Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  “You need to go!” someone shouted in her ear.

  “I need to drink!” She was already swaying: a wizened woman of the Mantis-kinden, lean and leathery as dried meat, every feature withered as a prune. Her wild white hair floated about her head like a cloud, and her eyes were red-rimmed. Her people had a reputation as peerless killers. It was a reputation she was trying hard to undo, but so far it had proved insoluble in alcohol.

  When she took a step forwards, she stumbled, then wheeled around glowering as though someone had tripped her. Had it not been for that accursed badge, nobody would have taken her seriously.

  They were not taking her seriously. They were laughing at her. She realised she had lurched forwards just enough to be nominally before her opponent. She was supposed to be fighting.

  “Grandmother.” Her opposite number was a broad-shouldered man of the Dragonfly and he had one of their long-handled swords down by his side. “Perhaps you have come to the wrong place. This is a fighting circle. For fighters.”

  Hoots, jeers. Had her badge lost its power at last? Was that why they were so deservingly derisive?

  No. She realized that her dishevelled, stained robes were hiding it. With a convulsive twitch of one hand she freed it from the folds, presenting the device to her enemy and to the mob. The sword within the circle blazed in gold from left breast and the catcalls and mockery died in patches. She turned one way and the other, feeling the world swim and the ground tilt beneath her feet.

  “Yes!” she shouted out. “Look at it! It’s right there!” She tried to point, but ended up jabbing herself painfully in the chest.

  “How dare you?” came the voice of her opponent, the nameless Dragonfly warrior. “How dare you steal such a thing and defile it?” He had been in the war, she guessed. To him, the Weaponsmasters’ order was an ideal that had somehow survived his people’s defeat.

  She deserved every drop of his contempt, but still she slurred out, “Didn’t steal it.” The charge of defiling she did not bother to defend.

  Then he was at her, just a simple cleaving stroke aimed at ridding the world of this offence to dignity. She tried, she really tried to stand and take it, but the badge was a harsh master. The badge would not let her.

  She had come to the circle without a blade, but it was in her hands even as her enemy swung, the grip familiar as breathing: a Commonweal sword like his, five feet from point to pommel, and half of that haft.

  She struck halfway through his swing, the blade dragging her tired old arms with it, no messing about with ripostes, but making the parry itself an attack. She ended in a high guard, commanding the middle line, point jabbing at his face. Convulsively, he tried to force her sword aside, because he was far bigger and stronger than she. It took the slightest rotation of her wrists to angle her blade inside his own and, in pushing her sword across himself, he cut his own throat. It was a miserable death for him, a miserable show for the audience, a wretched failure for an old woman who wanted only to die.

  Die with dignity, she reminded herself, but that ship had sailed long before, carried off on a tide of cheap spirits.

  Later, sitting with a bowl of something clear as water and harsh as defeat, she sensed someone approach her from behind. There had been a time, shortly after the war, when she had put her back to corners to deny the assassins their due. These days she sat with her back to open doors whenever she could. Surely somewhere there was a killer competent enough to rid the world of her?

  Not this one, though, and she turned and rose in one smooth motion, holding the drink up at arm’s length, bringing the blade down in a smooth strike to bisect her enemy’s left side from his right. Except the sword was not in her hands, or anywhere in evidence. Always the fucking thing knows best. She was left in a guard as perfect as an illustration from a manual, save that her hands were empty. The boy she faced was barely twelve. He had a name, she recalled.

  Eshe: a malnourished Dragonfly-kinden child, hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed. She could not remember where she had got him from, or why. He had just been there, one morning, getting the fire going when she woke on the cold ground. He was just another of the ten thousand orphans the war had churned out.

  “Please, Weaponsmaster, we must go.” He was so deferential to her. It was as though he saw someone else before him, someone who still possessed an echo of that pre-war golden glory.

  “Winnings,” she got out. The bowl was empty. She had no idea if she had drunk it or spilled it.

  “I have them, Weaponsmaster. We must go. I have had word. There were men asking for you.”

  “Let them ask it to my face.”

  There was a rod of iron in this one that somehow the Wasps had not broken. “They are hunting you, Weaponsmaster.”

  She just blinked at him blearily. Slowly, muscle by muscle, her perfect form collapsed until she was sitting on the floor again, her stained robes spread out about her.

  “Fine. Go tell them where I am. There might be a reward.”

  But that was too cruel and his face showed it. She hated Eshe, sometimes. She had never asked to be responsible for him. She had tried to drive him off. He had not gone. She had refused to feed him. He had proved more than able to scrounge food for both of them. And these days, he kept hold of the money.

  “Bad men,” he insisted. “Killers. They will not care who dies, what burns, to get at you.” He was shuffling from one foot to the other. “Please.”

  Why should I care? But the badge cared. The sword and the oh-so-honourable circle of the doomed order of Weaponsmasters, they cared, and they hauled her to her feet. Will I seek them out? she wondered. Apparently, she would not. Instead, she left town hurriedly – this place in the heart of the occupied Commonweal whose name she couldn’t even recall. She made sure people saw which way she had gone.

