Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  True, there were a pair of soldiers there, and they, too, looked rather neater and more orderly than Messer’s venal staff had been, but the Fly was plainly in charge, and that was something of note anywhere the Wasp Empire stamped its authority. He was a tidy little piece of work, pale and dark-haired with a high forehead, and he wore a rank badge but no uniform, instead favouring clothes of plain black. The rank badge said ‘captain’. Gaved had never met a Fly-kinden captain before.

  “So, ah...” He ended up exchanging a look with Sien Se, a lanky Grasshopper merchant who had been foolish enough to try and stint the Empire’s taxes. The Empire’s war to claim this slice of the Commonweal had not been overly long, but many of the locals had already become adept at properly civilized crimes like embezzlement, tax evasion and short-changing soldiers. “So, ah...”

  “My staff tell me you had some business with the quartermaster,” the Fly noted.

  “Only, maybe it could wait until Messer’s back...?” Gaved said uncertainly.

  “I really don’t think anyone would be willing to wait that long. Or able,” the Fly told him with a tight little smile. “Perhaps I should introduce myself. I am Captain Javvi of the Rekef Inlander.”

  “Ock,” said Gaved, or something like that. He had certainly never met a Fly-kinden from that branch of the secret service, nor had he met anyone from the Inlander who announced the fact quite so brazenly. Not until after an arrest, certainly.

  Something of his thoughts must have shown on his face, because Javvi went on, “It is a constant annoyance that people forget that one duty of the Inlander is simply keeping the peace in Imperial holdings. Not the most celebrated duty, but that serves as a rather sad indictment of the times we live in, I fear. You are...” he pointedly consulted the papers before him, “ex-Sergeant Gaved, I believe. You have recently made a very lucrative living for yourself tracking down fugitives of financial substance for Captain Messer.”

  Gaved guessed that ‘lucrative’ must have a different meaning for some people, but he reckoned it wasn’t a toss he was advised to argue. He assayed a very small nod.

  “Captain Messer made a rather better living accepting what he laughably termed ‘fines’ in return for letting those fugitives go about their business,” Javvi observed primly, “but then you knew that.”

  Gaved’s eyes roamed the room as though seeking an escape. This time he shook his head. It didn’t seem to help.

  “These lands that we have so recently conquered,” Javvi confided in him, “are somewhat lawless. You may have noticed. The Emperor, in his wisdom, has dispatched a number of Investigative Officers of the Inlander to restore the rule of law. We have been granted very wide powers, given that we are faced with territories rife with former Commonweal soldiers, bandits, profiteers, common criminals and deserters,” and he put an unpleasant emphasis on that last word.

  “I’m not a deserter,” Gaved said quickly.

  “You’re a Wasp of eligible age and gender, and you’re not in uniform and under orders. This rather begs the question.”

  “It’s a long story-” Gaved started.

  “I wouldn’t dream of denying you the chance to tell it. However, as you can imagine I am rather busy assimilating Captain Messer’s somewhat duplicitous records, and so I suggest you use your time in the cells to get your long story in some sort of comprehensible order.”

  “Hey, no, wait –!” Gaved started, but the Grasshopper merchant chose that moment to speak.

  “What about me? I have a business to get to. I see Messer’s gone, so fine. I can deal with you.” He apparently had no idea who the Rekef Inlander were.

  Javvi smiled, the sort of brittle expression constantly on the point of shattering into points and sharp edges. “You are guilty of withholding funds from the Emperor. However, the law-abiding shall rejoice, for the rule of law is here, and I can deal with you.” He nodded to his soldiers, and one of them stepped forward with a hand out.

  Gaved was sharp enough to abruptly not be standing next to Sien Se. In the next second there was a crackling snap as the soldier’s sting discharged, flinging the tall Grasshopper into the wall with his chest burnt out.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” Gaved heard himself unwisely say.

