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

wood. Around about then, Aelta must have gone, but Gaved missed it entirely as did the sentry. The man was so concerned with getting the fire going that he failed to notice his missing prisoner for the best part of an hour.

There was a great deal finger-pointing and blame, after that. Javvi was tight-lippedly livid, the threat of the Rekef looming large enough to make up for any deficit in his stature. In the end, though, he was forced to accept a job half done.

“We will track her down,” he swore. “Come tomorrow, we’ll pick up her trail. We’ll follow her all the way to the Monarch’s feet if we have to.” He was not raging, but his anger burned in him like a furnace. “For now, at least we have the main prize.”

That struck Gaved as bitterly unfair, given that he was not even a deserter, and Aelta some kind of master criminal. Javvi saw his reaction and stalked over.

“I suppose you thought we wouldn’t follow this far, through all your twisting and evasion?” he demanded. “Know this: I am for law. No fugitive or criminal is safe from me, no matter how small their misdeeds, and above all, those who flee from Imperial justice. You were a man who brought in fugitives for money. I despise the fact that the Empire ever needs to rely on such. The love of the law, that is the only true motivation for a hunter of men.”

Gaved could only goggle at him.

The next development came just before dawn. Gaved was snapped out of a fitful half-doze when a squad of soldiers descended on the camp with drawn blades and open hands and did to Javvi and his men what they had done unto others. Gaved watched, slack-jawed, as they secured the two soldiers and backed the indignant Fly against a tree at sting-point.

“I am a captain of the Rekef !” the little man snapped at them. “Stand down! This is treason!”

“Pipe down, maggot,” and it was Lieutenant Sharmen striding into camp, an unlikely rescuing hero. “We know all about you, don’t we, Captain?”

And walking past him, wearing a uniform that was only slightly ill-fitting, came Aelta. Her entire manner spoke of authority, and a particularly hard-edged kind of authority at that. She walked through the soldiers as though she owned them, and her nod to Sharmen was pure condescension.

“Impersonating a Rekef officer is the true treason, short one,” she told Javvi, in a perfect balance of cruelty and amusement. “It’ll be crossed pikes for you, if they can find any small enough.”

Javvi’s eyes bulged, and he fumbled for his rank badge, even as his gaze was drawn to the glinting object pinned to Aelta’s breast. And of course the Rekef did have women in its ranks – the spies and the agents who would take a man’s bedroom bragging and speak it back to him at his trial. A woman captain of the Rekef was at least as plausible as a Fly.

“You want us to kill him now, sir?” Sharmen asked.

For a moment Aelta regarded the defiant Javvi, and Gaved held his breath, wondering how it would go.

“Hand him over when you report in,” she decided. “I am for law.”

They found the key and freed Gaved, and then Sharmen and his pillagers trooped off, three prisoners in tow.

“Should have killed them,” was Gaved’s comment, watching them recede.

“That’s what you’d have done, is it?”

“Maybe.” He shrugged, then sneaked a glance at her. “Are you...?”

“Am I Rekef?” She laughed delightedly. “What do you think?”

“I think Rekef people don’t laugh like that.” He was still staring. “I, ah, that’s a fine uniform.”

“Got it from Sharmen’s smallest soldier.”

“Didn’t look half as good on him.”

Her good humour changed character subtly, but she still had a smile for him at the end. “We’re not far off now,” she told him. “You just hold that thought.”

Another day’s travel saw her words come true, and they crouched in the evening overlooking a grand estate. This had been some Commonweal noble’s holding once, a fortified house and a village and field on field stretching out beyond them. Now the fortifications were scattered by war, and many of the houses just burned shells In their place stood a knot of squat two-tier buildings with flat roofs, a taste of home for the Imperials who lived there.

Most of the fields still lay fallow from the war’s depredations, but there were plenty of bodies out there clearing them. Gaved knew the pattern: an organized mass of slaves with a scattering of overseers. The occasional whip-crack echoed to them even at this distance.

“This is Ash Esher,” confirmed Aelta. “There’s a group of officers taken up here, the sort of old men who are grabbing as much of the Commonweal as possible now the war’s done. A nice little slice of retirement for them. They bring their families and servants and slaves over from Capitas, ready to make all this just another slice of Empire. I suppose you’re all for that.”

“I took off the uniform for a reason,” Gaved murmured. He was pushed up close to her as they overlooked the village – closer than he needed to be, but she hadn’t shied away. “A lot of Wasps down there,” he noted. The field workers were Commonwealers, but there were plenty of pale-skinned menials around the houses themselves.

“Like I say, they bring their whole households,” she agreed. “They don’t trust the locals with a lot of the work. Would you want to be shaved or bathed by someone whose country you’d just invaded?”

“So where’s your gold stashed?”

“See the big house there? That’s the property of one Colonel Haaked, formerly of the Quartermasters’ Corps and now living the dream. It’s buried at the back of his home. You see the shacks there? That’s where the house slaves sleep. That’s where I buried it.”

“That’s not exactly the easiest place to go digging.”

“How much time do you think I had?” She was all wide-eyed innocence. He knew even then