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

The Scorpion shrugged. “Who knows? I take it you’re not just buying and selling, slaver?”

At the word, Mordrec flinched, only then remembering that his colours marked out his allegience and station. With a snarl he dragged his barred tunic off, exposing the stained arming jacket beneath. “What do you want?”

The Scorpion grimaced toothily. “Out. Saving that, a drink.”

“Fine, lead on.”

“The place I’m drinking doesn’t like Wasps, Wasp.”

“All the better. Se- Mordrec.” With difficulty he bit off the rank that had preceded his every introduction for years.

“Barad Ygor,” the Scorpion returned, his fluid accent running the words together.

“And where’s Barad, when it’s at home,” asked Mordrec, who knew a little of Scorpion naming customs.

“Further south than you’ve ever been, I’ll bet. Come on, let’s see if you get lynched by the mob.”

Mordrec had guessed at some den of the locals, filled with surly, unruly Mynan Beetle-kinden, or rather the local pack of grey-blue-skinned malcontents that passed as Beetles if you had no better. Instead, Ygor led him to what had been someone’s home once: a flat-roofed house with boarded-up windows. From outside, nothing suggested it was a taverna save the faint murmur of voices but, when they got inside, the dim interior had a dozen or so drinkers, and a halfbreed local sat on the floor at the back, filling clay bowls from the cask beside him.

The drinkers were, to a man, Grasshopper-kinden: tall, lean men and women wearing imperial colours, auxillians drafted in from some conquered Commonweal province to perform those civic tasks too menial for the proud Wasp army. Not surprisingly, none of them looked on Mordrec with much love, but his lack of uniform apparently earned him a stay of execution.

Ygor scanned the room as he walked to the barrel. “Where’s Soul?” he asked its tender, but the man just spread his hands. The Scorpion scowled briefly but secured a couple of bowls, and he and Modrec found themselves alone at a table for the simple reason that the other drinkers would not share one with a Wasp.

“You’re in trouble, then?” the Scorpion suggested.

Mordrec sipped what turned out to be the thinnest honeydew mead he had ever been exposed to. “Debts,” he admitted. “You?”

“Heheh.” Ygor’s expression was awkward and evasive. “Worse than debts, me. Imperial debts, yours?”

The Wasp nodded glumly. “And yours, Imperial worse-than-debts?”

“Hmm, well, let’s just say that a friend and I did a real big service for your lot, after your lot had conspicuously failed to do it.”

Mordrec regarded him for a moment, translating. “So everyone else hates you for what you did, and the Empire hates you because you’re not a Wasp and you made them look like fools.”

Barad Ygor’s smile was a nightmare snarl of fangs. “In one,” he agreed. “Soul and I, we need to disappear quietly from Myna before one side or the other decides that they’d rather we disappeared noisily. You’re trying to ride out on the same beetle, I take it?”

Mordrec nodded, but not the sullen bob of the head of a moment before. “Can you meet Hokiak’s price?” he added.

“Academic,” Ygor told him dismissively, but when pressed he added, “I’ve no idea. I never got that far. You can’t?”

“That depends on the currency.” Modrec frowned. “Those Scorpions came up to sell slaves. That puts them somewhere near the market and the Corps barracks. It’s more than my neck if I’m spotted there.  But you...”

“Go spy on the Scorpions,” Ygor said carefully. “As a prelude to...?”

“Hokiak wants payment up front, he said. I reckon we’ve found a new currency.”

Gryllis crept into the empty backroom as though he was burgling it. Hokiak glanced balefully up at him. “Well?”

“Well you’re lucky your fellows like the big public song and dance, old claw,” the Spider told him softly. “If my bad memories caught up with me the first I’d know would be finding myself tied upside down in a cellar somewhere, surrounded by lads with razors. None of this showmanship.” Under the Scorpion’s yellow gaze he shrugged his bony shoulders. “But I see what they did, yes. Clever. Easy to look into a mug like theirs and think they’re stupid, but I see.” He stilted over and took a seat on the next nearest table to his business partner. “You’re going to fight?”

“The word’s out. If I ignore ’em, everyone in Myna will know it,” Hokiak growled. “Then it’ll start: people stop paying their debts. People start pushing me for terms. Before you know it, some bastard local or Skater or someone has decided he can run my business better than I can.”

“And they’re sitting with the Slave Corps, under the Empire’s wings,” Gryllis noted. “So you can’t just do them in without losing all that goodwill we’ve worked so hard on.” But there was a speculative expression on his face. “Old claw, I’ll risk that. Old men together. Let’s face it: you’d not be able to best that big fellow if you had a repeating ballista.”

Hokiak’s gaze dropped to the table, where his broken-clawed hand lay like a dead thing. “Once...” he rasped.

“We can neither of us live on ‘once’.” The Spider let out a sigh altogether too big for his narrow frame.

“When I roamed the length of the Dryclaw,” Hokiak whispered, “nothing could stop me. I was like a flame, burning. Any who stood against me were ash, just ash on the wind.” The words came unwillingly, as though drawn from him by wires. “So much heat and fury. But the sands never stop, do they?”

“They don’t,” murmured Gryllis, in heartfelt agreement.

“And I cooled, year on year, then month on month, then each day a little cooler, and I saw that I was guttering, and the next man who braved me would snuff me like a candle. But I had sold my loot all the way up the silk road to the Empire’s edge, and all the little cities in between, and I hauled my embers off and thought that the others’d forget, that they’d overlook, this once, one of their own leaving the table with a handful of his winnings.