Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  I had them ready for his inspection. He came with a sizeable escort of his own: medium infantry and a few sentinels, as though he was expecting a Commonweal resurgence at any point. As I say, his usual style was to demand people came to him, not actually go visit them. Possibly he’d forgotten what the outside world looked like.

  I’d got my men into some semblance of order. The Beetles polished up nicely, although the airborne are never easy to keep in line. I had Sergeant Wanton stalking between the ranks with a stick, ready to belabour anyone joking with their neighbour, but even so there was a fair amount of shifting and shuffling going on. Major Tancrev, Old Mercy, had billetted his own men, and now he made his appearance, dressed in enamelled mail with a cloak gusting behind him. I met him, and followed him down the ranks, just a step behind him, answering his occasional question about the troops. Despite his promise of congratulations, his praise was sparse, but at least he didn’t actually have anyone mutilated for having dirty boots, so I was counting the whole exercise as a success.

  Then we got to the pioneers, those that were left. They were not parade ground material, but they stared straight ahead as the major inspected them: the Wasp-kinden, the Flies, then Cari.

  “Well, Thorn Bug, eh?” he said, with that higher officer’s infallible knack of stating the obvious. I had praised her in my report, because I’ve got at least that much decency, but Old Mercy did not personally commend lesser kinden, and so we passed on. Just as we were about to look at the Auxillians, though, he remarked to me, “I had a Thorn Bug once...” with a curl of his lip. I knew then. From his tone it could just have meant that he’d had one serving under his command, but I knew.

  I could have done something. The whole business was in my hands and at my discretion. As a lieutenant in the imperial army I had a duty.

  That night, after everyone had turned in, I got drunk enough that I didn’t have to think about what the morning would bring, what I knew it would inevitably bring, barring any action from me.

  She was gone before dawn, of course, and I never heard tell of her since, but who keeps track of Thorn Bugs, honestly? Old Mercy’s people turned the camp upside down looking for him, but I didn’t help. I played the ignorant card and bumbled about getting in their way. Only towards noon did one of them realise that the number of Cari’s grisly trophies was up by one on the day before, a new post added to her collection. The rest of him we never found.

  Thorn Bug-kinden feature a few times in the novels, primarily in the form of Scuto, Stenwold’s Helleron agent. Cari has little common ground with Scuto, though. In ‘Camouflage’ we see more of the Wasp-Dragonfly war, this time just a little backwater part of it. Cari has no repeat appearance (though she really deserves one) but the Pioneers themselves have a part to play in War Master’s Gate and their ramshackle training and diversity come straight out of this story.

  The Shadows of Their Lamps

  The Commonweal’s Grand Army – the flower of its nobility, its gallant cavalry, the unnumbered host of its infantry – had met the Wasp Empire’s forces in the field. The warriors of the Commonweal had possessed a vast numerical superiority, but more than that, they had been heroes; their hearts had sung a ballad of honour and glory; they had right on their side, defending their hearths and their homeland.

  The Imperial armies had war machines, automotives, repeating crossbows and artillery. In a single day they had mown down tens of thousands of Commonwealer Dragonfly-kinden, over a hundred thousand left dead on the field in all. All those noblemen and women in their glittering mail with their thousand-year-old sword and archery traditions; all that massed host of terrified peasant spearmen: the Wasps had made no allowance for social class. Born in a castle or a byre, the machines and ordered soldiers of the Empire had not cared. In the end, the broken shreds of the Commonweal army had fled in all directions, and those nobles who had survived had run for their stone walls to hide. And of course, the Empire’s artillerists were good with stone walls. Before their might, the ancient architecture of the Commonweal was so many children’s wooden blocks.

  And yet Prince Serge Esselente did not know the meaning of dismay. He had withdrawn the remnants of his forces to his mountain stronghold, up the steep paths where the war machines could not follow. He had forced the Wasps to invest his fortress with their infantry and their airborne soldiers, and he had held out. And winter was on its way, that the mountains would make a rod of iron for the natives, but a murderous terror for the invader.

  Serge Esselente was a noble of the old school. He was not just glitter and glory and a heedless disregard for the lives of his own followers; he was a seer. Through the lenses of his eyes, the strands of an infinite future were strung. From the tallest tower of his castle blazed a beacon that was called Light Eternal, a reminder of his family’s history as champions of justice and truth. He took the rostrum for his people daily, telling them that the shining light of the Commonweal, that had fought many darknesses back in the Days of Lore, would triumph yet over these machine-handed Wasp-kinden. After the winter, he told them, they would retake what was theirs.

  He would have been flattered to discover that the Wasps shared his beliefs. Not about the magic; the Wasps had no belief in magic. They had a hard-learned respect for Commonweal winters, though, and had no intention of keeping a mountain siege going once the ice set in. That was why Prince Serge Esselente, preparing to go before his people once more, had his throat cut by a woman wearing the face of his wife.

  After she had done that, Scyla took his shape, donning the face and mannerisms of the prince as easily as she would a slightly ill-fitting coat. The magic, the meagre magic that was yet all the magic she had ever learned, was almost second nature to her now. She was a scion of an ancient mystery, its last and least. The masters of her masters had spun webs of intrigue between great houses and mage-lords and scholars of the unseen; and here she was, a mercenary infiltrator for the grubby-handed Wasps.

