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.
She thrust herself down on to him, and he was more than ready to enter her. Locked together, still grappling, his hands warm against her cool skin, in that moment he abandoned the Empire, all the games and rules and weaknesses.
Later, separated, they lay watching each other, as the watches of the night turned towards morning. Scorpion-kinden did not slumber in one another's arms. Jakal had fallen back out of arm's reach, perhaps close enough still that the claws of her hands could scrape against those of his.
'Let me in,' he said, barely more than a whisper. 'What is it that I cannot understand of your people? I want to be part of your world.'
'Have I not let you in, this very night?' she asked him, amused.
'I have worked with your kinden for years, in the Dryclaw,' he told her, feeling an urgency about it. 'You are not like them: they have been corrupted by the Spiders, by the Empire. How is it you have not?'
'They forget their true enemies. They forget their past,' she explained, with a one-shouldered shrug. 'They tell no histories, they keep no lore. We hold firm to our histories here. Perhaps you had not thought of us as scholars?' He saw her fangs bared in a grin. 'Our histories are our grudges, told by each generation to the next. We hold to those grudges, and we would never let them go. Let our cousins of the Dryclaw be seduced away from their past. We remember.'
'But remember what?'
She eyed him, still smiling. 'And why would you know?'
'Because I would be a part of it. Your grudges are mine.'
'So besotted, Of-the-Empire?'
'I will kill you if you name me that again.' The words came out flatly, but sharp-edged. She paused a long moment, regarding him, turning his death over in her mind once again, but the smile stayed put.
'At last you speak as we do,' she said. 'A warrior needs no more reason to shed blood tomorrow than because the sun shines, but perhaps you should know our story, at last. We remember. We remember to the time when the desert was green. Long and long ago, when the desert was green and the cities of the Beetle-kinden were strung across it like dew on a spiderweb. Long ago when we lived in the dry fringes. When the whole world was ruled by the Masters of Khanaphes, and we alone would not bow the knee.'
Hrathen felt an odd feeling stir inside him, as though he was at the edge of a chasm, looking down. How many generations? he wondered. How much was 'the whole world' when that was true?
'Year on year, mother to daughter, and the slaves of the Masters tried to tame us. They forced us to the very edge of the world, but we would not be their slaves. We alone, of all the kinden of the world, would not surrender, nor would we flee to seek other lands and other masters.'
Other lands and other masters? Hrathen had never been a student of history, but he guessed this must mean what they called the Bad Old Days, those times in which the world had belonged to very different kinden: Moths, Spiders. Were these 'Masters' in fact Spider-kinden? It sounds like their way.
'Then the dry times came,' Jakal went on, 'and the green lands faded and the Beetle-kinden departed. Year on year, mother to daughter, the land dried, and the Beetle-kinden returned to their river, where it was always green. It was not that they could not have survived in the drier lands, but that their Masters could not, and where their Masters' power failed, so they failed also, for they were slaves always to their Masters.' Jakal's telling had started to sound almost ritualized, recalled words told over and over, told to him now in this tent in sight of Khanaphes's walls. He sensed history all around them: the clawed and brutal story of the Scorpion-kinden.
'So we came unto the lands that had once been green, and we came unto the cities of the outer desert and the mid-desert, and all the things that the Beetles had left behind. We took their metal and made swords from it. We took their wood and made spears of it. Such was the wealth they had discarded that we yet mine their cities for the commonplace treasures they have left behind. Only the cities of the inner desert are barred to us, for there the Masters posted their guardians, and those we may not disturb.'
The inner desert? Hrathen shivered again. Nothing lived in the inner desert, of course. Even the Scorpions could not survive there. That had been the Imperial understanding, at least. It had not been considered that fear of something worse might keep them away.
Once Khanaphes is dust, he thought, I shall go there and view these cities, But it was a hollow boast because, in absorbing the Many's history, he was adopting their strictures too.
'Yet still,' Jakal watched him carefully, 'still our enemies kept to the river, and held all the land that was still green, and penned us up in the dry lands, year on year, mother to daughter. Until the strangers came from the north and brought us many weapons, and showed us how to take those green lands from the Masters' servants. And we smote the servants of the Masters and tore down their walls, and slew them, women, men and children, each and every one,' and she said it sweetly, very sweetly indeed, and he loved her for it. Thirty-One We have lost control.