Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Then she had him by the chin, yanking his head about, forcing the confrontation onto her terms. “Even in my homeland, my teachers were nothing more than pawns of the Aristoi, and our magic just the tool of princes. Servants and mercenaries, that is all we are. Your shining past was dead long before the Empire came. They’re just throwing its body onto the pyre.”

  “I will not believe it,” he said calmly. “My father –”

  “Is dead,” and she almost said, I killed him wearing your mother’s face, because she wanted to hurt him. She wanted to take his pride and self-possession and crumble them to pieces in her hands. She had seen herself through his eyes now – a stunted tree. It made her want him all the more but, if she was to have him, he must be broken. Only then would he give himself to what he had seen in her.

  But all she said was, “Come with me,” and she got him back on the horse and then led the beast down the road towards lower ground.

  Two days before, there had been a battle here. A force of Commonwealers had turned up at the rear of Thalric’s men, either sent to relieve the castle or just very lost. The Empire’s response had been swift and predictable.

  Serge Volente stood and looked out at it all, and she saw him tremble. Her secret heart exalted at it.

  “Behold,” she told him, “the glorious field of valour. Here did the gilded lords and ladies of the Commonweal bring their righteous battle against the craven brutes of the Wasp Empire.”

  She was exaggerating, of course: courage was one thing the soldiers of the Empire never lacked. She was telling him the story as the old tales were told, though, where the heroes of those days had walked through a world that bled superlatives.

  The Wasps had removed their own dead for cremation, of course. What was left was the history of the Wasp-Commonweal war in miniature: dead Dragonfly-kinden and their allies, strewn and abandoned.

  “Here, these were noble retainers,” she went on, picking her way forwards and drawing him with her. “See how their bright armour gleams.” Where it isn’t shattered. “See the swords and bows and lances, the tools of their ancient and exquisite skills.” Broken now, fallen from lifeless hands. “And here, the great and loyal populace of their farms and fields, banded together in the loyal service of their masters,” she went on, showing him where the peasant levy had been mown down, hacked down, crushed beneath the grinding wheels of the war automotives. “And here –” but for a moment even her jibes failed her, staring at the cracked and half-dismembered carcass of a praying mantis twelve feet long, killing arms splayed and twisted. Around it, the spined corpses of Mantis-kinden lay where they had fallen, the most feared killers of the old days brought down by crossbow bolts and stingshot.

  “Stop,” whispered Serge Volente, although she already had. And then, “but who are these that have come here.” He was clutching desperately for hope. “Have they come to honour the fallen?”

  There were a score or so tattered and hunched figures, creeping sidelong across the field of ruin like crabs. At his assessment of them she laughed.

  “Oh my princeling, my poor innocent, they have come to rob the dead of what little dignity remains. They are the carrion-pickers, here for rings and broaches, treasured keepsakes, ancestral heirlooms. Because trinkets are the only things of value left to your people.” She was going to laugh again, but for a moment one of those shabby ring-cutters was looking at her, and she thought she saw red, bulging eyes beneath its cowl.

  “How can you be on their side, the ones who have done this?” Volante’s voice brought her back to herself. “You’re one of us.”

  And he was clutching at her arm: even her support was better than no support at all. He was pressing close to her because the alternative was the dead or their parasites.

  She took him by the shoulders, feeling him shiver. “There is you and me,” she told him, with all the gentleness she could scrape together, “but there is no us. There is no great age of magic for you to inherit. All the futures your father saw were lies.” And tears came to his eyes at last, as though he had only just understood his parents were dead, “The engines of the Wasps grind forwards,” she explained, “and leave this in their wake: this is all that is left of magic now – its corpse.”

  “Then what are you?” he asked her desperately.

  “I am a maggot in that corpse,” she told him. “But, if you let go all your foolish futures and give yourself to me, I will save you.”

  His face clenched, and the sobs took hold of him and shook him. Scyla gathered him in her arms, let him bury his face in her shoulder. He was not hers, not quite: he had not stepped through the doorway of that gilded world he had been born to, but the door was open. All she had to do was wait.

