Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  We stopped before nightfall because Merric had found a wooded hollow that would keep the fire’s heat in. The wind was really up, then, and when it hit the trees it made all kinds of sounds: my cue again. When we were all sitting round the best fire Merric could make I jumped up all of a sudden, meaning so did they, swords out and palms clear.

  “Did you hear that?” I called over the wind.

  “What?” Roven snarled at me.

  “Voices!”

  His look was all belligerence on the surface, but that surface was thin ice. “Whose?”

  “They were calling my name!” I insisted.

  “Your Dragonfly?” Roven demanded. I just shook my head dumbly. He tried out a disgusted expression, but I could tell they were all listening. The problem was, once you’ve said a thing like that, well, the wind makes all kinds of noises, out there in the wilds. I just hunched closer to the fire and told myself in no uncertain terms that under no circumstances could I really hear my name in the wind. I’ve always had an active imagination and it’s never done me much good.

  Then it was Roven’s turn to jump up, sword out, and we repeated the whole pantomime. This time, when he insisted he’d seen a shape out there, everyone was supposed to believe him.

  “Bandits,” he snapped out. “Got to be. They’ve seen the fire.” Nobody objected to this, although I think you’d have had to be within burning distance to do it. “Merric, go scout. You find anyone, kill them.”

  Merric didn’t look happy about that, but Roven was a sergeant, and he was just a soldier, and they beat that into the Wasp army with big lead hammers. This, too, was the plan, but it was that part of the plan we hadn’t really talked much about.

  Merric bundled himself up in a cloak, a grey-white garment that would hide him nicely in this weather. He had his shortsword drawn but he led with his offhand, palm-out. Crouched low to the ground he went, with one backward glance at Roven.

  He didn’t come back. By the time that was clear, the night was well and truly upon us and nobody was going to search for him. The three of us, Wasp, Fly and Spider, just looked at each other mutely over the fire and listen to the storm call off its roster.

  Merric was still absent the next morning when we set off, trailing two horses now, and with the snow much decreased. We caught up with the man soon enough, though. He was waiting for us, in a way.

  It was a long time before Roven spoke. I don’t know how long he’d known Merric or what he felt about him, but he took a good, long look at what had been laid out for us. It made me wish for more snow.

  He was strung between two trees, held there by some tying of the whip-like branches themselves, arms and legs spread out at unnatural angles. The pieces of his armour, the plates of the Light Airborne, were hanging off, scratched and dented. He had been quite hollowed out. You could see his spine through his belly. His eyes were gone too, and his tongue. His head was back, his mouth was open, and you could almost hear the scream in your mind. It was a real professional job. The Wasps themselves seldom put that much effort into stringing up a corpse. It’s just crossed pikes and leave them to sag, most of the time.

  Skessi was swearing under his breath now, almost constantly. “On,” Roven said at last, and kicked at his horse even though it needed no real encouragement. I followed right along, feeling absent eyes watch me go. This was the plan, but the details had turned my stomach. I knew the reasoning, but still, there’s such a thing as going too far. Of course, Merric would have been dead before all that window-dressing happened, but even so...

  We made better time that day, although the ruin was still on the horizon when we stopped to camp, The wind was picking up again, and I tried to block my ears. “Avaris! Run!” it called, but the wind will say all sorts of things if you let it. After dark the snow crept back too, shrouding the world beyond the firelight in a blur of gusting white, not as fierce as yesterday, but it cut us off from the world, severed us from it totally. As the wind formed words, so the snow was apt to make shapes, and it wasn’t long before I stopped looking.

  Skessi was near breaking. He’d been high-strung even before we found Merric, and around the fire that night he ran out of brave.

  “I want my share!” he burst out with. Roven gave him a long, level look.

  “What’s that?”

  “Give me my share of the loot, now,” Skessi insisted. “I’m not crawling along here like this. Give me mine, and I’m out of here.”

  “You’ll keep pace, soldier,” Sergeant Roven told him. Skessi was shaking his head very fast.