  She went out to Esselente’s people wearing his skin, and told them that the omens favoured their cause; that they must throw open the gates and surge down the slopes, that the Light Eternal would send the Wasps stumbling bloodied back to their far home. She told them in his voice, with his precise patterns of conviction and passion, and they ate it up. They loved it. This was what they had been waiting for.

  And they opened the gates and sallied forth and were destroyed: many killed, many more captured, none understanding how it was that they had been betrayed.

  The Dragonfly-kinden of the Commonweal were a graceful and elegant people, gold-skinned and delicate. Surrounded by the Wasps – big, pale men with hard eyes and broad shoulders – they seemed like something of another world, something that would break at a touch. And many of them would break. They had made the Empire work hard to conquer them. There would be reprisals.

  Scyla presented herself before her paymaster. Only with him did she drop most of the masks. She was no Dragonfly, no Wasp, nobody from this corner of the world at all: an exiled renegade casting her lot in with the winning side. The face she showed him was that of a slender man, sharp-featured, fair-haired, but showing the features of her Spiderlands home of the far south. It might have been her brother’s face, had she ever had a brother – always better to be a man, to deal with the Wasp-kinden. As for the woman’s face she had been born with, she had no cause to don that any more. She had left it behind like a bad debt.

  Scyla had been working with Captain Thalric for some years now. She had been in a prime position to watch him being corrupted by his work. When she first offered her services to him, he had been a bluff young officer, a patriot, a hero. Then he made the mistake of being too successful. He had been noticed by his superiors, dragged up the chain of command. Now he worked for the Rekef, the Empire’s intelligencers and secret police. He had gained the world and lost all his friends.

  “You’ve done well, you and your tricks,” he told her. “Nobody wanted to be sitting outside these walls when the sno
w came.”

  Her tricks, because that was what he could cope with. He would not admit to magic. Show him a hundred proofs and he would contrive some way of explaining it in terms of suggestion and sleight of hand. Looking into his eyes she felt a chill sweep through her like the first wind of winter. I am the only magician in the Imperial advance, she thought. And where we have trodden: nothing, the earth swept clean of magic and wonder, trampled down by their machines.

  He paid her wage, heavy coin in exchange for the ancient mysteries of her order. Her teachers would have despised her for selling herself to these grim, small-minded people, but she had never been a good student.

  Back in the castle they were securing the prisoners, waiting for the Slave Corps to come take them away. Long chains of them, bound at the neck, coiled dispiritedly through the halls of Prince Esselente’s castle. Wearing the face of a Wasp, she walked amongst them, cuffing and swearing at them because that was what Wasps did.

  And there she saw him.

  The Wasps had been stringing their lamps about the castle. They could not abide the dark and their eyes were pitiful compared to those of the Commonwealers or Scyla’s own. Wherever they went, they beat the night back with lamps that burned chemicals or noxious gas. Everywhere they made their own was lit up by a cold, dead flame a world away from torches and hearths.

  When the radiance struck her, she thought it was their lamps, so fierce and blinding was it, but it was him: his beauty and his power. She had not realised the boy had survived.

  The late Prince Esselente and his slightly later wife had one child, a youth of barely eighteen. Serge Volante he was named, and he was beautiful. His father had been a seer for many decades, but the son had already been overtaking him. Those slanted violet eyes could see forever: truths and lies, pasts and futures. He was a natural talent such as Scyla had never known – such as the Commonweal had not known for a hundred years.

  Esselente had prophesied that his son would bring back the great days, the Days of Lore; that Serge Volante would be the hope of a new generation of magic. Instead of which, the Apt forces of the Empire had brought their armies and their scoffing disbelief and swept them all away. All except Volante himself.

  Nobody else would see that glorious golden aura about him. It was for her eyes only. His perfect face hurt her deep inside. And he was young, and she had surely been young within living memory.

  All at once she decided that the Wasps were not paying her enough, and that this would be a just recompense for her skills.

  And then his eyes met hers and they flashed wide as she cut through the mill of busy soldiers to him.

  “You...” he said. “I see you.” Behind the glow he was haggard, bruised, stained with blood. “You’re not like the others. You shine.”

  Her heart, an organ from which she had been estranged these last ten years, stuttered.

  “I see the magic about you,” said Serge Volente. “I see your face.”

  A sense of panic flooded through Scyla, her mind a blank. What face? Which face? Did he look past this stolen Wasp visage, with its brutal jaw and narrow eyes? Did he look past the male Spider-kinden mask she donned to speak to Captain Thalric, to fool him into thinking she was being honest with him. Did Volente see all the way back to the face she had been born with, the face that she never used anymore?

  In that moment, she searched her memories and found that she could not remember what that face had ever looked like.

  He was reaching out to her, and one of the guards smacked a cudgel across his arm with a snarl. Still, Serge Volante’s eyes did not leave her. There was a pleading in those eyes. If there had been a promise, she would have freed him then and there, if she’d had to borrow Captain Thalric’s face to do it. But he was golden and beautiful and noble. Such as he did not make promises to a broken renegade like her.

