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

Within two tendays, one of the Fly-kinden and two of the Wasp pioneers were dead. The main force’s deaths to the knives of the Sel’yon insurgents were just two, rather than the ten or so I’d have expected, and one of those two had been incautiously relieving himself outside the camp edge at night. The distrust and contempt that my light airborne and auxillians felt for the shabby pioneers was replaced by a wary respect. The female Wasp had not yet been raped or assaulted. And there was Cari.

She vanished for the first tenday, and everyone assumed she had deserted. I, on the other hand, had the sense to talk to the other pioneers. No, no, they assured me, she was out there. They didn’t see her, not so much, but they found traces. They were just intercepting the Commonwealers as they tried to sneak past our pickets and cause mischief. Cari was in the deep Sel’yon, hunting.

One morning, a tenday and a half from when she arrived, I awoke to find she’d left me a present.

Enemy casualties were hard to estimate. Pioneer accounts were contradictory, and the forest swallowed bodies. That morning, though, I was treated to a unique audience as I left my tent, yawning and rubbing my eyes. I nearly choked on my own yawn, I’ll say, and my body slave screamed and bolted back inside. He was a twitchy little Grasshopper from the East-Empire, and he never did have much nerve.

There were heads: nine of them, on poles, neat as you like. One was Dragonfly, the rest were Mantis. They watched me with glassy disinterest.

Sergeant Wanton explained. “She pitched up before dawn, sir, with a sack. Had all these set up by first light and off again.”

“Did it occur to you I might not want to see a lot of severed heads first thing in the morning, Sergeant?”

Wanton had assiduously practiced a sergeant’s proper lack of expression. “No sir, it did not.”

I dismissed him, and strode down the line of decapitation. Strangely enough, the more I looked on those slack, drained faces, with the day’s first flies bumbling about them, the more I did like them. I had been fighting a losing war for too long. It was about time I had proof that the blood being shed wasn’t all ours.

“Glad you approve, sir,” came the voice. I stopped dead, only then realising that I had been grinning back at the dead heads. There was nobody about.

There was. I only saw her because she moved. The Sel’yon was a fecund place, and though we were on its edge, and had trampled our campsite flat besides, there were always nettles and ferns and cane springing up, growing at appalling rates. What I had taken as a stand of bracken had shuffled a place closer. Armed with that, I saw her.

She had foliage all over, knotted and twined about her into a meshed cape of green and fading brown. Her shape, that had always been at the edge of a human figure anyway, was lost in it. The eye passed over her and consigned her to the static and the vegetable. There was more to it than that, of course. I knew all too well how some kinden could call on their Art to hide them, for the Mantids of the Sel’yon were keen practitioners of it. I had not realised that Thorn Bugs owned to the same Art. Only now, seeing her afresh, did I note the crossbow over her shoulder. The dead Commonwealers had eyes better than mine, but they must never have seen her coming.

Glad she’s on our side, I thought, and never so glad as when she appeared out of nowhere. “Auxillian,” I acknowledged her, with admirably steady tones.

She was watching me with a direct stare unbecoming of an auxillian, but then it was hard to actually look her in the eyes without flinching at the knotted carnage that surrounded them. I recovered my professional bearing.

“Who do these represent?”

“The Dragonfly lad there’s a nephew of the headman. The Mantids... Whoever I could catch. They’re getting a mite less happy about just jaunting off into the woods.”

“And you took the heads why?”

“You don’t need to ask that, surely, sir?”

I wanted to slap her down for impertinence, but slapping down a Thorn Bug is always a self-destructive activity. She was standing just the other side of the row of posts now.

“You know how superstitious these Commonwealers are, sir,” she said, her voice just a whisper coming from between those twisted teeth. “Does no harm to make them fear.”

I sent to Old Mercy with reports of our progress in holding the line, hoping for a quiet life, and perhaps a minor commendation. What I did get proves that a little success can be worse for your health than any amount of failure, because Mercy decided that he wanted us to take the Sel’yon, or at least start making inroads into it. Was he sending us more men? A dozen heavy infantry arrived with his message, not sufficient to make any difference and yet arrogant and argumentative enough to start really getting on the backs of the Auxillians.

I had my orders, which I knew were a bad idea. There was no way we were going to catch them much by surprise, for all that I had the pioneers sweeping the forest fringe for their scouts before we formed up. I put the Beetles on the wings, the newly-arrived heavies in the centre, made our front as broad as I dared, mostly only two men deep, and we moved in. The airborne ranged on either side and ahead, but the trees denied them their wings half the time. Still, they were used to fighting in skirmishing order, at range or in close as the situation demanded. If my whole force had been airborne I’d have cleared out the Sel’yon myself long before.

The Commonwealers had our number and no mistake. They started putting arrows at us from