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

“Gambling is a good way of losing what little you have.”

“Not for me. I never lose.” Her eyes glinted as she turned the lamps up, the light spreading out across a great open space that was most of the ground floor. “Nobody realizes what you can do with cards, if you’ve a perfect memory and a good head for figures. Of course, I have to move about a bit. People don’t like to bet against me twice.”

“You’ll get yourself killed.”

She shrugged, crossing to some kind of machine that stood in the centre of the floor, the focus of the room. It was a pillar a little over man-height, a mass of interlocking components that Tisamon’s Inapt eyes skipped over. All machines were incomprehensible to him.

“Look.” She led his eyes to the walls, where the light guttered fitfully over sketches of the human body. He saw what seemed at first to be a view from a torture chamber: figures with bones laid bare, flayed men, women who were strung with bared sinews, all annotated in minute script. And all in motion, each sketch catching the mangled body in mid-strike. Ellery’s studies of the fight. This was what she had meant.

Her expression was calm, focused enough to cut steel. “I know. I’m Apt. What can I know of your great and noble mystery? That’s it, isn’t it?” And, when he just looked at her, “But I do understand. I know everything of the fighter’s art save how to fight. I know the leverage and the fulcrums, all there is about balance and joints, extension and angle. I have anatomized the fight.”

She was young, unskilled, built to that Beetle-kinden frame that produced solid, compact, slightly overfull bodies, but her intensity intimidated him more than a drawn blade. “To what purpose?” he asked her.

“To reproduce it,” and she threw a lever on the machine and then stepped back.

He heard the hiss of steam, the floor beneath him quivering with the motion of buried engines, and then the thing unfolded its blade, a length of razored steel on an arm with three joints. There was nothing human – nothing natural – in the way it brandished the weapon.

“I will pay you,” Ellery Mainler told him. “I want to watch you fight. I want you to fight it.”

“How can it be fought?” Tisamon demanded. “It’s a thing.”

“You won’t know what I mean by a ratiocinator,” she told him. “They’re new. Nobody’s done anything like this with one. It lets my duellist think – or calculate anyway. If you approach it now, it will know where you are, from sound, from vibration. This leads into a cascade of gear trains that tell it how best to kill you. So fight, Mantis.” Her eyes were very wide. “I will pay you. I have money. Fight for me.”

He should have walked away, he knew. She was unbalanced, and this was no use of his skills, to attack an object. That should have ended it. He was going to do just that.

One step towards the door and he made the mistake of looking back at her, seeing her tremble at the rejection. Poor Apt girl, wealthy beyond counting in the world she had been born into, and yet without a single coin in his. He saw how long she had been working on this joke of a thing, how very badly she wanted to achieve... what? Perhaps even she was not sure.

He turned back, and now his clawed gauntlet was on his hand.

“You want me to destroy this thing.”

“I want you to try.”

He stepped towards the machine cautiously, watching that crooked blade. As he neared, parts of it moved, sliding and spinning, and abruptly its single arm flicked out, so that he leant back to avoid its reach. He circled, step by step, seeing the band that held the arm revolve with him. He had no sense that he was facing a living enemy.

He feinted twice, watching the machine follow his movements, feeling out the delay in its response, and then struck, batting aside the blade with his own, following through, stepping around it and then driving the point of his claw three, four times into the workings. A moment later he was pacing back, weapon raised between him and it, anticipating the mechanical arm spinning to lash after him. It was frozen, though, locked where he had parried it. Whatever damage he had done had returned the mechanism to the world of the inanimate.

He cocked his head at Ellery, surprising a wealth of expressions there as she fought to master herself. Very few of them made sense to him: perhaps these were Apt expressions, interpretable only by those who understood gear trains and calculus.

The Seven Clocks and the Fabrus Union had worked out their differences, but there was always another fight. Tisamon drifted from one to the next, but nothing pushed him, and the sense of purposeless despair that was never far away began to loom large in his life. Then came a challenger from the South, a Spider-kinden who called him out. Tisamon’s loathing for the Spiders was legendary, and his opponent seemed to return the sentiment in equal measure. They fought, and though the man had no sword and circle badge, he was good enough to have earned one. Afficionados of the duel said that it was best they’d seen in years, and Tisamon was bleeding from a handful of shallow wounds by the time he cut the Spider down, finding himself standing over the body, feeling oddly bereft that the man was dead.

Looking up, his gaze lit on Ellery Mainler, wide eyes fixed on him. He could read desire there, that possessive kind that rich Beetles specialized in. When he met her gaze, he felt the same physical shock he had when he had looked at the Spider down the length of the man’s steel.

She sought him out, of course she did. “Come and fight for me,” she told him.

“Your machine, again?”

“I’ve improved