Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  She was half-starved, filthy, bruised and scabbed, but her face was beautiful when she saw that he had come for her.

  The padlock holding the hatch shut was solid. The wood, though, was a different matter. His people had an Art that meant they would never starve, that they could live anywhere, on anything.

  There was a cry from the far side of the cells, except that the word did not do justice to it. It was a long, howling yell, dragged straight from the pits of someone’s being, a maniac’s death-cry. It went on and on, and Sfayot heard the sounds of someone battering and kicking at the wood, screaming curses and oaths, and it seemed that every Wasp in the area was running that way or flying overhead.

  Sfayot set to work, bringing his head low to the foul wood of the cage. He got his teeth to the slat the lock was secured to, and began to chew. His stomach roiled, but then his Art overruled it, and his jaws worked, grinding and grinding away, tearing off splinters and jagged mouthfuls of the cell.

  Wasp slavers were in motion from all around, pitching into the air and casting over the labyrinth of cells towards the commotion. Sfayot glanced up, jaws working fiercely, as one of them levered open the lid on that cell, hand extended. Instantly there was a man leaping up from it, Art-born wings flaring: a Dragonfly-kinden, rich clothes reduced to nothing but rags, but there was a brooch, some golden brooch, proudly displayed on his chest now, that surely the slavers would have taken if they had found it. From nowhere, from thin air, a sword was in his hands, long-hafted, straight-bladed. Still keening that dreadful, agonised shriek he laid into the Wasps, cutting two of the surprised slavers down on the instant before the rest descended upon him with sword and sting.

  Sfayot bent down and fixed his teeth in the wood again, wrenching and rending until the lock was abruptly holding nothing at all and the hatch swung open when he pulled.

  They passed her up to him. That was what he remembered most. The other prisoners, Grasshoppers and Dragonflies, passed her up first.

  He looked round. There was still a commotion at the far extent of the cells, and he saw the flash of sting-fire. The howling cry had stopped, but somehow the Dragonfly master at arms was still fighting. It could not be for long: the distraction was coming to its fatal conclusion.

  While he looked, the cell beneath him had emptied, Grasshoppers clearing the hatchway in a standing jump, Dragonflies crawling out and summoning up their wings. Sfayot took his daughter in his arms and huddled back to the nobleman’s cell.

  “I cannot free you, sir,” he said, almost in tears. “I would, but –”“

  “Take your child,” came the reply. “You can do nothing for us except remember.”

  And Sfayot fled, with his daughter clinging to him, and never looked back.

  Another early story, and another exploration of the Twelve-Year War, showcasing the absolute worst it has to offer. The choice of the Roach-kinden’s totem reflects the unreasonable prejudice shown to them by almost everyone, a people without a home, constantly being moved on, and now caught in the middle of a war they have nothing to do with. Sfayot and his daughter (Syale, though not named here) cross the path of the novels in Dragonfly Falling and, from those humble beginnings, go on to carve out quite a career for themselves.

  Camouflage

  I’ll start from when I got called up in front of Old Mercy – which was a journey of two days from the Sel’yon where I was stationed. You always got called to Mercy. He was not a soldier’s soldier. He didn’t go out to the battlefront to walk amongst the men, or even to giving his underperforming subordinates a dressing down.

  Major Tancrev, that was his real name. He had a reputation, though: everyone knew that Old Mercy never had a man killed, no matter what: Captured enemies or those juniors he was disappointed in, he was meticulous in preserving their lives, often far beyond the point that even a skilled surgeon would have given them over. You understand, then, that his was not a soft reputation.

  I was going, because Captain Kanen, who had been put in charge of the Sel’yon, had opened his eyes one morning and seen the sharp end of an arrow approaching at some speed. It was a common complaint just then. You’ll not read about the Sel’yon in any of the histories of the war. It was a heavily wooded armpit on the map of the Commonweal, important to nobody save the wretched, stubborn, sneaky bastards who lived there.

  Old Mercy was not even very old: a middle-aged man, strong-shouldered, square-jawed and fair-haired, quite the ladies’ favourite. The more sedentary life of a tactical major was starting to show about his middle, but not as much as you might think. He held court at Yos, that had been Iose before we took it, and there he summoned the luckless sods like me who weren’t doing well enough.

