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

She gave him a sharp look. By that time they had been left alone some time, and she crept out from their hiding place, forcing him to follow. They chose their path almost at random, avoiding any hint of movement, until they found the bodies.

Not the first bodies they had seen, of course: Darien’s assault had wreaked a costly ruin on so many of the Wasps. Cordwick recognized a face, though, in the flaring gaslight. Colonel Borden stared up at the ceiling, his face slack and his stomach opened. His dead men lay around him in a clutter of limbs and blades and riven armour. Looking down at them, Cordwick felt a sudden spur of anger at Lowre Darien.

“Bloody Dragonflies,” he said through his teeth, and at Tesse’s angry look he added, “Had to do things the old fashioned way, didn’t he? You and me, we could have got the woman out, if she’d even been here. We’d have got her out without spilling a drop of anyone’s blood.”

And a hoarse, faint voice answered him, “And where would be the fun in that?”

The two of them started, only then seeing the man who sat at a shadowed corner of the room, leaning back against the stones, his clothes gored and blood-streaked, his face wealed with burn-scar. Evandter.

Borden had done his best, Cordwick could see, to make an end to the infamous killer. The Mantis had been stabbed three times, not one of them mortal but enough to bring him down. Too late for Borden, though. Too late for his followers.

The eyes of Evandter glittered in the light. “So,” he asked them, the pain telling just a little in his conversational tone, “What now, eh?”

The garrison of Del Halle had been torn apart, and the reason for its existence was gone, too, though none of the Wasps seemed to know just what had happened to their vaunted prisoner. Still, in licking their wounds and with nobody to give them orders, they kept no special watch for any that might wish to further break in to the fortress, still less for those who only wished to get out.

And in the morning three set out for Kalla Rae.

So the Twelve-Year war is over now, and we’re just dealing with the after-effects, such as Lowre Darien. His father, Lowre Cean (the male version of Nysse Ceann’s name, of course), the mastermind behind Darien’s crushing of the Sixth (the army that fails to come for Varmen in ‘Ironclads’) makes a showing in the story ‘The Sun in the Morning’ (to be found in Newcon’s Feast and Famine collection) and then in Heirs of the Blade, still mourning the loss of his son. Cordwick Scosser, by the way, is absolutely inspired by Michael Keating’s character Vila from Blake’s Seven...

Shadow Hunters

Should never have taken this job, was Gaved’s thought on seeing the forest. He was a man who preferred to trust his instincts, but he also preferred to eat. Being a freelance Wasp-kinden in an occupied land where every other man of your people wore the uniform made it hard to find work. Patrons were scarce when you were hated by the locals and despised by the invaders.

Then he had met the Moth, tucked quietly in the corner of a raucous army drinking tent  full of off-duty soldiers, half of them still in their black and gold armour. That one corner had been an oasis of stillness and quiet, and there was the Moth. They were a relic of another land’s mystical past, the Moth-kinden, eking out a living on the edges of the Apt world. Like all the Inapt – like the Dragonfly-kinden that the Wasp army had recently bludgeoned into surrender – the Moths were a people who could not grasp the principles of machines, of logistics, of the modern world. They were the last tattered scraps of the past.

This man of the Moth: grey skin, blank white eyes, slender enough that a burly Wasp like Gaved could have broken him in half, yet somehow his soft voice had slid past all the rowdy jabber of the drinkers. “I have work for you.”

And here Gaved was, following the only employment he had been able to find, doing the bidding of one Moth by hunting down another. Somewhere in this tangle of thorn-barked trees there was a second man of that grey kinden, and Gaved was tasked with bringing him out.

Or kill him, the instructions had gone. Tell him it is better to be dead, than to be what he is.

Gaved had trawled for rumours about the forest his quarry had holed up in. A dark place, he was told; a bad place. The locals never went there, the army had not needed to fight there. Probably it was somewhere the Dragonflies thought was magic, not that a Wasp would care about that. More recently it was a haunt of bandits, because the war had left a lot of armed men with nothing to do,

Gaved didn’t mind bandits. He preferred them to soldiers, most of the time.

They ran into him at the same moment he ran into them, both sides freezing in surprise. Gaved had his hands out instantly, his palms warming with the Wasp Art. A thought from him and golden fire would spit from between his fingers, showing these locals just why his people were feared.

He saw a man and a woman, both Dragonflies, lean and golden-skinned. The woman wore a few pieces of iridescent armour, no doubt prised from a dead noble’s body. She had a sword, and perched on one wrist was the hunting insect of her kinden, a dragonfly two feet long with a carapace of glittering metallic blue, huge eyes regarding him and all the world impartially.

The man wore a ragged greatcoat and he had a short bow in his hands, which concerned Gaved far more than the sword or the insect.

“Good day, fellow travellers,” he said, one hand covering each of them. He