  Javvi looked at him blankly. “The withholding of taxes is treason, ex-Sergeant Gaved. However, your sympathy for the condemned is duly noted. Now bind his hands and lock him up until I can be bothered with him.”

  Messer had used the stockade at the back of his Quartermaster’s shack for goods, mostly those he was waiting to sell on to his contacts back home – he had a fine line in the Commonweal war memorabilia that armchair tacticians back in the Empire were mad about. Now all that clutter was gone, and Javvi had replaced it with human chattels.

  There a handful of locals were chained up there. Gaved knew the type: vagabonds, petty criminals, escaped slaves. He saw Grasshopper and Roach-kinden, and they stared at him with the big, frightened eyes they reserved for the conquering Wasps, even one who came to them with his hands strapped behind his back.

  They had one cage to themselves. Gaved got the middle one next to them. On the far side, a single prisoner sat on the ground and watched him keenly. Another Wasp; she was a Wasp.

  Wasp women didn’t travel unless they were with the army, but Gaved got the impression that this specimen was neither officer’s wife nor soldier’s whore. Perhaps she was from one of the travelling healer bands that trailed the Imperial advance, never officially recognized but tacitly tolerated nonetheless. If so, she had plainly pushed her luck too far.

  Her hands were bound as well – but in front of her. A leather thong from her wrists to the cage roof gave her enough play to roam her little slatted kingdom.

  “What are you looking at, deserter?” she asked him, though her own eyes had not left him. She was a handsome woman, and in truth Gaved had not seen a good-looking female Wasp for longer than he cared to consider. She had an oval face with fierce blue eyes and a pointed chin. Someone had hacked her pale hair short into a man’s cut. She wore a soldier’s cast-off tunic and breeches, and she was perhaps a little more slender and boyish than he normally liked. but to Gaved she was no less a sight for sore eyes for all that. He was a man who liked women, when he could get them, and who was simultaneously too poor to pay for them, and too conscience-ridden to seek more contested opportunities. It was a difficult path to walk, for a Wasp.

  “I’m not a deserter,” he told her. He was well aware that he was a rough-looking character: a long face with more than one scar, stubbled and dirty, and with a conspicuous burn about his neck as a memento of the day he left the army. He still had her attention, though, and so he added, “I’m a freelancer. I hunt fugitives.” Only when they were said did he consider how absurd the words sounded right now.

  “Did you track yourself down and bring yourself in? I hope they gave you a reward,” she remarked. She was looking him right in the eye, another thing Wasp women seldom did.

  “Well I’d thought to find Captain Messer –”

  “Oh, you ran into the new boy,” she finished for him. Her smile invited collusion. “Messer was supposed to be getting me out of here. I paid him well enough. But then little Master Law and Order turned up, and...”

  “Right.” Gaved nodded grimly. “So you’re... What?” Looking at her, with that bold and forthright manner, he could not guess. Had she been in the army? There had been the odd woman in the pioneers, hadn’t there, or working for the Rekef? All positons that placed them outside the usual grind of the military, and the repressive structures of the Imperial hierarchy.

  She drew closer, grinning, and he found himself leaning in.

  “Can you keep a secret?” she whispered and, at his nod, “I’m really a master criminal.”

  “Of course you are,” he replied, but obviously without conviction.

  “Doubt all you want, but there’s more than one Consortium merchant who’s cursing my name. And more than one who’s r
ejoicing now I’ve been caught. I’m only kicking my heels here because they want the pleasure of putting me on the pikes elsewhere, and the escort’s on its way.”

  “You sound very proud of this,” Gaved observed.

  “Take your achievements where you can, deserter.”

  “I told you, I’m not –”

  “That really matters to you, doesn’t it.” Her grin was still there, and it was hard for him not to match it. “You’re a tough man, are you? You rough it through the wilderness on the trail of whatever poor bastard you’re paid for?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve been known to.”

  “You might have been sent after me,” she observed thoughtfully. “Your luck’s out now, though, isn’t it. No cash, no freedom. And I bet they think you’re a deserter.”