  I found myself standing to attention in his office, whilst he reclined on a couch like some Spiderlands grandee. A Fly-kinden slave threw a scroll at my feet, and he beckoned for me to take it up.

  “Casualty figures for your command, Lieutenant,” hesaid. I knew it all already, of course, but he liked making his point. “Why are these savages still troubling the Empire?”

  This wasn’t the first time someone from the Sel’yon detachment had stood before him. He knew full well what the problem was. Still, I trotted it out: “Sir, the Sel’yon is heavily forested, and we lack the troops to make a decisive strike against the natives.”

  “Your orders aren’t even to strike, Lieutenant, just to hold, and yet you’re losing men hand over fist.”

  “The local Dragonfly clan has holed up with a Mantis hold. They know the woods and the surrounding land very well, and that, along with their Art, makes them difficult to hold anywhere, sir. Our troops there aren’t ideal for this sort of operation, sir. Give me another two hundred light airborne and –”

  “Cannot be spared, Lieutenant. Not for something as insignificant as these woodsmen of yours. Lieutenant, had it been Captain Kanen standing here now, no doubt I would be having orders written giving you command of the detachment in his prolonged absence, together with my fervent wishes that you stabilise the situation before I have to request your presence personally. As Kanen has managed to evade true punishment for his incompetence, I will give you a fair chance to prove that you are more able than he. One chance, Lieutenant.”

  Standing there before his iron stare I was closer to deserting than at any other time during the war. “Sir, I need more troops to hold the line at Sel’yon,” I got out, staring straight ahead now because I could no longer meet his stare.

  He made some dismissive gesture that I saw the shadow of from the corner of my eye. “I’ve sent you some pioneers. It’s all that can be spared. You had best use them wisely, I think. On your way, Lieutenant, and have better news for me soon.”

  There were probably only between a hundred-fifty and two-hundred fighting men within the Se’yon, half the numbers we had. They were Mantis-kinden woodsmen and warriors, though, led by a Dragonfly headman and his family, and it would take more than two-to-one odds to clean them out. Instead, as the man said, our orders were simply to keep them bottled up. Had the headman been reasonable then we could have settled in for a relatively peaceful few months. Instead, the locals were holding a grudge, and were quite capable of making us pay for it. Scarcely a tenday went by without some scattering of Mantis-kinden creeping invisibly past our sentries and killing some of ours, double the guard as we might. We lost provisions, tents were burned down, and then Captain Kanen himself had been shot dead one morning from within the camp, in broad daylight. I wanted the manpower to move in and crush them, or perhaps some incendiaries to burn the entire Sel’yon to ash, but at this point the Empire had other hives to raid, and so we were being whittled down, and there was nothing we could do about it.

  The quality of my troops was also less than inspiring. About a third were light airborne: keen, skilled, swift and just the sort of soldier needed to crack this particular nut. The balance, though, were auxillians from Sonn. The Beetles of Sonn had done well out of the Empire and won, or stolen, a great
many concessions, but they were still obliged to put up troops for the army, same as everyone else. As it wouldn’t do for the sons of Consortium magnates and factors to live in terror of conscription, the city elders’ practice was to send the army their criminals, which meant a scattering of thieves and a great many debtors. So it was that the men lined up to defend against the ravages of the Sel’yon were tradesmen, factory workers, artisans, clerks and small-time merchants, and military training sat uneasily on them. They were equipped with chainmail hauberks, shields and maces, which would have given them some clout in a field battle, if their nerve held, but for a contested advance through tangled woodland they were just about the worst-suited men one could have asked for.

  When I got back to the camp I sent for Sergeant Wanton, whose greatest contribution to the war effort was to never once find anything amusing in his own name. “Old Mercy says we should be expecting some pioneers,” I told him.

  “Yes, sir. They’ve arrived.”

  “How many?”

  “Ten, sir.”

  I had hoped for a few more, but given Old Mercy’s habitual generosity I’d not have been too surprised at the pioneers turning out to be two scruffy Fly-kinden. Ten was better than nothing, if they were any good.

