Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “All this I know,” Darien told him. “And yet I must go.”

  “The thing about traps,” went on Cordwick as casually as he could, building his courage, “is that if you know they’re there, you can disarm them, step round them. They know you. They know the stories. They know precisely how you’d do things. What they don’t know about is Tesse, or me.”

  “What could you possibly be good for?” Evandter growled disgustedly. “And don’t say locks. I could break any lock faster than you could undo it.”

  “Though not quieter,”said Cordwick mildly. “But I don’t mean locks. I mean that we’re a Fly and a Beetle, such as throng the Empire’s supply corps, and Tesse does a fair hand in pass papers, and we’ll just turn up at their door and they’ll let us in.” As he spoke he let matters fall into place in his mind. ”Then, when the opportunity presents itself, some time late tonight, we’ll open up one of those shuttered windows, and you three can flit in like shadows. Simple as that, if you trust me.”

  “And if they kill you instead?” Evandter snorted.

  “Then you’ll be saved the bother,” Cordwick told him. “And if they come out to find you, then you can kill them and even the odds a little. What do you say?” He turned away from the Mantis pointedly, appealing directly to the Prince.

  Tesse opened out her calligraphy set and took a blank sheet of blue-white imperial paper. It had always amused Cordwick that such a fiercely martial people had a monopoly on the best paper in the world.

  “Make use of this while you can,” she warned him. “Now the war’s over they’ll be back with doing things the long way, machine-stamped passes and all sorts of other things I can’t fake.”

  Cordwick nodded almost nostalgically. During the war, with thousands of imperial servants in constant motion, imperial writ was made out, stamped and signed by hand, which was a gift to the opportunistic rogue. Soon enough would come the time when people like Tesse and Cordwick would no longer be able to slip through the imperial net as easily. And even then I got caught...

  “So,” she said, “what’s it to be? A pair of Rekef agents, yes?”

  “No!” Cordwick snapped immediately. “Rekef? I don’t know how you’re still alive, waltzing about pretending to be the Rekef.”

  She shrugged. “So what? Everyone’s scared of the Rekef. They’ll do whatever you ask, and the Outlander employs lots of non-Wasps.”

  “Until you meet the real thing. And I reckon the Rekef reserve their worst for people who take advantage of their good name. No, no Rekef. Do me out papers for a Consortium agent, nothing too ambitious, just a lieutenant maybe. There are hundreds of imperial factors and agents on a roaming brief just now, taking census and working out what everything they fought for is really worth.” He savoured the next words greatly. “And you’ll be my slave.”

  “You jest,” she said crisply, with a smile as sharp as a razor.

  “Not a bit of it,” he confirmed.

  “You’re a lieutenant, I’m a lieutenant. Or maybe a captain.”

  “You’re my Fly-kinden clerk and slave, as evidenced by your superior handwriting.”

  She shook her head, trying to pretend good humour, but failing at it. “Listen, Beetle, I’m being nobody’s slave, not even for an act, and especially not for you. Why should I?”

  He told her, outlining the plan that he was still fleshing out in his mind. After that she bucked, refused, complained and threatened him, but at last her eyes were drawn to Darien, the man all of this was in aid of, and she bit her lip and nodded.

  So it was that Lieutenant Cardwic Scotawl arrived at the gates of Del Halle with his Fly-kinden slave in tow. The name followed Cordwick’s recent practice after one job on which he had failed to recognise the grandiose moniker he had given himself, leading to an inevitable degree of mistrust amongst those he was attempting to mislead.

  The village that the fortress lorded over had been cowed and quiet, and if there had been a warfront it would have been far from here, but the surly sentry who received them had to wait some time before the gates were unbarred and unlocked, whilst suspicious eyes watched them from arrowslits. Cordwick and Tesse exchanged glances, because there was only one cause they could see for all the security, and even then the Wasps seemed to be going a bit far. All this just for his Lordship? Cordwick wondered, but then he recalled just how much of a legend Darien had built about himself. His appearing over a hilltop with a thousand Commonwealer spearmen was not entirely impossible.

