Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1)

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  Few were desperate enough to disturb his repast. So far, apart from the band of Fly contrabandists who were kicking their heels until Gryllis had packed their shipment, he had spotted one of the local players, midway between criminal and resistance fighter, who was probably selling pilfered Wasp goods, and the unwelcome sight of another Scorpion, a squat, pug-faced tracker of fugitives that Hokiak had reluctantly done business with a few times. Neither of them seemed inclined to trouble him while he was eating, so he set to his bowl without enthusiasm. He had a couple of Mynans on watch and, three mouthfuls in, one of them stood up and moved closer to his table, indicating a visitor he wasn’t sure of. Hokiak glanced up balefully, noted the newcomer, and waved his employee back. He was in a foul mood this morning, and it would do him good to ruin someone else’s day.

  The man who sat down opposite him was Wasp-kinden, a solid-built, broad-shouldered example of Myna’s new masters, dark hair cropped shorter than usual, which Hokiak knew was a practice of the Slave Corps, because the full-face helms they wore could swelter in hot weather. There was a distinct edge to the Wasp, a nervous tightness about the eyes, that suggest this master of Myna was losing his grip on things.

  “Sergeant Mordrec,” Hokiak noted. “Third time in a tenday. Don’t tell me your luck’s run even further out? You’d need a glass to see it.”

  The Wasp’s face twitched but he manfully banished all irritation from it. Begging favours from a ‘lesser race’ was something that many Wasps would rather die than do, but the Slave Corps men had always been monstrous pragmatists. Hokiak knew, almost to the last coin, the burden that was on Mordrec’s back.

  “Hokiak. I’ve... got a business proposition.”

  The old Scorpion-kinden treated Mordrec to the full glory of his jagged and blackened smile. “Well, always willing to listen to business, son.”

  “The new territories, Hokiak, the principalities. You must be keen to set up trade contacts there,” the Wasp said, meaning those Commonweal lands that had been signed over to the Empire at the end of their war. “You know me. I’ve been all over there, last three years.”

  Hokiak made a noncommittal noise.

  “How’s about it? I’ll do good business there. I’ll pass it all back to you. You know me, Hokiak. I’m reliable.”

  “You’re a liability, you mean,” the old man rumbled. “And in return all I’d have to do is get you across the border, is that it? Now why would a strapping young Wasp like you need my help for that? Just hop on the next slaver caravan headed that way, I would.” Seeing the little twitch of a snarl that came to the Wasps’s face he chuckled. “Only I hear something about debts, Sergeant. Dice not being kind to you? Only two days back there was two slaver sergeants and a Consortium captain in here, asking if I’d seen one Sergeant Mordrec, absent without leave and owing more than his year’s pay to all and sundry? Now, Mordrec’s not so rare a name that maybe they meant someone else...?”

  Mordrec held very still, save for his eyes which flicked at the almost-empty room around them, fighting to see if Hokiak’s men were about to jump him. “Hokiak...” he murmured, with a slight tremble in his voice.

  “Now they were making demands,” Hokiak went on amiably. “I don’t take to them that give me demands. So I ain’t telling them nothing.” Seeing the Wasp relax he added, “Not unless’n they come asking nicely.”

  “Hokiak, listen to me,” Mordrec hissed. “It’s the crossed pikes for me unless I get out of here. I owe...”

  “Three-hundred and seventeen gold Imperials to Captain Lyker,” Hokiak finished. “Oh a load more than that, but I guess by now you’ve worked out that Lyker’s not just your regular-type creditor?”

  The word Rekef hung between them, unspoken.

  Hokiak shook his head. “You want out? Use your feet and hope they can take you somewhere that Lyker can’t reach you. Or you want my help over the border, you come up with some payment in advance, Sergeant. Any man who eats promises goes hungry, and your history ain’t inspiring me to extend you any credit.”

  Mordrec opened his mouth to argue but Hokiak was no longer paying the sergeant any attention. He struggled to his feet all of a sudden, cane almost snapping as his weight bore on it. The Wasp kicked back out of his chair, as if sure that the old man was going to attack him, but the Scorpion’s red-rimmed eyes were elsewhere.

