Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “Pretty much,” he said pointedly turning the conversational lamp onto himself. “I was dressed as a Consortium factor and talking my way into the big war loot depository in Shoal Acer, only I got carried away with my life story and someone saw the holes.”

  She looked at him cautiously, gauging his willingness to let the previous subject sink out of sight, and even then she snatched a quick glance at Darien, sleeping just then with Philomaea watching over him. I see, Cordwick understood. Not good enough for him, is it? He’s a prince and you’re just a rover and a thief, but you’re doing your absolutely tiny best to be the prince’s right hand woman, capable and loyal and utterly professional. She was younger than he’d thought, too, perhaps no more than twenty. She would have been a mere child when the war started, not even on her ill-fated apprenticeship at the Consortium.

  “So...” He glanced about, seeing a conspicuous absence, and ventured. “The prince and Evandter, then,” getting the stress on the Mantis’ awkward Commonwealer name wrong. “They go back a ways.”

  “Oh they tried to kill one another a good ten times before ever the Wasps came,” she confirmed. “Darien was a great bringer of justice, a Mercer and a magistrate, and Evandter was the man he never quite caught. And he was a bad one, certainly. A confirmed killer, for sheer love of blood, and a brigand leader who abandoned his men to save his own skin. He was the greatest villain of three principalities, and Darien was always after him. There are songs, even, stories of when they clashed. They fought, oh, half a dozen times, they say.”

  “This is because the prince stole his woman?”

  Tesse goggled at him for a moment. “No! Idiot Beetle. Nysse was betrothed to Darien, and to get at Darien Evandter stole her away. Kidnapped her, holed up with some cutthroats in a cave somewhere, set an ambush. You’ve never heard this story?”

  “I prefer making them up to hearing them,” he told her.

  “Must be the strain of listening to someone else’s voice for so long,” she sniped at him. “Well, Darien turned up and killed the cutthroats, and Evandter turned up and met him at the cave mouth, and probably Darien thought that the Mantis had laid the girl open and cut her up, you know. But the story goes that Evandter just told him he was a lucky man, and fled, and Nysse was untouched.” She smiled, and for once it was an expression that fit with her age. “Didn’t believe a word of it, until Himself sent me to fetch the Mantis out of Maille. They say she charmed him, used magic, used her Art, but you know what? That doesn’t last, not like that. You saw how he was when I said her name.”

  “And he’s good for his word, you think?” Cordwick pressed. “I mean Mantis oaths normally, yes, but even then only if they respect you, and this one...” but Tesse’s expression had changed, and Cordwick hurriedly changed the subject, understanding from her look that Evandter had rejoined them. Still, he thought, maybe Evandter respects the prince, and so maybe his word will hold. The thought carried on, though, to darker waters, because it was just as evident that Evandter hated Lowre Darien as no man had ever hated man, the gall-bitter, vitriolic hate that the envious have-nots reserve for those that have. When they had rescued Nysse Ceann there would be blood. The two old enemies would fight their last.

  It would have been a little under a tenday’s clear run to Del Halle. There were Wasps about, but they were still consolidating their vast gains from the war, spread thin and lording it over the populace only because they had killed off every noble or leader that they could catch, leaving the dispirited peasantry to trudge back to ruined fields and broken villages. Avoiding Wasp scouts, messengers and soldiers on the march would have been child’s play to any of the travelers.

  Then they came across the slavers: two great automotives grinding their way over the hilly landscape, the rear sections made into cages into which perhaps two hundred Commonwealers were crammed. The vehicles, overburdened, moved at a walking pace, and most of the twenty or so Slave Corps guards walked alongside, only their officers and artificer-drivers riding.

  Lying along a hill crest, lost in the long grass, Lowre Darien watched.

  “No,” cautioned Philomaea, when he returned to them. “This is not your quest.”

  “We will free the slaves,” the prince announced to them all. “It will be simple.”

  Evandter snorted derisively, a sound that was becoming far too familiar. “You mean we kill the Wasps and release the others. That is simple.”