  For an intinerant Consortium agent, however, the doors were opened, and Tesse’s draftsmanship bore the weight of the gate-guards’ scrutiny. With as little difficulty as that they entered Del Halle.

  Once inside, there were a few more hoops to fly through, of course. There was the hoop of kicking their heels in a barren antechamber while someone was found to deal with them. There was the hoop of explaining to the duty officer the exact same business that they had given over to the gate guards. Then there was the fortress quartermaster, who was all fat-man joviality on the surface whilst being viciously suspicious about someone trying to pry into whatever rackets he had going. Cordwick had done it all before. He had the imperial speech off perfectly, not quite an accent so much as a rhythm to the words: attack and defence, now pushing his own importance, then giving way to authority: the perfect picture of an ambitious Beetle in a Wasp’s world.

  After that they got the governor. The man was mid-supper when they were ushered in. Cordwick had timed their arrival for the appetisers, but the quartermaster had been more suspicious than expected. The governor himself was an old soldier, as the place merited: a battlefield major jumped up to colonel for the post. He was broad-shouldered, just starting to thicken at the waist, and he wore bracers and a gorget even eating in his own hall. His greying hair was short and neat and there was a sword slung over the back of his chair, as though he was prepared for an attack on the very heart of his power. Cordwick saw it, and saw that this was not the general readiness of the fortress but the man’s personal campaign to cling to his younger days of beloved strife.

  “Colonel Borden,” he was named, and Cordwick, as Cardwic, saluted him.

  Borden’s gaze passed over him, finding nothing of interest. He continued eating, something highly spiced and with plenty of meat, from the smell and look of it, letting his visitors stew for a while before grunting, “What do you want?”

  “Well, sir, I’m conducting a survey of this principality for my factor...” Cordwick started, anticipating the interruption.

  “Who?” Borden snapped.

  “Obden Bellowern, sir,” came the prompt, prepared reply. Whether there was an Obden of that family, Cordwick had no idea, but the Bellowerns were a Big Noise in the Consortium, a name to conjure with.

  Borden inclined his head, sullen but satisfied. “By survey you mean seeing what’s not nailed down,” he asserted.

  “One man’s theft is another man’s conquest,” Cordwick agreed, philosophically. The recently-occupied Commonweal territories were awash with agents of the various Consortium magnates wrestling for control of the new opportunities the invasion had turned up. The fact that Borden disapproved was noted and filed.

  “Any special brief?” the colonel asked suspiciously.

  “Agriculture, if you can believe it,” Cordwick told him. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the East-Empire harvests weren’t so great, the last two years.”

  It was a sufficiently innocuous and plausible proposition that Borden just nodded along. “And you want what from me?” he demanded.

  “From you, sir? Why nothing, As I’m going to be underfoot, so to speak, I thought I should take the courtesy of introducing myself.”

  That drew a few beats of calculating silence from the man, as Cordwick held his breath and hoped he’d got his appraisal right. Then the office nodded again, less abruptly. “That’s more courtesy than most Consortium men show,” he noted. “Most of your lot come and go without so much as a word, but you can im
agine the fuss when two or three of them get strung up as smugglers because nobody knew.”

  Good. This was a story Cordwick had heard before, enough times to guess that it was probably apocryphal, a soldier’s joke. That was fine because Borden was a soldier’s soldier who didn’t like the presumption of the Consortium merchants. Cordwick had now presented himself as respectful and polite, and it was no surprise when the governor gestured at a chair. Cordwick sat at the colonel’s table, implicitly in.

  A scattering of other officers were present, most of them looking as though they had been pried from their armour only reluctantly. Borden surrounded himself with like-minded men. Cordwick nodded carefully to them, measuring each until he came to the discordant note: a man as bald as a stone, sour faced as though whatever he was eating had been laced with lemons. A man, more to the point, with a vacant chair to either side of him. Not one of us, that said, but at the same time he was there, and within two seats of the governor. To Cordwick, that said Rekef as clear as if it had been branded on the man’s forehead. Had circumstances allowed, he would have shot an I-told-you-so at Tesse, currently fidgeting behind his chair. As it was, he just gave the bald man the same polite acknowledgement as the rest. It was not returned.

