'I've no intention of it. All I really need to do is make sure Master Gripshod and the others get to study the place, and they can probably do that just by standing and looking.'
'Hmm, two things,' Trallo said. 'First, don't poke and pry until I give the all-clear. They are a very private people, the Khanaphir. Second, don't call him that.'
'What?'
'Master Gripshod – or Master anything. Local customs, local rules. They keep the word "Master" for other purposes, and it's got nothing to do with people like us.'
He was quite serious. She waited for him to elaborate, and he shrugged.
'I'm not saying that I understand it. I've been to Khanaphes a score of times and I still don't understand the place. But, take my word for it, find some other way to make introductions.' She was below when the Lord Janis began to tack, but she felt the change in the timbers, and ran up on deck to see.
The desert had turned green. While her back was turned the land had been colonized by a vast expanse of reeds and spidery-rooted trees and huge arthrophytes twice as high as a man, all sprouting from a maze of little water channels. The Lord Janis was taking in sail, slowing down, and Che saw that it was angling for a broad watercourse that cut through the marsh ahead, a river in its own right.
The others were assembled on deck by now: the three academics standing forward of the mast, the two Vekken sullenly behind it. Che went to join Berjek Gripshod, watching the riot of vegetation pass by on the port side.
'The Jamail delta,' Trallo clarified for them. 'Goes on for miles. Once a year they dredge the main channel clear of silt, but it still moves around a bit. It all does. They say nobody but the natives can find their way in there from day to day.'
The channel itself was wide enough for five ships like the Janis to have sailed in abreast. It was a truce with nature, for beyond those carefully maintained borders the greenery ran mad. There were flies and dragonflies near man-size quartering the air over the water, and she saw something huge and brown and slimy-looking surface to peer at the ship with goggling eyes.
'This river is life, basically,' Trallo was saying. 'This river is Khanaphes and all the other towns north of it. This is the line of green through the desert that everyone here needs to survive.'
Something caught Che's eye, something too rigid and angular to be natural. Between the ferns and the articulated trunks of horsetails, she saw huts – a rabble of little straw-roofed hovels lifted out of the water on stilts. She caught a glimpse of people, and then a boat gliding through the shallow channels, half-obscured by the green. A moment later it cut out on to the river behind the Lord Janis, a long, low boat with a high bow and stern, constructed only from reeds and rope. A woman with silvery-grey skin was effortlessly poling it near the bank. Almost unsurprised, now, Che recognized her as a Mantis-kinden. She looked anxiously at the Spider sailors, but none of them paid the native the slightest attention.
They do things differently here.
'And there we go,' said Trallo.
Che followed his gaze and caught her breath. The academics, too, were abruptly at the rail, staring.
'Khanaphes, the majestic, the mysterious,' said the showman, Trallo, as though he was charging admission.
Ahead of them, the river was flanked by squared pillars of stone four storeys high, vast at the base and barely tapering as they reached up to support the sky. The stone of the pillars was a dusty tan, while the statues set into their faces gleamed white. They stood almost the entire height of the pillars, carved seamlessly from marble, a man and a woman, barely clad and walking forward. The sculptor had lavished infinite care on their colossal proportions, the man's body heavy and broad-waisted, the woman's rounded breasts and hips, the flowing cascade of long hair down both sets of shoulders. Their faces viewed the marsh and the sea with cold beatitude. These were the countenances of a man and woman who ruled everything they saw as far as the wave-stirred horizon and beyond. Before that commanding, all-encompassing gaze the academics momentarily quailed. Che felt a shiver go through her, witnessing such perfection in stone. Those were beautiful faces, but they were appalling in their utter lack of empathy. It was no failing of the sculptor, though: the hands that had shaped them had carved and chipped to instil them with just such a coldness.
They were certainly not Beetle-kinden. No trick of style could ever have transformed them out of something so mundane. Che had never seen anyone or anything that even approached them.
'The Estuarine Gate,' Trallo announced, but she barely heard him. The blind stone gaze seemed to follow the matchwood thing that was the Lord Janis as it passed through the gulf between them and they saw Khanaphes proper.
It was a city built of stones – more so than any other place Che had seen. Houses raised of tan masonry clustered thickly about both sides of the river, and beyond the single-cell dwellings of the poor loomed the edifices of the wealthy. Avenues flanked by pillars led off toward statue-adorned squares where great squatting palaces faced one another, rising higher and higher, each surrounded by a miniature city of smaller structures, and the gaps between them filled with meaner dwellings and workshops.
'Well, rack me,' Berjek Gripshod exclaimed softly. 'Now look at that.'
The Janis pulled in skilfully at a dock near the gate, and the crew tied up. With the gangplank down, Che led the way on to the wharves of Khanaphes. Even the pier they were moored to was of stone. How many pairs of hands, how many years, to make all this? And yet so little of it looked recent. Time had laid its rounding hand on each surface and angle.
'Look,' said Berjek, and he sounded as though he was going to weep. Even the buildings nearest to them, mere stone huts, were intricately carved. Some simply had borders of angular, stylized images etched on to them, others bore whole panels of complex, intricate, indecipherable work. Looking around, Che could not see a single surface of stonework, even the pier beneath her sandals, that had not somehow been illustrated.
'We should have brought more people,' Berjek said hoarsely. This was hopeless. It would take an army of scholars all their lives to record this. The city was its own library.
Trallo was meanwhile organizing the luggage, his two Solarnese hauling it down on to the quayside. Che stepped aside from the academics, and the brooding Vekken, and stared into the crowd. The docks were a continuous bustle, a dozen ships unloading, the same number again preparing to cast off. There were men and women of many different kinden there, together with a swarm of the ubiquitous bald-headed Beetles. Her eyes had grown used, not so long since, to being wary of crowds. Helleron, Solarno, Myna: the war had given her instincts that had become stubborn guests.
As she looked, so she found. The face leapt out at her, a moment's eye contact across the crowded docks, but that was not a face she was ever likely to forget. Not five minutes after stepping from the ship, and her world was reverting to its old faithless ways once again.
Thalric. Part 2 The Black and Gold Path Nine The grand army of General Vargen had arrayed itself before the city of Tyrshaan, black-and-yellow armour crossed with a sash of blue, the old badge of the Kings of Tyrshaan that had not been seen during this last generation. General Vargen, whose rank was self-given, and who was elsewhere known as just another one of the traitor-governors, had decided to risk a field battle, not trusting his forces to endure a siege. It was not necessarily a poor choice, for Thalric had seen the siege train that the Imperial forces had brought with them. Tyrshaan's walls were neither high nor strong.