Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Evandter’s gaze had obviously followed Cordwick’s because the Fly said, “Oh they think I’m Rekef right enough. They’re not expecting trouble, and I’m good with pieces of paper. When I call them back, they’ll come with the keys and you and I will walk out of Maille like old friends, Evandter. What do you say?”

  Cordwick saw the Mantis grin death up at her. “Call them,” Evandter said. “Set me free.”

  “Swear, first,” the Fly told him, calm as you please. “Swear by the health and life of Nysse Ceann that you will serve my master, not as slave but as sworn bonds warrior.”

  Evandter had gone utterly still as the name – a Dragonfly woman’s name, Cordwick assumed – was uttered. “So,” was all the Mantis said.

  “Swear,” the Fly repeated, “or I go, and you stay.”

  “You name me murderer and enemy of princes,” Evandter growled softly, “and yet you set your life by my word.”

  “I name you kidnapper, and my master says that by her name even your word is good, though it would not be worth a hair else,” she replied.

  “Then I so swear, and may you and your master regret it all the days of your lives.”

  “Good enough for me”, the Fly said, almost cheerily, and she dropped down to the cage. Evandter made no attempt to strike at her.

  “What about me?” Cordwick asked. There was a moment of bewildered silence as Fly and Mantis regarded him.

  “Who the spit are you?” the Fly asked eventually.

  “Cordwick Scosser of Helleron, procurer,” he told her, mustering what dignity he could in a cage too low to stand up in.

  “That mean pimp or thief where you come from?” she asked him.

  “Procurer of goods,” he stressed, as if pressing a claim to the aristocracy.

  “Well, thief, you’re not in my brief. You stay here.”

  Cordwick, who a moment ago would have been happy enough to share the cage with nothing more threatening than a corpse, suddenly felt the yawning chasm of dark water below him. “Please, you can’t just leave me here.”

  “Doing good deeds for the sake of it got put on hold after the Empire invaded,” the Fly told him, without sympathy.

  “But I’ll be executed, or enslaved!” Cordwick insisted.

  “You’ll be in good company. It’s very fashonable these days. Everbody’s doing it.” She stood as tall as she could and called out “All right, Sergeant!” in a voice that rolled and resounded across the cavern until the waters claimed it.

  “No no,” Cordwick said hurriedly. “Look, I don’t know what your master’s about or who he is or if he’s the Rekef or what, but I’m useful, I’m a good thief. I can get in just about anywhere, talking or lock-breaking.”

  “Yet you’re the one on the wrong side of the bars,” she pointed out. A Wasp with a lantern had appeared at the portal above.

  “One mistake! Don’t let me rot here just because I slipped up once. Please, I’ll serve your master ‘til my dying day, please, please don’t leave me in here. Don’t leave me to the Wasps.” A sudden inspiration struck him. “You’re Inapt, or you’d have brought the keys yourself. The Mantis is Inapt. Your master, I bet he’s Inapt. Locks, machines, door-catches, incendiaries – you want them? I’m your man. Come on now, give me a chance.”

  Her solemn eyes regarded him, a weight of doubt that seemed too great for her small shoulders to carry. “If I say kill him, will you kill him?” she asked, even as the guard above took wing to come down to them.

  “I’ll kill him even if you don’t, like as not,” Evandter said lazily. “Better to tell me if you don’t want him dead.”

  The Wasp’s wings brought him up on the cage’s very edge, as far from Evandter as he could manage. “You’re done?”

  “I’ll take them both,” she confirmed and Cordwick felt like weeping in relief.

  “Papers only said the Mantis,” the Wasp muttered stubbornly, but it was clear he believed her Rekef credentials because he was already fumbling for the keys. Cordwick had never tried to pass himself off as Rekef but he had met a few of the Outlander recently, as he set about his one-man mission to get rich from the Commonweal invasion, and he knew that the regular army held them in utter dread.

  “You fly, Beetle?” the woman asked him, as he ended up crouched atop the cage, gripping the bars. She and the Mantis and their jailer were standing there quite happily, heedless of the drop and the water. Cordwick shook his head and saw a suffering expression come to her face, already regretting springing him. Still, if she changed her mind now it would look odd to the Wasps. Just get me out of the castle, Cordwick thought, and then you never need see me again.