  “You’re right there,” he admitted. “You’d not credit how hard they find it to believe any red-blooded man wouldn’t want to slave for the army until he dies.”

  “Yes, you have it really hard, you men,” she observed acidly. “We women can’t imagine what it’s like to be forced into lives we don’t want.” Her smile had dropped briefly, but now she took it back up. “You’re for hire, freelancer?”

  “I have a feeling that, right now, you couldn’t afford me.”

  “You haven’t heard my offer. You see, I need to get out of here and across country, back to an old haunt of mine. I just happen to be on the lookout for a fellow who’ll guide and guard me on the way.”

  He could feel his smile growing, but the direction it was going was towards incredulous contempt. “How about we pick this conversation up after we’ve both been sentenced and executed. I’ll have plenty of time then.”

  “You haven’t heard the pay.”

  “Oh?”

  “One part up front on agreement, the other when we get there. First half is your freedom, tonight.”

  He regarded her, no longer smiling. “Is that so.”

  She shook her bound wrists at him, and for a moment he couldn’t tell why, but then he realized that she was simply displaying the bonds. A moment later she was twisting and turning them, an exaggeratedly innocent expression on her face, but she had a hand free in moments. Deadpan, she waved it at him, and then twisted and wriggled it until she was bound once more.

  “One of the things about being a thief,” she told him, “is that you learn all sorts of things to do with your hands. So, do we have a deal, deserter?”

  “The name’s Gaved,” he snapped.

  “Aelta,” was the name she gave him. How attached to her it really was, he could not say.

  But when she put her question to him again, he nodded. He had little faith in the impartiality of the Rekef, or in any genuine attachment to justice this Javvi might harbour. And the prospect of travelling in company such as hers was hardly an argument against.

  She wouldn’t talk much after that, although he caught her cool eyes on him more than once. The yard outside the Quartermaster’s was quiet now – a lot of Messer’s people must have either been taken up or run off. The little stock of soldiers the Fly commanded patrolled regularly, though, and cast suspicious eyes over the prisoners, and over Gaved most of all. A few stayed to ogle Aelta, but no more than that. The Fly had them on a tight leash.

  Only after dark did she make her move. She waited until a lone sentry had made his turn about the yard, dragging his feet somewhat, and then she stopped pretending to sleep, uncurling into a crouch and sliding her hands free.

  “Second thoughts?” she murmured.

  “Not me,” Gaved confirmed. “So... You’ve a key, or...?”

  “Or.” And she began to twist out of her clothes right there. The soldier’s tunic came off first, shrugged over her head, and then she had her britches off, a careful, minimalist ballet of economic motion. Beneath she had only a ragged shift that left very little to his imagination. Her skin gleamed pale in the wan moonlight.

  “Like what you see?” she asked him.

  His mouth was dry. “What are you doing?”

  “What do you think? A private show, for all the fugitive deserters of the world.” But she was staring at his face, trying to read him, to see what his true reaction was, body and mind. “So, you’re a red-blooded soldier after all, are you? Do your duty well enough, there might be a bonus for you at the end.”

  With his burn scar and his low status, it wasn’t the sort of offer Gaved got often, his quick nod came without the need to think about it.

  “But not before,” she added, still standing there with only a little linen between his eyes and her.

  “Is that right?” His voice was rough, when it came out.

  She nodded flatly. “Object lesson, deserter.” She gathered up her shed clothes and turned to the cage door, bundling and looping them swiftly about the lock. “For my next trick,” she said softly, working her hands into the muddle of cloth.

  He barely heard the stingshot, just a muffled creak and a slight rattle of hinges. All Wasps could sting, of course, women as well as men. A woman’s sting was a feeble thing, though, that was the general belief. They had no chance or need to develop or practice the Art. The only reason a woman had a sting was to give it to her sons.