  “You’ve lost your taste for blood?” Darien asked him archly.

  “I’d happily finish the slaves as well, for the crime of being stupid and weak enough to be caught,” Evandter said lazily. “Let’s be at it.”

  “You make your entrance,” Darien instructed him. “Kill all the Wasp-kinden you wish. I will slay those who goad the machines.” He turned to Tesse and Philomaea. “Take up your bows and make a good accounting of yourselves.” Those amber eyes turned on Cordwick. “You are a thief, you say? Steal the slaves from those machines.”

  This isn’t theft was Cordwick’s mantra as he made his way to the abruptly halted slave wagons. Theft, for him, was an exercise in being clever, in getting in, getting the goods and getting out without anybody being the wiser. Theft was also more definitely nothing to do with hurting people. Scosser Cordwick had a terror of hurting people that was born from a childhood understanding that people would hurt him back twice as hard if he did. This wretched circus, therefore, was not theft.

  Darien kicked off the festivities by flying straight at the driver’s bench of the lead automotive. He had two small punch-swords, like glorified brass knuckles only with foot-long blades projecting from them and little pearly round shields to cover the backs of his hands. He had cut apart the two Wasps he found there almost instantly and was away even as the slavers realised they were under attack, dodging and arcing in the air to come about for the other vehicle as the crackle and snap of sting-fire lanced the air around him. By that time Evandter had made himself known.

  The prince’s retinue was low on armaments. The two women had a tatty shortbow each and a varied selection of arrows. Darien had his swords. There had been nothing left to arm the Mantis but Evandter had not complained. As Cordwick ran in, utterly unremarked, he saw why. Evandter was killing the slavers. He raced through them with an erratic, zig-zagging swiftness, never staying still for longer than it took him to strike a blow. Each time he crossed Cordwick’s eyeline he had something different: a club, a shortsword, a spear, all ripped from the hands of the Wasps and turned on them without mercy. Between these chance acquisitions, taken up and cast down without care, his barbed arms spoke for him. He fought close up, tearing throats, ramming his spines through eyeslits, ripping at groins and armpits and guts, wherever the blood was easiest to get to. Then Darien was back, killing off the driver and officer in the other cab even as they tried to follow Evandter’s red progress. Added to the mix, sporadic arrow-shot came from beyond the edge of the fray, catching the Wasps off guard as their attention was monopolised by the killers in their midst.

  Cordwick reached the first automotive unspotted, less by any great stealth on his part than that he had become the least conspicuous thing in the locality by some margin. The locks securing the heavy bars were solid and unsophisticated. He had already manufactured some new picks from discarded military surplus on the road, a securing pin and some stout wire becoming the tools of his trade. They were makeshift poor tools, but it was a clumsy lock and he had its measure, springing it in half a minute and passing on to the next.

  All the while he was aware of Darien and Evandter fighting. Asthey circled around the fixed point of the wagons, on the ground and in the air, he understood that they were working as a matched pair, driving the Wasps into each other’s path, herding and dividing them. It was as though they had worked together for years, or were linked mind to mind as the Ant-kinden were. Or, Cordwick thought, it’s as though they really, really want to duel one another, and have just expanded the killing space between them until all the
Wasps fit into it.

  The second lock took longer, more for lack of repair than greater complexity. By the time he had tripped its tumblers the fight was done and Evandter was stalking from body to body, either extinguishing any remnant sign of life or mutilating the corpses, it was unclear which.

  The prisoners had formed an uncertain, awkward mob between the two machines, looking about them at the devastation. As a mass, they spelled out the words, “What now?” Cordwick agreed with them. All very well for Darien to come down and shed some blood to save his conscience, but would he feed them? Would he take them someplace safe? Cordwick freely admitted that the Prince and the Mantis had produced a skilled piece of bloody-handed performance art, but in his eyes there was nothing that clearly defined the supposed hero from the admitted villain. Killing people, even wicked people, was hardly a skill confined to the virtuous.