  “You’ll want a roof over your head, while you’re surveying,” Borden dropped in.

  “If possible, for myself and my slave,” Cordwick said.

  “Knew you’d want something from me.” Borden nodded at Tesse. “She’s all you have, no escort? So you’ll be wanting guards and the like also?”

  “Colonel, on my way here I saw a score of dead Slave corps men who’d run into some kind of local trouble. Travelling light and out of colours and, if you’ll forgive me, with no pale Wasp faces to catch attention, is the safest thing for me.”

  Borden smiled at that, for the first time. “Prudent,” he noted, and then ate for a while. A bowl and wooden spoon was placed before Cordwick, and he took a few mouthfuls of some kind of stew, so spicy as to be flavourless.

  “You’ve done a fair job of turning this place into a civilised fortress,” he commented at last.

  “More than you know,” Borden told him, chewing. “I had to defend Del Halle twice during the war.” The hook was there, and Cordwick made his eyes wide with a non-combatant’s earnest admiration.

  “I never got to see any of the fighting,” he prompted, and Borden obediently responded with, “I’ll show you where we threw them back, then.”

  Throughout the whole meal, the bald man said nothing, was not introduced or even much looked at. His silent, brooding presence was as pointedly evident as a stone in a shoe.

  Then came the grand tour, which Cordwick had been angling for. Borden, now sufficiently convinced of the credentials of his fresh audience, had a chance to tell his war stories, and as such stories relied on a knowledge of Del Halle, Cordwick and Tesse were guided through its halls and rooms, able to remark at their leisure just how the place was laid out, and how well it was secured.

  Well, was the answer to that, and there were a lot of guards at their posts, far more than peacetime would normally mandate. Borden even dropped an offhand hint that they were “expecting a little bother right about now.” Cordwick managed to exchange a look with Tesse. They are ready for Darien. Not for nothing had Philomaea led them here. Specifically, there were more than sufficient guards on the two downward stairs that they passed. The cellars were not just for wine, and Cordwick could only hope that the arrangements down there were less convoluted than those at Maille.

  Then Borden took them to the central light-well of the castle, and Cordwick breathed an inward sigh of relief. The place had been so heavily refortified that this original Commonwealer feature might easily have been cluttered up, but here it was: a column of empty space in the centre of the castle reaching from the ground to the roof-space, with plenty of openings and doors up and down its length, the swiftest road through the building for anyone with wings. Most of these old Commonweal forts had them, and there, at the top, were what had been portals to the outside. They were shuttered and barred now, but Cordwick recalled what he had seen of the exterior, matching up window for window and door for door.

  “I say, colonel,” Cordwick said, as the man came to the end of one of his military anecdontes, “seeing this space here... Have you ever heard of thea rappa?”

  Borden’s look suggested that he assumed it was some piece of martial artifice that he hadn’t yet encountered.

  “It’s an entertainment, a Commonweal dance form,” said Cordwick, in his best ‘oh-what-silly-things-these-primitives-do’ sort of voice. “My slave’s a fair hand at it, in fact. I only mention it because it’s a sword-dance, a fighting dance, almost. As a soldier, I thought you might enjoy it.”

  Borden glanced back at his officers, gauging their mood. They had been waiting for Darien for a while, Cordwick guessed, because the idea of some fresh amusement obviously appealed to them. The colonel nodded. “Proceed.”

  “I will need a sword,” Tesse said, and then, “Master,” with what sounded to Cordwick like undue sarcasm.

  The Wasps exchanged looks, Borden’s officers instantly suspicious, but Borden growled at them, “What’s she going to do? This is nothing. This is nothing to do with him.”