  “I’ll call for the winch,” said the jailer, clearly amused.

  There was nothing in the world so lovely as the sun, Cordwick decided as he was led out into it. Even in the stockade that the Wasps had bound about one arm of Maille, where men and machines and beasts jostled for space, the air was cool and fresh, the freedom and space intoxicating. He took deep breaths, turning his face to the sky and squinting against the light.

  When he next looked, the Fly was regarding him dubiously, seeing him in good light as a Beetle-kinden man in ragged clothes, just the right side of young, just the wrong side of thin – which still made him relatively slender for his kind – short, slope-shouldered, a mild, dark face and thinning hair. Beside him, Evandter looked like some Bad Old Days personification of death, his dark hair worn long and half-shrouding his lean, angular face, his pale skin laced with random scars. The jagged barbs flexed and jutted from his forearms as though possessed of their own bloodlust, entirely separate from their owner’s.

  “Lieutenant.” A Wasp bustled up, followed by a Grasshopper slave who set down a little table with quill and ink. The Fly-kinden made her mark on a few pieces of paper and the Wasp nodded. “You’re sure you’re safe with him,” he asked, nodding at Evandter and ignoring Cordwick entirely. “I can detail you some guards if you want.” He seemed genuinely concerned, but perhaps it was just that he wanted to do right by the Rekef.

  “Him?” she scoffed. “Have you heard how many nobles he gutted, the banditry, the raids? He’s done more harm to the Commonweal than half the fighting Seventh.” She didn’t quite claim that Evandter was a Rekef agent all along, but the implication hung in the air clear enough.

  When they had trekked far enough for the slopes of the Commonweal countryside to put them out of sight of Maille, the Fly-kinden turned to Cordwick. “You really can’t fly?” she asked him.

  “My people aren’t known for it,” he replied, in understatement.

  “Then let your feet take you where they will, thief. I can’t see you’re much use,”

  A wave of glad relief washed through Cordwick, only to crash against the intractable wall that was Evandter.

  “No,” the Mantis said And when the Fly quizzed him he explained, with relish, “The Beetle paid the same price I did for his freedom. If he walks free, then so do I. Otherwise he’s bound to the Prince’s purpose as I am. Or I’ll open his throat now, if you don’t want him slowing us down.” He had Cordwick’s collar instantly, without his arm seeming to move, dragging the Beetle close and putting razor-edged spines to his neck. For a horrifying moment the Fly hesitated, then: “We walk,” she said, disgusted either at the Mantis, Cordwick or her own soft-heartedness.

  After they had gone a mile or so in stony silence Cordwick judged that her ill temper had ebbed sufficient for him to prompt, “I’m Cordwick Scosser, of Helleron, by the way.”

  “Yes, you said.” She frowned as Cordwick pointedly stretched the silence. “Tesse,” she told him shortly.

  “And you work for some prince, the Mantis said,” he proceeded carefully. Evandter snorted with derision.

  This time Tesse’s look at him was cruel. “Prince Lowre Darien,” she pronounced carefully, and, “Heard of him, I take it?” as Cordwick choked.

  Lowre Darien was a name known to a lot of people, mostly imperial soldiers, but the st
ories had filtered down even to lowly thieves trying to filch war-plunder from its rightful conquerors. Prince Lowre Darien, who had led the coalition of principalities that had smashed the Sixth Army, and who had fought the Empire to a brief standstill outside Shan Real. In a war that was a catalogue of defeats and retreats he was one of the only Commonweal leaders to boast even a halfway success. More stories were told of his personal courage than his military acumen, though. He was the man who could walk in and out of imperial camps like the wind. He freed slaves and killed enemy officers, and Rekef men, especially Rekef men. The Empire had been after him forever, assassins and freelance hunters and the cream of the Outlander, but his name refused to go away and, even now the war was over, word of his exploits kept coming. The Monarch had signed the Treaty of Pearl in craven surrender but Prince Lowre Darien had not been a signatory and for him the war was still raging.

