Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  In Collegium they drank wine, mostly from the local vineyards, and almost always watered. Drinking unwatered wine was for madmen and Mantids. And Tallway, when she deigned to drink anything so commonplace as wine. She was an expert in locating brands of alcohol that were as potent as they were obscure.

  The stuff she foisted on Lial after Limner died was bitter on the tongue, sweet on the back of the throat and apparently some kind of nettle brandy. Where Tallway had got hold of a case of it, she wouldn’t say, but they got through a remarkable quantity, with Lial brooding evermore deeply, and Tallway becoming increasingly erratic. Some time after midnight she explained to him, in great and complex detail, how she was going to go home and show “him” just how wrong he’d been, to “knock down all his people” and to “puncture his drum”, whatever that meant. Lial did not try to ford the rushing torrent of her words lest he be swept away. Besides, almost everything that Tallway said was a lie, usually an obvious and entertaining one. He had no wish to find out whether the little truth left in her was all that remained after sufficient drink.

  And in the small hours she looked him straight in one eye or the other and said, “So, you can’t fly yet then.”

  “Not even the slightest bit,” Lial confirmed, clinking the rim of his bowl to hers.

  “Shows what a rotten teacher I am, though,” she told him, slurringly earnest. “Never believe anyone who tells you they know how the Art works. Nobody does, not my lot, not your lot, not a bit of it.”

  “What do I pay you for, then?” Lial had been meditating under Tallway’s guidance for over a year.

  “This stuff costs something rotten,” she explained, refilling their bowls messily. “So, you can’t fly, not even with this expensive liquor inside you.”

  For a moment he thought, befuddled, that this was the secret, and he reached for the wings that were waiting for him in the ether, the unseen place that the Art came from, but there was nothing, and instead of leaping into the air he fell over sideways, which seemed hilarious to both of them.

  “Not me,” he confirmed to the floorboards.

  “And your man Limner, old Cutmold Limner, he couldn’t fly either,” she said sadly. He cocked an eye up at her.

  “It should have worked. No reason, no reason for it not to’ve,” he told her. Long arms reached out and righted him, or tried to, and for a moment they were clinging to each other, getting tangled up with just which arm belonged to who, and she planted a nettle-flavoured kiss on his cheek. He leant into her bony armpit. “I heard the engine, though,” he explained, gesturing wildly. “It was working. The wings, oh the wings were going all over the place, but then... the gears sheared. We made them strong as we could, but I heard all the teeth go on one of them, ping, ping, ping! Big old gears, but not strong enough, not for those wings. Why not? Why not fly? All the calculations worked. Master Limner had me check ‘em myself.”

  “Nothing that big can fly,” Tallway pronounced, hugging him to her one-armed, the other reaching for the bottle. “Sorry. I sorry. I sorry? Yes, I sorry, old Beetle old boy, but I say you before. Too big piece of metal belong earth, not sky, don’tcherknow?”

  “I’ve seen bigger insects than that get off the ground,” Lial muttered stubbornly. “I saw a load-beetle twice that size get airborne. Landed on a roof and went straight through it.”

  Tallway snickered. “No, but no, but your beetle, your beetle of whatever shape or size or what have you, you see, isn’t metal. Not wood. Not weighing, see? Not that I know how your gears and teeth or what have you, but metal... metal belong earth not sky. Us also.”

  “Then I’ll build it out of...” Lial frowned and slurped the last drops out of his bowl, “something that belongs sky. What belongs sky?”

  “Clouds,” she said, and “wind,” he countered, and they continued naming the lightest, airiest things they could think of until dawn (itself named two hours before) marched from the east like a harsh and unforgiving army.

  Lial slept for most of the rest of the day, and retained only two things from the entire night’s work. One was a hangover of grandiose proportions, and the other was one of Tallway’s suggestions for something that belonged to the sky.

  Staring at the ceiling of his lodgings, knowing that the workshop was lost, his master was lost, and the entire dream was on the very point of following them, he determined that he would give it a go. What could go wrong? Or at least, what else was left, that had not already gone as wrong as could be?