  Three men had pushed their way into the backroom as if they owned it. The leader held Gryllis off the ground by his collar, and now dumped the spindly Spider-kinden to one side without a glance. The other two spread out, one either side: Scorpion-kinden, all three of them, massively built, bald heads brushing the ceiling. Piecemeal armour of chain and chitin and leather bulked them out further, and they were all armed with double-handed swords or axes, massive weapons almost as tall as they were. They radiated fierce strength, the jut of their fanged underbites, the talons that curved like knives from each thumb and forefinger, the waxy paleness of their skins, all spoke of a world beyond these seedy backstreets. Hokiak felt ten years older just seeing them, and his withered heart sank and stuttered in his chest.

  Ah no, not now. Couldn’t they wait a decade more? I’d he gone then, and they’d not need to trouble themselves. And he hadn’t thought they would. Despite it all. Despite all he’d done to hold his place amongst them, to keep his rivals down, he’d thought that the desert would burn out their memory of him soon enough. But no.

  Their leader had fixed his yellow eyes on the old man, and the disgust and disdain on his face cut deeper than years. So that is what I look like to them. Those few of his own kind he had been forced to deal with, like the man who had been waiting for him that morning, had at least needed his goodwill and covered up their revulsion, but here it was, naked and plain to wound him. On their faces was written in a large script: you should have died before you became as this.

  Hokiak lent on his cane for a moment, husbanding his strength, and then hobbled forwards, eyes narrowed as though against a glaring light. “What do you want?” The words had formed with all the illicit authority he wielded in Myna, as a buyer, a seller, an arranger of things, but they came out as an ancient’s rattle.

  “You know,” spoke the lead Scorpion, not loud, but his deep voice was robust with life and health.

  “Who was it then?” Hokiak pressed. “Your father? An uncle? Did I cut the head off your family and not come back to finish the job? Who?”

  “Father? You might have done for my grandfather, for all it matters,” the huge Scorpion replied, “But I’d not come so far north for him, nor just to trade slaves with the Wasps, for all their gold flows like sand. You fled, old man, when you owed us all a death. Every wrinkle in your rotting face cries out to me. ‘Bring an end to me, Ecta,’ it begs. I’ve come to set things right. You owe a death and I hold your marker.”

  Hokiak’s Mynan guards were standing uncertainly, hands to sword-hilts, but the Scorpion-kinden would make short work of them, sure enough. And the mention of the Empire showed that the three were here with imperial sanction, no mere trespassers to be arrested or enslaved. As for their words...

  Hokiak felt himself shrivelling before the thought of his homeland, the harsh sands, the harsher people: men and women who lived by strength, who took what others could not deny them, who cared nothing for laws or empires, who lived in freedom and blood until their limbs faltered and their deeds caught up with them, then died at the hands of those that would take their place. There had been a day when Hokiak had driven his band of raiders across the sands and known no master, and killed with his mighty clawed hands any who would challenge his will.

  That was thirty years before, and for the last five years of his rule he had relied on reputation more than action to hold his place.

  He had left it all behind. When he saw he could not hold them, he had fled them. He had left their world of brutal simplicity for the shadowsand allowed himself to forget. Now here were the scions of his old life of strength and battle, fired with their right to h
is blood. He had broken a chain of generations of murder when he fled, and here came the smiths to reforge it.

  “There’s a market a dozen streets from here, off Seldom Street. Wasps’ve got a stage there, to sell slaves off. Nice place,” the Scorpion told him relentlessly. “Two days’ time, they’re done with their selling. Come meet us there then, after dusk. Come pay your debt.”

  “Or?” That one word was the worst admission of weakness Hokiak had heard in his long life, but the mere presence of these, his people, his successors, was draining him. The fugitive decades that they had brought with them were laid like timbers across his back.

  “Or we come for you, and all of yours,” the uncompromising voice assured him. “You, him,” the hand picked out Gryllis before taking in the whole exchange, “this. We’ll burn you out, old man. We’re time and we’ve caught up with you. Two days.” The big man turned on his heel, his companions giving the room a flaying glare before following him.

