The Scarab Path by Adrian Tchaikovsky

spears and drawn bows, the gilded and alabaster armour of the
Royal Guard of Khanaphes.
    The
slavers made no attempt at fighting. At the sight of the Royal Guard, they took
to their heels. Petri saw the three guardsmen holding bows calmly aim and
loose, and heard the solid sounds behind her of arrows finding their mark. The
lead guardsman was now approaching her, one hand held out to draw her to her
feet. She saw it was their captain, Amnon, who had always terrified her. He was
over six foot – very tall for a Beetle – but he seemed at least a foot taller
still. He seemed larger than life, packed with energy and strength, bulging
with muscles, with hands that could have crushed rocks: so fiercely alive and
strong that she felt his presence as if he were a fire. She cringed away as he
reached out, but he put her back on her feet one-handed, the other grasping a
second spear behind his glorious oval shield.
    ‘Honoured
Foreigner Petri Coggen,’ he said, grinning at her with white teeth, ‘how
fortunate that we found you.’
    She
could only nod. This was the First Soldier of Khanaphes, the Captain of the
Royal Guard. He was everything she had been trying to escape from, to warn
Collegium about. He was part of what had taken Master Kadro, she felt sure of
it.
    ‘Come,
we will take you to your new rooms,’ Amnon informed her, putting an arm about
her shoulders. He made her feel like a mere child, like a Fly-kinden. He had
come accompanied by only five men, but twice the number of slavers would not
have dared face him, for he could have walked into the Marsh Alcaia on his own.
Amnon was a legend here, and his position in the city was well earned.
    At last
his words got through to her. ‘New rooms?’ she asked timorously.
    ‘Of
course.’ He drew a folded paper from inside his broad belt. It was the same
letter from Collegium that she had left on the desk back in her lodgings. ‘Your
people are sending friends, so we must ensure that our hospitality is not
wanting. We will prepare a proper welcome for them.’ His smile was guileless,
yet as savage as the sun.
     

Six
    ‘I have travelled in more luxury, in my time,’ said Mannerly Gorget.
‘When they said we would be travelling on the White Cloud, I allowed myself to get excited. I hadn’t realized they meant as freight.’
    ‘You
exaggerate,’ Praeda told him. ‘Also, the padding you bring to the ship should
be luxury enough.’ She had made herself comfortable, or at least as comfortable
as possible, against a bulkhead. It was not actually the cargo hold they were
in, but three compartments alongside it that had probably been originally
intended for crew. By unspoken agreement, Che and Praeda had taken the bow, the
men had taken the stern, and the middle compartment was where they habitually
sat and complained about the arrangement.
    Since
the war, Solarno and Collegium had not been strangers. A two-way trickle of
scholars and artificers had begun, all keen to learn or to profit from the
shortcomings of the one city or the other. The sheer distance, and the
intervening cities of the Spiderlands, sufficiently complicated the journey to
still make most forms of trade uneconomical. There was a certain market,
however, that had grown up very recently between them, and that was aptly
represented by the White Cloud . Just as Spider
Aristoi had been using Solarno as a holiday retreat for centuries, so the idea
had grown up amongst the richest of the Collegium magnates. Solarno, that
beautiful lakeside city, with its civilized comforts and entertainments, had
become the place to go for a certain class of the
very wealthy. Deep in the Beetle mind there had always been a sense of
grievance with the world. Beetle-kinden felt themselves looked down upon. They
came from old slave stock. They were unsubtle in their dealings. Compared with
the elegant grace of the Spider-kinden, they felt like club-footed children. It
was a thorn in the minds of all of them, especially those