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

to get him onto the ground outside after a brief struggle. A moment later there was a sawing at his wrists, and then his arms were free.

He looked up into an open palm, a depressingly familiar sight these days. Not Aelta’s, but a stocky Wasp man Gaved didn’t know. He was dressed in ill-fitting but good-quality clothes – tailored for a man of around Haaked’s build as it happened.

“You...” Gaved stared at him, then at Aelta. “You’re who she came back for, are you?”

The man nodded. He had a sword at his belt but, unlike Aelta, there was still something of the slave in his stance.

“Come on,” the woman hissed to them, and the three of them took wing, coasting until they were clear of the house, coming to rest in a nettle-strewn copse towards the edge of the estate.

There were a lot of words Gaved wanted to say to her, after that. Some were accusations, many were not. None felt appropriate now it was not just the two of them. Instead he simply stared at her, and at last she looked away and shrugged.

“Here.” And she had slung something at his feet: a lumpy bag. For a mad moment he thought she had packed him some food for the journey.

But he recognized the contents, when he tugged open the drawstring. He had only got a brief look at those intricate statues, while Haaked and Javvi had fought over him, but they had found themselves a place in his memory. Here were four of the dozen and, even sold to thieves at thieves’ rates, they would keep him fed for a long time. So long as he sold them far away from here.

“So you are a thief,” he said at last.

“I’m what the Empire’s made me,” she said. “Goodbye, Gaved.”

He looked at her companion, then, trying to find out what there was in the man that had drawn her all the way back here to rescue the man. Trying to see what made her prefer him. Some part of him – not a small part – still wanted her, and more than ever now he understood her and had seen what she could do.

But: “You’re a lucky man,” he said gruffly, and managed a soldierly nod to Aelta, comrade to comrade. And so they parted, even though he carried her in his thoughts for many miles and days.

As per the note for ‘Shadow Hunters’, Gaved is just particularly fun to write for, but the lot of women in the Empire is a theme the novels keep coming back to - most importantly of course with Seda herself. With that social background it made for a good story to turn the ‘rescued princess’ plot on its head and have her rescue him. Continuing the meta-story of the Empire and the Commonweal, men like Haaken show just how the occupation is going to go – not to men like Gaved or Varmen, but to the great and the good whose blood was not the red being spent in the getting. Javvi, of course (who was supposed to be in more stories and still may be) is nothing more than a Victor Hugo tribute act at heart.

An Old Man in a Harsh Season

Sometimes, when he woke, he forgot for a moment. Lying in his windowless room in the chill of pre-dawn, he felt the desert sky’s great arch over him. The hard mattress beneath (for a night on a soft one was agony to his back) became, briefly, the grittiness of sand, and he was young again.

Like scavengers to a carcase, though, the aches and pains of age came back to him one by one: his teeth, his joints, his back, his weak leg, the phantom twinge of his broken thumb-claw. Hokiak awoke. It was winter in Myna and, though the nights lacked the desert’s predatory cold, the days never seemed to warm him, not even if he bowed to his years and sat dawn til dusk in the sun.

Money to be made. Work to do. He rolled awkwardly from his bed, lowering his legs over the side, clutching for his cane. Dreaming of the old country again. More fool me. It was not even as though they had been good times. He was not such a fool as to paint all his memories with gold. Hard, violent times, the Scorpion-kinden’s endless round of raiding and stealing, killing and infighting, and if he had been the Man, when it came to pillage and savagery, where had it got him now?

No, life was better here, playing the black market in the Empire’s shadow, if only he had not grown so old before he had worked that out.

Around him he could hear Hokiak’s Exchange already bustling. Gryllis, the emaciated Spider he had taken on as a business partner, was an early riser, and the man made sure that his staff kept to the same clock. Even now their band of young wastrels would be cataloguing the most recent imports, or boxing the next round of goods to be smuggled out, and if they were not then Gryllis would be reminding them that Hokiak still held their papers, and juvenile slaves were hardly a rare commodity anywhere under Imperial rule.

Hokiak grunted, dragging on a pair of loose breeches and an open fronted robe. He scratched at his sagging, wrinkled belly with the curved claws of one hand. And have these claws not torn the guts from a challenger, and let his blood soak into the sand? Nowadays the thought was dismal to him, if only because of the mess.

A half-hour later found him in his back room, breaking his unenthusiastic fast on a bowl of porridge garnished with chopped dates. Some bastard somewhere was frying cricket meat with lemons, the scent leaching in from the outside, past the Exchange’s front door, sneaking by Gryllis and his underage labourers to creep into Hokiak’s slit-like nostrils and make his mouth water. And last time I gave