Adrian Tchaikovsky - The Scarab Path

He spared a glance for the main army and saw that something was wrong. They were now locked in with the Scorpions, but were being forced back, the host of Scorpions surging to both sides of their formation.

Before him he spotted the strung-out line of weapons, long black tubes that the Scorpions were swarming around in some arcane ritual. He goaded Penthet onward, knowing that the riders behind him would take up the pace.

There were other Scorpions rushing to get between him and the weapons, but he knew a cavalry charge would break them. The Scorpions had no decent spear-wall to fend off riders, and their own cavalry was hopelessly outmanoeuvred.

Penthet came down before them, and he realized his next leap would clear the mob of Scorpions entirely. He felt the locust's hind legs bunch with all the power of their colossal muscles, knowing that his charging followers would scatter and smash the Scorpions and join him on the other side of them.

Even as he jumped, he saw the enemy crossbows let fly into the charging riders.

He came down right behind them, within three yards of the hindmost Scorpions, and turned to see his cavalry. By that time, more than half of them were dead.

Something tightened inside him. The ground the Scorpions faced was strewn with fallen men, with dying animals. Riding beetles, whose shells could shrug off javelins and axe-blades, had been pierced through with holes, the short, heavy bolts barely slowing for chitin or barding. They lay on their sides or on their backs, legs twitching and kicking in uncomprehending agony.

By now, the survivors had struck the Scorpion line, which fragmented before them, the enemy simply running left and right. Though many of the crossbowmen fell to the lances of the riders, or under the feet of their mounts, there were still plenty left.

'Onwards!' Amnon cried, although he heard his own voice sounding raw with grief. Penthet took him another great stride towards the enemy weapons, and his men followed without question. The crossbow shot began to fall on them from behind now, and from the left where the main Scorpion army was. The bolts zipped through the air like wasps. One bounded from Amnon's shield. Another skipped across Penthet's thorax right in front of him, leaving a shallow gouge, barely slowed.

The Scorpions were fleeing from the nearest weapon but he was too quick for them. He came down in their midst, his lance impaling one, and then his sword lashing out to kill two more. A scattering of riders reached him, slaying the rest before they could escape. He felt Penthet prepare for the next leap.

They had shifted the next weapon round, he saw. Some of the crew there were not Scorpions but Wasp-kinden, such as had so recently been the guests of Khanaphes. The gaping maw of the leadshotter was now facing him.

Amnon gave out a wordless cry, feeling two crossbow bolts impact into Penthet's side. The locust kicked off from the ground, unevenly but high.

The thunder spoke.

It was not just that one, but many, the others dropping shot on to the rear edge of the Khanaphir forces. That one weapon filled Amnon's view, though: the flash of fire followed by the plume of smoke. The lead-shot ball struck into his cavalry just as it was forming, smashing three riders and their beasts smashed into bloody shards.

The crossbows loosed again, and now there were just two riders behind him. The crew of the weapon ahead of him had scattered, and he did not have the numbers to hunt them down, or the strength to break the iron of the weapon itself.

He came down again, his two survivors still with him. 'Rejoin the army!' he bellowed. 'Fly!'

Penthet could fly, not strongly but enough. The beetles could manage a brief hop: a frantic, buzzing barrelling through the air. It would have to suffice.

The locust launched itself into the air, wings spreading into furious motion right behind him, battering Amnon with their force. The beetles lifted more slowly, clawing for height. One faltered, the bolts finding it an easy target, piercing its underbelly in a dozen places and bringing it down. The other one took three bolts but stayed in the air, in a single strained burst of effort that took it down behind the Khanaphir lines. Amnon felt the shuddering impact as another quarrel took Penthet in the abdomen.

Amnon's officers had already begun the retreat. With what discipline was left to them, the Khanaphir forces were falling back. In places it was already a rout, but the centre — the Royal Guard itself — was holding the Scorpions at bay, selling their own lives at a ruinous cost to the attackers.

Behind them, on the approach to the river Jamail, there lay farms and tributary villages, herders' hovels, dozens of little homes that had trusted to Khanaphes's protection. The army retreated through them at the best pace it could, and the Scorpions, who might have harried them right up to the very walls of the city, fell away to seize on this immediate chance to loot.

So it was that the remnants of the army of Khanaphes regained its city. Half of the men and women who had marched out that morning never came home.

Jakal came to him at last, that same night, after the host of Nem had made its camp amongst the burned-out farmhouses, the ruined fields. When the last prisoners had finally been tired of and slain or packed off for slaves, when the bloodlust of the battle had simmered into an anticipation of the morrow, she came to him, at last, naked save for a belt where a long dagger was sheathed.

In the gloom of his tent, by two guttering oil lamps, he could see her well enough. The bluish light tinted her pale skin with an undersea glow. She was lean and muscled, her breasts small, little of the feminine about her. Hrathen was more used to slave women, Wasps or other kinden of the Empire. Jakal's jaw jutted with narrow fangs, her hands bore claws curving over thumb and forefinger.

Gazing on her, he felt such a surge of arousal as he had never known. She was the Warlord of the Many of Nem, on whose word the horde of Scorpion-kinden fought and died. She had marked him out from the start: a constant teasing, backed with steel, that had found all the gaps in his Rekef facade. Her eyes still glinted with amusement at the victories she had won in her own personal campaign.

'Do you not trust me, yet?' he asked, looking at the dagger. She knelt beside him, pressed one hand to his broad and hairless chest, pushing him back on to his bedroll.

'I will never trust you, Of-the-Empire,' she replied, 'but this is our way. We are a fierce people, after all, and couplings turn into killings sometimes. Claws, daggers … perhaps I should take one of your crossbows into bed with me, to mark today's conquest.'

He had reached for his own sword-belt, but she pounced on his arm, pinning his wrist with her claws, gripping hard enough to draw blood.

'What need have you of steel?' she demanded. 'I know you are never unarmed, Of-the-Empire, for your Art lives in your hands — the Art of both your kin.' She drew his hand to her mouth, biting at it gently, the rank of her fangs barely denting the skin. He felt her tongue lick his palm, as though exploring where his Art came from. He could feel his palms warm with the sheer excitement of it. She released his hand and laughed at him delightedly.

She is ready to kill me , he thought, but that was no revelation. She was equally ready to kill him at any time, for any reason. It was how they lived, the Scorpion-kinden, and it meant he belonged.

She was upon him in an instant and they wrestled briefly. He might have been the stronger by some small margin, but she fought with more fire — the Warlord of the Nem demanding nothing less than a complete surrender, pinning him down beneath her and clasping him between her claws.

Her eyes held his, and he thought: Claws first, and then sting. Always the way of it . His death was now in the forefront of her mind, being contemplated, and that did nothing but inflame him more.