Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Tisamon did not want a drink, particularly. He wanted to track down the Seven Clocks and get the balance of his fee. However, he saw the way that some of the woman’s gaming partners looked at her – as though they had already tallied up the worth of her clothes and decided that they were too valuable to be allowed to leave with their current owner. In the hope of a new fight, he agreed.

  She named herself Ellery Mainler. She spoke with an educated precision he recognized, a graduate of distant Collegium. She was young, monied, intense. She kept unfolding her spectacles to look at him closely, the lenses flashing with reflected gaslight against her dark skin, then tucking them away again.

  “You fight beautifully,” she told him. They were at a taverna well out of the reach of the Fabrus Brothers.

  Tisamon looked her over, trying to work out what she wanted. Her expression was still lit from within as though witnessing the bloodshed had set a fire there.

  “I’m a connoisseur,” she confided to him, “of the fight.”

  She must have read his reaction – the haughty disdain felt by the master of the ancient tradition for the presumptuous amateur – and was instantly trying to disabuse him.

  “It’s not like that! I don’t just bet on the matches. I’m not one of those,” and, seeing that the distance between them was only growing, “I’ll show you. Come to my home. It’s not far.”

  Tisamon shook his head, drained his wine, stood to go. Instantly she’d reached for his sleeve, almost bloodying her fingers on the sharp spines that ran down his forearm, a manifestation of the Mantis-kinden Art, that made him what he was.

  “Come with me!” she insisted and, when he turned to go, she shouted after him, “I need you to see! I’m not just some sad spectator. I’m a scholar of the fight. Mantis, I have my honour!”

  In the taverna’s doorway, Tisamon turned.

  “I have my honour,” she repeated. “I won’t be... dismissed, misinterpreted, like that. At least let me show you.” There was something naked in her face, not need but needs, intertwined. He knew then that she was trouble but, in his circles, everyone was trouble of one kind or another.

  “Show me,” thus he committed himself.

  Her home was mostly a workshop. She lived in the small upper rooms, she said, but artifice was her life, and where her money went. The building was expansive and in a good area, redolent of inherited wealth.

  “Why risk yourself gambling, if you have this?” he challenged her.

  “Because my research is expensive,” she explained tersely, as she unlocked the door.

  “Gambling is a good way of losing what little you have.”

  “Not for me. I never lose.” Her eyes glinted as she turned the lamps up, the light spreading out across a great open space that was most of the ground floor. “Nobody realizes what you can do with cards, if you’ve a perfect memory and a good head for figures. Of course, I have to move about a bit. People don’t like to bet against me twice.”

  “You’ll get yourself killed.”

  She shrugged, crossing to some kind of machine that stood in the centre of the floor, the focus of the room. It was a pillar a little over man-height, a mass of interlocking components that Tisamon’s Inapt eyes skipped over. All machines were incomprehensible to him.

  “Look.” She led his eyes to the walls, where the light guttered fitfully over sketches of the human body. He saw what seemed at first to be a view from a torture chamber: figures with bones laid bare, flayed men, women who were strung with bared sinews, all annotated in minute script. And all in motion, each sketch catching the mangled body in mid-strike. Ellery’s studies of the fight. This was what she had meant.

  Her expression was calm, focused enough to cut steel. “I know. I’m Apt. What can I know of your great and noble mystery? That’s it, isn’t it?” And, when he just looked at her, “But I do understand. I know everything of the fighter’s art save how to fight. I know the leverage and the fulcrums, all there is about balance and joints, extension and angle. I have anatomized the fight.”

  She was young, unskilled, built to that Beetle-kinden frame that produced solid, compact, slightly overfull bodies, but her intensity intimidated him more than a drawn blade. “To what purpose?” he asked her.

  “To reproduce it,” and she threw a lever on the machine and then stepped back.

  He heard the hiss of steam, the floor beneath him quivering with the motion of buried engines, and then the thing unfolded its blade, a length of razored steel on an arm with three joints. There was nothing human – nothing natural – in the way it brandished the weapon.