  “Oh no,” he got out. “Not a hope. You’re going to die. They’re going to catch you. Not me. I’m fast. Give me my share.”

  “A whole third of what we’ve got?” said Roven, grinning. “Little man, that’d weigh more than you do.”

  “Give me what I can carry. Keep the rest.”

  “How generous.” Roven stood, still trying for casual, but Skessi skipped back a few steps and abruptly his sword was out.

  “You cross me, Roven, I’ll tell! I’ll tell your lieutenant about what you’ve been up to. I’ll tell them you killed Merric.” The Fly was in the air now, wings a-blur, and I heard the wind call, “Skessi! Skessi!”

  Roven shot, but Skessi was faster, the bolt of fire streaking past him. The Fly launched for the campsite’s edge, towards the dark where Roven would not be able to track him, but he tumbled from the air even as he did so, ending up a crumpled heap at the edge of the firelight.

  Roven, for whom the edge of the firelight was a good deal closer, lit his lantern with patient care. When he stood he had a hand facing me. I spread my own, showing that I had nothing. He jerked his head the way Skessi had gone.

  The arrow that had transfixed the Fly was dead white, both the shaft and the fletchings, that were made from shimmering moth scales. I knew where I’d seen arrows just like that, not so long ago. So did Roven.

  “I get it.” He’d grabbed me before I could step back, snagged a hand about my collar and hauled me close. His face was uglier than ever up close, and his breath stank. “I get it,” he repeated, shaking me for emphasis. “Your mate, the turncoat ‘Wealer.”

  I shook my head, but he was shaking it for me pretty hard so he probably didn’t see. “I don’t know how he killed Merric,” Roven growled, “but he surely won’t get me, or the treasure.” With contemptuous strength he threw me to the ground and fixed me in place with the threat of his open palm. “And as for you,” he said.

  And stopped. He made a sound then I never heard from a Wasp: a little, broken sound deep in his throat.

  He turned from me and ran for the animals, stumbling and almost falling into the fire. He got to the beetle even as I struggled to my feet. He was wrenching at the animal but it dug all six legs in and would not move. I could just hear Roven’s voice shrieking at it, see his mouth opening and closing. At last he just wrenched at the sacks. One of them tore open, spilling the wealth of ages over the trampled ground of the campsite. The other came away whole and he shouldered it with a supreme effort and was gone, obliterated by the snow, lurching away under his priceless burden.

  I crawled back to the campsite, for the fire’s warmth more than anything else. Even before I got there I heard him scream. And scream. It went on for some short while. I just took the time to gather my wits. The plan seemed to be going ahead full tilt, but in ways I hadn’t really imagined.

  When I looked up, he was there: Galtre Fael in a cloak of blown snow across the fire from me. I nodded wearily and reached to start gathering up the spilt loot.

  “Stop,” he said. “Avaris, listen to me. Do not touch the treasure, not even one piece of it. Just go, Avaris, go. Please listen to me.”

  A cold feeling came to me, but it was disappointment, not fear. I stood slowly, sensing the end of what little good times I had known. “Fael,” I told him, “Don’t.” I reached down for a piece of treasure, a broach worked into the shape of a beetle with spread wings.

  “Avari
s!” he insisted. “Not one piece! Please!”

  “Don’t play it on me,” I told him. “Fael, I practically invented the ghost scam. There’s enough for both of us to live like Princes Major. Don’t try it on me. There’s no need.” But I felt sad because, whether he tried it on me or not, we couldn’t trust each other now. Our partnership had just been killed as sure as Merric.

  “Avaris,” Fael said despairingly, and his friends turned up.

  Pale shapes with grey wings, but I can do better than that. Ancient armour, hollow eyes, the military prime of the Commonweal’s early glories, pearly bows and white arrows, crescent-headed glaives and long-hafted swords with inscribed blades. Behind them, and mercifully half-lost in the snow, some taller thing, some greater figure, man-shaped but pale and regal and ten feet tall, armoured in mail that would put to shame a sentinel for bulk and a merchant-lord for precious stones.