  For a moment, as alone as a man can possibly be, Hokiak lent on his stick, feeling it tremble beneath him, or perhaps just feeling himself tremble against its support. All eyes were on him.

  “Get out,” he whispered, barely to be heard, and then, “Get out!” at them all, the petitioners, the smugglers, his own people, even Gryllis. “All of you! Out!”

  “Hokiak, listen –!” Mordrec started, and the other Scorpion, the tracker, was on his feet as well, but Hokiak summoned all his strength, that had been whipped into cowering by the presence of his kinsmen, and bellowed at them hoarsely, shouting them down until the sheer senile fury of him had driven them, and everyone, out of the door.

  Then, unwatched, Hokiak let himself sag onto a chair, his cane clattering to the floor.

  There were two Wasp soldiers amongst those passing by the front of Hokiak’s Exchange, but they were staring after the departing Scorpion-kinden and Mordrec made good his exit, heading away from the centre of Myna towards those parts where he would be less likely to meet with other servants of the Empire. Two turns later, though, he heard footsteps behind him, and saw the Scorpion who had been his fellow petitioner before Hokiak. The man regarded him narrowly, pausing to see if Mordrec was going to be a problem. He was short for a Scorpion, broad across the chest, wearing the metal-inland leather hauberk of a Commonweal brigand. There was a crossbow slung over one shoulder.

  In a moment of mutual scrutiny each man sized up the other, trying to cast him as a threat, then:

  “I see nobody’s doing business with Hokiak today,” the Scorpion said. His voice, against all odds, was ridiculously cultured, his accent definitely from somewhere far from wherever either Hokiak or his three antagonists had come from.

  “Possibly ever,” Mordrec said shortly and then, drawn from a well of bitterness, “when they chop him into wrinkled bloody segments.”

  The Scorpion shrugged. “Who knows? I take it you’re not just buying and selling, slaver?”

  At the word, Mordrec flinched, only then remembering that his colours marked out his allegience and station. With a snarl he dragged his barred tunic off, exposing the stained arming jacket beneath. “What do you want?”

  The Scorpion grimaced toothily. “Out. Saving that, a drink.”

  “Fine, lead on.”

  “The place I’m drinking doesn’t like Wasps, Wasp.”

  “All the better. Se- Mordrec.” With difficulty he bit off the rank that had preceded his every introduction for years.

  “Barad Ygor,” the Scorpion returned, his fluid accent running the words together.

  “And where’s Barad, when it’s at home,” asked Mordrec, who knew a little of Scorpion naming customs.

  “Further south than you’ve ever been, I’ll bet. Come on, let’s see if you get lynched by the mob.”

  Mordrec had guessed at some den of the locals, filled with surly, unruly Mynan Beetle-kinden, or rather the local pack of grey-blue-skinned malcontents that passed as Beetles if you had no better. Instead, Ygor led him to what had been someone’s home once: a flat-roofed house with boarded-up windows. From outside, nothing suggested it was a taverna save the faint murmur of voices but, when they got inside, the dim interior had a dozen or so drinkers, and a halfbreed local sat on the floor at the back, filling clay bowls from the cask beside him.

  The drinkers were, to a man, Grasshopper-kinden: tall, lean men and women wearing imperial colours, auxillians drafted in from some conquered Commonweal province to perform those civic tasks too menial for the proud Wasp army. Not surprisingly, none of them looked on Mordrec with much love, but his lack of uniform apparently earned him a stay of execution.

  Ygor scanned the room as he walked to the barrel. “Where’s Soul?” he asked its tender, but the man just spread his hands. The Scorpion scowled briefly but secured a couple of bowls, and he and Modrec found themselves alone at a table for the simple reason that the other drinkers would not share one with a Wasp.

  “You’re in trouble, then?” the Scorpion suggested.

  Mordrec sipped what turned out to be the thinnest honeydew mead he had ever been exposed to. “Debts,” he admitted. “You?”

  “Heheh.” Ygor’s expression was awkward and evasive. “Worse than debts, me. Imperial debts, yours?”

  The Wasp nodded glumly. “And yours, Imperial worse-than-debts?”

