Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  But then someone was being shoved up to face her. Not a Wasp: somehow she had thought it would be one of their own.

  It was a Dragonfly man in ragged clothes that had once been fine. She knew it was not Aleth, of course. Aleth was dead. This was some captured warrior or noble, hauled out to give the lads a bit of sport. When he stood before her, though, she could only see Aleth Rael in him. Her tear-blurred eyes would not focus on the reality. The drink betrayed her and let the memories pour in like the sea.

  When he took up a stance against her, sword held high just as Aleth always preferred, she howled out her denials, staggering away but being jovially pushed back onto the stage every time.

  “Come on!” her opponent yelled at her, and she knew that voice: it was the voice of desperation, of someone who wanted to die. She had heard it from her own throat often enough to recognize it now.

  So she went. The sword wanted to fight. It wanted to put someone out of their misery and probably didn’t care which of them. So she went with a will, with a vengeance.

  Eshe hunched himself down until he had his back to the Beetle-kinden’s barrels. Ineskae and her Dragonfly opponent had clashed three times, separating after each, long swords gleaming and leaping in the firelight. As always when fighting, the old woman was steady as steel: she was drunk but her sword was sober.

  People thought she had taken him in for charity. They did not realise it was the other way around. He had grown up on stories of the Weaponsmasters. After the war, without family or home, those stories were all he had left of the world he had once known. Everything had been stripped from him but the dreams.

  He had been begging when he saw her – that badge, unmistakeable. He had latched onto her not because she would save him, but because he might save her. He knew, miserably, that he was failing.

  And then someone had sat down next to him and said, “Hello there,” as naturally as anything, and he looked, and it was the Wasp woman, the one hunting Ineskae. She was here, bold as day, surrounded by men of her own kind who would rape her and put her on crossed pikes if they realized what she was.

  He tried to bolt, but she had his arm in a pincer grip.

  “I’m Terasta,” she said conversationally. “What’s your name?” Despite the roar of the crowd he heard her words clearly.

  He would not say, but then her grip redoubled and he gasped out, “Eshe!”

  She nodded, her eyes on the fight. “Hello, Eshe. You know we’ve a mutual interest? I’d say ‘acquaintance,’ but we’ve yet to be introduced. We will be, though, and very soon.”

  He wanted to cry out, to warn Ineskae, but there was no chance his voice would be heard and he was afraid Terasta would hurt him more.

  “Look at her fight,” the woman breathed, eyes gleaming as she stared at the stage. “Magnificent, isn’t she?”

  The duel had intensified, both of the combatants striking faster, blades scraping and rebounding from each other. Ineskae’s face was set into an expressionless mask, every part of her bitter, sodden personality purged in the moments of the fight. Eshe was unhappily aware that this was what she sought, to be taken from herself. Simply being Ineskae was her own private hell.

  “It looks as though things are about to become busy here,” Terasta observed. She pointed out a band of Wasps who were forcing their way laboriously through the crowd. Unlike most of the off-duty audience they were in full armour, and it was obvious they were making for the stage.

  “Why?” Eshe whispered, and somehow she heard him.

  “The reward that has motivated my band of cutthroats is a powerful incentive to the army’s more venal elements. Now...” And she was standing, dragging Eshe to his feet. “Time to get her attention.”

  For a blessed second her hand was gone and Eshe bunched to run, but then she had stooped and picked him up effortlessly. Almost like a proud mother, she hoisted him up into the air, holding his struggling form over the heads of the crowd.

  Eshe did not think Ineskae would see. He did not think she would care. A moment later, though, she had swayed aside from a strike, failing to counterattack, and her eyes met his.

  He would not cry for help. A Weaponsmaster would not. He kicked and scratched, and got nowhere, the Wasp just shifting her grip easily, anticipating every move. Then she was taking him away, and the uniformed Wasps were reaching the stage, and he did not see what happened next.

  Ineskae was fighting Aleth Rael. The memory was stronger than her actual duel with the ragged Dragonfly nobleman. She had sparred with her beloved student so often, in those golden days before the fall. To relive those lost fights was far more satisfactory than to admit the truth.

