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

rivals down, he’d thought that the desert would burn out their memory of him soon enough. But no.

Their leader had fixed his yellow eyes on the old man, and the disgust and disdain on his face cut deeper than years. So that is what I look like to them. Those few of his own kind he had been forced to deal with, like the man who had been waiting for him that morning, had at least needed his goodwill and covered up their revulsion, but here it was, naked and plain to wound him. On their faces was written in a large script: you should have died before you became as this.

Hokiak lent on his cane for a moment, husbanding his strength, and then hobbled forwards, eyes narrowed as though against a glaring light. “What do you want?” The words had formed with all the illicit authority he wielded in Myna, as a buyer, a seller, an arranger of things, but they came out as an ancient’s rattle.

“You know,” spoke the lead Scorpion, not loud, but his deep voice was robust with life and health.

“Who was it then?” Hokiak pressed. “Your father? An uncle? Did I cut the head off your family and not come back to finish the job? Who?”

“Father? You might have done for my grandfather, for all it matters,” the huge Scorpion replied, “But I’d not come so far north for him, nor just to trade slaves with the Wasps, for all their gold flows like sand. You fled, old man, when you owed us all a death. Every wrinkle in your rotting face cries out to me. ‘Bring an end to me, Ecta,’ it begs. I’ve come to set things right. You owe a death and I hold your marker.”

Hokiak’s Mynan guards were standing uncertainly, hands to sword-hilts, but the Scorpion-kinden would make short work of them, sure enough. And the mention of the Empire showed that the three were here with imperial sanction, no mere trespassers to be arrested or enslaved. As for their words...

Hokiak felt himself shrivelling before the thought of his homeland, the harsh sands, the harsher people: men and women who lived by strength, who took what others could not deny them, who cared nothing for laws or empires, who lived in freedom and blood until their limbs faltered and their deeds caught up with them, then died at the hands of those that would take their place. There had been a day when Hokiak had driven his band of raiders across the sands and known no master, and killed with his mighty clawed hands any who would challenge his will.

That was thirty years before, and for the last five years of his rule he had relied on reputation more than action to hold his place.

He had left it all behind. When he saw he could not hold them, he had fled them. He had left their world of brutal simplicity for the shadowsand allowed himself to forget. Now here were the scions of his old life of strength and battle, fired with their right to his blood. He had broken a chain of generations of murder when he fled, and here came the smiths to reforge it.

“There’s a market a dozen streets from here, off Seldom Street. Wasps’ve got a stage there, to sell slaves off. Nice place,” the Scorpion told him relentlessly. “Two days’ time, they’re done with their selling. Come meet us there then, after dusk. Come pay your debt.”

“Or?” That one word was the worst admission of weakness Hokiak had heard in his long life, but the mere presence of these, his people, his successors, was draining him. The fugitive decades that they had brought with them were laid like timbers across his back.

“Or we come for you, and all of yours,” the uncompromising voice assured him. “You, him,” the hand picked out Gryllis before taking in the whole exchange, “this. We’ll burn you out, old man. We’re time and we’ve caught up with you. Two days.” The big man turned on his heel, his companions giving the room a flaying glare before following him.

For a moment, as alone as a man can possibly be, Hokiak lent on his stick, feeling it tremble beneath him, or perhaps just feeling himself tremble against its support. All eyes were on him.

“Get out,” he whispered, barely to be heard, and then, “Get out!” at them all, the petitioners, the smugglers, his own people, even Gryllis. “All of you! Out!”

“Hokiak, listen –!” Mordrec started, and the other Scorpion, the tracker, was on his feet as well, but Hokiak summoned all his strength, that had been whipped into cowering by the presence of his kinsmen, and bellowed at them hoarsely, shouting them down until the sheer senile fury of him had driven them, and everyone, out of the door.

Then, unwatched, Hokiak let himself sag onto a chair, his cane clattering to the floor.

There were two Wasp soldiers amongst those passing by the front of Hokiak’s Exchange, but they were staring after the departing Scorpion-kinden and Mordrec made good his exit, heading away from the centre of Myna towards those parts where he would be less likely to meet with other servants of the Empire. Two turns later, though, he heard footsteps behind him, and saw the Scorpion who had been his fellow petitioner before Hokiak. The man regarded him narrowly, pausing to see if Mordrec was going to be a problem. He was short for a Scorpion, broad across the chest, wearing the metal-inland leather hauberk of a Commonweal brigand. There was a crossbow slung over one shoulder.

In a moment of mutual scrutiny each man sized up the other, trying to cast him as a threat, then:

“I see nobody’s doing business with Hokiak today,” the Scorpion said. His voice, against all odds, was ridiculously cultured, his accent definitely from somewhere far from wherever either Hokiak or his three antagonists had come from.

“Possibly ever,” Mordrec said shortly and then, drawn from a well of bitterness,