The Scarab Path

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.

'It's a slow-burning stable mineral oil, sir. That's useful for engineering, and there are pools of it all over, probably entire lakes of it underground. Would they trade it, do you think? For more weapons?'

'I don't see why not. Like you say, there's no shortage of the stuff.' Hrathen, no artificer, shrugged the idea off. 'Are they going to be ready?'

'It's up to them, now. I'm keeping the artillery under my thumb, but the crossbows are already out there — the warriors we taught are teaching the others, as best they can. It's not difficult, to point a crossbow. That's why we like them.'

Hrathen nodded, standing up straight. It had been like watching a slow-building rockslide, seeing the Scorpions take to the crossbows. The weapons were old Imperial Auxillian standard issue kit, second-hand and almost obsolete, but for the Many of Nem they had been a revolution.

Jakal had ordered her two advisers to examine them first. The old man, with his fetishes and charms of cogs and gears, had climbed all over them, muttering to himself, testing the action on the weapons, thrumming the strings with his thumb-claw. He had reported that they were good, a worthy armament for the Host of the Nem. Next, the young man, wearing a cloak of clattering chitin shards, had walked round the wagons with his eyes closed, trailing one hand near them. He had then announced that the land believed it was well time for the city of Khanaphes to be broken open like an egg.

Scorpion-kinden made bad archers, and Hrathen knew it well. It was their claws, arching over forefinger and thumb, that got in the way, snagging or even severing a bowstring as the arrow was loosed. Those few of the locals who still preferred the bow had cut notches into their claws to hook the string with, but they were poor shots even so. Most reverted to throwing axes, spears and javelins.

The big, pincered hands of the Scorpion-kinden could manage a crossbow, though. They were still slightly clumsy with it, but they were strong enough to re-cock their weapons without the bracing and ratcheting the makers had intended. Once the crossbow was loaded they could pull a trigger as well as anyone. Eyes that had learned to foresee the flight of a spear could adjust to the swift shiver of a crossbow quarrel. There were hundreds of them, now busy eating through the stock of bolts that Hrathen had brought with him. Hundreds more were crafting new quarrels, with more and more confidence, out of chitin and wood and pillaged metal. There were not enough crossbows to go round, but about half the Scorpions were unable to use them anyway, crippled by their Inapt heritage. These would become the shock troops, the warriors of the traditional way, using greatsword and halberd and double-handed axe. There was a new fighting nobility emerging, though, and it brandished a crossbow.

We have brought a revolution, Hrathen reflected, and was slightly awed by the thought. The population of Gemrar had doubled in the last tenday, was set to double again. Allied tribes had been summoned out of the mid-desert, eager to have their part in the destruction of their age-old foe.

'Why do your people hate Khanaphes so?' he had asked Jakal once.

'Of-the-Empire, you try so hard to be Of-the-Scorpion, but you will never succeed,' she had replied, with a cruel smile. 'So we are told that our ancestors fought with theirs when this land was yet green, when these broken cities still thrived. So we are told that, of all the peoples in their Dominion, only we did not bow the knee to their Masters. So we are told all of this. What other reason do we need but that we can, and that they are there?'