  Once she had staggered a sufficient distance, with the alcohol evaporating off her like mist, she covered her trail and doubled back. She wanted to look at her pursuers. Perhaps one of them would be good enough to kill her. There was always hope.

  Sober, she could be stealthy as a shadow. An old, old shadow, it was true, but then all shadows were old. They were the only things in the world that even the rising sun could not renew but must either destroy or leave in hiding. Creeping like a creak-jointed thief back into that village, hiding and lurking, she felt in bitter need of destruction.

  Eshe, she had told to stay away, out in the fields. No doubt he would ignore her, as he always did, but he was at least half shadow himself, and who would notice one more starving Dragonfly child in a land that the Wasp armies had chewed their way through?

  She remembered the war: the one that had so recently ended. Back then she had been a prince’s champion and her badge a source of pride. Sword to sword, she’d had no equal, and this in the Commonweal, where the art of the duel had been perfected centuries before. When the Wasp Empire brought their challenge she had laughed, they all had. Oh, certainly the Wasps had always been a hostile presence on the Commonweal’s eastern border, but they were savages, soon riled and soon slapped down.

  Those few merchants and vagrants who warned that the Empire had changed in the last generation were ignored. The Monarch of the Commonweal commanded a nobility unparalleled with sword and lance and bow, and a levy of peasants vast enough to swallow the Empire a hundred times over. The outcome of the war was never in doubt.

  Of all their predictions, only that last had been true.

  A fugitive in her own country, she crouched and spied on these men who had come to take her. There was no mistaking them: not soldiers but some band of trackers sniffing after the bounty the Empire would pay for her head. There were more than a score of them, men who had been peasants, and then soldiers, and were now just survivors. She saw Dragonfly and Grasshopper-kinden amongst them, and a handful of Wasps who were probably deserters. It was their leader who caught Ineskae’s attention, though.

  It wasn’t that you didn’t see Wasp-kinden women. They came with the
army, but as slaves and kept women and whores. The Wasps had a firm idea of where women belonged in their Empire. And yet here was one of their delicate maidens out on her own, and in command of a pack of killers. This one had seen better times, it was true. She was lean and angular, and wore a knee-length brigandine that had been ill-used and stitched back together. Her fair hair was hacked short, and she carried herself with every bit as much belligerence as a man of her people. Across her back was the same style of Commonwealer sword that Ineskae herself carried.

  What, then...? the old Mantis asked herself. What does this one want? And what do I do about it? The answer to that one came readily enough. I suppose I kill her. That’s how this usually goes.

  Yet there was something disturbing about her, impossible to define, impossible to ignore. Ineskae reached out for her sword – not an act of the body, but of the mind – and yet her hand remained empty. Something was wrong.

  She was too old and too sick of her own existence to know fear. More, there was nothing about this tatty-looking mercenary to strike awe into her. This was just some runaway with a Dragonfly blade, some hunter for hire. There was nothing.

  But still her sword avoided her grasp and she slunk away. There would be a clean death in some other place. Better to die crossing swords with some ignorant brigand or fighting beasts in a Wasp pit. So many better ways to die.

  Two nights later, and Ineskae could not even find herself a fight.

  This was some wretched little village, barely a half-dozen wooden huts and some animal pens. She was not welcome. The locals feared her. She had been rattling at their doors demanding drink this last hour, but each family had closed and shuttered their homes, just as they would if the fierce winter wind were crying outside. Eshe had stood in the centre of the village, the still point she was orbiting around, watching her sadly.

  She had no wish to be sober. Sobriety brought memory in its wake like a leprous beggar. Outside, under the keen and starless sky, Ineskae took her sword in both hands, but this was an enemy she could not fight.

  Past midnight, feverish and trembling, the last veil of her drunkenness was stripped away and she could not stop herself remembering Aleth Rael.

  Weaponsmasters were supposed to pass on their skills, but in all her long life she had trained only the one student: Aleth Rael, the swift, the laughing. She had loved him. She had ached to see him fight, or dance, or paint. When he had won his own badge, in the secret trials of their order, she had felt her heart swell until she thought it would break. He had been all the children, all the family she felt she would ever need.

  And he had gone out into the world, and she had known that he was destined for great things. He was going to be a general, a diplomat, a man who could have forged a future.

  And the Empire had come, and he had come home and gone to war, as all of them had gone to war. When she was drunk she could forget that he was dead.

  That was what Eshe did not understand. He was so well meaning. He tried to keep the drink from her hands because he thought that would make things better. But when she had to remember that her student, her surrogate son, Aleth Rael was dead, it tore at her like no sword or claw ever had.

  By morning the two of them were gone, she staggering off into the wilderness, Eshe silently dogging her steps, following the faded track to the next town. The cold would not take her, the wild beasts and the bandits avoided her. And so she ended up as she always ended up, seeking the oblivion of drink, because it was the only oblivion she could find.

  Three days later she dragged her feet into some other no-name place with the rising sun, weary as death but still not dead. This time she did not even have the energy to beat on doors and make demands. She sat down in the cleared space that formed the centre of the village, kicking aside a detritus of spent candles and the charred ends of incense sticks. During the war, places like this had looked to their traditions when the Wasps came. They had placed their faith in all the comforting lies and rituals inherited from generations past. It hadn’t worked. Around her was the debris of a battleground where the present had slain the past.

