Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Scarab Path

'You wished, I believe, to have words with me?' the old man enquired. He was standing at the nearest desk, a simple slab of stone with some half-furled scrolls resting upon it.

Che seized her courage in both hands, determined to crack the First Minister's shell. 'What happened to the scholar, Kadro?' she asked.

Ethmet did not even blink. 'We have been unable to locate him, I am sorry to say.'

Che gritted her teeth. 'It has been … suggested to me that he may have been asking awkward questions, that the Ministers of Khanaphes may not have approved of his researches.'

Ethmet's smile remained distantly polite. 'I understand only that your compatriot was given to asking his questions, impolitic or not, in unwise places. He was seen much in the Marsh Alcaia, even out in the desert, where the writ of the Khanaphir Dominion runs regrettably thin. In seeking such company it would seem most likely that the manner of his researches, and not the subject of them, proved the cause of his difficulties.' He gathered up some of the scrolls and made his patient way towards a flight of steps.

'You're telling me that you gave no orders …' Che trailed off. In the face of such denial, such a wall of denial, what can I say?

'None at all. Why should we?' Ethmet replied, taking the stairs one at a time. Even in those few words, Che had the absolute certainty that he was lying. I can prove nothing, but Petri is right . She was becoming used to intuitions that arrived without logic, with nothing but an assurance of their own truth.

She followed him up the steps, trying to formulate the words that might trip him up, expose the man behind the mask. Then he remarked, as blandly as ever, 'I understand that you have succumbed to the vice of Profanity.'

She stopped, as thoroughly thrown as she had ever been, ice coursing through her veins. This trap has sprung the wrong way . Ethmet was not even looking at her, carefully filing the scrolls, one by one.

'I …' she began, her heart hammering. She waited for the guards to suddenly spring out from their hiding places, but guards there were none, just herself and the old man within the big, echoing chamber.

'We make it a crime,' Ethmet continued, still at his deliberate filing, and she thought, The First Minister does not do a clerk's job. He has brought me up here for some reason .

'I … I know,' she stammered. 'What …What will you …?'

'Do not fear.' He looked at her directly then. 'It is a law that is enforced only against those who are not … worthy.'

'I do not understand.' And she genuinely did not understand. He was waiting for her, testing her.

'Word has reached us, O Foreigner, of you and your unusual heritage.'

'They thought I was of the blood of …' She could not bring herself to say it, but he completed the thought for her.

'Of the Masters. But you are not.' He was at the balcony rail now, hands resting on the carved stone. 'But you are special nevertheless, or so we have been led to believe. Not for many ages has Khanaphes welcomed one like you. The eating of Fir is a practice not forbidden, but restricted. Through Fir do those of us bearing the blood hear the voice of the Masters.'

She gaped at him. 'But you don't mean … you mean that … the Ministers? You?'

'The sin of Profanity is profane only when committed by the unrighteous who seek to steal that which is given freely to those who deserve it.'

She clenched her fists, utterly lost now. 'Tell me what you're talking about,' she urged him. 'Just tell me … tell me something plainly, please.' She had joined him at the balcony's edge, but his gaze did not even flick towards her.

'You know ,' he said. 'Am I plain enough in that?'

'But I don't -' She stopped and, at last, followed his gaze down to the tiled floor of the chamber. After a moment she said, 'Oh.'

The mosaic, the tiles of sepia and black and grey, swam before her eyes, and she felt Ethmet take her arm to keep her from simply pitching over the rail. What had been an abstract arabesque down below was suddenly recognizable, stylized but familiar. The floor was a map.

Khanaphes lay at the centre, she now saw plainly, but the extent of the map was large, the world stretching away on every side. She found the Sunroad Sea, and from that guessed at north, seeing nothing of the Empire, no Capitas, none of the centres of Imperial Power. But that city is where Myna stands today, and that other one for Maynes . Her eyes were drawn westwards: Darakyon was a living Mantis Hold, and west of that lay Tharn, but no Helleron. There were other cities marked, whose names she could not guess at, of kinden that perhaps she had never heard of. The edge of the Commonweal was picked out in a glorious detail beyond her own people's modern knowledge of it. She followed the unfamiliar lines of what should have been a familiar land. There was a coastal city there that she knew must be marked 'Pathis', for the name 'Collegium' was only five hundred years old. This map was from an age that made close cousins of the Wasp Empire and her own home city — and infant cousins at that. A map that had been scuffed by the feet of Khanaphir clerks for …

'How long?' she asked.

'I cannot say, save to say that the Scriptora was not young, when the Masters ordained that a map of their world should be placed within.' Ethmet's voice was soft and sad. 'O Honoured Foreigner, you see it plain, do you not?'

'I do,' she said. This was not a map as she had once been used to, drawn from the precise cartography of grids and measurements that the Collegium mapmakers taught. There was no regular scale down there, and the lands around the Jamail river were shown disproportionately large, but it all fell into place before her eyes. It gave up its secrets with barely a struggle.

'I have never seen it,' Ethmet whispered.

She could not drag her eyes from the map. 'What do you mean?'

'I know it as a map, for our older records speak of it as such, but I am not so blessed as you. I have a touch of the blood of the Masters — in truth, enough to pursue my duties as my fathers have done before me — but you are truly blessed.'

She turned to him at last, tearing her gaze away from the inlaid patterns. 'But the Masters are gone, aren't they? That pyramid out there is their tomb, their monument. That's what I …' Had anyone actually told her that? 'That's what I always thought …'

'Oh, it is indeed their tomb,' he whispered, and suddenly he stood uncomfortably close. 'But they are not dead. They shall walk their city once more, and in time they shall call for you — and you shall go to meet them.'

'There's post waiting with your lunch, sir.'

Totho nodded absently, brushing past the man. He was in a poor mood. He had spent a restless night thinking towards some way of reclaiming Che, but reaching no conclusions. He only hoped that Amnon was having better luck with his chosen Collegiate woman.

Of course he is , the little voice inside Totho — the one he had been born with, that had started speaking to him as soon as he had been old enough to realize what he was — piped up again. Amnon was big, handsome, charismatic. He would not need to do much to get the woman to notice him. Life had been kind to Amnon. Totho doubted the big man had ever had to work too hard at getting anything.

I have had to work, though . It felt bitter. Even in Collegium, which prided itself on its industry, the dream was to become rich enough not to have to work. That dream was inherited from the past, when Beetles had worked and Moth-kinden had spent their time in idleness, living off the sweat of their slaves. The dream was further honed by the effortless lives of the Spider-kinden Aristoi, who had nothing better to do in life than intrigue against one another. Whereas I have had to work for everything . Delivered to an orphanage by unknown parents, tinkering with mechanisms from the age of five, competing against dozens of others for a College place that would have been his for the asking, if only he had been some rich magnate's son. Yes, he had worked: to get where he was now, he had not only got his hands dirty, he had steeped them in blood to the elbows.