Read The Scarab Path for Free Online Page B

that his shadowy benefactors
were wealthy, and that they knew where he lived.
    The
insect whirred angrily off into the night, swooping low over the streetlamps
but impelled by an inescapable instinct to return home. Before morning the
Rekef operatives in Collegium, placed there with exquisite care after the close
of the war, had something new to think about, and other, grander, messengers
were soon winging their way east.
     

Four
    She was dreaming, and she knew she was dreaming. The problem was that it
was his dream. Worse still, she knew that the things
that she was witnessing through his eyes were real.
    Her mind
was full of chanting voices, overlapping and blurring together. She heard no
distinct words, just the ebb and flow of the sounds interfering with each other
until it was like a great tide, rolling in towards her endlessly.
    And she
saw robed shapes …
    She saw
robed shapes. They were atop a mountain, and the air around them was bending
and fragmenting under the strain of what they were doing. She could not tell
which one of them was Achaeos. Because it was also her dream she rushed from one to another, to find him. She never could. Their pale,
grey Moth faces, their blank white eyes, were all transfigured, so that each
face looked the same. The ritual had gripped them with an identical hand. She
shouted at them and tried to shake them. She warned them that he would die, if
they kept tearing at the world like this. Because it was his dream, and she had
not been present, they ignored her.
    She knew
that she was running out of time. It was not his time, not the time remaining until the barbed peak of the ritual, when the
power they invoked would come thundering down through the city of Tharn, and
his fragile body would be unable to take the strain. Instead it was the time
until the other arrived.
    It had
always been there beside them, although she had been blind to it for so long.
From the very first moment their minds had touched, he venturing among the
ghost-infested trees, she imprisoned in the hold of a Wasp heliopter, it had
been with them. Now she felt it rising from beneath them, through the warrened
rock of the mountain, through the very weave of the world. It was surging
upwards at a fierce, relentless pace, but it was still a good distance off
because it was pursuing from five hundred years ago.
    She
thought of flying over the Exalsee and seeing the lake monster rushing for the
surface, the great pale body of it forming from the depths.
    The
chanting grew even less and less coherent as the voices of the Moth-kinden fell
into the echo of that older, greater ritual. Around them the rock of the
mountain itself began to crack. Thorny vines thrust themselves violently into
the air, then arced round to penetrate the stone once more, to pierce the flesh
of the ritualists, yet they did not seem to notice. Transformations were being
wreaked on them. Che would run faster and faster from one to another, trying to
find Achaeos before the things of the Darakyon did. There were shadows all
around now, the shadows of great twisted trees, of Mantis-kinden writhing,
bristling with barbs, gleaming with chitin. The shadows were closing in,
encompassing the ritual. The robed figures were being consumed.
    She felt
it again, as she had felt it in life. She felt the sudden silence, that utter
silence as though she had been struck deaf. It was a silence so profound it
left an echo in the mind. It was the moment when the wrenching strain of the
ritual, the fierce attention of the Darakyon, had become too much for him, the
moment when his wound had ripped open and he had died.
    Had
died, and yet not left her.
    Behind
the Tharen mountain top and the shadow-trees of the Darakyon lay the streets of
Myna, the ziggurat of the governor’s palace, her own dream evolving in the
shadow of his. She saw a tiny figure break from the barricades, and then charge
towards the soldiers clustered around the broken palace gates. She saw, as she
had