  She took him to a sheltered dell: within sight of the high castle, close enough to the battlefield that the air bore a faint scent of festering decay. She was stage-managing Volante’s fall from grace expertly. She got a fire going, while he sat on the hard ground and stared up at the glittering and cheerless constellation that the Wasps had made of his home. Their little artificial lights were out in force, burning with their acrid, unnatural flames and lighting the way for the Wasps’ poor, dull eyes. Eyes that could not see the wonder of the world as Volante’s could. Eyes that saw only mundane and pragmatic things, like profit and victory.

  “What do you want with me?” His voice was thin, still ragged with weeping.

  “You know what.” She drew him to her; they sat shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, her arm about him, and yet the last of that distance still remained.

  “But I don’t,” he complained. “You want this flesh? You want this face, to add to your collection? And then what? How will I live, then?”

  “At least you will live,” she told him. “You’ll live like me. And I will teach you my mystery.” As she said the words, it was as though she were a seer herself: the future unfolded before her. “And we will walk together through the lives of others. I will teach you how to live as a maggot, princeling, if you will learn it of me. If you will step down from your broken throne to stand in the dirt with me. For I am all that is left. The Wasps pillage your home of its treasures, and you are what I carry away from the wreck. But you must surrender to me. You must be mine.”

  And he stood at the threshold, trembling at this new world she offered him. It was a world of bones and dust, but it was all the world there was.

  Then a new voice came to them from beyond the reach of their fire. “In the old days,” it said, sepulchral and sharp, “there were many paths to magic.”

  She had her knife in her hand, but when the newcomer showed himself she could not attack him. His eyes reflected the light back red, and his skin took no life from the flames. His forehead bore a birthmark or a blotchy scar, save that it shifted like liquid beneath the translucence of his skin.

  “Who are you?” Scyla demanded.

  “You make an eloquent case,” he said softly, folding himself crossed-legged across the fire from her.

  “What do you want?” As though there could be any doubt.

  “Young prince,” the newcomer whispered to Volente, “your father had high hopes for you.”

  The boy was staring at him, rigid with fear.

  “In the old days, men lived in fear,” the ragged man went on. “Tell me of your histories, young prince. Tell me your oldest tales.” But Volente would not speak, and so he continued, “They huddled about fires like this, and they looked out at the darkness. And the darkness held many terrors: the magics of night, and death, and blood.” And he smiled slightly, and his lips showed needle teeth, thin and sharp as a fish’s.

  “Go,” Scyla spat out, drawing that crimson gaze to herself.

  “But you have been so good as to bring the prince out here to meet me,” the creature told her.

  “He’s mine.” Almost. Almost he was mine.

  “The Prince of the Golden Future,” the old man breathed. “But now the Wasps have stolen your gold, and what future have you l
eft?”

  “I will give him a future!” Scyla snapped.

  Again that serrated smile. “One where he will bring about a new age of magic?”

  “There is no age of magic.” Volente sounded like a dying man. “The Light Eternal has gone out, all across the Commonweal. Why should I not be a ghost in this woman’s dead world?”

  And a fierce shout of joy boiled up within Scyla but, before she could give voice to it, the old man spoke again.

  “Oh, young prince, how could you think such a thing? Or course there is a new age of magic. We stand on its very brink.”

  The silence that followed his words was like a well without end.

  “In the beginning there was night, and death, and blood,” and a ribbon of tongue touched across the tips of those needle teeth. “And then the first Monarch of the Commonweal gathered all that was bright and glorious about her, and cast back the darkness, and swore that her nation of light and joy would endure for a thousand years.” He laughed softly. “But a thousand years have been and gone, my prince, and province after province falls beneath the boots of the Wasps, who know no light but the sun and that which their artifice makes. And so the light of your people, that has been guttering these many years, is put out like a candle.” He mimed it, withered lips pursing to blow. “But even the Wasps know what happens when you put out a light,” he added with a hungry glee. “Even the Wasps know to fear the darkness.”

  Scyla’s hand was tight about her knife-hilt, but she couldn’t move.