  “Hmm, well, let’s just say that a friend and I did a real big service for your lot, after your lot had conspicuously failed to do it.”

  Mordrec regarded him for a moment, translating. “So everyone else hates you for what you did, and the Empire hates you because you’re not a Wasp and you made them look like fools.”

  Barad Ygor’s smile was a nightmare snarl of fangs. “In one,” he agreed. “Soul and I, we need to disappear quietly from Myna before one side or the other decides that they’d rather we disappeared noisily. You’re trying to ride out on the same beetle, I take it?”

  Mordrec nodded, but not the sullen bob of the head of a moment before. “Can you meet Hokiak’s price?” he added.

  “Academic,” Ygor told him dismissively, but when pressed he added, “I’ve no idea. I never got that far. You can’t?”

  “That depends on the currency.” Modrec frowned. “Those Scorpions came up to sell slaves. That puts them somewhere near the market and the Corps barracks. It’s more than my neck if I’m spotted there. But you...”

  “Go spy on the Scorpions,” Ygor said carefully. “As a prelude to...?”

  “Hokiak wants payment up front, he said. I reckon we’ve found a new currency.”

  Gryllis crept into the empty backroom as though he was burgling it. Hokiak glanced balefully up at him. “Well?”

  “Well you’re lucky your fellows like the big public song and dance, old claw,” the Spider told him softly. “If my bad memories caught up with me the first I’d know would be finding myself tied upside down in a cellar somewhere, surrounded by lads with razors. None of this showmanship.” Under the Scorpion’s yellow gaze he shrugged his bony shoulders. “But I see what they did, yes. Clever. Easy to look into a mug like theirs and think they’re stupid, but I see.” He stilted over and took a seat on the next nearest table to his business partner. “You’re going to fight?”

  “The word’s out. If I ignore ’em, everyone in Myna will know it,” Hokiak growled. “Then it’ll start: people stop paying their debts. People start pushing me for terms. Before you know it, some bastard local or Skater or someone has decided he can run my business better than I can.”

  “And they’re sitting with the Slave Corps, under the Empire’s wings,” Gryllis noted. “So you can’t just do them in without losing all that goodwill we’ve worked so hard on.” But there was a speculative expression on his face. “Old claw, I’ll risk that. Old men together. Let’s face it: you’d not be able to best that big fellow if you had a repeating ballista.”

  Hokiak’s gaze dropped to the table, where his broken-clawed hand lay like a dead thing. “Once...” he rasped.

  �
��We can neither of us live on ‘once’.” The Spider let out a sigh altogether too big for his narrow frame.

  “When I roamed the length of the Dryclaw,” Hokiak whispered, “nothing could stop me. I was like a flame, burning. Any who stood against me were ash, just ash on the wind.” The words came unwillingly, as though drawn from him by wires. “So much heat and fury. But the sands never stop, do they?”

  “They don’t,” murmured Gryllis, in heartfelt agreement.

  “And I cooled, year on year, then month on month, then each day a little cooler, and I saw that I was guttering, and the next man who braved me would snuff me like a candle. But I had sold my loot all the way up the silk road to the Empire’s edge, and all the little cities in between, and I hauled my embers off and thought that the others’d forget, that they’d overlook, this once, one of their own leaving the table with a handful of his winnings. I was sure that nobody cared.”

  “Well, touching as their sentiment is, what’s it to be?” Gryllis prompted. “Broadswords at dusk? Honourable clash of two barbarian princes?”

  Hokiak’s hand clenched, and he stabbed his finger-claw at the table, another scratch amongst dozens. “We Scorpions,” he snapped, “we don’t do honour. Not me, not them. We fight. They came to my city. We fight my way.”

  When Barad Ygor rejoined Mordrec it was with a savage welt across the side of his head. He entered the auxillian drinking den with another of the long, lean Grasshopper-kinden behind him, and the murmur of the drinkers went quiet for a moment. Mordrec felt a wave of disapproval, an utter back-turning on the part of the auxillians. Whatever disdain they felt for the Wasp in their midst, or the Scorpion mercenary, it was as nothing to what they reserved for this one of their own.