Feast and Famine

by Adrian Tchaikovsky

  They had been going to kill him, mostly out of bitter disappointment. It had been the horse they wanted, not some itinerant Dragonfly. They had taken his sword, commenting on its poor condition. One of them had put his palm to Mornen’s forehead, quite casually.

  “Hold,” another had interrupted, the man Mornen would later know as their sergeant. The faceless helm had stared down at him, only a T-shaped slit giving onto the darkness within.

  “If we’ve no horse to pull, make this bastard push,” the sergeant had dictated, and so it was.

  *

  Daybreak came dressed in red, the sky in the direction of the Empire streaked bloody. Now he had committed himself to freeing the others Mornen found he had no confidence whatsoever in his own plan. There were five Wasps. How was he supposed to keep them occupied while even one of his fellows freed themselves? He should go now, just shrug the manacles and fly. The Wasps would not be expecting such a trick. He would be away before they could burn him from the sky.

  He took a deep breath, seeing the slavers group up, about to come over no doubt with the slops of breakfast.

  It was a strange thing: his father had brought him up with all manner of stories about bad princes, cruel princes, lazy princes and mad princes. His father had tried to be a prince, though, and tried to be the sort of prince that the Commonweal should have. Perhaps there were such men, perhaps Lowre Cean was one. Mornen did not know: he had not had much opportunity to move in elevated circles.

  But his father had taught him exactly how a prince should behave: the ideal prince was the shape left by all the failed princes of his stories. And now Mornen was a prince, and all the responsibilities the title brought with it were immovably on his shoulders. These luckless slaves had sworn themselves to him. That meant that they were his people. He had a duty towards them that was like iron: if he tried to break it, it would break him first.

  He felt a moment’s sour despair at the father who, coming from a life of brigandage and plunder, had saddled him with such a sense of right and wrong.

  The Wasps had not slept much, he guessed. Their talk had taken them long past midnight. Now three of them were approaching the wagon, as hesitantly as naughty children wary of punishment.

  They carried no bowls for the slaves. The fire had died low and the slavers had yet to rake it and rebuild it for breakfast. Mornen had a sudden realisation that the moment had arrived ahead of time.

  Ignoring the slaves, the three Wasp-kinden paused in a loose circle about the back of the wagon, looking at the dark square that was Valken’s window.

  “Hey, lieutenant,” one of them said, almost nervously. “Wake up, Lieutenant.” The slaver opened and clenched his hands, working up to the courage required to kill a bound man trapped in a wagon.

  Valken sensibly made no sound. The three slavers glanced at one another, and from the camp behind them their sergeant shouted, “Get on with it! Do it and let’s be rid of him.”

  “Just stick your hand in and sting him dead,” one of the three suggested.

  “Why don’t you?” was the instant response. It made Mornen wonder just how far the discipline of the imperial armies went, if these bullies could not bring themselves to murder a helpless man just because of the spectre of an officer’s rank badge.

  The closest of the three had a key at his belt, dangling from its thong. Mornen felt his heart speed, knowing that the others were watching him. Overnight he had severed the last scraps of the Fly-shackles beneath his arm, and the rope around his wrists held its place solely because he had the loose ends in hand.

  “Piss on this,” said one of the slavers and took that final step forwards, hand directed into that small window. Mornen was frozen, waiting for the clear and definite decisive moment, unable to act.

  Tadeusz kicked the slaver in the knee with all the force he could manage and Mornen heard the joint crunch. The Wasp was down in a second, howling, and Mornen found that he was free of his rope, shrugging off the leather shackles. The closest slaver to him was reaching for his club rather than blasting a valuable slave with his sting. Mornen got a hand on the haft of the key and yanked, snapping the thong and pulling the man off balance. Will and Ceccy were wrestling with the man Tadeusz had downed, now, trying to keep hold of the Wasp’s wrists. The Bee-kinden himself reached urgently towards Mornen.