  “And your people have forgotten the battles they fought, all those years ago,” the old man stated. “You forget that night, blood and death are magic too, and though your high-burning fires banished them to the edges of the world, what will happen, now those fires are out? Let the Wasps light as many lamps as they can. All they achieve is to cast more shadows.”

  “What are you saying?” Volente asked him, voice raw.

  “A new age is coming, boy.” The ragged apparition hunched forwards towards him, the firelight reflecting in his eyes. “A terrible age, of horror, of despair. An age of suffering and fear to spark nightmares from the Wasps and their victims alike. But it shall be an age of magic for all that. Not your fading fires, but magic nonetheless.”

  The old man gestured derisively at Scyla. “You can diminish, and become a husk of a thousand faces, none of them your own, picking over corpses until you are no more than a corpse yourself, inside. Like this one.” And he spared her a look at last, from those blood-coloured eyes. “Or you can realise the destiny your father saw in you. You can give up your power to feed a new age of magic. Not a new dawn, perhaps, but a new dusk.”

  She felt Volente tremble in her arms and tried to hold tight to him. The distance between them, that had always been there, only grew greater and greater until he was standing before the ragged man, so deep in his shadow that the firelight barely reached him at all.

  “My father...” he got out: a plaintive, lost cry.

  “Your father was so blinded by his own light, he could not see,” the old man whispered. “He could not see how dark the path is that you will walk.”

  “Wait.” Scyla was on her feet, useless knife still in hand. “Wait, Volente, princeling, please...” And she wished, she dearly wished that somewhere inside her was even the slightest spark of that light magic his people had espoused. Even the faintest gleam of it would have driven the haggard creature away, and made Volente hers.

  When those violet eyes turned on her, she saw herself, her true face, in them: her true face as it would be, if she had worn it for all the mean and bloody things she had done. The sight had her cringing back, hand thrown up to blot it out.

  And they were gone, when she next dared look. Her golden boy was lost to the shadows. He would rather let his life’s blood feed the dark, than stay with her. But how will I live? he had asked, and now the question echoed in her ears, in her own voice, and it occurred to her that, whatever it was she had been doing these last ten years or more, it had not been living.

  Sympathy for the devil? Three major villains of the early books turn up here, but in the novels Scyla never quite gets the moments of redeption that Thalric, and even Uctebri, are allowed. This story goes some little way to making up for that. And the war, of course, goes on. The great battle at the start of this story hreaks the back of the Commonweal resistance and it’s all downhill from there. What remains, then? The renewed age of magic that Uctebri predicts. For those who reach the end of Seal of the Worm, you decide.

  The Dreams of Avaris

  Roven was a tough guy and Merric was a killer and Skessi was just an annoyance, and they were the bad part of the deal, but me and my partner had been in Wasp cells at the time, and finding a couple of Wasps willing to go absent without leave for a private errand had been all the luck we could scrape together. It was better than slavery. I’d been born poor in Siennis, way down south, and I know everything that one Spider-kinden can teach another about slavery. I was bought and sold from when my mother had parted with me at age five to when I’d cut the throat of the latest merchant to offer me for sale, and I fled the Spiderlands after that because the merchant was an Aristoi man. Back then the Commonweal had seemed a nice peaceful place to pull a few scams and get rich. That was right before the Wasp Empire got the same idea, only on a much larger scale.

  From that point, the Dragonfly Commonweal had become an overly exciting place, and I’d have made tracks south, or north, or anywhere, if not for the money. There was money in other peoples’ suffering. The Wasps were chewing up great tracts of Commonweal land, scooping up whole villages’ worth of slaves, winning hard-fought battles, enduring the keen Commonweal winters. They were men, those Wasp soldiers, and men had needs. A light-footed trader in certain luxuries could make a living out of drink and whores and second-hand Dragonfly souvenirs. If I watched my step: watching one’s step was a difficult proposition even for a Spider-born. The Wasp officers had short tempers. Every so often a trader in dubious goods would be taken up, stock confiscated and leg-irons applied with professional speed and care. There was no appeal. The Wasps accorded other kinden no rights, nor even the status of a human being. Everyone else was fair prey.