  “I will pay you,” Ellery Mainler told him. “I want to watch you fight. I want you to fight it.”

  “How can it be fought?” Tisamon demanded. “It’s a thing.”

  “You won’t know what I mean by a ratiocinator,” she told him. “They’re new. Nobody’s done anything like this with one. It lets my duellist think – or calculate anyway. If you approach it now, it will know where you are, from sound, from vibration. This leads into a cascade of gear trains that tell it how best to kill you. So fight, Mantis.” Her eyes were very wide. “I will pay you. I have money. Fight for me.”

  He should have walked away, he knew. She was unbalanced, and this was no use of his skills, to attack an object. That should have ended it. He was going to do just that.

  One step towards the door and he made the mistake of looking back at her, seeing her tremble at the rejection. Poor Apt girl, wealthy beyond counting in the world she had been born into, and yet without a single coin in his. He saw how long she had been working on this joke of a thing, how very badly she wanted to achieve... what? Perhaps even she was not sure.

  He turned back, and now his clawed gauntlet was on his hand.

  “You want me to destroy this thing.”

  “I want you to try.”

  He stepped towards the machine cautiously, watching that crooked blade. As he neared, parts of it moved, sliding and spinning, and abruptly its single arm flicked out, so that he leant back to avoid its reach. He circled, step by step, seeing the band that held the arm revolve with him. He had no sense that he was facing a living enemy.

  He feinted twice, watching the machine follow his movements, feeling out the delay in its response, and then struck, batting aside the blade with his own, following through, stepping around it and then driving the point of his claw three, four times into the workings. A moment later he was pacing back, weapon raised between him and it, anticipating the mechanical arm spinning to lash after him. It was frozen, though, locked where he had parried it. Whatever damage he had done had returned the mechanism to the world of the inanimate.

  He cocked his head at Ellery, surprising a wealth of expressions there as she fought to master herself. Very few of them made sense to him: perhaps these were Apt expressions, interpretable only by those who understood gear trains and calculus.

  The Seven Clocks and the Fabrus Union had worked out their differences, but there was always another fight. Tisamon drifted from one to the next, but nothing pushed him, and the sense of purposeless despair that was never far away began to loom large in his life. Then came a challenger from the South, a Spider-kinden who called him out. Tisamon’s loathing for the Spiders was legendary, and his opponent seemed to return the sentiment in equal measure. They fought, and though the man had no sword and circle badge, he was good enough to have earned one. Afficionados of the duel said that it was best they’d seen in years, and Tisamon was bleeding from a handful of shallow wounds by the time he cut the Spider down, finding himself standing over the body, feeling oddly bereft that the man was dead.

  Looking up, his gaze lit on Ellery Mainler, wide eyes fixed on him. He could read desire there, that possessive kind that rich Beetles specialized in. When he met her gaze, he felt the same physical shock he had when he had looked at the Spider down the length of the man’s steel.

  She sought him out, of course she did. “Come and fight for me,” she to
ld him.

  “Your machine, again?”

  “I’ve improved it.” And of course that was what the Apt did. While the old world of magic, that Tisamon had been born to, had sprung into being in the height of its power and only declined since, the Apt were always improving. “I can pay you,” Ellery added, and “Please.”

  The machine, when he laid eyes on it again, had changed. He had made some comments before leaving the last time, concerning how such a thing could never be what she wanted it to be. She had taken the details to heart and discarded the body of the message.

  There was a webwork of rails patterning the ceiling, crossing everywhere in the room, and the machine was no longer just a pillar fixed to the floor. “It must move,” Tisamon had said. Now, the lumpy, part-armoured cylinder of its body was suspended between the rails and four articulated legs. It had two arms, the familiar blade and a twin that ended in the bronze disc of a buckler. It still resembled nothing living and, even when she threw the lever and it juddered into motion, it remained a dead thing to him.