  Cordwick kept his face carefully straight, watching as the colonel drew his own shortsword and passed it to Tesse hilt-first. She bowed gracefully and took up her station in the centre of the space, beneath that far-off roof. The original plan had been to use her thea rappa for a distraction, allowing Cordwick free rein to make his inspection. This would be better, though, provided the Fly had understood what he required of her.

  She stamped on the stone floor, and in the echo of it was airborne, wings shimmering and flickering about her shoulders. She had a red ribbon in one hand, its end weighted with a bead of lead, and the sword dragging at her other side, and she spiralled up until she was halfway to the far ceiling. Cordwick hoped that she was as good as her boast. If nothing else, bad thea rappa could be a hazard for the spectators, and if she clipped one of Borden’s general staff, things would not go well.

  She let go of the sword. Even as the Wasps were spreading out in alarm she had caught it up again, the ribbon trailing like blood, casting the blade up towards high shuttered windows. Instantly she was after it, spinning and gyring about it, catching and lifting the weapon with tiny touches, making it spin in a glitter of steel that the high sconces caught. She moved in swift loops about it, making it seem that the blade was nearly still, that she was orbiting it as a moth about a flame. The streamer of red that followed her spelled out the corkscrew of her path in brief letters as she flew.

  She was adequate, Cordwick decided. His interest in such displays was purely for their tendancy to distract people from their valuables, and in this he judged her adequate. The Wasps seemed more appreciative, supporting his suspicion that decent entertainment was at a premium out here.

  After she had landed, with the sword repatriated to its owner, Borden grunted his approval.

  “How much for her?”

  Cordwick’s innards lurched but his mouth was already working. “Alas, Colonel, I can’t, much as I’d like to sometimes. Not only is she my clerk as well as my dancer, her papers are in the Bellowern name and not mine to dispose of.”

  “Well, perhaps she can entertain us again tomorrow,” Borden said, pragmatic as any field officer. “Find the lieutenant quarters,” he directed one of his underlings. “Until tomorrow, Lieutenant.”

  Once they had been decanted to a spartanly appointed guest room, with barred boards over the windows, and once he had made an exhaustive investigation to ensure that nobody was nearby and eavesdropping, Cordwick sat on the hard-mattressed bed and said, “Well?”

  “Well, I’m going to kill you, some day soon,” Tesse informed him.

  “You sound like Evandter,” the Beetle noted drily.

  “You think I like performing for Wasps like some kind of trained cri
cket?” she demanded in a fierce whisper.

  Cordwick held his hands up. “Please, please tell me that you took a look at those high windows.”

  She looked surly for a moment, but then nodded.

  “And you can go out tonight and pop one open for Himself?”

  Tesse shook her head. “Shuttered, secured. Same as that one, in fact.” She indicated the bars of their own chamber. “But they’re definitely the outside ones at the top, that we were talking about.”

  Cordwick looked at their own window. The thick wooden shutters were backed by a solid metal bar secured at each end with a lock. Darien and Evandter could have spent all night hacking with axes before they made any serious dent in the castle’s security. “Be thankful for the Engineering Corps’ love of order,” he told Tesse, “because they make these locks by the hundred in Sonn, and I can spring them easy as breathing.” He met her gaze, finding her small face so crammed full of determination that he almost laughed at her.

  “If we let Darien and the others in, then they’re going to start killing people,” Cordwick noted soberly.

  “Wasps,” Tesse responded, three foot six inches of disdain.

  “People,” he corrected absently. “All I’m saying is that, once they’re in, our part in this is done. We can walk away.”

  “Coward.”

  “Yes. Also, bloodshed was never really part of my way of doing things. And what about you? Darien storms in here, kills some Wasps, frees his sweetheart, kills Evandter, probably, and they live happily until the Wasps finally track them down? Where does that leave you, or the Moth for that matter?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she snapped.

  “You do, but I can’t be bothered to set out the proofs. Anyway, you’re not my business any more than the prince is, once he’s in. I’m just saying, going elbow-deep in blood so that someone else can have the story-book ending is no recipe for happiness.”