  My name’s Avaris, and I’ve never stayed still long enough to have to change it. My partner was a lean old Dragonfly called Gatre Fael who’d been robbing his kinsmen up and down the roads and canals since long before the Wasps took an interest. Our game was black guild trading and a lot of different versions of selling the Monarch’s Crown to people, which makes sense when you know there’s no such thing, but you’d be amazed how many people don’t know. We’d been working together three years now: my mouth and his knowledge of the land, until we landed up in the north-eastern end of the Principality of Sial Men, and in irons, and in trouble.

  We’d done a fair trade, and had missed just one step. We’d passed through the Wasp camps peddling our seedy wares, bringing flesh and firewater to bitter, bloodied soldiers who had been fighting, some of them, a full ten years without seeing their homes and wives. It was not that the war was going badly: to the generals and the folks back home it was stride after stride of victory for the legions of Black and Gold. To the soldiers it was fighting a numberless and fiercely determined enemy, bringing Imperial rule to village after village of bitter, surly peasants, months of trail rations and harsh discipline, the bite of each year’s snow and ice, the red-washed memories of what war had made them do. Even Wasp-kinden started to feel the bloodstains, after ten years without mercy.

  We never knew what it was that had seen us taken up, stripped of our goods and slung into slave-cells. It was simply one of those things that happened to people, that you heard about, and this time the people it happened to were us. We had planned for this, though. Gatre Fael had a caper, a good one we had been waiting months to spring, and with slavery our only other option, why not spring it now? Riches beyond riches, Fael had said. Riches beyond riches indeed, but our target was behind Wasp l
ines, now, and somehow it had never seemed worth the journey.

  “It’ll be worth the journey,” I had explained to Roven and Merric. “It’s a fair step, but riches, Sergeant, riches. They used to bury them well-heeled back in the bad old days.”

  It helped that Roven, the sergeant, had heard something of this. He opined, offhand, that some officer in the engineers he knew had struck old gold excavating some Commonweal lord’s broken-up castle. “Vaults of it, he said,” Roven explained. “Just bodies and gold.” Merric had looked interested.

  “I don’t know, though,” Gatre Fael had said, his lean face twisting, the colour of gold itself. “Disturbing the dead.”

  “Disturbing the dead what?” Roven had grunted.

  The Dragonfly had shrugged. “They say... bad things happen, when you open the oldest tombs. The makers protected their wealth with curses, and the dead aren’t always that dead.”

  And the Wasps had jeered at that, and the seed was planted in their minds.

  I could talk forever and Fael knew the land, and that got both of us sprung from the cells and travelling overland north, heading for the mountains. Roven and Merric were sick of campaigning, they said, or of campaigning places where there was too much risk and not enough gold. Both of them were swearing blind they wished they’d signed on with the Slave Corps. Who cared if everyone hated you when you were that rich? Money bought back all the respect that a slaver’s uniform lost you, was the way they put it. As for Skessi, he just turned up when we were two days out. Skessi was Fly-kinden, a scout attached to the Fourth and a nosy bastard by anyone’s book. He’d heard somehow that Roven and Merric had something on, and he turned up threatening to shop them to their officers unless he was dealt in. Nobody much liked that, but Skessi could fly faster even than Gatre, and he was a wary little sod, and it didn’t seem we had much choice. It was odds on whether the officers would declare Roven deserter anyway, especially after he’d had it away with four horses and a pack-beetle, but if he came back rich, well, that would smooth over a lot of rough waters. Besides, there were just so many Wasps forging west even as winter came on that it seemed possible that two soldiers could slip off on a frolic of their own and just claim to have got left behind. That was what Roven was counting on. As for Merric, he was happy enough to follow along, and if he got the chance to open my or Fael’s throat, well, that would be a bonus. Merric was like that, and he liked that. He was a simple man with simple pleasures, and would have been a perfect Wasp soldier if he’d had the slightest interest in listening to orders.