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

The Shadows of Their Lamps

The Commonweal’s Grand Army – the flower of its nobility, its gallant cavalry, the unnumbered host of its infantry – had met the Wasp Empire’s forces in the field. The warriors of the Commonweal had possessed a vast numerical superiority, but more than that, they had been heroes; their hearts had sung a ballad of honour and glory; they had right on their side, defending their hearths and their homeland.

The Imperial armies had war machines, automotives, repeating crossbows and artillery. In a single day they had mown down tens of thousands of Commonwealer Dragonfly-kinden, over a hundred thousand left dead on the field in all. All those noblemen and women in their glittering mail with their thousand-year-old sword and archery traditions; all that massed host of terrified peasant spearmen: the Wasps had made no allowance for social class. Born in a castle or a byre, the machines and ordered soldiers of the Empire had not cared. In the end, the broken shreds of the Commonweal army had fled in all directions, and those nobles who had survived had run for their stone walls to hide. And of course, the Empire’s artillerists were good with stone walls. Before their might, the ancient architecture of the Commonweal was so many children’s wooden blocks.

And yet Prince Serge Esselente did not know the meaning of dismay. He had withdrawn the remnants of his forces to his mountain stronghold, up the steep paths where the war machines could not follow. He had forced the Wasps to invest his fortress with their infantry and their airborne soldiers, and he had held out. And winter was on its way, that the mountains would make a rod of iron for the natives, but a murderous terror for the invader.

Serge Esselente was a noble of the old school. He was not just glitter and glory and a heedless disregard for the lives of his own followers; he was a seer. Through the lenses of his eyes, the strands of an infinite future were strung. From the tallest tower of his castle blazed a beacon that was called Light Eternal, a reminder of his family’s history as champions of justice and truth. He took the rostrum for his people daily, telling them that the shining light of the Commonweal, that had fought many darknesses back in the Days of Lore, would triumph yet over these machine-handed Wasp-kinden. After the winter, he told them, they would retake what was theirs.

He would have been flattered to discover that the Wasps shared his beliefs. Not about the magic; the Wasps had no belief in magic. They had a hard-learned respect for Commonweal winters, though, and had no intention of keeping a mountain siege going once the ice set in. That was why Prince Serge Esselente, preparing to go before his people once more, had his throat cut by a woman wearing the face of his wife.

After she had done that, Scyla took his shape, donning the face and mannerisms of the prince as easily as she would a slightly ill-fitting coat. The magic, the meagre magic that was yet all the magic she had ever learned, was almost second nature to her now. She was a scion of an ancient mystery, its last and least. The masters of her masters had spun webs of intrigue between great houses and mage-lords and scholars of the unseen; and here she was, a mercenary infiltrator for the grubby-handed Wasps.

She went out to Esselente’s people wearing his skin, and told them that the omens favoured their cause; that they must throw open the gates and surge down the slopes, that the Light Eternal would send the Wasps stumbling bloodied back to their far home. She told them in his voice, with his precise patterns of conviction and passion, and they ate it up. They loved it. This was what they had been waiting for.

And they opened the gates and sallied forth and were destroyed: many killed, many more captured, none understanding how it was that they had been betrayed.

The Dragonfly-kinden of the Commonweal were a graceful and elegant people, gold-skinned and delicate. Surrounded by the Wasps – big, pale men with hard eyes and broad shoulders – they seemed like something of another world, something that would break at a touch. And many of them would break. They had made the Empire work hard to conquer them. There would be reprisals.

Scyla presented herself before her paymaster. Only with him did she drop most of the masks. She was no Dragonfly, no Wasp, nobody from this corner of the world at all: an exiled renegade casting her lot in with the winning side. The face she showed him was that of a slender man, sharp-featured, fair-haired, but showing the features of her Spiderlands home of the far south. It might have been her brother’s face, had she ever had a brother – always better to be a man, to deal with the Wasp-kinden. As for the woman’s face she had been born with, she had no cause to don that any more. She had left it behind like a bad debt.

Scyla had been working with Captain Thalric for some years now. She had been in a prime position to watch him being corrupted by his work. When she first offered her services to him, he had been a bluff young officer, a patriot, a hero. Then he made the mistake of being too successful. He had been noticed by his superiors, dragged up the chain of command. Now he worked for the Rekef, the Empire’s intelligencers and secret police. He had gained the world and lost all his friends.

“You’ve done well, you and your tricks,” he told her. “Nobody wanted to be sitting outside these walls when the snow came.”

Her tricks, because that was what he could cope with. He would not admit to magic. Show him a hundred proofs and he would contrive some way of explaining it in terms