  Beyond the decaying vistas of her imagination, the Wasp crowd hooted and cheered as they danced, blade to blade. Who could have expected such a good show from a pair of old relics like this?

  She could not know what her opponent was thinking, but when she crossed sword with him, when they tried ardently to kill each other with the razor edges of their shared steel, he played her game. It was as if she had asked him to wear her student’s face, just as a favour for the woman she had once been.

  And she knew it was all in her mind. She knew that she was fooling only herself. Tears drew their lines down her withered cheeks even as she fought. But while the fight went on she could pretend, and remember being happy.

  And then there was a wrong note, and she fell from her killing reverie and opened her eyes.

  The child: the annoying, unwanted, useless child who dogged her every footstep for no reason she could divine; the child was in trouble.

  There was that Wasp woman, the hunter. She had Eshe struggling in her grip. She was taking the child. Why was she –?

  The crowd had not noticed her distraction. Her sword had not stopped its dancing. Abruptly, though, she had somewhere else to be.

  She changed her pattern and, to her joy, her opponent followed, his own sword leading him to her plan, enemy become accomplice. She went into the crowd, and he went with her.

  She saw black and gold armour and heard a Wasp voice shout her name. They were arresting her. What did that mean? Arrest means to stop, she considered very calmly, as her sword lanced forwards. I can’t be doing with that.

  The lead Wasp, the officer, took her blade through his open mouth. By then there were already half a dozen brawls as other Wasps objected to the interruption.

  Ineskae plunged into the crowd, running on heads and shoulders, hacking at arms, weaving from stingshot. Behind her, her opponent stopped and fought, buying her time though he owed her nothing.

  Ahead, the Wasp woman was already out of sight, and Eshe with her.

  The Wasp woman had near two-score villains assembled here, in tents and around fires. This land, a good mile from the garrison where Ineskae had been fighting, was broken and rocky. The hunter-brigands were strewn about wherever offered shelter from the cold wind. A handful were notionally on watch, and a Dragonfly man went from one to the other, kicking them if he found them asleep.

  “You think they’ll beat Ineskae,” Eshe divined.

  Terasta snorted. “They’d barely slow her down.”

  “Nobody can beat her. She’ll kill all of you.”

  He expected her to slap him, or at least to sneer. Instead, her expression was thoughtful. “Could she?”

  “You know the badge she wears!” Eshe snapped fiercely.

  Terasta nodded. “Better than you’d believe. And I know that she has fought the desperate and the doomed in every pit across the Commonweal. And she was cut, back in Te Sora, and again in Mian Lae. Can you imagine? One of the Weaponsmasters, the ancient order, losing blood to some thug swordsman in the back of an army drinking den.” She did not sound mocking, anything but.

  “I hope the reward makes all your deaths worthwhile,” Eshe hissed.

  “Oh, my men want the reward, and we have fought off three other packs of hunters who sought it. Why else would I need scum like this? But that’s not it. Not for me ...
”

  Then there was a yell from one of the lookouts, and a moment later the gang of villains was scrabbling for weapons, leaping up as the spitting light of a chemical lantern heralded the Imperial army.

  “Time for the scum to earn their keep one last time,” Terasta murmured.

  The soldiers who marched up were perhaps half the strength of her hunters but their faces showed only contempt for their lessers. “Who commands here?” their officer said. Eshe guessed they were the same mob who had crashed the fight back at the garrison.

  “How can I help you, Sergeant?” Terasta’s hand was abruptly off Eshe’s shoulder, abandoning him in the midst of her camp.

  The lead Wasp raised an eyebrow at finding a woman in charge. “We want the Weaponsmaster.”

  Terasta nodded. “You want her; we want her.”

  The sergeant squared his shoulders. “We know she came this way. Don’t play games.”

  “I never do,” the woman replied, unintimidated. “I have papers authorising me to hunt fugitives from Imperial justice.”

  Eshe looked about him, finding that nobody seemed to be paying him all that much attention. He began a slow shuffle away from the camp’s centre, edging towards the dark beyond the fires.

  “I piss on your papers, woman,” the Wasp sergeant snapped.