  When she unwrapped her clothes from the door, the wood around the lock had been shattered into charcoal shards, the metal itself hanging loosely by a few splinters. She turned back to him, one white palm presented. In a man, it would have been a threat. Abruptly it was a threat from her, too.

  “Easy, now,” he told her.

  “Not so easy as you were hoping, I’ll bet.” She slipped from her cell and came right up to his door. If his hands hadn’t been tied behind him, he could have grabbed her through the bars. “But what can I say? I’m a miser with things of value.” And the smile came back. “They have to be earned, Gaved.”

  She was pressed up against the slatted wood, half-naked and utterly stripped of the modesty and humility a Wasp woman was supposed to show. And he wanted her very much. There was a part of him telling him to seize her as soon as her back was turned, but he had fought that down before and he did so again now. Perhaps she had seen in his face that Gaved had been many bad things in his time, but never that.

  She shattered the lock to his cage as quietly as she had her own, and undid his hands when he turned to present them to her. A moment later she had stepped back swiftly as he stalked out. That was the first moment where there was nothing between them but distance, and perhaps she had thought he would assert command then and there, just manhandle her away. His mind was already working on the strategy of escape, though.

  “Them too,” he said to her, nodding at the Commonwealer prisoners in the third cell. “Give the little maggot as much to chase as possible.”

  “You do it,” she told him, and for a moment he felt anger rise in him: the Wasp man he had always been taught to be, denied by a woman. The pressure of time was greater, though, and anyway, all of that way of thinking seemed inextricably linked with the army life he was so desperate to get away from.

  He grimaced – good coats were hard to come by – but he copied her scheme and broke the lock on the last cell, though he needed two stingshots to do so. When he turned back to her, she had her clothes on again, though they were scorched and holed, revealing as much as they concealed.

  The Commonwealers were already running, scattering too, each one of them to their own path. That should keep the little Rekef bastard busy, but Gaved had the uncomfortable feeling that Wasp fugitives would be priority in Javvi’s ordered little mind.

  They cleared out quickly – surely not much time now until the next guard came to discover the wreckage. Gaved made a map in his head, and led Aelta towards the nearest stand of forest. This was good farmland they were in, but there was nowhere in these lands that was completely cleared. The Commonweal lacked the great breadbasket plains that the East-Empire boasted – too many rocks, too many trees and no modern machinery to clear them. That far, it was a fugitive’s gift, bu
t a good hunter could overcome all those advantages. Until tonight that had been Gaved’s role.

  He kept them on the move half the night before pausing, using their wings whenever they could, to deny the trackers. He knew all the tricks, from having foiled them. They changed direction, they followed watercourses, flitted over the great stone-walled canals. They tangled their trail in copses and straggling stands of trees.

  Past midnight Aelta was slowing and, if he was honest, so was he. For some reason, running after someone seemed far less effort than running away. There was a village nearby, and he could tell at a glance that half the homes there were no longer occupied. It was a common-enough sight: casualties of war and the depredations of the Slave Corps had seen the surviving residents contract to a little knot of dwellings, like a snail drawing into its shell.

  The night was cold and Aelta was certainly no longer dressed for it, but a fire would be too risky. Instead he slung his coat over her, and that was the second moment, his hands on her, the warmth of her body like a fire in itself. The contact sent a jolt through him, and for a moment he was holding on to her shoulders with a grip that had gone too hard, too possessive. She was tense, but she was a woman, and there were generations of his ancestors telling him how these things went.

  If she had looked at him, if she had met his eyes with that mockery and abandon she had shown when breaking free, then he might have convinced himself it was all right. In that moment, though, she was not looking at him, not looking at anything, just drawn tight as a wire and waiting to see what he would do.

  He let go and took a step back, exaggeratedly casual. He saw, then, that she’d had a hand directed at him, hidden in the shadows of his own coat. That was another thing Wasp women didn’t do and perhaps she wouldn’t have had the nerve. Women didn’t, that was the soldier’s motto, because they knew it would be so much worse for them if they did.