  Pioneers were an odd lot, and their position in army hierarchy was vague. Officially they were right at the bottom, beneath regular soldiers, on a par with unskilled auxillians like my Beetle-kinden, just above slaves. Unofficially, those that lasted for any time at all tended to be good enough at what they did that the army handled them carefully. They were not quite soldiers, not quite mercenaries, not slaves but not entirely free. Their work required them to be out of reach of orders and officers most of the time, so they had more liberty than almost anyone in the army. At the same time, they were always suspect, and if they slipped up then the Rekef would take them, with glee.

  I had them lined up for inspection. They were a motley band. Half were Wasps – four tough-looking men, out of uniform, wearing armour of leather and dulled chitin under capes or long coats, not a piece of black and gold to be seen. There was also one woman, apparently the partner of one of the men. I groaned at that – setting one woman down in a camp of army soldiers was always trouble. Even Beetle-kinden get the itch after a few years of campaigning, as plenty of Commonweal girls had found out. Of the balance, four were Fly-kinden, who tended to make the best pioneers – fast, sneaky, good shots and they could see well at night, at least as well as the Commonwealers they would be up again. Most Flies avoid physical danger as keenly as they do paying taxes, but I knew full well that when a Fly-kinden gets put through the mill enough you get a vicious little bastard at the end of the process.

  The last of the pioneers stopped me dead, because Thorn Bug-kinden’ll do that to you, and this one was uglier than most. The top of his head came about to my shoulder, but his back peaked a few inches higher, and of course there were the thorns on top of that. He was bundled in layers of ragged tunic and coat, a tattered scarf snagged about his neck, and a cloak over that, and every garment was patched and darned and then torn through again. What little I could see of his skin was shiny and nut-brown, but the thorns grew out every which way, twisted and irregular. A lot of them were truncated, with the stumps sprouting a half-dozen smaller spikes like new shoots growing from a tree-stump, so that I wondered whether the creature had some uniquely Thorn Bug disease. The face was the worst. Even behind the stubble of small and large spines he was a nasty-looking member of the breed, long nose broken and reset crooked, with his pointed chin slanting the other way in a perverse kind of balance.

  “And who in the pits are you?” I demanded, all military propriety slapped from me by the very sight.

  “Auxillian soldier Cari, sir.”

  The creature’s voice was low and husky, and undeniably a woman’s. Nothing else in that bundle of rags and thorns suggested the feminine, most certainly not the face.

  “Cari,” I said weakly. “A Thorn Bug pioneer?”

  “Try me, sir,” Her eyes, in amongst all of that hideousness, were green and lively.

  I didn’t shrug, because imperial officers did not show that kind of casual weakness before their men. “It’ll be the Commonwealers trying you, not me,” was what I said, albeit a beat too late to be a proper riposte.

  Our little slice of war started to change from that day. The pioneers knew their business. Cari knew hers, certainly.

  Within two tendays, one of the Fly-kinden and two of the Wasp pioneers were dead. The main force’s deaths to the knives of the Sel’yon insurgents were just two, rather than the ten or so I’d have expected, and one of those two had been incautiously relieving himself outside the camp edge at night. The distrust and contempt that my light airborne and auxillians felt for the shabby pioneers was replaced by a wary respect. The female Wasp had not yet been raped or assaulted. And there was Cari.

  She vanished for the first tenday, and everyone assumed she had deserted. I, on the other hand, had the sense to talk to the other pioneers. No, no, they assured me, she was out there. They didn’t see her, not so much, but they found traces. They were just intercepting the Commonwealers as they tried to sneak past our pickets and cause mischief. Cari was in the deep Sel’yon, hunting.

  One morning, a tenday and a half from when she arrived, I awoke to find she’d left me a present.

  Enemy casualties were hard to estimate. Pioneer accounts were contradictory, and the forest swallowed bodies. That morning, though, I was treated to a unique audience as I left my tent, yawning and rubbing my eyes. I nearly choked on my own yawn, I’ll say, and my body slave screamed and bolted back inside. He was a twitchy little Grasshopper from the East-Empire, and he never did have much nerve.

