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

hiding it. With a convulsive twitch of one hand she freed it from the folds, presenting the device to her enemy and to the mob. The sword within the circle blazed in gold from left breast and the catcalls and mockery died in patches. She turned one way and the other, feeling the world swim and the ground tilt beneath her feet.

“Yes!” she shouted out. “Look at it! It’s right there!” She tried to point, but ended up jabbing herself painfully in the chest.

“How dare you?” came the voice of her opponent, the nameless Dragonfly warrior. “How dare you steal such a thing and defile it?” He had been in the war, she guessed. To him, the Weaponsmasters’ order was an ideal that had somehow survived his people’s defeat.

She deserved every drop of his contempt, but still she slurred out, “Didn’t steal it.” The charge of defiling she did not bother to defend.

Then he was at her, just a simple cleaving stroke aimed at ridding the world of this offence to dignity. She tried, she really tried to stand and take it, but the badge was a harsh master. The badge would not let her.

She had come to the circle without a blade, but it was in her hands even as her enemy swung, the grip familiar as breathing: a Commonweal sword like his, five feet from point to pommel, and half of that haft.

She struck halfway through his swing, the blade dragging her tired old arms with it, no messing about with ripostes, but making the parry itself an attack. She ended in a high guard, commanding the middle line, point jabbing at his face. Convulsively, he tried to force her sword aside, because he was far bigger and stronger than she. It took the slightest rotation of her wrists to angle her blade inside his own and, in pushing her sword across himself, he cut his own throat. It was a miserable death for him, a miserable show for the audience, a wretched failure for an old woman who wanted only to die.

Die with dignity, she reminded herself, but that ship had sailed long before, carried off on a tide of cheap spirits.

Later, sitting with a bowl of something clear as water and harsh as defeat, she sensed someone approach her from behind. There had been a time, shortly after the war, when she had put her back to corners to deny the assassins their due. These days she sat with her back to open doors whenever she could. Surely somewhere there was a killer competent enough to rid the world of her?

Not this one, though, and she turned and rose in one smooth motion, holding the drink up at arm’s length, bringing the blade down in a smooth strike to bisect her enemy’s left side from his right. Except the sword was not in her hands, or anywhere in evidence. Always the fucking thing knows best. She was left in a guard as perfect as an illustration from a manual, save that her hands were empty. The boy she faced was barely twelve. He had a name, she recalled.

Eshe: a malnourished Dragonfly-kinden child, hollow-cheeked and hollow-eyed. She could not remember where she had got him from, or why. He had just been there, one morning, getting the fire going when she woke on the cold ground. He was just another of the ten thousand orphans the war had churned out.

“Please, Weaponsmaster, we must go.” He was so deferential to her. It was as though he saw someone else before him, someone who still possessed an echo of that pre-war golden glory.

“Winnings,” she got out. The bowl was empty. She had no idea if she had drunk it or spilled it.

“I have them, Weaponsmaster. We must go. I have had word. There were men asking for you.”

“Let them ask it to my face.”

There was a rod of iron in this one that somehow the Wasps had not broken. “They are hunting you, Weaponsmaster.”

She just blinked at him blearily. Slowly, muscle by muscle, her perfect form collapsed until she was sitting on the floor again, her stained robes spread out about her.

“Fine. Go tell them where I am. There might be a reward.”

But that was too cruel and his face showed it. She hated Eshe, sometimes. She had never asked to be responsible for him. She had tried to drive him off. He had not gone. She had refused to feed him. He had proved more than able to scrounge food for both of them. And these days, he kept hold of the money.

“Bad men,” he insisted. “Killers. They will not care who dies, what burns, to get at you.” He was shuffling from one foot to the other. “Please.”

Why should I care? But the badge cared. The sword and the oh-so-honourable circle of the doomed order of Weaponsmasters, they cared, and they hauled her to her feet. Will I seek them out? she wondered. Apparently, she would not. Instead, she left town hurriedly – this place in the heart of the occupied Commonweal whose name she couldn’t even recall. She made sure people saw which way she had gone.

Once she had staggered a sufficient distance, with the alcohol evaporating off her like mist, she covered her trail and doubled back. She wanted to look at her pursuers. Perhaps one of them would be good enough to kill her. There was always hope.

Sober, she could be stealthy as a shadow. An old, old shadow, it was true, but then all shadows were old. They were the only things in the world that even the rising sun could not renew but must either destroy or leave in hiding. Creeping like a creak-jointed thief back into that village, hiding and lurking, she felt in bitter need of destruction.

Eshe, she had told to stay away, out in the fields. No doubt he would ignore her, as he always did, but he was at least half shadow himself, and who would notice one