  “You must fight it,” she told him, and he saw the articulated legs pick their way sideways, not supporting the machine’s weight but just guiding its progress, so that it seemed to glide over the floor like a crab over the seabed. When Ellergy spoke, the machine stopped and turned towards her.

  “What if I leave?” he asked her. “Can you make it stop?” And he had its faceless attention once more.

  “I don’t know,” she told him. He remembered her in the gambling den, amongst men and women who would have murdered her for her shoes. A Beetle girl, yes, born to money and education, and not satisfied, never satisfied. A warrior’s heart in the body of a dilettante.

  He approached the machine at a rush.

  It reacted more swiftly than the previous incarnation, lashing towards him with sword and buckler together, dominating the mid-line like a real swordsman. Still, it was slower than flesh. Still the movements were that fraction of a second late, a hand’s span off, as it tried to keep up with where he was. He led it around the room, getting a feel for this new mobility, fending the blade off when it came in range. The machine pursued him relentlessly, snorting steam, the massed ranks of clockwork within it sounding like grinding teeth.

  He struck three times, watching the machine move shield and blade into place, understanding its rhythms. A moment later he had dropped beneath its next swing, putting a boot into its torso that set it swinging on the rails. An upwards blow locked the sword arm rigid where it met the body, brass housings bent into a firm clasp. He had no way of telling its weak points, but he let his blade drive into those parts that seemed less armoured, and finally it stopped chattering and hissing, the last of its steam escaping in a long, disappointed breath.

  “It’s still nothing but a thing,” he told Ellery. Her stare was disconcerting, acquisitive. He took his fee and left.

  Tisamon’s agent was a pragmatic Beetle woman named Rowen Palasso, and she became very familiar with Ellery Mainler over the next month. Business was slow, and Mainler paid over the odds – indeed it seemed she would pay whatever Palasso asked. Three times more, Tisamon trudged to her workshops to demolish the latest incarnation of her machine. She never seemed to run out of money, though he wondered that there was anyone left in Helleron who would bet against her. More, she never ran out of whatever drove her. She watched him fight with an avid hunger that he felt every moment. She sketched him, not clad as he presented himself, but stripped – to the skin, to the muscle, to the bone, intimate beyond the dreams of pornography. Tisamon knew obsession when he saw it. He had been its victim, in his time. What he did not know was how to cure it.

  The machine was still lacking. Even as he engaged it, it failed to engage him. It remained a thing.

  After that last clash, third of this series, fifth overall, she asked him to stay with her. Given how much she was paying Palasso, he felt he owed that to her, and she poured out a little wine and asked him questions. At first these were the expected: technique, distancing, balance, a façade of professionalism, as though all she cared about was her pointless, useless fighting automaton. Once the wine had loosened them both a little she segued into darker territories. She asked him about his upbringing, his training, his badge. She asked him a dozen questions about what his fighting meant to him, the Inapt Weaponsmaster, and he did his best for her. His answers slid away from her, just as hers would baffle him if he asked her to explain the workings of her machine. They were from different worlds, and he was bewildered that she, the inheritrix of all that was new and strong and dominant in the world, should yet find herself jealous of the old, pining for a world of uncertainties that she could never be a part of.

  He imagined her as she staked her fortune at the card tables, pitting the gleaming steel of her wits against the risk of losing everything. What would her face look like, in the moment before the cards turned? Would he recognize that expression from the fighting ring, from the swordsman caught at the height of his skill, letting his blade bear the weight of a life?

  She met his gaze, and he realized that he had been staring at her for some time.

  “I will make it better,” she told him. “Come back to me.”

  To Palasso’s annoyance, he began to turn down commissions. He did not need the money – though perhaps she did – and he felt off balance, incomplete and without his unassailable focus. He was waiting for Ellery’s word.

  When he dreamt, he did not see Ellery but he heard as she worked invisibly about the craft that he could not imagine, as though she was tunnelling through the walls of his dream. Instead, what he saw was the machine stalking through the halls of his mind to challenge him. In her workshop he had faced it boldly, but in the dreams it was a thing of terror and he fled rather than see its face. He awoke ashamed, sweat-stained, feverish.