  From death sentence to death sentence, thought Cordwick, because anywhere near Lowre Darien – or even someone pretending to be Lowre Darien – sounded like a mighty unhealthy place to be, but at the back of his mind was a spark of curiosity. To set eyes on the Wasp-killer, the hero of Masaki, the man who stung back: that would be worth a little risk. That would be something to regale his fat, rich friends with, when he was fat and rich himself, and stealing like a merchant steals, rather than like a poor and honest thief.

  Whatever Cordwick was expecting, the army of enamel-armoured Mercers, the castle hidden in a wood, the golden splendour of a Commonweal warrior-lord, none of it was there. The tangled stretch of trees that Tesse led them to was in a hollow so rocky that even the locals hadn’t tried to step it and plough it, let alone build a secret fort there. Instead of a hundred sworn champions ready to drive the Wasps from Commonweal soil in fulfillment of their destiny, there was one man and one woman, and Cordwick looked at the man two or three times before realising that this was it. This was the man himself.

  Prince Lowre Darien was lean and slight of frame, like most Commonwealers, although perhaps a little taller than most. His dark hair was raggedly cut, as by a man with a knife and a mirror, and Cordwick reckoned he could see a little grey over the ears. His golden skin was smeared with grime, making him seem older. Instead of a Mercer’s scintillating armour or the gold-heavy robes of a nobleman, he was dressed like a successful bandit, hardwearing leather backed with coarse silk that was either dirty or dyed mottled, with a long hauberk of cloth-backed chitin scales and shoulder-guards of the same. Beside him, on the rock he sat on, lay a worn pack and a quiver of arrows. The bow was in his hand, a servicable recurved shortbow, not the elaborate man-high weapon of a noble but that of a bandit who must fight and run. His eyes were the only part of him that convinced Cordwick of who he was. They were the colour of amber, and they held all the noble fire and mastery that every other part of him had been stripped of.

  His companion, whoever she was, was not this Nysse woman the Mantis had sworn on. She was a surprise for Cordwick, because she no more belonged in the Commonweal than he did: a slender Moth-kinden, grey-skinned and blank-white-eyed, dark hair intricately plaited into a braid that fell to past her waist. She wore a tunic, breeches and sandals, in the style of the Commonwealers, and they looked strange on her. Her face was inward, clouded with secrets, but in Cordwick’s experience that was true of Moths whether they had any secrets or not.

  Seeing the Fly-kinden and her baggage approach, Lowre Darien stood like a man readying himself for a fight. Evandter’s progress towards him slowed and stopped and the two men regarded one another coolly.

  “Prince Darien,” Tesse said, but very quietly, and he did not glance at her. Nobody paid any attention whatsoever to Cordwick.

  “So you’ve lost her,” Evandter stated flatly. “Seems a shame, after you went to so much trouble to take her back from me.”

  “The Wasps have her at Del Halle,” Darien confirmed. His expression, gazing on the Mantis, was utterly without love. “Well guarded.”

  “A trap,” Evandter said.

  Darien nodded. “For me,” he agreed, “and yet she is mine, and I must free her.”

  “And for this you come to me? If she is yours why should I help you regain her?”

  “Did he swear himself to me?” Darien asked Tesse lightly, and she nodded, too caught up in the tension between the two men to speak.

  Evandter sneered. “To the pits with swearing and oaths. Why should I?”

  “Because your oath holds only to when we have freed her. If you will cross swords with me then, I will oblige you,” Darien told him.

  The words transformed the Mantis, just for a moment. In that brief second his mocking expression, all the slouching despite of his stance, had vanished away, and Cordwick had a brief show of a younger man, a brighter one: some Evandter that might have been, had the world not been so very wicked and taught him so well. Then the old snarl was back but the Mantis was nodding. “Lead me, my prince,” he invited, with a curl of his lip.

  “And who is this?” At last those amber eyes pinned Cordwick through, and the Beetle stammered out his name.

  “He’s a thief. Cordwick Scosser. Evandter wants to kill him or keep him about. Send him away, I would,” Tesse explained, “or let the Mantis have him.”

  “Cordwick Scosser.” Darien pronounced the Lowlander name carefully. “You understand what we’re about, here?”

  “Off to rescue some noblewoman,” Cordwick replied guardedly.

