Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  The sound of boots heralded the arrival of the bald, humourless man who had haunted the colonel’s table: the Rekef man.

  “Captain,” the Spider acknowledged, cleaning his blade on the remains of the robe.

  “Scylis,” the Rekef man nodded. “Where...?”

  The Spider indicated the room he had just left with a jerk of his head. “I take it you did not include Colonel Borden in your plans, Captain?”

  “How could I have explained matters to his satisfaction?” The Rekef man had taken one look into the further room, and was clearly satisfied. “One more enemy of the Empire done with. You’ll get your pay, Scylis, and a commendation.”

  “So kind,” the Spider, Scylis, remarked. “And Nysse Ceann? I’ll find her at that place in Kalla Rae, I take it?”

  “What of it?”

  The Spider’s smile was only affable. “It was suggested that I could kill the precious bitch, after I’d done for her lover.”

  The Rekef man shook his head. “She might yet be useful, as bait, or to keep some Commonweal hotheads in line. Forget her. There’s call for you in Helleron, I hear.”

  Scylis shrugged. “You’ll want her dead some day, and my rates for ridding the world of spoilt princesses are surprisingly reasonable. Now, shall we collect my fee?”

  And they were gone, walking companionably off, the killer and his paymaster. Only then did Cordwick realise that he had been holding his breath.

  Tesse insisted on seeing Darien’s body at first, but when they reached the entrance to that room her nerve failed her and she would not look. Instead, she let Cordwick guide her away, weaving carefully through the nest of cellars. Wherever the live Wasps were gathered or searching, they changed path, went into the dark and found a way round through the interconnecting passages.

  And later, as they crouched in the shadows whilst Wasp surgeons and their slaves hunted for wounded that could be saved, Cordwick stated, “We can do it.”

  Tesse looked at him mutely, locking eyes with him until, somehow, his meaning seeped into her.

  “Nysse Ceann?” she breathed.

  “Kalla Rae,” Cordwick confirmed.

  “And why?” she pressed him, “Why would you? Where’s your profit, thief?”

  Cordwick just held her gaze, and at last said, “Just because I am Apt, and a Beetle, and make free with the goods of others, do not think I know nothing of doing what is right. If it can be done, without great risk, without loss. Besides, there might be profit in it. Some Commonweal family would pay well, to have her. No reason why a man can’t be mercenary and still do right.”

  She gave him a sharp look. By that time they had been left alone some time, and she crept out from their hiding place, forcing him to follow. They chose their path almost at random, avoiding any hint of movement, until they found the bodies.

  Not the first bodies they had seen, of course: Darien’s assault had wreaked a costly ruin on so many of the Wasps. Cordwick recognized a face, though, in the flaring gaslight. Colonel Borden stared up at the ceiling, his face slack and his stomach opened. His dead men lay around him in a clutter of limbs and blades and riven armour. Looking down at them, Cordwick felt a sudden spur of anger at Lowre Darien.

  “Bloody Dragonflies,” he said through his teeth, and at Tesse’s angry look he added, “Had to do things the old fashioned way, didn’t he? You and me, we could have got the woman out, if she’d even been here. We’d have got her out without spilling a drop of anyone’s blood.”

  And a hoarse, faint voice answered him, “And where would be the fun in that?”

  The two of them started, only then seeing the man who sat at a shadowed corner of the room, leaning back against the stones, his clothes gored and blood-streaked, his face wealed with burn-scar. Evandter.

  Borden had done his best, Cordwick could see, to make an end to the infamous killer. The Mantis had been stabbed three times, not one of them mortal but enough to bring him down. Too late for Borden, though. Too late for his followers.

  The eyes of Evandter glittered in the light. “So,” he asked them, the pain telling just a little in his conversational tone, “What now, eh?”

  The garrison of Del Halle had been torn apart, and the reason for its existence was gone, too, though none of the Wasps seemed to know just what had happened to their vaunted prisoner. Still, in licking their wounds and with nobody to give them orders, they kept no special watch for any that might wish to further break in to the fortress, still less for those who only wished to get out.

