Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1), Adrian Tchaikovsky [13 ebook reader .txt] 📗

and for a moment Varmen was bracing himself for a real fight to hold them, but then Arken’s voice was shouting to aim and loose, and a concentrated lash of short arrows and the golden fire of sting-shot ripped through them. Varmen reckoned that almost a score of them went over in that first moment, and the others scattered instinctively, no trained soldiers they. Arken called to shoot at will and another score of the Grasshoppers were picked off as they tried to get away. There was precious little left of them but a crowd of frightened farmhands by the time they lost themselves in the trees.

“Good work,” Varmen called back. “Now let’s have some proper fighting.”

The Dragonflies themselves had massed. Varmen guessed they had expected to ride the wave of their Grasshopper levy and break up an Imperial line already engaged. There was a pause now while they re-evaluated their tactics. Varmen tried to see if he could make out either of the envoys, the woman especially, but when they stood shoulder to shoulder they were all too alike.

“Here they come,” muttered Pellrec, and they came. Again there was a mass of spearmen in the vanguard, and the individual archers, the Dragonfly nobles and their retainers, vaulted up into the air, Art-spawned wings glittering, to slice down shafts at the Wasps. The sentinel line braced, arrows and sting-fire lancing past and between them from behind. Although they were no more professional soldiers than the Grasshopper-kinden had been, the Dragonflies weathered the volley without breaking and smashed against the thin line of black and gold armour that held the entryway to the crashed heliopter.

The fighting was fiercer this time. Varmen took a dozen strikes to his mail in the first few moments, each one sliding off to the armourer’s design. There were a lot of them, jabbing and stabbing furiously at him and his men. He had the uncomfortable realisation that if they had been Ant-kinden or even Bees, used to fighting in solid shoulder-to-shoulder blocks, then the fight would be halfway over by then. The Dragonflies were used to mobile, skirmishing wars, though, and although the Wasps could match them in that, the locals had nothing to meet the hard core of an Imperial battle formation, the core that Varmen had drawn up in miniature here. The Commonweal spearheads were long, narrow, but narrowing only very close to the tip, not the needle-point lances that Varmen would use against heavy armour. These Dragonflies were summer soldiers, their first love and training in some peaceful trade, mostly farming. They had neither the mindset, training, nor gear for this war. Every Wasp-kinden man of the Empire was foremost a soldier. The slaves and the subject races did the tedious business of actually making the Empire run.

He saw it only in retrospect. One of the Commonweal archers had been scorched out of the sky even as he dived in for a shot. He came skidding into the mass of spears, bowling a couple of peasants over, still trying to stand with feebly flickering wings even as he ended up at the very feet of the sentinel line. His chest and side was a crisped mass of failed leather and chitin armour, and boiled flesh beneath. His arrow was still to the string.

Varmen raised his sword point-downwards to spit him, and the man’s fingers twitched, the arrow spearing upwards. From the limited window of his eyeslit Varmen did not actually see Pellrec struck, nor did he hear him cry out. Even as his broadsword chopped solidly into the archer’s chest his honed senses were telling him of the gap to his right, the abrupt absence.

The worst was that he could not turn, could not look to see what had happened to his friend, whether the man was even living. He stood his ground. He kept his shield high, and redoubled his sword-work to make up for the gap, the man on his right doing the same. For Varmen-the-man it was loss and horror but for Sergeant Varmen it was a change to the tactical situation.

The Commonwealers kept the assault up for another twenty savage minutes before the back of their offensive was broken and they made a messy retreat under the fire of Arken’s stings. Varmen forced himself to watch them go, to be sure that they would not suddenly rally and return. The very moment he was assured of it, he turned, barking the name, “Pellrec!”

The man lay prostrate, but the field surgeon had his helm off. The sight made Varmen’s innards squirm. The arrow had pierced the mail under Pellrec’s chin, lancing up into his jaw. One corner of the arrowhead glinted out of his left cheek.

“Report,” Varmen got out.

The surgeon looked up resentfully, and Varmen spared a brief moment, only a brief one, to acknowledge that a good eight more men were wounded or dead around them to the Commonwealer arrows.

“He lives,” the surgeon said. “Whether he’ll live much longer –”

“Make him live,” Varmen snapped, further endearing himself by spitting, “He’s worth ten of the others.” And I need Pellrec around to stop me saying things like that.

“No guarantees.” The little Fly-kinden seemed to be watching the steam-dial of Varmen’s temper, knowing how essential his skills were. “I need to find how deep the tip’s gone. Then I need to take it out.” Pellrec’s eyes were staring, unfocused. Varmen guessed the surgeon had already forced something on him to strip the pain away. The wounded man’s breathing was skipping, ragged. There was a scream there waiting for its moment.

“Do it.”

“No guarantees.”

“Do it! If he –” dies I’ll kill every last one of you midget bastards, but he managed to bite down on that one. “What can be done, to help?”

The surgeon shook his head disgustedly, glanced sidelong at Tserro, beside him. The sergeant of scouts had a clumsily-tied bandage about his forehead, a narrow line of blood blotting through.

Varmen stalked to them. “If he lives then nobody cares how Landren