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

for nobody’s entertainment. Much of Helleron was held by a patchwork of gangs, the Fiefs, who existed under and alongside and sometimes in the pocket of the great industrial magnates. There was always a fight brewing amongst the Fiefs. There was always a street or a gambling den changing hands. There was always blood. It was almost reassuring how there was always blood.

Tisamon admitted to no Fief, acknowledged no masters, but there was always a brisk trade in skilled freelancers on the hard streets of Helleron. There, to no applause and to the death, he plied his trade. He had a reputation.

It was a Fief turf war that brought him to the artificer Ellery Mainler.

A disagreement had arisen over a particularly choice establishment, conjoined brothel and gambling den – specifically, who had the right to protect these establishments from the woes of the world, for a modest fee. The players were the Seven Clocks, native Beetle-kinden muscling in from the nearby factories, against Fabrus Brothers Union, close-knit Ant-kinden exiles from some place in the Empire. The Fabrus boys were noted brawlers but the Clocks had the wherewithal to call in a few independents. Their factor tapped the Beetle woman who served as Tisamon’s agent, and she gave him a time and a place.

Supposedly it was going to be just a friendly piece of leaning, the Clock lads swaggering over to take in the sights and put the Ants in their place, with Tisamon for backup. The Fabrus caught wind of it, got the wrong idea, and did their level best to turn a minor incursion into a war. Tisamon  had to earn his keep. Whilst the grandees from Seven Clocks decided the game had gone sour and beat a retreat, the Mantis had a busy few minutes dancing and stepping through a shifting net of Ant swords and knifes, leaving bloody writing everywhere he went and getting a guided tour of most of the establishment along the way.

He particularly remembered a tight spot when three knife-men had him penned up in a small room in the brothel, whilst the original occupant and his patron cowered underneath the bed. Tisamon’s claw – the gauntlet with its metal blade that jutting down the line of his fingers – had been busy fending off their furious lunges and, whilst he left them plenty of shallow wounds to remember him by, the Ants fought together well, and he had begun to wonder if this, this tawdry little business, might be it. Then one of them lunged too strongly, and Tisamon took the man’s arm and flung him through the wall, so that the entire brawling pack of them spilled out into the gambling den next door.

With a little more space at his command he was able to teach the Fabrus boys that the game was not worth the stakes, and once he had killed one and bloodied the rest they vanished away, leaving him standing on a card table with a stunned audience of gamblers.

There was one woman there, who did not seem the type. A Beetle-kinden, like most of the Helleren, but dressed too well and looking too clean. She had been staring up open-mouthed with the rest at this bloody interruption to the game. Unlike the rest, who got out of his way as though he had the plague, she trailed him to the doorway and offered to buy him a drink.

Tisamon did not want a drink, particularly. He wanted to track down the Seven Clocks and get the balance of his fee. However, he saw the way that some of the woman’s gaming partners looked at her – as though they had already tallied up the worth of her clothes and decided that they were too valuable to be allowed to leave with their current owner. In the hope of a new fight, he agreed.

She named herself Ellery Mainler. She spoke with an educated precision he recognized, a graduate of distant Collegium. She was young, monied, intense. She kept unfolding her spectacles to look at him closely, the lenses flashing with reflected gaslight against her dark skin, then tucking them away again.

“You fight beautifully,” she told him. They were at a taverna well out of the reach of the Fabrus Brothers.

Tisamon looked her over, trying to work out what she wanted. Her expression was still lit from within as though witnessing the bloodshed had set a fire there.

“I’m a connoisseur,” she confided to him, “of the fight.”

She must have read his reaction – the haughty disdain felt by the master of the ancient tradition for the presumptuous amateur – and was instantly trying to disabuse him.

“It’s not like that! I don’t just bet on the matches. I’m not one of those,” and, seeing that the distance between them was only growing, “I’ll show you. Come to my home. It’s not far.”

Tisamon shook his head, drained his wine, stood to go. Instantly she’d reached for his sleeve, almost bloodying her fingers on the sharp spines that ran down his forearm, a manifestation of the Mantis-kinden Art, that made him what he was.

“Come with me!” she insisted and, when he turned to go, she shouted after him, “I need you to see! I’m not just some sad spectator. I’m a scholar of the fight. Mantis, I have my honour!”

In the taverna’s doorway, Tisamon turned.

“I have my honour,” she repeated. “I won’t be... dismissed, misinterpreted, like that. At least let me show you.” There was something naked in her face, not need but needs, intertwined. He knew then that she was trouble but, in his circles, everyone was trouble of one kind or another.

“Show me,” thus he committed himself.

Her home was mostly a workshop. She lived in the small upper rooms, she said, but artifice was her life, and where her money went. The building was expansive and in a good area, redolent of inherited wealth.

“Why risk yourself gambling, if you have this?” he challenged her.

“Because my research is expensive,” she explained tersely, as