Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Scarab Path

The Wasps had killed them all in less than a minute. Faighl and the others, loyal servants of the Iron Glove, they had not stood a chance. Meyr glowered now at the Wasps, at their halfbreed leader. He saw more than that. He looked beyond them at the Scorpions, all lovingly fingering their spears and knives. The blood and the violence had been like food and drink to them.

With the bodies of his followers strewn at his feet, he met the gaze of the halfbreed. The man was smiling slightly, and Meyr tensed for a gesture, the smallest sign that would signal the attack.

Instead, the man grinned openly as he stepped back three paces, letting a Scorpion pass him to his left, and another to his right. All his men kept widening their half-circle, until it was the Many of Nem that Meyr faced, and not the Empire. The Scorpions all wore the same hateful smile as their half-caste cousin. Step by step they closed in on the giant, pausing just out of the reach of his axe.

So, we are weak, in their eyes . Meyr found, belatedly, that he despised them. They had signed themselves over to the Empire, and they did not even know it.

One of them hurled a spear, almost without warning. Meyr got his shield up, felt the strength of the missile rattle against the aviation steel. Something else, perhaps a hand-axe, rebounded from his pauldron, striking from behind.

They came for him then. Without a war cry, with nothing but a glitter of raised weapons, they descended like ravenous beasts.

'I spit on you all,' Meyr roared at them, and then let himself fall into the earth.

That night, around the fires, Jakal came to find Hrathen. She crouched beside him, one sharp elbow knocking aWasp slaver away and clearing a space. She did not spare the unseated man a glance.

'You are very clever, Of-the-Empire,' she began.

'Am I?' he said, carefully neutral. Her presence, suddenly so close, had fired his pulse a little. Is it that I genuinely admire her, or simply because I cannot have her? he asked himself.

'Walk with me, great conqueror,' she said, standing again. 'We will talk of your deeds.'

It is because she challenges me , he thought. She cares nothing for rank, nothing for the Empire. She is the pure savage, and she would cut my throat in a moment — will do so, when I am no longer of use .

And the thought came back, And she would do the same with any other here, and so I am one of them . It was bittersweet, that thought. The Rekef in him jeered at it, but that part of him whose actions had seen him brought in for treason, that man understood. He launched himself to his feet and followed her off into the dark.

'What would you hear of my deeds, O Warlord?' he asked her, trying to match her tone. Away from the fires, he could not see her face clearly but he knew she was smiling.

'I shall tell you of them. You are a cunning creature, Of-the-Empire. You knew that the giant would escape my people.'

He shrugged. 'I was a slaver for the Empire. You learn about the Art of the lesser races. I knew that some of his kinden could walk within the earth.'

'How do you ever keep them enslaved?' she asked.

'Many don't have the Art. Most have kin that don't. For every runaway, every act of rebellion, we punish those we still have.' He spread his clawed hands. 'That man bought his freedom with the blood of his people. He's unusual. They're clannish, the Mole Crickets, and most of them just offer their backs to the lash and get on with their work.'

She gave a brief laugh. 'So your generosity gave the giant to my people.'

'And if they had killed him, they'd have thanked me,' Hrathen said. 'And if we'd gone for him and he'd escaped, we'd look weak. Do you disapprove?'

'No. I love cleverness. There are chieftains stronger than I, more skilled, more savage, but none is more clever, Of-the-Empire, remember that.'

'Must you call me that?' He surprised himself with the complaint. It was a weakness, to seek to avoid the name, but it jabbed him like a stone in his boot every time she used it. Perhaps it had surprised her, too, for she paused, appearing nothing but a darkness within the night. He sensed her staring back at him.

'What else am I to call you? That is all you are, to me: you are the Empire's halfbreed hand.' She sat down, looking back at the fires, at the hasty tents of her people. 'So tell me, Of-the-Empire, tell me of yourself — if there is more than that.'

He joined her carefully, within arm's reach of her. Now that his eyes were growing used to the dark, he saw how the distant wash of the oil flames gave her pale skin the faintest touch of blue fire.

'I was a slaver for a long time, working the Silk Road mostly,' he said. 'Then I was a Rekef man, keeping an eye on the slavers. It looked like that was all I'd ever be, travelling up and down the Dryclaw with the Scorpion-kinden-'

'I know of them,' she interrupted dismissively. 'The tame ones, we call them.'

He digested that, nodding. 'Then the war came,' he continued. 'War with the Lowlands. First strike was against an Ant city-state off the Silk Road, an army moving through the desert to get there. Throwing money at the Scorpions to act as guides. Suddenly I was important: the Rekef were leaning on me, wanting the Scorpions this place or that.'

'And who did you betray?' she asked, keen as a razor, enough to make him pause for one second, thinking: Is she Rekef? Is this the reckoning for me, here and now?

'To run with your kinden, even the "tame ones", one must live like you, share your values,' he explained. 'When the time came that they seized on the hand that fed them, I did not restrain them. Perhaps they could not have been restrained, anyway. Imperial supplies began disappearing. It was only a matter of time. If they hadn't gone on to hatch this plan, I'd be on crossed pikes by now.'

'Yes, this plan.' After that she was silent for a long time and, although he opened his mouth to speak several times, he could not find the words.

Eventually she sighed. 'Your Empire thinks us stupid,' she said, and then, 'I had the omens read, today, from the blood spilt on the sand.'

He had nothing to say to that, so he waited for her to elaborate.

'The haruspex told me that we would advance like the desert wind, that we would break the walls of Khanaphes and scourge them from the city's streets.'

'That sounds a good omen.'

'Does it?'

He gave her time to explain but she said nothing, and her melancholy was now infecting him. Eventually he said, 'I don't … we don't have omens and such in the Empire. Even amongst the Dryclaw tribes. I don't know what you mean.'

She laughed softly. 'Oh, the desert storm is a terrible thing, but where does it go to, when the wind is blown out? When the sand has settled again, where shall we be? The world is changing, Of-the-Empire. The Khanaphir do not realize it, and so they will be destroyed, but the world is changing. As for us, what do we build? What do we craft, save weapons? What do we create? And now we have your Empire to our north, and we look upon the tame ones and we can see our future. How long will it be before the Nem is no longer ours to rule? Perhaps I am the very last who can truly call herself the Warlord of the Many.'

He said nothing to this, because he could deny none of it.

'But in these last days we are strong,' she said, and with that she had banished her mood back to where it could not be heard or seen. 'And if the grave-marker of my people shall be the ruin of Khanaphes, so be it. Let them look upon those broken walls and know that once the Nem was free.' He saw the faintest movement of her face turning to him with its distant phosphorescence. 'You will never be one of us, Of-the-Empire, but I think you will never be of the Empire either. Men like you are cast simply for moments when the desert storm strikes. And then they are cast away. And then cast away, remember that.'