  “Fael.” I remember very clearly my voice, then, how it shook and twisted.

  “It’s too late for me,” Fael said, “But they have let me intercede for you, for they were of my kinden once.” His gesture took in the gaunt-faced warriors about him, most definitely not the looming shadow behind.

  And I fled, then. I fled without ever having touched the smallest part of the greatest hoard I have ever seen, and I never saw Galtre Fael again, nor heard any word of him.

  And I wonder, now... well, at this remove, I’m sure you can guess what I wonder. I wonder whether my friend truly spent his last free moments, facing absolute annihilation, bartering for my continued life and health, and if so, I cannot measure what I owe him in all the world’s riches.

  But I wonder, too, whether the second plan, the plan Fael and I had that contained the first plan we explained to Roven and the others, I wonder whether that second plan might not have been part of a third plan, known only to Fael.

  And I will never know.

  “They loved to dwell in cold stone...” People do ask how much I planned Shadows of the Apt out in advance, and really I should just point them at this story. This was written with ‘Ironclads’ and ‘Spoils of War’ at around the time Empire was published, and anyone who’s read The Scarab Path will be able to make a stab at what’s going on in the background and who the armoured giant is. Moreover, the business with the Centipede is absolutely pointing at the revelations from the last few books. As a side note, Avaris turns up in Heirs of the Blade as one of Dal Arche’s brigands, and he tells this very story to his fellows to entertain them. So perhaps it is just a campfire ghost story after all...

  The Prince

  There were two other men in Cordwick’s cell. One was dead and the other was showing far too many signs of life

  When the Wasp-kinden had taken Maille Castle from the Dragonfly-kinden they had taken it mostly intact, and Cordwick was given to understand that the task of turning Commonweal fortification into imperial garrison had fallen to the engineering corps. He gleaned this by what the Wasps had done to the cellars, which spoke volumes of the lengths artificers would go to to stave off boredom.

  They had converted the cellars into a prison, being Wasps. Their technical difficulty was that Maille Castle was constructed over a subterranean river. The ancient stones of the fort above formed an arch straddling nothing, a bridge over nowhere, each end soundly founded in the rock, and the middle suspended over the hidden watercourse. Architecturally, it was a piece of genius. Defensively it had been less than useless, and the Imperial Sixth had captured it in just a day. Now the war, which they were calling the Twelve Year War, was done, and the border of the Empire had swept on far from Maille.The place had become a storehouse and a prison and a staging post for the Slave Corps.

  The aforementioned cellars were a great vaulted space buried beneath the castle’s arch, and floored only with dark water, where the river plunged ten feet into a roiling pool before coursing on between the rocks. Denied a conventional oubliette to store their captives in, the engineers of the Sixth had become ingenious.

  Of the men in Cordwick’s cell, the dead one, had been Dragonfly-kinden. He had been wounded before he was lowered in and had died shortly after and, despite Cordwick’s vocal complaints, none of the guards had seen fit to remove him. The third man was the problem. The third man had been brought in bound, wrist and ankle, spitting death and vengeance. His legs were already free, and he was slowly working at the leather thongs pinning his hands, wearing them away against the rough iron of the bars, gnawing at them with his teeth. His eyes were fighting mad. He was itching to kill someone. The barbed spines of his arms, that had made such short work of his ankle-bonds, were twitching and fretting, demanding to be slaked with blood. The problem was that the cell itself was shackled shut, an impediment that was never going to yield to spines and teeth. The further problem was that the cell they were in was an open lattice cage suspended over the inky waters of the pool below by a mere rope, which rope was attached to, by Cordwick’s estimate, a particularly fine example of a Shewner version 5 winding engine. The real problem was that the only blood available for the raging, very-close-to-escaping prisoner to paint the bars with was Cordwick’s. Having done so, the prisoner would be free to do nothing but, by dint of some effort, sever the rope and send himself and the two corpses—one older, one fresher—hurtling to a watery tomb. The fact that Cordwick Scosser, fellow prisoner, soon-to-be-fresher-corpse and failed thief, would already be dead by this point did not rob the thought of its horror. Death by drowning was a terror to him, even at such a remove.

