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

Javvi looked at him blankly. “The withholding of taxes is treason, ex-Sergeant Gaved. However, your sympathy for the condemned is duly noted. Now bind his hands and lock him up until I can be bothered with him.”

Messer had used the stockade at the back of his Quartermaster’s shack for goods, mostly those he was waiting to sell on to his contacts back home – he had a fine line in the Commonweal war memorabilia that armchair tacticians back in the Empire were mad about. Now all that clutter was gone, and Javvi had replaced it with human chattels.

There a handful of locals were chained up there. Gaved knew the type: vagabonds, petty criminals, escaped slaves. He saw Grasshopper and Roach-kinden, and they stared at him with the big, frightened eyes they reserved for the conquering Wasps, even one who came to them with his hands strapped behind his back.

They had one cage to themselves. Gaved got the middle one next to them. On the far side, a single prisoner sat on the ground and watched him keenly. Another Wasp; she was a Wasp.

Wasp women didn’t travel unless they were with the army, but Gaved got the impression that this specimen was neither officer’s wife nor soldier’s whore. Perhaps she was from one of the travelling healer bands that trailed the Imperial advance, never officially recognized but tacitly tolerated nonetheless. If so, she had plainly pushed her luck too far.

Her hands were bound as well – but in front of her. A leather thong from her wrists to the cage roof gave her enough play to roam her little slatted kingdom.

“What are you looking at, deserter?” she asked him, though her own eyes had not left him. She was a handsome woman, and in truth Gaved had not seen a good-looking female Wasp for longer than he cared to consider. She had an oval face with fierce blue eyes and a pointed chin. Someone had hacked her pale hair short into a man’s cut. She wore a soldier’s cast-off tunic and breeches, and she was perhaps a little more slender and boyish than he normally liked. but to Gaved she was no less a sight for sore eyes for all that. He was a man who liked women, when he could get them, and who was simultaneously too poor to pay for them, and too conscience-ridden to seek more contested opportunities. It was a difficult path to walk, for a Wasp.

“I’m not a deserter,” he told her. He was well aware that he was a rough-looking character: a long face with more than one scar, stubbled and dirty, and with a conspicuous burn about his neck as a memento of the day he left the army. He still had her attention, though, and so he added, “I’m a freelancer. I hunt fugitives.” Only when they were said did he consider how absurd the words sounded right now.

“Did you track yourself down and bring yourself in? I hope they gave you a reward,” she remarked. She was looking him right in the eye, another thing Wasp women seldom did.

“Well I’d thought to find Captain Messer –”

“Oh, you ran into the new boy,” she finished for him. Her smile invited collusion. “Messer was supposed to be getting me out of here. I paid him well enough. But then little Master Law and Order turned up, and...”

“Right.” Gaved nodded grimly. “So you’re... What?” Looking at her, with that bold and forthright manner, he could not guess. Had she been in the army? There had been the odd woman in the pioneers, hadn’t there, or working for the Rekef? All positons that placed them outside the usual grind of the military, and the repressive structures of the Imperial hierarchy.

She drew closer, grinning, and he found himself leaning in.

“Can you keep a secret?” she whispered and, at his nod, “I’m really a master criminal.”

“Of course you are,” he replied, but obviously without conviction.

“Doubt all you want, but there’s more than one Consortium merchant who’s cursing my name. And more than one who’s rejoicing now I’ve been caught. I’m only kicking my heels here because they want the pleasure of putting me on the pikes elsewhere, and the escort’s on its way.”

“You sound very proud of this,” Gaved observed.

“Take your achievements where you can, deserter.”

“I told you, I’m not –”

“That really matters to you, doesn’t it.” Her grin was still there, and it was hard for him not to match it. “You’re a tough man, are you? You rough it through the wilderness on the trail of whatever poor bastard you’re paid for?”

He shrugged. “I’ve been known to.”

“You might have been sent after me,” she observed thoughtfully. “Your luck’s out now, though, isn’t it. No cash, no freedom. And I bet they think you’re a deserter.”

“You’re right there,” he admitted. “You’d not credit how hard they find it to believe any red-blooded man wouldn’t want to slave for the army until he dies.”

“Yes, you have it really hard, you men,” she observed acidly. “We women can’t imagine what it’s like to be forced into lives we don’t want.” Her smile had dropped briefly, but now she took it back up. “You’re for hire, freelancer?”

“I have a feeling that, right now, you couldn’t afford me.”

“You haven’t heard my offer. You see, I need to get out of here and across country, back to an old haunt of mine. I just happen to be on the lookout for a fellow who’ll guide and guard me on the way.”

He could feel his smile growing, but the direction it was going was towards incredulous contempt. “How about we pick this conversation up after we’ve both been sentenced and executed. I’ll have plenty of time then.”

“You haven’t heard the pay.”

“Oh?”

“One part up front on agreement, the other when we get there. First half is your freedom, tonight.”

He regarded her, no longer smiling. “Is that so.”

She shook her bound wrists at him, and for a moment he