  The key-less slaver fetched the Dragonfly prince a solid punch to the gut, doubling him over, but Mornen’s Art flung his wings out, the air shimmering and dancing about his shoulders, turning the move into a full somersault that dropped him awkwardly before Tadeusz. The key fell somewhere between them and the Bee lunged for it. For a moment the slaver with the damaged knee had his hand to Tadeusz’s collar, yanking him back, but then Wil had found the man’s boot knife, fumbled it out with shackled hands and driven it into the slaver’s groin.

  “Mornen!” It was Valken’s voice. Even as the two slavers at the fire had leapt to their feet, there was still one man free to put a hand to the wagon’s window, determined to rid the world of Valken before the slaves were disciplined. Mornen shouldered the Wasp aside and added a solid kick to the man’s chest to keep the slaver off balance, the man’s sting flashing splinters from the wood. Then the Wasp that had punched him had grabbed Mornen’s arm, wrenching it back.

  “Mornen!” Valken shouted again. He had his hands out of the window, bound at the wrist with rope, but secured palm-to-palm only with cloth. “Free me!” the Wasp prisoner ordered. Mornen himself was fighting for control of the slaver’s club, though, the two of them twisting this way and that, neither able to gain the advantage, and the sergeant and his second were running up.

  The Dragonfly saw out of the corner of his eye that the sergeant’s patience had run out. The man had a hand out, directed at Tadeusz as the Bee fumbled with the manacle lock. He called his wings again for a split second, the force of them throwing his opponent sideways. In the next instant he felt the solid crunching impact as the sergeant’s sting-shot seared into the slaver’s back.

  The dying man clung on to him, screaming, which gave Mornen a moment more of protection against the next shot. He reached back with one hand, hooked his thumb-claw into Valken’s bindings, and then threw his wings and his weight against them.

  It was mostly a mistake. He realised that when his thumb popped out of joint, sending agony screaming down his arm. He fell to the ground atop the still shuddering Wasp, unable to think of anything except the pain. Some part of him was expecting the burning punch of a Wasp’s sting to slam into him any moment, but he couldn’t imagine that it would hurt him any more than his abused hand.

  He heard the lash of the sting, shockingly close. Someone fell across his legs: the man who he had kicked, a rough circle charred through his black and gold tunic. Valken’s smoking hands retreated into the wagon and the wooden door jumped as he made it his sting’s next target. The wood about the bolt cracked and twisted.

  The sergeant arrived then, directing a hand down at Mornen. His companion was going for the other slaves with a club, shouting at them with the utter indignation of a man faced with people who just didn’t know their place in the world. Mornen snatched a wild glance at his fellows and saw Wil still chained and Tadeusz, for reasons incomprehensible, fighting to get the gag off Ceccy.

  “You,” the sergeant told him, “are more trouble than you’re worth.”

  Mornen stared into that faceless helm and the world exploded in screaming.

  The sergeant dropped to one knee, his shot going wild. No wonder: Mornen’s head felt like the clapper of a bell being rung by a maniac. The sergeant’s second was on the ground with blood about his ears, his eyes rolled so far that only the whites were visible.

  Ceccy’s gag was off. The wild man was down on his hands and knees, gasping for breath, his face mottled red and purple with effort. It still took Mornen a moment’s more staggered wonder before he connected the appalling sound with the man who had made it.

  The sergeant’s count of falle
n slavers verses live slaves finished at about the same time as Mornen’s own. Then the sergeant had him, hauling him up to use him as a shield against his rebellious property, one hand wrenching Mornen’s injured arm and one about his throat. The Wasp got as far as “Now you listen here –” before Valken’s sting shattered the wood around the bolt and the wagon door flew open.

  The caged Wasp had his bound hands directed before him, at the sergeant, at Mornen, it was hard to be sure.

  “Steady now,” the sergeant got out, speaking too loud, but then they were all of them a little deaf just then. He retreated, taking Mornen with him, as Valken stepped down from his prison. In the pause, Mornen could hear the industrious scratch and click as Tadeusz dealt with Wil and Ceccy’s manacles.

  “Steady now, sir,” Valken corrected, with evident and enormous satisfaction.

  “Now listen, sir...” the sergeant began, but it was evident that no amount of interpretation was going to save this situation. “Look... there’s treasure, a fortune,” he got out. “We hid it in the wagon. We can split it, sir. We’ll be rich men.”

