Free The Scarab Path by Adrian Tchaikovsky Page B

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 rich enough to discover that there were things that money could not buy. Solarno, lying outside the Spiderlands proper, had given them a place to go and flaunt their affluence. They would promenade alongside the glittering Exalsee, throng its tavernas, watch its excitable locals and pretend that, by doing what the Spider-kinden nobility did, they had become their equals. What the Spiders thought of it all was unknown, but Solarno was raking in money hand over fist. The White Cloud did not lack passengers for the return trip, either. The Spider-kinden who lived in Solarno were sheltering from the Dance, and it provided a backwater allowing them to play their games in safety. The introduction of Collegium into their lives, a whole city crammed with the naive and the adoring, had enlivened their social scene considerably.
    Captain Parrols of the White Cloud was possessed of unusual acumen, himself a Helleren Beetle of dubious provenance. He had almost ruined himself to fit out this little airship with as much tawdry opulence as possible, but he had since made it all back and more, even with only a single round trip every month. The sort of people who took the air in Solarno could not afford to be seen looking cheap. Parrols had been less enchanted with the idea of carrying a grab-bag of academics on his ship, but he owed Drillen and so had grudgingly acquiesced. Their current station within the bowels of the vessel was testimony to the stalemate reached between Drillen’s influence and Parrols’s parsimony.
    The Khanaphir Expedition of the Great College consisted of either three, four or six people, depending on your point of view. The fourth person was Cheerwell, and she found herself with an uneasy and ill-defined role. Although a scholar of the College, she was not present here as an academic. The other three had credentials, while she was merely a student with a colourful recent history. She had been given the over-large title of Collegiate Ambassador to Khanaphes, even though Stenwold could not furnish her with much idea of what such a grand personage might do. Khanaphes itself sounded a confusing and contradictory place, so she would have to think on her