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

of suggestion and sleight of hand. Looking into his eyes she felt a chill sweep through her like the first wind of winter. I am the only magician in the Imperial advance, she thought. And where we have trodden: nothing, the earth swept clean of magic and wonder, trampled down by their machines.

He paid her wage, heavy coin in exchange for the ancient mysteries of her order. Her teachers would have despised her for selling herself to these grim, small-minded people, but she had never been a good student.

Back in the castle they were securing the prisoners, waiting for the Slave Corps to come take them away. Long chains of them, bound at the neck, coiled dispiritedly through the halls of Prince Esselente’s castle. Wearing the face of a Wasp, she walked amongst them, cuffing and swearing at them because that was what Wasps did.

And there she saw him.

The Wasps had been stringing their lamps about the castle. They could not abide the dark and their eyes were pitiful compared to those of the Commonwealers or Scyla’s own. Wherever they went, they beat the night back with lamps that burned chemicals or noxious gas. Everywhere they made their own was lit up by a cold, dead flame a world away from torches and hearths.

When the radiance struck her, she thought it was their lamps, so fierce and blinding was it, but it was him: his beauty and his power. She had not realised the boy had survived.

The late Prince Esselente and his slightly later wife had one child, a youth of barely eighteen. Serge Volante he was named, and he was beautiful. His father had been a seer for many decades, but the son had already been overtaking him. Those slanted violet eyes could see forever: truths and lies, pasts and futures. He was a natural talent such as Scyla had never known – such as the Commonweal had not known for a hundred years.

Esselente had prophesied that his son would bring back the great days, the Days of Lore; that Serge Volante would be the hope of a new generation of magic. Instead of which, the Apt forces of the Empire had brought their armies and their scoffing disbelief and swept them all away. All except Volante himself.

Nobody else would see that glorious golden aura about him. It was for her eyes only. His perfect face hurt her deep inside. And he was young, and she had surely been young within living memory.

All at once she decided that the Wasps were not paying her enough, and that this would be a just recompense for her skills.

And then his eyes met hers and they flashed wide as she cut through the mill of busy soldiers to him.

“You...” he said. “I see you.” Behind the glow he was haggard, bruised, stained with blood. “You’re not like the others. You shine.”

Her heart, an organ from which she had been estranged these last ten years, stuttered.

“I see the magic about you,” said Serge Volente. “I see your face.”

A sense of panic flooded through Scyla, her mind a blank. What face? Which face? Did he look past this stolen Wasp visage, with its brutal jaw and narrow eyes? Did he look past the male Spider-kinden mask she donned to speak to Captain Thalric, to fool him into thinking she was being honest with him. Did Volente see all the way back to the face she had been born with, the face that she never used anymore?

In that moment, she searched her memories and found that she could not remember what that face had ever looked like.

He was reaching out to her, and one of the guards smacked a cudgel across his arm with a snarl. Still, Serge Volante’s eyes did not leave her. There was a pleading in those eyes. If there had been a promise, she would have freed him then and there, if she’d had to borrow Captain Thalric’s face to do it. But he was golden and beautiful and noble. Such as he did not make promises to a broken renegade like her.

I will have you, she told him silently. But I will have to break you first.

She retreated from him to make plans. No point asking for him as a gift from Captain Thalric. The moment the Rekef man’s attention was drawn to Volante, the boy’s death warrant would be signed. There was a standing order to exterminate all of the Commonweal noble bloodlines, to deny any uprising a focus. It was Thalric’s special mission, and he was nothing if not dutiful.

Is it time I parted company with the Empire? But it would not come to that. She was fond enough of her own cleverness to decide that she could have it all: Volente and the Empire’s gold. She was all the magic there was, in this latter-day world; all the magic after the Light Eternal was put out and the great magician-lords of the Commonweal fell under the wheels of the Empire’s progress. The Wasps had no magic, nor any way to believe in it, and that made her a secret lord of their world.

Plans made, she left the castle, slipping out of the gates and passing unseen through the Empire’s camp there. The officers and their cronies had commandeered the walls but there were plenty of the lesser soldiery left to huddle in their tents still. They had not wasted any time making themselves at home. There were many locals there too, some prisoners, some simply starving and willing to serve their oppressors in exchange for the scraps from their table. The air filled with the clamour of soldiers who weren’t going to have to fight in the morning.

There was one strange moment, though. She was leaving the camp, having appropriated a horse that could pass as an Imperial messenger’s, when there was a man. For just a fractured instant, in all the camp there was only that one man that mattered. He was not a Wasp, not