  “You appear to be hiding behind a man of inferior race to dissuade me from killing you, Sergeant,” Valken noted crisply. “I hope you’re aware of the tactical limitations of that.” He smiled, perhaps the coldest and most clinical display of humour Mornen had ever seen.

  It must be now, and Mornen’s wings flashed. He had intended to fling the sergeant away from him, dance out of reach and let Valken do what he wanted, but the slaver’s grip on his wrist was stronger than he had thought, and his injured hand sent a crippling wave of pain through him, dropping him to his knees.

  For the merest second Valken’s open palm followed the Dragonfly down, but then it jerked up and sent a bolt of fire into the slit of the sergeant’s helm even as the man was raising his own hand.

  Mornen made getting to his feet a priority above all else, finding himself rising to meet Valken’s icy stare. The Wasp’s hands were by his side, but that could change in a moment. Mornen tensed, to fight or fly, he did not know which.

  “So, what’s a Wasp’s word worth, Lieutenant Valken?” he enquired warily. The other slaves were all free now, a peripheral presence weighing on both of them: what would they do? How swiftly would they intervene and how much would their presence influence Valken’s decision?

  “I have lived a long time with only my word, Captain Mornen,” stated Valken at last. “I’m not willing to devalue it just yet.”

  “Captain?”

  “If you’re going to command a lieutenant of the imperial army, you need a rank. You don’t think you merit major, surely?” Again that smile, and this time Mornen saw a brief glimpse of the world of exhaustion behind it.

  “So you’re one of mine, are you?”

  “For now, Mornen, for now.” The Wasp sat back into the wagon’s doorway, looking about at the dead slavers.

  “So you can tell me what you did, to get shipped home for the crossed pikes?”

  Valken’s smile was terrible to behold. “I killed a superior officer because I disagreed with his orders, Captain. They look askance at that in the army.”

  “Y’d’ty bas’sd,” Ceccy growled, or something very like it. The removal of his gag had not made him that much more comprehensible.

  “How did he do... what he did?” Mornen demanded. His ears were still ringing from the man’s shriek. That thin frame had surely not been capable of encompassing such a shattering wail.

  “You don’t know the Cicada-kinden then?” Wil asked him. “Some powerful Art, they’ve got.”

  To Mornen the Cicada-kinden were something belonging to stories from some other part of a Commonweal where few people travelled any distance. Of course, the Empire had changed all that, throwing together all manner of unlikely neighbours. He made to mimic one of the Roach-kinden’s shrugs and stopped with a grimace.

  “Let me look at that, y’highness,” Wil suggested, Tentatively Mornen proffered his injured hand.

  “You’re a doctor, Wil?”

  “Live on the road enough and you pick up most things.” The Roach-kinden bowed his head over the hand and closed his eyes, obviously enacting some healing mantra that his people had taught him. Whatever he was doing, at least it didn’t hurt.

  “Now,” Mornen said, turning back to the others, and Wil did something unspeakable to his thumb that dropped him to his knees, so unexpectedly, unreasonably painful that he was utterly silent with it, teeth clenched against the slightest sound.

  When he was in a position to take any notice of his surroundings again he found that he could move the offending thumb once more, although he felt that ten years had just been wrenched off his life. He got to his feet, noting the way that Ceccy and Tadeusz were here, balancing Valken there, maintaining a tenuous status quo to cover his brief incapacity.

  “Thank you,” he managed to say to Wil. Valken’s look was darkly amused.

  “Hoi, watab’t treh’shr!” said Ceccy. The man was pointing at the wagon urgently but it took a moment for his barbarous accent to unravel sufficiently to allow them to understand him.

  The five of them exchanged looks, the sergeant’s words recurring to them all simultaneously. It was to Mornen that the other former slaves looked, however.

  “Let’s have a look at this treasure then,” he agreed, unhappily aware that the tenuous loyalty of his new companions might not survive their sudden enrichment.

