just working on speed, Captain, seeing if these brutes can manage faster than a shot every twenty minutes. They already know what they're doing, but they lose focus so quickly.' The engineer shrugged. 'My lads out there can shout at them without me needing to strain my throat, so I decided to do a little investigating.'

'Really?' Hrathen knelt by him. 'Beyond your brief, isn't it?'

'Engineers and Slave Corps both, we think for ourselves,' Angved replied, meeting Hrathen's small, yellow eyes. 'This rock-oil of theirs, they use it just for lighting, yes?'

'What else is there?' Hrathen asked. The engineer smiled at that.