  I will have you, she told him silently. But I will have to break you first.

  She retreated from him to make plans. No point asking for him as a gift from Captain Thalric. The moment the Rekef man’s attention was drawn to Volante, the boy’s death warrant would be signed. There was a standing order to exterminate all of the Commonweal noble bloodlines, to deny any uprising a focus. It was Thalric’s special mission, and he was nothing if not dutiful.

  Is it time I parted company with the Empire? But it would not come to that. She was fond enough of her own cleverness to decide that she could have it all: Volente and the Empire’s gold. She was all the magic there was, in this latter-day world; all the magic after the Light Eternal was put out and the great magician-lords of the Commonweal fell under the wheels of the Empire’s progress. The Wasps had no magic, nor any way to believe in it, and that made her a secret lord of their world.

  Plans made, she left the castle, slipping out of the gates and passing unseen through the Empire’s camp there. The officers and their cronies had commandeered the walls but there were plenty of the lesser soldiery left to huddle in their tents still. They had not wasted any time making themselves at home. There were many locals there too, some prisoners, some simply starving and willing to serve their oppressors in exchange for the scraps from their table. The air filled with the clamour of soldiers who weren’t going to have to fight in the morning.

  There was one strange moment, though. She was leaving the camp, having appropriated a horse that could pass as an Imperial messenger’s, when there was a man. For just a fractured instant, in all the camp there was only that one man that mattered. He was not a Wasp, not a Wasp’s male whore or servant. He looked like a beggar, a shabby creature in ragged, dark robes holding out a stick-thin hand for alms. And she thought, You’re out of luck because, of all kinden, one did not go to the Wasps for charity. And then she met his eyes, those protuberant red eyes that pressed out from his gaunt, ashen face, and the world stopped for a single heartbeat.

  He was gone after that, and she shook herself and went on with the plan. It had been a long war and she had been put to find many inventive uses for her training. Perhaps she needed a rest from it: enough murder and treachery would start to wear on anybody.

  She chose her face from the packed shelves within her mind. Her magic gave her a major’s rank badge, a uniform creased and stained from travel. She turned up at the gates on the very horse she had just led through them and nobody spotted it.

  They took her to Thalric, of course, and she played her part perfectly, simultaneously the major looking down at the captain and the regular officer wary of the Rekef man. She told him she had a remit to look for some specific prisoners wanted for questioning. She had no papers but it was a routine request and she was good at her job. She talked him round and laughed at him silently all the while.

  And of course she went down the ranks of prisoners, and Volante’s eyes were on her. She stopped by him and murmured, “How would you thank me if I freed you, little princeling?”

  The rush of gratitude, of hope; these things she did not see.

  “What has been done to you?” he asked her. “You are like a stunted tree.”

  A shock of hurt fury went through her, so that for a moment she almost lost her false face and shape. How dare he, prisoner that he was? How dare he play the lord with her? And she was going to walk away then, and leave him to his fate; she was going to inform on him to Thalric and have him executed on the crossed pikes. But no: No, I’ll take him. I’ll break him. I’ll make him thank me. I’ll show him the way the world has turned.

  And in her clipped major’s voice, with its heart-of-the-Empire accent, she ordered that he be released into her custody. Did she need an escort? She poured scorn on them. She was a strong soldier of the Empire and Volente was barely more than a child.

  And she led him out of the Empire’s camp as easily as if she had bought him at auction, her golden boy.

  She had already chosen her spot to let him down from the horse. They were still within sight of his father’s castle: let that symbol of defeat be right in the forefront of his min
d. She had a whole itinerary planned for him, but this desolate stretch of road and rocks would serve for now.

  He stood, thin and shivering, and made no attempt to flee. He had nowhere to go.

  “What is to become of me?” he asked her.

  She regarded him with a mocking smile fixed to a face she had chosen specially. She was a woman of the Spider-kinden once more, but with as much allure and grace as her skills could stitch together. Still, she was in his shadow, and all the work she had put into her features and her frame passed him by.

  “Tell me, princeling,” she addressed him, “what would you do, if you had the freedom for it?”

  His eyes met hers; again the sheer exotic wonder of them struck her, the perfection of his golden skin. “My father saw many futures,” he told her. “He said I would bring a new dawn. Let me bring that dawn. Let me fulfil my destiny.” Abruptly a passion entered his voice. “You – whatever you are, however you have fallen, you are a creature of magic as I am. You are not one of them,” and he thrust a hand towards the conquered castle.

  “You have no idea what I am,” she told him derisively.

  “I see through your faces. I have read of your order in the tales of my people. It was once a calling of honour and skill.” And his eyes searched the face she showed him, as though he really thought he would find some dormant spark of all that in her. There was such yearning in his expression, in that moment, that she shrank back from him. She knew that he could search there a year, dig through all the layers of her, and find no grain of what he sought. His disappointment cut her, because for a moment he had thought she was something more than she was. If she had been capable, she would have been that, for him.