  He let the workshop go. He would not need one until he had fixed a great many other things, and there was no point frittering his meagre savings on it. He sold every piece of machinery in it, kept the pick of the portable tools, and let the landlord reclaim the barren room. So much for that.

  That done, he began to make enquiries into supply. The commodity that Tallway had dreamt up was neither readily available nor cheap. The local stuff was legendarily poor in quality and, while the Spiderlands shipped tons of it, they charged the earth, and demand was high enough to keep prices rising in all seasons. A little came south from the Moth-kinden of Dorax, but that was through Sarn, adding both tariffs and considerable personal danger for any trader willing to risk that route. Dealing with Ant-kinden was always a dubious business, with arbitrary confiscation, imprisonment or slavery always a possibility.

  After a couple of months of asking questions and trying to arrange deals, Lial began to recognise that more than simple economics were against him. Merchants saw him coming, and closed their doors. Word of his intentions preceded him, with universally negative results. For a long time he could not account for it, but then Goiter Parrymill paid him another visit.

  “I was sad to hear that you’d let old Limner’s workshop go,” the magnate rumbled. “You’re doing all right for yourself, of course?” He looked around the mould-stained walls of Lial’s wretched little room, where he had turned up unannounced.

  “I live,” Lial told him flatly.

  “And retain your ambitions, no doubt.” A sharp look came into Parrymill’s eye. “My friends tell me you’re enquiring into the silk trade. Buying. That rang a few warning bells.”

  Lial sat on his sagging bed and waited, without comment.

  “If you’re trying to mark out a space in the airship business, lad, it isn’t that easy,” Parrymill said, and his avuncular jolliness was gone. “I know, I know, everyone looks up and sees the gasbags, and thinks, that’s a decent line of work, licence to mint money, I want a piece of that. But it’s not that easy, lad, and for those of us who have put in all the hard work, we don’t appreciate new and inexperienced hands trying to undercut us. You’re not the first young artificer to think we’ll share ownership of the sky.”

  “So that’s it,” Lial said aloud. It was true, the airship trade did very well. It was the safest way to travel, the swiftest, and the bigger airships could even haul a fair weight in cargo. Over the last few decades the men who built and operated the airships had become a commercial aristocracy in Collegium, counting College Masters and Assemblers amongst their ranks.

  “If you want work in the airship line, lad, there are easier ways than trying to piece together your own float and set up as a sole trader. Just ask. I’ll find a place for you. For Limner’s sake. He always reckoned you were a good hand.” Parrymill served up his most beneficient smile.

  Lial smiled back a little, and Parrymill obviously took that as an encouraging sign, but the younger Beetle shook his head.

  “You needn’t fear, Master Parrymill, I want none of the airship trade.”

  The magnate frowned. “Then why such an interest in the price of silk?”

  “Because it’s so very, very light,” Lial told him. “Now, if you would be so kind, Master, I have an early morning in the markets.”

  Parrymill was actually almost through the door before he abruptly turned and stared at Lial. “You wouldn’t be about the same lunacy as your master, would you?”

  Lial just looked at him, pointed
ly waiting for him to leave.

  “I don’t see why I should let a gifted apprentice get himself killed by such stupidity,” Parrymill snarled. “Boy, I will make it my business to ensure that you’re in no position...”

  “Goodbye, Master Parrymill,” said Lial firmly, and closed the door on him. Still, he considered, how very insistent. Why would Goiter Parrymill be so concerned by this?

  Does he see now what the river barge men saw, when the first airship put out and stole their trade?

  And yet the doors remained closed against him. The airship cartels were the city’s greatest consumers of silk, and no merchant wanted to get on the wrong side of them. Lial descended the trading hierarchy rung by rung. From the big trading houses he went to known independent dealers, then to generalist merchants who sometimes saw a little silk in their business, and then to those whose stock in trade came to them after unexpectedly parting company with its rightful owner, and still nobody would sell him the quantity of silk he required. He was making ends meet doing piecework and tinker-work around the city, saving every silver standard and ceramic bit, but no matter how much he offered, the material was not to be had.