  And in the morning three set out for Kalla Rae.

  So the Twelve-Year war is over now, and we’re just dealing with the after-effects, such as Lowre Darien. His father, Lowre Cean (the male version of Nysse Ceann’s name, of course), the mastermind behind Darien’s crushing of the Sixth (the army that fails to come for Varmen in ‘Ironclads’) makes a showing in the story ‘The Sun in the Morning’ (to be found in Newcon’s Feast and Famine collection) and then in Heirs of the Blade, still mourning the loss of his son. Cordwick Scosser, by the way, is absolutely inspired by Michael Keating’s character Vila from Blake’s Seven...

  Shadow Hunters

  Should never have taken this job, was Gaved’s thought on seeing the forest. He was a man who preferred to trust his instincts, but he also preferred to eat. Being a freelance Wasp-kinden in an occupied land where every other man of your people wore the uniform made it hard to find work. Patrons were scarce when you were hated by the locals and despised by the invaders.

  Then he had met the Moth, tucked quietly in the corner of a raucous army drinking tent full of off-duty soldiers, half of them still in their black and gold armour. That one corner had been an oasis of stillness and quiet, and there was the Moth. They were a relic of another land’s mystical past, the Moth-kinden, eking out a living on the edges of the Apt world. Like all the Inapt – like the Dragonfly-kinden that the Wasp army had recently bludgeoned into surrender – the Moths were a people who could not grasp the principles of machines, of logistics, of the modern world. They were the last tattered scraps of the past.

  This man of the Moth: grey skin, blank white eyes, slender enough that a burly Wasp like Gaved could have broken him in half, yet somehow his soft voice had slid past all the rowdy jabber of the drinkers. “I have work for you.”

  And here Gaved was, following the only employment he had been able to find, doing the bidding of one Moth by hunting down another. Somewhere in this tangle of thorn-barked trees there was a second man of that grey kinden, and Gaved was tasked with bringing him out.

  Or kill him, the instructions had gone. Tell him it is better to be dead, than to be what he is.

  Gaved had trawled for rumours about the forest his quarry had holed up in. A dark place, he was told; a bad place. The locals never went there, the army had not needed to fight there. Probably it was somewhere the Dragonflies thought was magic, not that a Wasp would care about that. More recently it was a haunt of bandits, because the war had left a lot of armed men with nothing to do,

  Gaved didn’t mind bandits. He preferred them to soldiers, most of the time.

  They ran into him at the same moment he ran into them, both sides freezing in surprise. Gaved had his hands out instantly, his palms warming with the Wasp Art. A thought from him and golden fire would spit from between his fingers, showing these locals just why his people were feared.

  He saw a man and a woman, both Dragonflies, lean and golden-skinned. The woman wore a few pieces of iridescent armour, no doubt prised from a dead noble’s body. She had a sword, and perched on one wrist was the hunting insect of her kinden, a dragonfly two feet long with a carapace of glittering metallic blue, huge eyes regarding him and all the world impartially.

  The man wore a ragged greatcoat and he had a short bow in his hands, which concerned Gaved far more than the sword or the insect.

  “Good day, fellow travellers,” he said, one hand covering each of them. He tried a smile, but his smiles were seldom reassuring.
He was one of the dreaded invaders, after all: a big, pale man with the red weal of a burn-scar about his neck and chin, from when he had finally decided to leave the army and go freelance.

  “What do you want here, Wasp?” the woman demanded.

  “I’ve come looking for someone.” Better not to say hunting. It had so many negative connotations.

  Gaved saw the archer’s hands twitch, saw a moment’s glance pass between them, and then the Dragonfly man said, “He’s after the Moth.”

  It was plain that ‘the Moth’ was no friend of theirs. The tension leached out of the moment.

  The woman’s name was Eriss, the man was Kael. They never used the word ‘bandit’ but that was plainly what they were. More, they’d another dozen friends who plied the same trade. Or they had, before coming to this forest.

  “Because the army wouldn’t be here,” Kael grumbled. “Even the Empire can’t make the trees pay taxes.”