  He glanced at Evandter and saw his thoughts mirrored in the man’s sneer. It was clear the Mantis would happily butcher the prisoners as well, and solve their problems with his characteristic finality.

  “Listen to me,” Darien said. He had hopped up onto the top of one of the automotives. Despite the grimy clothes, the bandit’s mail, he had an undeniable authority about him. He did not have their trust, but he had their attention.

  “If any one of you wishes to remain in the hands of the Empire, stay with the machines and they will find you. Tell them our descriptions, tell them you could not prevent us. It may help. I speak now to those who will venture a little for their freedom.”

  They had quieted entirely but their stare remained suspicious, waiting for him to name his price.

  “Who among you has any woodcraft? Hunters, woodcutters, poachers, bandits even. I will not judge you. Step out and make yourselves known.”

  Cordwick wouldn’t have moved, but almost a score did, stepping to form their own small band away from the rest, until Darien asked them to separate, to each stand alone.

  “Now, you others, take yourselves to these men and women, so that each one has followers.” Darien made no attempt to organise or divide them and the result was uneven, some of the self-professed woodsmen having a few, others having more than a dozen. The Prince nodded approvingly nonetheless.

  “Perhaps a tenday’s travel from here to the west is the border between the free Commonweal and the captive principalities, newly drawn. Hear me: make for that. Avoid towns and villages. Avoid the roads. Travel by night where you can: our eyes are better than theirs. Each group of you must move alone. The border itself is not secured, not yet. The Wasps will make it a line of forts and watchposts soon enough but for now their numbers are spread across all their stolen lands, and they have not the hands to bar the door to those who have a will to escape them. Head west, and do not stop until you are free.”

  “And if they catch us?” one of them asked bitterly.

  “Then say nothing of this, nor of being prisoners. Say only that you were turned off some distant village somewhere. You will be no worse, I hope, than you were before I came. If you are caught by any other than the Slave Corps then no doubt you will be better. The Wasps need men and women to labour in what are now their fields. You may simply be made their serfs, and not taken away as their slaves.” His voice was mild, clear and kind, and it loaned them confidence, enough to start out where before they might just have crouched in the ruin of their former slavery until new masters arrived.

  Not one stayed behind. The little bands of Dragonfly-kinden and Grasshopper-kinden trekked off away from the fight, and soon they were lost to sight, each on its own private mission, each with the blessing of Prince Lowre Darien.

  When the Prince’s retinue set off again, Cordwick put himself next to Tesse. She was looking at Darien’s back, and the only word for her expression was adoration. When she caught the Beetle looking at her she scowled, but then said, “Do you see?”

  “I’m beginning to,” admitted Cordwick. What he actually felt was mild resentment. As a man in his chosen line of work he lived off his firm belief that he was simply cleverer than most people, and that most people were rogues who deserved to be robbed. Lowre Darien was a thorn in his ideology.

  Del Halle was another of the old Commonweal castles that had been built in some previous age and which the Commonwealers themselves had scant use for before the invasion. When the Wasps had rolled in, however, the locals had rallied to their ancient fortifications to muster against the invader, and the leadshotters, the incendiaries, the rams and the trebuchets of the imperial armies had brought them down or cleaned them out, one after another. The old stones did more service to the Wasps themselves, who used them as seats for their new governors, re-edified and strengthened and fitted with artillery. Such was Del Halle. The town it overlooked was thoroughly occupied and while the townsfolk, whose exchange of serfdom for imperial slavery had not markedly altered their lot, went back to the fields to repair the damage that a dozen years of war will inflict on careful agriculture, there was a Consortium office set up in what was once the headman’s house, and drafted auxillian soldiers, Bee-kinden from some forsaken part of the east-Empire, patrolled the streets.