  And then, after one more dismal evening of being given the brush-off even by smugglers and fences, a Fly-kinden messenger turned up with a note, written out in blockily neat letters

  Hear it’s Silk now you’re after. I met a Fellow has some, he says. Find the Roach’s Roost on Partwell Street near the river. Party name of Terant. Looks Horrible. Probably is. Good Luck.

  There was no signature, but Lial felt he had nothing to lose by then.

  The Roach’s Roost was a sagging and dilapidated hostelry that had once served the barge trade up towards Sarn. The river trade had been getting steadily poorer since Parrymill’s peers had brought their airships to bear on the shipping of goods, and so he had hoped for some sympathy. Lial took a table on entering the Roost, and had fended off three whores and a drunken Beetle with a knife before a big man dropped easily into a seat across from him. Lial suddenly reconsidered just how capable he might be of looking after himself.

  The big man was a Spider-kinden, but like no Spider Lial had ever seen. He was heavy-jawed, broad-shouldered, shockingly hairy: his arms, chest and shoulders were virtually pelted with the stuff, and a coarse, dark mane was tied back from his unshaven face. He wore nothing but a coarse cloak and a kind of leather harness, from which a knotted cudgel dangled.

  “You’re the naïf who’s trying to become a silk merchant,” the big man observed.

  “And you’re Terant? I just need a quantity of silk, not even very much. It’s not too much to ask.” Lial had his hands on the table-edge, ready to throw it up in the man’s face if he needed to. He wasn’t sure it would do any good. The man looked strong enough to break Lial and the table in half in one go.

  “We have silk. Some,” the big man said. “Your people won’t trade with you, yes? Ours won’t trade with us. We’ll work well together. We’ll make everyone hate us.”

  “Who’s ‘we’?” Lial asked, but his heart was pounding. At that point he couldn’t care less who this man represented.

  “Follow,” said the big man, standing. He towered a full head over Lial, who was not short for a Beetle-kinden.

  Lial was led to a private house in a poor district, and by that time his initial enthusiasm had begun to wear off. He kept a hand to his knife-hilt and tried to reassure himself by considering that, had the big man wanted to do him harm, then precious little could have prevented it already, they were so mismatched. This proved less reassurance with every step he took.

  Then the man was pushing open a door in a tall, narrow house of very poor repair, looking back to give Lial a grin that showed one missing tooth. “Followed me this far, did you? Stout Beetle. Come in.”

  It was clear that only a couple of rooms had been made liveable: cheap rugs for the floor, a table, a couch. The bare walls had been covered over with hangings that glimmered darkly in the gloom. Lial reached to examine one, and felt a sudden rush when his fingers encountered the unmistakeable filmy smoothness of silk.

  When he looked back to Terant, they had been joined by a woman, or perhaps she had always been there, shrouded by shadow and Art.

  She was short and slight of build, a Spider-kinden of more conventional aspect. Her robes were also silk, pale in the dimness. “A lantern for our guest, Terant,” she said, her voice soft. “You forget, he does not have our eyes, for the dark.” There was something cradled in her arms and he took it for a child, and then for a lumpy bag of valuables.

  Terant took out an ancient-looking oil lamp and then started fumbling with flint and steel. Automatically, Lial said, “Let me,” and came forward with his steel lighter, producing a flame on the third turn of the wheel and setting up a subdued glow from the lamp. He looked at his hostess, and froze, trying desperately to fix his face in a polite smile.

  She wore a half-mask and it was a beautiful thing, a lattice of gold filigree and black lacquer about a many-faceted ruby that sat neatly over her left eyesocket. For material and craftsmanship that mask could have bought Lial Morless many times, and would have put a dent in even Goiter Parrymill’s accounts. What froze him in place was how the mask had been made: not what it concealed, but what it revealed. It was open-lattice and sat like a spider’s web over half her face, and hid not at all the fact that someone had done a great deal of work, over a considerable period of time, to ruin her. The scar-lines filled in the detail of the mask’s web, so that between them, artifice and injury, she was complete.