  “But he was here already,” Eriss added. “We didn’t realize at first. We’d made camp. But there was something...”

  “Nobody slept,” Kael took up the story. “Not well. We started to see... shadows, ghosts. Then he came to our fire. A Moth. A magician.”

  Gaved raised a doubting eyebrow.

  “Scoff all you want,” Eriss snapped. “He walked in and told us we were his, and our chief couldn’t speak, not one word. Kael and me, we got out, just slipped away. We thought the others’d follow us when they could. Nobody did.”

  “This is a place of evil magic from the old days,” Kael added. “A death-place. We should never have come here. Your people wouldn’t understand.”

  They were going back to find their friends. Gaved was going to face down their enemy. Common cause was made.

  The Art of the insect-kinden gave many gifts. It let the Ant-kinden speak to each other, mind to mind, and allowed the Wasps to sting; to each race its own blessings. Gaved could fly a little, too, the shimmer of wings materialising from his back when called on. The Dragonflies were better, born to the air.

  The forest was dense, the interlaced branches of the canopy a fortress that even the Imperial army had not fancied bringing down. The bandits’ preferred road was the high one, from bough to bough, making short hops through the uppermost fingers of the trees.

  Eriss had sent her dragonfly ahead to scout, the agile insect hovering and darting over the dense foliage. When it returned to her, she would speak with it, gleaning what it had seen from its simple mind; another gift of the Art.

  The first two times she sent the insect out, it had found traces of the other bandits’ progress through the woods, heading for the very heart of the place. The third time it had been on the way back when the canopy came alive and. In sight of its mistress, what had seemed just green leaves and branches unfurled toothed arms and clawed for the insect. Gaved saw a triangular head with bulbous, gleaming orbs for eyes and mandibles beneath that resembled scissor blades: a mantis, one of the great forest mantids, and this one surely fifteen feet long.

  For a long moment they stared at one another: the three humans and the monstrous insect, with the dragonfly waiting on above. Then the mantis cocked its head at them and let itself drop, vanishing into the gloom of the forest below.

  They thought like men, Gaved had heard it said. They hunted and planned and held grudges. And sometimes, said the old tales, they served magicians.

  Soon after, they found the rest of the bandits.

  They were in a clearing, sitting in a circle as though they had decided to stop for some conference of thieves. Except they were dead. Except they were splinted up, propped on bloody, jagged shards of cane and wood. Some even had arms spiked out as though caught mid-gesture. Some had open mouths, and Gaved could see the splinters that had been driven in, to keep their jaws in place. It was a ghoulish tableau, and what was worse was the empty place. All those dead eyes, all that arrested body language, led the eye to one spot about the circle, as though some chairman of the damned had only that moment stepped away.

  Kael and Eriss were frozen, staring. Gaved himself was watching for the Moth, because a man with this sense of showmanship would not miss his entrance.

  And sure enough, there he was: stepping in to take his place at the circle, the grey-faced man of slender build, bundled in a threadbare robe. His blind-looking eyes took in his visitors and he smiled.

  The Moth. The same Moth. The same man that had sent Gaved here; there was no mistaking.

  Then Kael had his bowstring back with a shout of fury, and Gaved was already moving, running around that grisly circle, hands out, but holding off –

  His forbearance made Kael the target, so that when the mantis’ strike lashed out of the shadows it was the archer who was snatched away, gone in a heartbeat and a cry. The huge insect loomed above them, from shadow to killer like a trick of the light. Its razor mouthparts were working busily as it chewed at the stump of Kael’s neck.

  Eriss should have run, then, but she shrieked and hacked at its nearest leg, her dragonfly spiralling up and away overhead. Gaved saw her blade smash one of the mantis’s stilt-like limbs, and it raised its killing arms in threat, Kael’s remains still dangling.

  Gaved’s hands flashed, his sting searing across the clearing. One bolt charred across the creature’s thorax, another crackled past the creature’s head, even as Eriss lunged forwards and sunk her blade up to the crosspiece into the insect’s abdomen.