  “Interesting,” Terasta remarked thoughtfully. The transition from her standing there and her sword clearing its scabbard to cleave between neck and shoulder, was swifter than Eshe could follow, and yet so natural that it seemed rehearsed. The Wasp let out a gurgling yelp and went down, and then the fighting started in earnest, and Eshe ran.

  He got quite far, hopping and stumbling over the broken countryside, his Dragonfly eyes wringing as much light from the waning moon as he could manage. He thought he was clear of them, the sounds of battle receding until they became someone else’s problem.

  Then he skidded down a scree slope, fetching up against a jutting rock hard enough to beat the breath from him, and Terasta stepped around it and took his arm again, as though she and he had been following the steps of the same dance.

  Eshe struck at her with his free hand, but she twisted his arm above his head, driving him to his knees.

  “I approve of your instincts, boy,” she said softly. “Any other time they’d have been right on the money. But this is where I wanted you. Right here.” She cocked her head, listening as the sounds of the fight were carried on the breeze.

  “Your people are losing,” Eshe spat at her. It was anyone’s guess whether it was true.

  “Probably. But they’re a pack of killers, thieves and deserters fighting a squad of equally greedy soldiers. Why should we spare any tears?” She shrugged. “My scum have served their purpose, in getting me this far and fending off the others who wanted Insekae’s head.”

  A new voice growled out, low and dangerous, “And you think you’ll collect it, do you?”

  Ineskae had intended to avoid the bloody skirmish between the Empire and her hunters, but somehow she had ended up going through the middle of it, her sword and the dregs of her drunkenness just drawing the shortest possible line between her and Eshe and then cutting along it. There was blood weighing down her robes, mostly other people’s. Her souvenirs were a thin line of red above one eyebrow and a ragged gash across the back of her left hand.

  The Wasp woman regarded her coolly. “I’m not here for any reward,” she said. “I’m here for you.”

  “Personal, is it?” Ineskae squinted. “I don’t know you.” She was tensed, ready to strike, sword and mind finding her a dozen solutions to the problem: kill the woman, not the boy. Eshe’s eyes were burning on her.

  “I know you, Weaponsmaster,” the Wasp woman told her. “I have heard more stories of you than you probably know exist. I know everything of you, your history, your victories, your provenance.”

  “And how?” Ineskae demanded scornfully.

  “Aleth Rael.” The Wasp smiled tiredly, letting go of Eshe, abruptly nothing more than a shabby mercenary in ill-fitting armour. “Aleth Rael, old woman.”

  Ineskae was very still. “How dare you speak his name?” she whispered.

  “Because he was my teacher.”

  “You? A Wasp?” Her fury was automatic, and also hollow. There was something new come into Terasta’s voice, an earnestness beyond her studied poise. Ineskae was practically spitting with insults, desperate to keep this confrontation as something simple: just another throat to cut. And yet no words came out. Her sword trembled in the air between them, fighting her, and her hand was stayed.

  “I am Terasta of the Empire, and I was his student while he lived.”

  “Impossible,” Ineskae got out. “Where’s your badge?”

  “I never had the chance to earn it,” the Wasp said bitterly. “The war came. He went home to fight for his people, and against mine. And then he died.”

  “Yes.” Something vital went out of Ineskae. Abruptly neither she nor her sword had the heart to continue their struggle.

  “And I knew I should have been with him,” Terasta added, “even if it meant killing my own kinden. I failed him.”

  “Yes,” Abruptly Ineskae tottered over to a flat stone and sat down. “Yes,” she said again. “But here you are.”

  “He left me with one thing only,” the Wasp said. “He left me with his memories of you, the woman who gave him everything. He loved you.”

  The old Mantis looked at her bleakly. “So why are you here? To give me his fondest best wishes?” Eshe had retreated to her, half hiding behind her, and she reached up to him. His hand in hers was like a lifeline in a world that was draining away.

  “I have tracked you. I have followed your path from fight to pointless fight,” Terasta told her. “You are looking for death. A proper death. A Weaponmaster’s death, worthy of the sword and circle badge. And you can’t find it. Not here. Not any more.”