  If Ellery had been a magician, he would have understood, but she was Apt, an artificer, as far from magic as a kinden could go. He had bewitched himself.

  Then the call came, at last, and he went to her like a warrior to his last battle, but gladly.

  She met him at the door of her workshop. There was a terrible excitement bubbling in her face.

  “It’s finished,” she told him. “It’s ready for you. Nobody has ever built such a thing as I have. I took all you told me of yourself, and I have measured it and calculated and trapped it in metal. I am the greatest artificer in the world. Fight my champion, Tisamon. I challenge you. Like a Mantis, I challenge you.” Just as her machines were not life, but could feign, so she was not Inapt, and yet she had listened to him enough to know what words to say.

  He stepped into the workshop with Ellery at his back. The machine was ready for him, gears wound, steam hissing softly from its joints as it waited. She had given it two legs, and it no longer hung from the ceiling tracks like a murderous marionette. The arms still had a joint too many, and its shape was hunchbacked and inhuman to accommodate the burgeoning intricacy of the workings, but it had a head now. His face, cast in brass, as perfect and devoid of expression as a death mask.

  Tisamon fell into his stance, the blade of his claw unfolded to lie between them. When the machine smoothly adopted a mirror stance, he stared into that familiar face and felt the shock of contact that had never come before.

  He could no more back down from this challenge than he could have refused the Spider-kinden. He would leave her workshop victorious or dead.

  He stepped in, expecting to hold the initiative, but his movements triggered a sudden whirling rush by the machine. Its footing was still slightly slow and awkward, but its attacks were fast and not limited by the arcs of human joints, and abruptly Tisamon was on the defensive.

  He could keep clear of its reach, but the workshop space – that had seemed huge when he first saw it – was abruptly constricting, with the machine constantly sidestepping to herd him towards the walls. Each time he backed up, the machine followed further, faster. That razor edge whirled in from unexpected direction
s as it tested out his guard.

  He changed stance, trying to get closer, within its reach, but ducking past and through swiftly when he saw that its loose-hinged arms could just fold straight back on themselves. As he passed, he struck back, and felt a scraping impact of his blade on the thing’s armoured body. Then he was rolling below a counterattack as it stepped heavily after him.

  He caught a glimpse of Ellery, of her face, mouth slightly open, eyes very wide, watching her champion defend her honour.

  At the far end of the room, he paused and watched the machine slow as it ceased to hear him or detect his motion. He had thought that it would stop, then, blind as it was, but it began methodically stalking forwards, sweeping left and right, knowing to an inch the dimensions of the space around it.

  With the greatest care, Tisamon bunched himself to spring, a foot against the back wall for more purchase, seeing the automaton grow closer; unhurried, assured of finding him.

  He waited until it had committed to its next exploratory sweep before kicking off, catching that blade-arm in his off hand and slamming into the thing’s body before its shield came up. He felt the device begin to topple, but it took three clumsy steps backwards, adjusting to his weight, and the blade was pivoting on the end of the arm, slicing back towards his fingers.

  He kicked away again, shifting his hand to dig into the edge of its armour, throwing his full weight against it, driving his blade in. A moment later he found himself tumbling across the floor, staggering a little as he found his feet.

  The automaton had turned for him again, but his claw had struck true, finding the gap he had wrenched in its plating. There was a rupture of steam venting there, half-obscuring the thing’s impassive face.

  He had left a smear of blood on the floor, he saw. It had cut him twice as he left, two long, shallow lines, outer thigh and back.

  The automaton was coming for him again. He was breathing heavily, and he glanced at Ellery, to see an expression of fierce passion on her face. “Finish it!” she demanded, of him, of it, and in that moment she had truly understood the fight, as the Inapt knew it: the fight that is a gamble where neither player can limit the stake.