  There were heads: nine of them, on poles, neat as you like. One was Dragonfly, the rest were Mantis. They watched me with glassy disinterest.

  Sergeant Wanton explained. “She pitched up before dawn, sir, with a sack. Had all these set up by first light and off again.”

  “Did it occur to you I might not want to see a lot of severed heads first thing in the morning, Sergeant?”

  Wanton had assiduously practiced a sergeant’s proper lack of expression. “No sir, it did not.”

  I dismissed him, and strode down the line of decapitation. Strangely enough, the more I looked on those slack, drained faces, with the day’s first flies bumbling about them, the more I did like them. I had been fighting a losing war for too long. It was about time I had proof that the blood being shed wasn’t all ours.

  “Glad you approve, sir,” came the voice. I stopped dead, only then realising that I had been grinning back at the dead heads. There was nobody about.

  There was. I only saw her because she moved. The Sel’yon was a fecund place, and though we were on its edge, and had trampled our campsite flat besides, there were always nettles and ferns and cane springing up, growing at appalling rates. What I had taken as a stand of bracken had shuffled a place closer. Armed with that, I saw her.

  She had foliage all over, knotted and twined about her into a meshed cape of green and fading brown. Her shape, that had always been at the edge of a human figure anyway, was lost in it. The eye passed over her and consigned her to the static and the vegetable. There was more to it than that, of course. I knew all too well how some kinden could call on their Art to hide them, for the Mantids of the Sel’yon were keen practitioners of it. I had not realised that Thorn Bugs owned to the same Art. Only now, seeing her afresh, did I note the crossbow over her shoulder. The dead Commonwealers had eyes better than mine, but they must never have seen her coming.

  Glad she’s on our side, I thought, and never so glad as when she appeared out of nowhere. “Auxillian,” I acknowledged her, with admirably steady tones.

  She was watching me with a direct stare unbecoming of an auxillian, but then it was hard to actually look her in the eyes without flinching at the knotted carnage that surrounded them. I recovered my professional bearing.
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  “Who do these represent?”

  “The Dragonfly lad there’s a nephew of the headman. The Mantids... Whoever I could catch. They’re getting a mite less happy about just jaunting off into the woods.”

  “And you took the heads why?”

  “You don’t need to ask that, surely, sir?”

  I wanted to slap her down for impertinence, but slapping down a Thorn Bug is always a self-destructive activity. She was standing just the other side of the row of posts now.

  “You know how superstitious these Commonwealers are, sir,” she said, her voice just a whisper coming from between those twisted teeth. “Does no harm to make them fear.”

  I sent to Old Mercy with reports of our progress in holding the line, hoping for a quiet life, and perhaps a minor commendation. What I did get proves that a little success can be worse for your health than any amount of failure, because Mercy decided that he wanted us to take the Sel’yon, or at least start making inroads into it. Was he sending us more men? A dozen heavy infantry arrived with his message, not sufficient to make any difference and yet arrogant and argumentative enough to start really getting on the backs of the Auxillians.

  I had my orders, which I knew were a bad idea. There was no way we were going to catch them much by surprise, for all that I had the pioneers sweeping the forest fringe for their scouts before we formed up. I put the Beetles on the wings, the newly-arrived heavies in the centre, made our front as broad as I dared, mostly only two men deep, and we moved in. The airborne ranged on either side and ahead, but the trees denied them their wings half the time. Still, they were used to fighting in skirmishing order, at range or in close as the situation demanded. If my whole force had been airborne I’d have cleared out the Sel’yon myself long before.

  The Commonwealers had our number and no mistake. They started putting arrows at us from ten yards in, a nuisance at first, a menace pretty soon after. The heavies and the Auxillians were decently armoured, but those Commonweal bows were like nothing I’ve ever seen in the hands of the Inapt. A clean shot could go through mail and still leave enough punch in the arrow to make a mess of the man inside. The Commonwealers didn’t stand still, but they knew the woods better than we did and they could move faster. They were behind us soon enough, as well. If we held together we were slow and they picked at us. When the airborne, or individual maniples of the heavier troops, rose to the bait and went for them, then the Commonwealers were always there in force to make them regret it.