  Cordwick knew Mantis-kinden, or he’d thought he did. He knew the Lowlander Mantids, from closer to home, as brooding, sullen, backward thugs, and that was fine. He had thought that the Commonweal breed was different: quiet, ceremonial, unflappable and usually in service to some Dragonfly noble or other. His cell-mate was a Commonweal local but he seemed to be the exception to the rule. To be blunt, he seemed the sort of mad killer that even the Lowlanders would have felt was overdoing it.

  “Look, you Mantis-kinden like stories, don’t you? I know a hundred of them, heroic and tragic as you like,” he tried. The Mantis prisoner continued to worry away at his bonds, which were looking alarmingly frayed. Other conversational gambits that he had rebuffed included “Those Wasps are bastards, aren’t they?” and “So, what are you in for?”

  My mother always said it would end like this. It was an assertion that did not bear too much scrutiny. In telling the young Cordwick, on the occasion of his precipitate leaving of home, “You’ll come to a bad end, you’ll never amount to anything,” the old dear probably hadn’t been envisaging quite these circumstances, but Cordwick was willing to bet that she’d take the credit for prophecy if she ever found out.

  There was a taut little sound that was leather giving way under great pressure, following by one that was a Beetle-kinden thief whimpering. He had tried calling for the guards several times already. Now he opened his mouth one last time as the Mantis turned to him, his hands free and on his face an expression of morbid delight. Cordwick’s voice died in his throat.

  A second later he screamed with fright and released tension as someone landed atop the cage. The Mantis lunged upwards instantly and had the newcomer been an incautious Wasp then things might have gone badly. As it was she was a Fly-kinden and four feet up the rope on the instant, leaving the Mantis clutching at empty air.

  She was a neat little thing in a tunic that the hanging lanterns showed as black and gold. Her hair was cut short like a soldier’s, too, but something about her had already given the lie to that. Cordwick was good at reading people nine times out of ten. Of course, the tenth time was always the important one...

  “Enough of that,” she snapped at the Mantis. “Evandter, yes?”

  The Mantis crouched below her, poised to spring as though there were not solid iron bars between them. “I am Evandter. Kill me or die, Fly, or go. You are of no interest to me.”

  The Fly-kinden studied him. “You’re the famous Evandter, are you? Scourge of
a dozen principalities? Rogue and kidnapper, murderer, enemy of princes? Who’d have thought you’d end up in here, eh? I heard you were drunk when they brought you in. Drinking toasts to your own health, was it? Celebrating the fall of the Commonweal?”

  A shudder went through Evandter that Cordwick identified as sheer penned rage. Don’t antagonise the bastard! he thought frantically, but that would be stoking a fire that was already roaring.

  “My master has an offer for you,” the Fly said.

  “I want nothing from your master, Rekef bitch,” the Mantis hissed. Cordwick considered this, and decided he agreed. A cocky female Fly-kinden in imperial colours almost certainly led to the Rekef eventually.

  “He offers death by the sword,” she went on. “I won’t say it’ll give you a chance to regain your ancestors’ approval, because from what I gather you pissed on that a long time ago, but he reckoned you’d rather die fighting than on crossed pikes.”

  “And what do the Rekef –?”

  “He’s not Rekef, neither,” the Fly said sharply, and then, more softly, “Piss on the Rekef, I say. I’ll have naught to do with them.”

  There was a pause in which her words echoed in the vaulted space. Cordwick craned about, seeking out the single doorway that led up to the castle proper. There were two guards there, always. They had been the object of his desperate pleas since Evandter had started on his bonds. Now they were gone, vanished away.