  “Seems that way,” Ineskae grunted. “You’re going to give it to me, are you?”

  “If I can. Because I understand the sword and circle, even if I never earned it for myself.”

  The old Mantis stared at her. Wasp-kinden weren’t noted for any kind of honour that the fallen Commonweal might have recognized, but she saw it in Terasta: the stillness, the calmness; a woman whose life had been given over to the sword for its own sake, and not merely for what that sharp edge might win. Something rose in her at the thought: a proper fight, a final fight, a dignified exit from a world that no longer wanted her.

  Her sword and her badge desired that. She had used them badly, since the war’s end. They wanted rid of her.

  But she was damned if she was their plaything.

  “No,” she said softly.

  The Wasp started in surprise. “But... all this time, what have you sought, except this?”

  “I know.” Ineskae closed her eyes, feeling out this new thing she had discovered within herself as though it was an arrowhead too barbed to draw out. So I have to push it on through. “I thought so too, until now.”

  “Then what changed?” Terasta demanded, bizarrely infuriated that all her good work and planning had apparently been in vain.

  “You took him.” Ineskae squeezed Eshe’s hand gently. “And I wanted him back. It was the first time I wanted anything that wasn’t a drink or a death since the war. It was meaning.” She managed a brittle smile. “And you did the right thing, by Aleth Rael, by me. You were right on all counts. And if you want to draw your sword and try your luck, I don’t reckon I can stop you. Only now I’m not ready to go. Now I’ve got other business to deal with.” It was absurd, she knew. She was too old, too worn down, and yet somehow she felt younger than she had in a long time. Somewhere in that flood of feeling was the ghost of the woman she had been back before Rael died, back when she had something to care about.

  Terasta was looking completely lost. She had come a long way, engineered so much, and played by all the right rules, and now what did she have? “I don’t understand,”
she complained. “What is the boy to you, really?”

  “Who knows?” Ineskae stood, feeling her joints creak. “Maybe it’s time I took another student. Can’t let the old ways die out just yet, can we?” She weighed the thought in her mind, feeling a tentative and probationary approval from her sword, from her badge. “I could take two, maybe.” Her gaze was still red-rimmed and wild, but it was steadier than it had been in a long time.

  For a long moment, Terasta stood frozen, hand partway to her sword hilt, world yanked out from under her. And Ineskae saw that the woman’s hunt – her relentless pursuit of her teacher’s teacher – was indistinguishable from Ineskae’s own quest for self-destruction: differing strategies to deal with an identical void.

  “I will fight you, old woman,” the Wasp said flatly, and Ineskae sighed, waiting for the strike, but then Terasta’s shoulders twitched, the smallest shrug. “But not until you are ready,” she added. “Until then, it would be an honour and a privilege to learn.”

  Then there were voices calling amongst the rocks, the survivors of the Imperial soldiers spreading out to search for their elusive quarry. Ineskae consulted her sword and her badge, but they felt no need to go and shed more Wasp blood today. There was no hurry to go picking fights, now that she had so much else to do.

  It turns out that the post-war Commonweal is a perfect setting for a Kurosawa/Eastwood sort of wandering samurai/western story, as well as my homage to David Gemmell (this story was originally published in the Gemmell tribute collection Legends). This story, like most of its neighbours, is about picking up the pieces – the end of the war is, to some, as destructive as the war itself. Ineskae herself is equal parts Tisamon and Granny Weatherwax. Like Evandter in ‘The Prince’ or Danaen in The Sea Watch, the Mantis-kinden archetype of the perfect warrior is more honoured in the breach than the observance.

  Idle Hands

  When Gaved bundled the fugitive Sien Se into the quartermaster’s office there were some subtle changes that struck him very quickly. Mostly it was that the corpulent bulk of Captain Messer had been removed, possibly with a winch, and the gaudy opulence of his office reduced to a spartan simplicity. Where the great man had lounged in his bee-fur robe, fingers glittering with resized rings, where his desk had been strewn with jewellery and miniatures, Commonweal regalia and stacks of coin, now there was a bare space of wood burdened only with neat stacks of paper, and a Fly.