  The castle itself was not the spanning marvel that was Maille, of unfond memory. The original structure had been a four-storey square tower, but the Wasps had been busy, installing a large ground floor and a smaller floor above, making the whole thing look like a makeshift cousin of the ziggurats they favoured back home. It stood on a rise, with a good view of many miles of newly imperialised coutryside, and must be the garrison commander’s pride and joy. Looking up at it, Cordwick’s professionalism was piqued. He saw at once that this had been a lynch-pin of the Imperial advance, every window narrowed down to a slit, every hatch reinforced, and the top of the tower roofed over with plenty of slots from which defenders could shoot flying attackers.

  Prince Lowre Darien looked on the castle of Del Halle with nothing but determination. If he considered the defences, it was merely to acknowledge that the Wasps were taking the value of their prisoner seriously.

  That evening found them on a bluff that overlooked the village but was still beneath the watch of the fortress. Darien and Evandter had both taken up posts where they could study the Wasps’ refortification of Del Halle, and Cordwick knew exactly the kind of entrance both were thinking about. Not a frontal assault, for not even Lowre Darien’s legend included taking castles single-handedly, but denied the chance to be forthright the old Inapt kinden always fell back on the same kind of skulking business. Stealth and creeping, prying a way in, stalking corridors, silent murder. He understood the Commonweal had boasted some limited success with this tactic, but of course the Wasps had been outside the castles in those days, not inside having had plenty of opportunity to update the place with locked shutters. Even Cordwick’s eyes, which were half-blind compared to Darien’s, could see that there were no conveniently open windows for a sneak to make his entrance. If I were here to rob the place, I wouldn’t risk it. Levering open shutters was a fool’s game in a place so obviously well-stocked with soldiers.

  But it was plain that Lowre Darien’s legend also failed to include giving up and going away.

  Time to let him hang himself? Looks like the Empire’s given him more than enough rope. And Cordwick laughed at the thought, because it reminded him of a joke he used to make. Everyone looked at him in annoyance. Darien was liaising with Philomaea now. Whatever counsel she was giving him, it was not what he wanted to hear.

  “But you’re sure she’s there,” he insisted, breaking from his whispering.

  “I...” The Moth woman’s face twisted. “Yes. I think. All the signs say yes.”

  “Then I will go there and I will bring her back,” Darien said simply. “I defy prophecy.”

  “My prince, please...” the Moth hissed desperately, and Cordwick saw she was almost in tears. “You will die.”

  She was a seer, and Darien was one of those superstitious people who believed in that sort of thing. His face ha
d a desolate, despairing caste then, perhaps for the first time in his life. “I cannot leave her.” The ‘cannot’ was said as though it referred to some absolutely insuperable physical barrier.

  “Oi,” said Cordwick quietly, and prodded Tesse in the ribs. She scowled at him, her attention briefly wrested from Darien. “What?”

  “You want him to live?”

  “What sort of stupid question is that?”

  “You want him to go to Del Halle?” he asked. “You’re sane enough that you know the best way for him to live is to leave.”

  “He won’t leave,” she said, and he saw that she understood. Whether it was the seer’s doom or just common sense, she knew the odds.

  “It was your idea, how you got Evandter out, right? Darien was all for storming in?” When she nodded he went on: “Will you back me? I have a plan.”

  He put on his most confidence-inspiring expression, that had robbed several men and women of their valuables almost by itself, and she gave him a tiny, distrustful nod.

  “Lord Prince, your highness,” said Cordwick Scosser the proletarian, loud enough to break through whatever impasse had grown between Dragonfly and Moth, “we have a saying, where I come from.”

  Darien regarded him, and while the Moth glared and the Mantis sneered, he waited for Cordwick’s next words.

  “Give a man enough rope, he’ll hang himself,” the Beetle explained. “Give him too much, he’ll make a hammock.” Seeing that the Prince did not understand he elaborated. “There’s a whole load of swords and armour in that place. They could hold off an army and they could keep out a single thief or assassin, and it’s a rare place that can do both. They must have sentries and patrols and all manner of fun going on inside. Your lass is in there, and you want her, and they know it. They’re ready to take you, is how I see it. It’s like a trap, sprung and tensed to snap down the moment you put your hand into the jaws.” He saw that his Apt metaphor had lost his audience a little, but the meaning was plain.