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

She thrust a hand into the air as though calling for silence, and for once the sword knew its cue and was there. She heard the expanding ripple of surprise, a crowd of Apt soldiers – for whom a Weaponmaster’s magic was just a story – hurriedly trying to rationalize what they had seen.

“Give me my fight!” she roared at them, as though expecting them to storm the stage and drag her down. “Come on, you sons of whores!”

But then someone was being shoved up to face her. Not a Wasp: somehow she had thought it would be one of their own.

It was a Dragonfly man in ragged clothes that had once been fine. She knew it was not Aleth, of course. Aleth was dead. This was some captured warrior or noble, hauled out to give the lads a bit of sport. When he stood before her, though, she could only see Aleth Rael in him. Her tear-blurred eyes would not focus on the reality. The drink betrayed her and let the memories pour in like the sea.

When he took up a stance against her, sword held high just as Aleth always preferred, she howled out her denials, staggering away but being jovially pushed back onto the stage every time.

“Come on!” her opponent yelled at her, and she knew that voice: it was the voice of desperation, of someone who wanted to die. She had heard it from her own throat often enough to recognize it now.

So she went. The sword wanted to fight. It wanted to put someone out of their misery and probably didn’t care which of them. So she went with a will, with a vengeance.

Eshe hunched himself down until he had his back to the Beetle-kinden’s barrels. Ineskae and her Dragonfly opponent had clashed three times, separating after each, long swords gleaming and leaping in the firelight. As always when fighting, the old woman was steady as steel: she was drunk but her sword was sober.

People thought she had taken him in for charity. They did not realise it was the other way around. He had grown up on stories of the Weaponsmasters. After the war, without family or home, those stories were all he had left of the world he had once known. Everything had been stripped from him but the dreams.

He had been begging when he saw her – that badge, unmistakeable. He had latched onto her not because she would save him, but because he might save her. He knew, miserably, that he was failing.

And then someone had sat down next to him and said, “Hello there,” as naturally as anything, and he looked, and it was the Wasp woman, the one hunting Ineskae. She was here, bold as day, surrounded by men of her own kind who would rape her and put her on crossed pikes if they realized what she was.

He tried to bolt, but she had his arm in a pincer grip.

“I’m Terasta,” she said conversationally. “What’s your name?” Despite the roar of the crowd he heard her words clearly.

He would not say, but then her grip redoubled and he gasped out, “Eshe!”

She nodded, her eyes on the fight. “Hello, Eshe. You know we’ve a mutual interest? I’d say ‘acquaintance,’ but we’ve yet to be introduced. We will be, though, and very soon.”

He wanted to cry out, to warn Ineskae, but there was no chance his voice would be heard and he was afraid Terasta would hurt him more.

“Look at her fight,” the woman breathed, eyes gleaming as she stared at the stage. “Magnificent, isn’t she?”

The duel had intensified, both of the combatants striking faster, blades scraping and rebounding from each other. Ineskae’s face was set into an expressionless mask, every part of her bitter, sodden personality purged in the moments of the fight. Eshe was unhappily aware that this was what she sought, to be taken from herself. Simply being Ineskae was her own private hell.

“It looks as though things are about to become busy here,” Terasta observed. She pointed out a band of Wasps who were forcing their way laboriously through the crowd. Unlike most of the off-duty audience they were in full armour, and it was obvious they were making for the stage.

“Why?” Eshe whispered, and somehow she heard him.

“The reward that has motivated my band of cutthroats is a powerful incentive to the army’s more venal elements. Now...” And she was standing, dragging Eshe to his feet. “Time to get her attention.”

For a blessed second her hand was gone and Eshe bunched to run, but then she had stooped and picked him up effortlessly. Almost like a proud mother, she hoisted him up into the air, holding his struggling form over the heads of the crowd.

Eshe did not think Ineskae would see. He did not think she would care. A moment later, though, she had swayed aside from a strike, failing to counterattack, and her eyes met his.

He would not cry for help. A Weaponsmaster would not. He kicked and scratched, and got nowhere, the Wasp just shifting her grip easily, anticipating every move. Then she was taking him away, and the uniformed Wasps were reaching the stage, and he did not see what happened next.

Ineskae was fighting Aleth Rael. The memory was stronger than her actual duel with the ragged Dragonfly nobleman. She had sparred with her beloved student so often, in those golden days before the fall. To relive those lost fights was far more satisfactory than to admit the truth.

Beyond the decaying vistas of her imagination, the Wasp crowd hooted and cheered as they danced, blade to blade. Who could have expected such a good show from a pair of old relics like this?

She could not know what her opponent was thinking, but when she crossed sword with him, when they tried ardently to kill each other with the razor edges of their shared steel, he played her game. It was as if she had asked him to