  How long she sat there in the morning chill, she could not say. Then she heard Eshe whispering her name, and a shadow fell across her. She reached for her sword, wherever she had left it, but her hands remained empty.

  A boot nudged her knee none too gently. There was a stocky Dragonfly man standing before her, a cudgel in his hand. He was greying and leathery, and she guessed he must be the local Headman.

  “What do you want?” she asked him.

  “We want you to leave.”

  “Give me a drink first.”

  His face darkened. He could read the history of her descent in the stains of her robe. “Leave.”

  “Fight me.” Abruptly she was on her feet, but the sword still refused to come. She had dropped it somewhere on the trail, but it would be in her hands the moment it knew she needed it. Apparently this was not one of those times.

  “You want a fight?” the Headman spat, utterly disgusted. “Go to the garrison. They fight there. They fight and drink and turn our daughters into their whores. Go to the Wasps, woman. You’ll fit right in.”

  “Sounds like paradise,” she croaked sourly. “Just point the way.”

  “No, Weaponsmaster,” Eshe whispered with a tug at her sleeve. “Not the Wasps.”

  “Well there’ll be hunters through here within the day, asking after me,” Ineskae snapped, slapping at the boy. “I wanted to fight them but you... wouldn’t let me.” It had been her sword and her badge, not the child, she recalled. Did the sword and badge object to her going to seek a blood match at the Wasp garrison? Apparently not. Fickle bastards, the pair of them.

  The Headman was plainly glad to send her to the Empire, possibly because it would involve people he despised getting hurt either way. He said something to Eshe, too, and Ineskae thought it must have been an offer to find the boy a place.

  Yes, say yes, she mouthed, but Eshe was proud. Eshe wanted to stay with her. She had no idea why. She should send him away.

  With that thought, she felt a sudden cold emptiness within her, at not having the irritating child underfoot. He was no Aleth Rael, her golden protégé, but he was something. Why did she need something, in this ruin that history had made of her life? She could not say, and yet the need was there, insistent as her sword.

  Where there were Imperial soldiers, there was fighting. Where there were soldiers there was drink. I should have thought of this a long time ago.

  The garrison itself had been some noble’s castle, built in the ancient days as four high walls surrounding a central courtyard. The ancient ways had not weathered well, which was why the structure was now just three walls and a low bank of rubble that the Imperial war machines had pressed down.

  She took in the scene at a glance, guessing that the off-duty soldiers gathered in that space at nights, with a half-dozen big fires bleeding their warmth out at the heedless sky. There was a raised stage made of piled stone carrion from that fallen wall. There were traders and vintners who were established enough to each have a patch of wall they made their own. When Ineskae appeared, she was immediately surrounded by a sour-looking mob in black and gold who thought she looked like a beggar. When she told them with exaggerated dignity that she was a Mantis come to fight, they let her through, no questions asked.

  They had several matches lined up that night. It gave her plenty of time to get in the right state of mind. When Eshe would not fetch her a drink, she was not too proud to get it herself, and when she had found a Beetle-kinden selling the harsh, cheap spirits she was fond of, she saw no reason not to sit with him and give him money. In that way, the fights preceding hers passed in a blur: men against men, a man against a big tarantula, a gang of chained criminals against a Wasp soldier.

  At her side Eshe huddled miserably, jostled by every passing Wasp. “We should go,” was all he would say.

  “Why?” she demanded. “Look how we’re all gett
ing on! You’d think there’d never been a war.”

  “Weaponsmaster, if there are hunters, there’s a price. The Wasps love gold as much as any,” he insisted.

  “Let them come,” she declared loudly, turning a lot of heads. The Beetle tapster was looking alarmed, holding off on giving her another filled bowl. She fixed him with a steel stare. “Try it, fat man. Just try and come between me and my love.” When the words were out, she did not know where they had come from. They seemed abruptly pathetic.

  Then someone was tugging at her sleeve again and she rounded on Eshe to snap, “I’m not leaving!” only to find it was a Wasp out of uniform. “What?”

  “You said you were here to fight,” he boomed over the crowd. “Your moment’s here.”

  “About damn time.” She got up, lurched, ended up clinging to him, then stumbled off into the crowd at a tangent, trying to set a course for the stone mound of the stage. When she got there, she rebounded from it painfully, and then someone unwisely tried to help her up, so she punched him to the floor.

  The soldiers around her, with the exception of her bewildered victim, found this hilarious, whooping and cheering for her as she clambered up, her robe rucking about her knees. When she stood there, swaying, someone yelled out, “Did you forget something, grandma?” and another, “Where’s your sword gone?”

  “She drank it!” called some wit, and she only wished it were true.

  She thrust a hand into the air as though calling for silence, and for once the sword knew its cue and was there. She heard the expanding ripple of surprise, a crowd of Apt soldiers – for whom a Weaponmaster’s magic was just a story – hurriedly trying to rationalize what they had seen.

  “Give me my fight!” she roared at them, as though expecting them to storm the stage and drag her down. “Come on, you sons of whores!”