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

had found it. From nowhere, from thin air, a sword was in his hands, long-hafted, straight-bladed. Still keening that dreadful, agonised shriek he laid into the Wasps, cutting two of the surprised slavers down on the instant before the rest descended upon him with sword and sting.

Sfayot bent down and fixed his teeth in the wood again, wrenching and rending until the lock was abruptly holding nothing at all and the hatch swung open when he pulled.

They passed her up to him. That was what he remembered most. The other prisoners, Grasshoppers and Dragonflies, passed her up first.

He looked round. There was still a commotion at the far extent of the cells, and he saw the flash of sting-fire. The howling cry had stopped, but somehow the Dragonfly master at arms was still fighting. It could not be for long: the distraction was coming to its fatal conclusion.

While he looked, the cell beneath him had emptied, Grasshoppers clearing the hatchway in a standing jump, Dragonflies crawling out and summoning up their wings. Sfayot took his daughter in his arms and huddled back to the nobleman’s cell.

“I cannot free you, sir,” he said, almost in tears. “I would, but –”“

“Take your child,” came the reply. “You can do nothing for us except remember.”

And Sfayot fled, with his daughter clinging to him, and never looked back.

Another early story, and another exploration of the Twelve-Year War, showcasing the absolute worst it has to offer. The choice of the Roach-kinden’s totem reflects the unreasonable prejudice shown to them by almost everyone, a people without a home, constantly being moved on, and now caught in the middle of a war they have nothing to do with. Sfayot and his daughter (Syale, though not named here) cross the path of the novels in Dragonfly Falling and, from those humble beginnings, go on to carve out quite a career for themselves.

Camouflage

I’ll start from when I got called up in front of Old Mercy – which was a journey of two days from the Sel’yon where I was stationed. You always got called to Mercy. He was not a soldier’s soldier. He didn’t go out to the battlefront to walk amongst the men, or even to giving his underperforming subordinates a dressing down.

Major Tancrev, that was his real name. He had a reputation, though: everyone knew that Old Mercy never had a man killed, no matter what: Captured enemies or those juniors he was disappointed in, he was meticulous in preserving their lives, often far beyond the point that even a skilled surgeon would have given them over. You understand, then, that his was not a soft reputation.

I was going, because Captain Kanen, who had been put in charge of the Sel’yon, had opened his eyes one morning and seen the sharp end of an arrow approaching at some speed. It was a common complaint just then. You’ll not read about the Sel’yon in any of the histories of the war. It was a heavily wooded armpit on the map of the Commonweal, important to nobody save the wretched, stubborn, sneaky bastards who lived there.

Old Mercy was not even very old: a middle-aged man, strong-shouldered, square-jawed and fair-haired, quite the ladies’ favourite. The more sedentary life of a tactical major was starting to show about his middle, but not as much as you might think. He held court at Yos, that had been Iose before we took it, and there he summoned the luckless sods like me who weren’t doing well enough.

I found myself standing to attention in his office, whilst he reclined on a couch like some Spiderlands grandee. A Fly-kinden slave threw a scroll at my feet, and he beckoned for me to take it up.

“Casualty figures for your command, Lieutenant,” hesaid. I knew it all already, of course, but he liked making his point. “Why are these savages still troubling the Empire?”

This wasn’t the first time someone from the Sel’yon detachment had stood before him. He knew full well what the problem was. Still, I trotted it out: “Sir, the Sel’yon is heavily forested, and we lack the troops to make a decisive strike against the natives.”

“Your orders aren’t even to strike, Lieutenant, just to hold, and yet you’re losing men hand over fist.”

“The local Dragonfly clan has holed up with a Mantis hold. They know the woods and the surrounding land very well, and that, along with their Art, makes them difficult to hold anywhere, sir. Our troops there aren’t ideal for this sort of operation, sir. Give me another two hundred light airborne and –”

“Cannot be spared, Lieutenant. Not for something as insignificant as these woodsmen of yours. Lieutenant, had it been Captain Kanen standing here now, no doubt I would be having orders written giving you command of the detachment in his prolonged absence, together with my fervent wishes that you stabilise the situation before I have to request your presence personally. As Kanen has managed to evade true punishment for his incompetence, I will give you a fair chance to prove that you are more able than he. One chance, Lieutenant.”

Standing there before his iron stare I was closer to deserting than at any other time during the war. “Sir, I need more troops to hold the line at Sel’yon,” I got out, staring straight ahead now because I could no longer meet his stare.

He made some dismissive gesture that I saw the shadow of from the corner of my eye. “I’ve sent you some pioneers. It’s all that can be spared. You had best use them wisely, I think. On your way, Lieutenant, and have better news for me soon.”

There were probably only between a hundred-fifty and two-hundred fighting men within the Se’yon, half the numbers we had. They were Mantis-kinden woodsmen and warriors, though, led by a Dragonfly headman and his family, and it would take more than two-to-one odds to clean them out. Instead, as the man said, our orders were simply to keep them bottled up.