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

tried a smile, but his smiles were seldom reassuring. He was one of the dreaded invaders, after all: a big, pale man with the red weal of a burn-scar about his neck and chin, from when he had finally decided to leave the army and go freelance.

“What do you want here, Wasp?” the woman demanded.

“I’ve come looking for someone.” Better not to say hunting. It had so many negative connotations.

Gaved saw the archer’s hands twitch, saw a moment’s glance pass between them, and then the Dragonfly man said, “He’s after the Moth.”

It was plain that ‘the Moth’ was no friend of theirs. The tension leached out of the moment.

The woman’s name was Eriss, the man was Kael. They never used the word ‘bandit’ but that was plainly what they were. More, they’d another dozen friends who plied the same trade. Or they had, before coming to this forest.

“Because the army wouldn’t be here,” Kael grumbled. “Even the Empire can’t make the trees pay taxes.”

“But he was here already,” Eriss added. “We didn’t realize at first. We’d made camp. But there was something...”

“Nobody slept,” Kael took up the story. “Not well. We started to see... shadows, ghosts. Then he came to our fire. A Moth. A magician.”

Gaved raised a doubting eyebrow.

“Scoff all you want,” Eriss snapped. “He walked in and told us we were his, and our chief couldn’t speak, not one word. Kael and me, we got out, just slipped away. We thought the others’d follow us when they could. Nobody did.”

“This is a place of evil magic from the old days,” Kael added. “A death-place. We should never have come here. Your people wouldn’t understand.”

They were going back to find their friends. Gaved was going to face down their enemy. Common cause was made.

The Art of the insect-kinden gave many gifts. It let the Ant-kinden speak to each other, mind to mind, and allowed the Wasps to sting; to each race its own blessings. Gaved could fly a little, too, the shimmer of wings materialising from his back when called on. The Dragonflies were better, born to the air.

The forest was dense, the interlaced branches of the canopy a fortress that even the Imperial army had not fancied bringing down. The bandits’ preferred road was the high one, from bough to bough, making short hops through the uppermost fingers of the trees.

Eriss had sent her dragonfly ahead to scout, the agile insect hovering and darting over the dense foliage. When it returned to her, she would speak with it, gleaning what it had seen from its simple mind; another gift of the Art.

The first two times she sent the insect out, it had found traces of the other bandits’ progress through the woods, heading for the very heart of the place. The third time it had been on the way back when the canopy came alive and. In sight of its mistress, what had seemed just green leaves and branches unfurled toothed arms and clawed for the insect. Gaved saw a triangular head with bulbous, gleaming orbs for eyes and mandibles beneath that resembled scissor blades: a mantis, one of the great forest mantids, and this one surely fifteen feet long.

For a long moment they stared at one another: the three humans and the monstrous insect, with the dragonfly waiting on above. Then the mantis cocked its head at them and let itself drop, vanishing into the gloom of the forest below.

They thought like men, Gaved had heard it said. They hunted and planned and held grudges. And sometimes, said the old tales, they served magicians.

Soon after, they found the rest of the bandits.

They were in a clearing, sitting in a circle as though they had decided to stop for some conference of thieves. Except they were dead. Except they were splinted up, propped on bloody, jagged shards of cane and wood. Some even had arms spiked out as though caught mid-gesture. Some had open mouths, and Gaved could see the splinters that had been driven in, to keep their jaws in place. It was a ghoulish tableau, and what was worse was the empty place. All those dead eyes, all that arrested body language, led the eye to one spot about the circle, as though some chairman of the damned had only that moment stepped away.

Kael and Eriss were frozen, staring. Gaved himself was watching for the Moth, because a man with this sense of showmanship would not miss his entrance.

And sure enough, there he was: stepping in to take his place at the circle, the grey-faced man of slender build, bundled in a threadbare robe. His blind-looking eyes took in his visitors and he smiled.

The Moth. The same Moth. The same man that had sent Gaved here; there was no mistaking.

Then Kael had his bowstring back with a shout of fury, and Gaved was already moving, running around that grisly circle, hands out, but holding off –

His forbearance made Kael the target, so that when the mantis’ strike lashed out of the shadows it was the archer who was snatched away, gone in a heartbeat and a cry. The huge insect loomed above them, from shadow to killer like a trick of the light. Its razor mouthparts were working busily as it chewed at the stump of Kael’s neck.

Eriss should have run, then, but she shrieked and hacked at its nearest leg, her dragonfly spiralling up and away overhead. Gaved saw her blade smash one of the mantis’s stilt-like limbs, and it raised its killing arms in threat, Kael’s remains still dangling.

Gaved’s hands flashed, his sting searing across the clearing. One bolt charred across the creature’s thorax, another crackled past the creature’s head, even as Eriss lunged forwards and sunk her blade up to the crosspiece into the insect’s abdomen.

And it was shadows; it had only been shadows. Gaved stared, seeing the patterns between the trees that had looked as though a monstrous mantis was there, wondering how he could have been fooled by it. And yet