  “To rescue Nysse Ceann, because she and I are promised, because it is my duty, and because I love her,” Darien confirmed. “Did you swear yourself to me?”

  Did I? Even as he wondered, Cordwick had opened his mouth for the instictive denial, but Evandter said “Yes” before he could say “No.”

  The Mantis grinned coldly. “Oh he didn’t say it as an oath, but his kind never do. Your Fly let him out because he said he would help. ‘Serve you to his dying day,’ were the words, I think. Free him and I’ll kill him as an oathbreaker.”

  “What is he to you?” Darien asked.

  “He talks too much and I want to kill him,” Evandter replied. Cordwick looked between the two of them: relics from an age that industry and the Empire were scouring from the face of the world, and yet here he was caught between a prince’s duty and a Mantis’ bloodlust.

  “If it’s all the same to you,” Cordwick said faintly, “I’ll help in the rescue, if that’s all right. How far to Del Halle?”

  They moved across the face of the Commonweal like fugitives, far from any princely procession that Cordwick had imagined. Then he brought to mind the fact that this countryside, the ditches and the copses, the untilled fields and the hollow, abandoned villages, none of this was the Commonweal any more. The Empire had, after considerable choking and gnawing, swallowed it all. Prince Lowre Darien was dethroned and in the shadow of his enemy. These were the captured principalities, taken in blood, sealed in ink when the Monarch signed the Treaty of Pearl.

  They moved more by night than by day, avoided any human contact. Darien hunted for them, his bow bringing down stoneflies or goats gone feral. He moved through the grown-wild land as though he had lived under the stars all his life. Evandter was seldom seen, ranging ahead or dragging behind or off murdering children for all Cordwick knew. Still, whenever they paused or rested or started a sheltered fire, there he was, the professional brigand emerging from the landscape.

  The Moth woman was seldom absent from Darien’s side and he conferred with her often. Cordwick understood that she was some manner of advisor, and then that she was some manner of magician, who told Darien where to find game and had found for him the whereabouts of his lost love. Her name was Philomaea, he learned from Tesse, and she had been in Darien’s retinue since before the war. If she had dressed for it, she would have been beautiful, but it took Cordwick a while to realise this because she had that quiet, drab look that most Moth-kinden had, all in-looking and severe. He saw what she could be in the rare moments when her face truly came to life,
and that was only when she looked directly at Lowre Darien, which was only when he was not looking at her. This was so guttingly tragic that Cordwick, who was used to having people to talk to, wanted to discuss it. As Darien scared him, Philomaea ignored him and Evandter actively wanted to kill him, he was left with Tesse, and he could not talk to Tesse about that because, when she stole glimpses of Lowre Darien, her expression was the same.

  She was a tough and prickly little thing but she needed to talk too and, although she ventured the occasional lighthearted banter with Darien, there was too much bottled up within her to keep that going. Philomaea ignored her, too, and if Evandter hadn’t got as far as threatening her life, he was still not much of a conversationalist. So it was that, when they stopped to rest out the noon hours, under cover and hidden away, she spent her words on Cordwick. They were derisory words, mostly, but it was better than hostile silence. Mostly she mocked his credentials as a thief. How could a Beetle-kinden possibly survive on what those thick fingers could pilfer? This allowed him to ask about her own pedigree. She was Imperial Fly-kinden, as he’d guessed, and she told him she’d done five years as a Consortium clerk, in which time she learned to fake official documents with great precision. Then she’d left to pursue her chosen career, taking with her several hundred gold imperials originally slated as Slave Corps back pay. What was her chosen career? Cordwick asked her.

  “Thea repa,” she replied mysteriously, on the basis that he would certainly never have heard of it. Cordwick was a people person, though, and fond of street entertainment, specifically as an opportunity for his thick fingers to do as much pilfering as humanly possible, and his face split into an incredulous smile.

  “What? Little Miss Superior is a street-dancer? Ribbons and knives and that? And a thief, and who knows what else you’ve had to do, when prancing about in the air wouldn’t pay your way! Why we’re well met, Miss Tesse, all thieves together.”

  “Is that why the Wasps caught you, Beetle? Your big mouth?” she demanded. To his surprise her hard shell was cracked; she seemed almost on the verge of tears.