  He swallowed any retort and managed to straighten up from the lamp and hold himself still.

  “Terant, our hospitality,” the woman said, and her – what? Servant, slave, friend? – fished a jug and some clay goblets from a table. The wine was brackish and cheap. Tallway would have turned her nose up at it. While the big man served, the Spider-kinden woman hugged her bundle to her, an uneven, sagging thing of knots and loose ends.

  Lial racked his mind for all he knew of Spiders and their cohorts. “He is of your cadre?” he asked her, nodded towards Terant.

  “He is almost all the cadre I have left,” the woman replied. A cadre was the close personal retinue of a Spider lady or lord, the most trusted, most capable and most valued of her staff. Lial was looking at someone who had lost out in the politics of the Spider dance, fallen far and hard.

  “My name is Lial Morless, artificer,” he told her.

  “And you may call me Gryssa.” The way she said it made it clear that it was a name of convenience. “You want silk, and nobody will sell to you. That’s what Terant tells me.”

  “He’s right,” Lial admitted.

  “I want to invest, but nobody will trade with me. Any reputable merchant of this city knows me as someone who has enemies. They consider me a bad risk. I, on the other hand, have access to a small supply of silk.” She was watching him carefully. “Not enough to make an airship of, but I’m told that is not your intent.”

  Told by whom? But at the same time Lial had no other offers. “I need silk, yes. I’ll gladly deal with you, if I can meet your price. But I don’t understand. If nobody will trade with you, how are you bringing the goods into the city?”

  She just looked at him, pale living eye and rich ruby in tandem, and a moment later he realised she had shifted her bundle, trying to proffer it for his inspection. It clung to her, though, like a child, clung to her with its thin, sharp-elbowed legs. The lantern-light caught a glitter across the scatter of its eyes.

  “I have one other in my cadre, save Terant,” she told him, but she was looking down at her burden now, doting, and the spider in her arms looked back, linked to her by some communion of her Art. Lial shuddered uncontrollably, for although any venomous beasts of such size were long driven far from Collegium’s walls, there were still houses where the nursery windows were barred to keep them out, and you still heard stories...

  But he had no options, and they needed each ot
her, and despite the thing in her arms, or because of it, they reached an agreement.

  “Now do you remember old Cutmold Limner,” grated out the iron magnate, Torqwell Glassey, as a servant topped up his wine.

  Goiter Parrymill nodded almost fondly. “Oh yes. The heavier-than-air flying machine. Well, we saw where that went, sure enough.”

  “Down,” another wit suggested, to general amusement. Parrymill was dining with some of his peers, a very comfortable affair. He had not thought of old Limner in months.

  “Why drag him out?” he asked. “The old fellow was a good artificer in his day. You’ll not be disrespectful, I hope.”

  “One of my people ran into a chap that used to be his apprentice,” Glassey explained. “Reminded me, is all.”

  “Reader’s rights! That boy?” Parrymill shook his head. “And would you believe I offered him a perfectly decent place working on the airships, and he wouldn’t take it. So what’s he up to now?”

  “Same business as the old man, from what my fellow could gather. Buying up all sorts of odds and ends in the machine parts way of things,” Glassey explained.

  Parrymill had gone very still. “You’re surely mistaken,” he said softly. “I made clear to the young man months ago that Limner’s line of speculation was leading nowhere. Besides, last I heard, nobody would deal with him. He was trying to elbow into the silk trade.” And, the unspoken thought, I made cursed sure that he’d not get the first foothold there, to build his flying machine. It’s been so long. I assumed he’d left the city or something. Has he just been planning all this time?

  “Putting together something for Clifftops in his bedroom, is he?” he asked carefully.

  “Fellow’s got a workshop,” Glassey said, all apparent innocence, but there was a part of him watching Parrymill with great amusement. “Fellow’s serious, Goiter. He’s set up on Shallowacre. Go take a look at him, if you want.”