  “False floor to the wagon,” Tadeusz had already identified. “Good place, for hiding loot. Have it open, one moment.” He set to work searching for catches while the others stood by and watched. Using ingenuity and brute force, the Bee-kinden had levered up the wagon’s floor in only a few minutes, and the others crowded close to see the loot, even Valken.

  “What the blazes is that? Paper?” the Wasp exclaimed. Tadeusz’s work had exposed stack after stack of flat parchment, each piece held in a gilt wood frame. Mornen guessed that there were perhaps two hundred there in total, the weight of the frames contributing considerably to their misery of the last few days. On each piece could be seen elegant Commonwealer calligraphy, and images in the finest style of Dragonfly high art. Each one, every single one, depicted men and women of Mornen’s kinden engaged in what was euphemistically referred to as ‘the soft arts’, pose after pose, couplings and triplings and more, invention after invention of the erotic to the most complex and elaborate degree.

  “Treh’shr!” breathed Ceccy reverently, as though he had found the secret of life.

  “Stab me,” Valken murmured, squinting. “What is…? Is that,..?”

  “So this is what they were taking to Helleron?” Wil asked. “Dirty pictures?” He shrugged once more. “Well they say there’s a buyer for everything in that place.”

  “This is a masterwork copy of The Book of Red Wings,” Mornen identified somewhat shakily. He knew it because it represented one of the noble vices his father had so railed against. “This is... I’m told it’s a classic, or sorts. There will be collectors, I have no doubt, who will pay for this – for all of it, complete. Not the frames – we can take the paper out and load the beetle up with it, and damn the wagon. The paper itself is the value.” He looked over at the Roach-kinden. “Wil, you’ve been to this Helleron?”

  “Twice. They’ll trade with anyone, but they don’t like my kinden much there.”

  “They don’t like your kinden much anywhere,” Valken remarked, but Arden Wil ignored him.

  “They sell slaves, in Helleron?”

  “Outside the walls they do,” Wil confirmed.

  Mornen glanced about him, face to face. In Tadeusz’s was the unwavering loyalty that his kinden were known for. Wil and Ceccy were speculative, willing to give him a chance at leading them, at least. They were with him even so, though he could not have said why: the Bee, the Roach, the Cicada-kinden, all nodding. Perhaps it was not loyalty, exactly, but that staying with him at least as far as Helleron was better than going it alone and falling to t
he next band of slavers that might come their way.

  “I was charged, in the Monarch’s name, to find soldiers to fight the Empire. You have all sworn to me, in this,” he reminded them. “My poor people are not soldiers. Those that were are dead or slaves already. Perhaps some were even taken to Helleron for sale.” He felt like a wingless man crossing a chasm by constructing the bridge as he went. He could fall at any time. “In Helleron, this,” he waved a hand at the wagon’s contents, “will allow us to find and equip soldiers for the Commonweal’s army. In spring I’ll meet Prince Lowre Cean with a force such as he’s never seen. Now let’s get these things out of their frames and wrapped against the weather.”

  “An army of slaves,” Valken tasted the words. “How progressive. We’ll make an imperial of you yet.”

  “No, not slaves. I’ll take only men who will swear themselves to me voluntarily.” Mornen looked the Wasp straight in the eyes, remembering the man’s claim about his crime. “Do you disagree with my orders, Lieutenant?”

  “Oh no, Captain Mornen, not yet,” came the Wasp’s dry reply. “You’re going to take a wagonload of Commonweal filth to Helleron in order to buy up an army of volunteers to come and fight the invincible imperial army. I don’t think it can be done, sir, but, by the Emperor’s bloody knees, I want to see you try.”

  * * *

  No collection of mine would be representative without a Shadows of the Apt story. This one was written for, and appeared in, Deathray magazine, which I recall being given a fairly tight deadline for. The story itself was set down pretty much in its final form in just a couple of days, and I’m very pleased with the result. Mornen & Co were intended to be regular features in my kinden short stories, and indeed a sequel, ‘The Chains of Helleron’, can be found at http://shadowsoftheapt.com/blog/279, but so far I’ve not had the chance to give them a third outing. It’s on the list… along with so much else.