  And it was shadows; it had only been shadows. Gaved stared, seeing the patterns between the trees that had looked as though a monstrous mantis was there, wondering how he could have been fooled by it. And yet Kael was dead and dismembered, and Eriss’s sword was gone...

  Gaved saw the Moth already beside her, reaching out. One thin grey hand caught her collar and the other drew a dagger across her throat with a butcher’s economic skill.

  Then those white eyes turned to Gaved, who unleashed his sting.

  Or he had meant to. There had been no other thought than that, before the burning gaze caught him. Moths had their own Art, and abruptly this one was in Gaved’s mind, holding him rigid, trapping his will as the thin figure picked its way towards him, bloody blade held reverently.

  “Why have you come to this place of power, little Wasp-kinden?”

  He could not be sure whether the voice was in his ears, or just in his head.

  “This place of magic – and there are so few left any more. The iron armies of your people trample and trample, your machines and your progress and the brightness of your lamps. A poor scholar must travel a long way to find somewhere that has even a vestige of the old days about it. And who can say what the quality of such a place might be?” The Moth was right before him now, the wet coldness of the blade resting on his cheek. “And yet we must make accommodations. We magicians cannot be choosy, in this latter age...”

  The Moth turned the blade, so that the thin, hard line of its edge was against Gaved’s burn-scarred throat,

  Then the dragonfly stooped, glittering wings battering madly at the grey face as it tried to avenge its fallen mistress. The magician staggered away, clutching at it, shielding his eyes, and abruptly Gaved could move again.

  He sent a sting-shot at the robed figure, only catching the Moth a glancing blow, even as the man snatched the dragonfly from the air, crushing its delicate wings between his fingers and tearing them from the insect’s body.

  Those white eyes were on him again, and although he had a hand out, he could not loose his sting. But the Moth’s hold was imperfect: he could speak.

  “You sent me!” he got out. “You came to me and sent me here! You told me, ‘Tell him it is better to be dead, than to be what he is.’”

  The words struck the Moth hard. For a brief moment there was realization on that grey face. Those blank eyes took in the scene around them: the gruesome parliament, the utter bloody madness of what had been done under the forest’s influence. No wonder some part of him had rebelled, seeking what little help could
be found in this occupied land.

  Then Gaved’s hands blazed again, and this time he struck true, and just in time. He had seen the twist of cruelty coming back to the man’s face, the moment of truth already passing.

  Standing there, with nothing but that conclave of the dead for company, he felt a tired emptiness inside him.

  With a wary eye out, in case that mantis had been real and not just shadows, he set about relieving the corpses of their valuables. One thing was certain: he wasn’t getting paid for this job.

  The character of Gaved originated in Dragonfly Falling and went on to have quite a chequered career in and out of the novels and in these stories. He was inspired by a sketch I drew back when Shadows was just an RPG setting, of a somewhat rogueish Wasp, and for some reason he held my imagination far more than a minor character should have, levering himself a significant role in the novels while always trying to get clear of them.

  Sword and Circle

  They were shouting for her. At first she thought she heard her name in the tulmult: “Ineskae! Ineskae!” but that was her sodden imagination. The roar was a wordless demand that she turn up and bleed for them. Out there was a makeshift amphitheatre, just a hollow in the ground. Its uneven sides were lined with a raucous, leery crowd who wanted to be entertained by her death.

  There were almost no Wasp-kinden amongst the spectators, that was the shame of it. The Commonweal had possessed a tradition, once, of stately and mannered duels between skilled masters. Like so much, it had not survived the war. What the Wasps had brought with them was a taste for blood and brutal violence, and these conquered locals were latching onto imported ideas with a will. Why not try to emulate the winning side, after all? Centuries-old traditions had not stopped the armies of the Black and Gold.

  She drained the jug, harsh grain spirit searing her throat. The sound of individual voices blurred in her ears so that the mob of them, gamblers, brigands, fugitives and deserters, became like a wave of the sea that ebbed and flowed in its own living rhythm.