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

it.” And of course that was what the Apt did. While the old world of magic, that Tisamon had been born to, had sprung into being in the height of its power and only declined since, the Apt were always improving. “I can pay you,” Ellery added, and “Please.”

The machine, when he laid eyes on it again, had changed. He had made some comments before leaving the last time, concerning how such a thing could never be what she wanted it to be. She had taken the details to heart and discarded the body of the message.

There was a webwork of rails patterning the ceiling, crossing everywhere in the room, and the machine was no longer just a pillar fixed to the floor. “It must move,” Tisamon had said. Now, the lumpy, part-armoured cylinder of its body was suspended between the rails and four articulated legs. It had two arms, the familiar blade and a twin that ended in the bronze disc of a buckler. It still resembled nothing living and, even when she threw the lever and it juddered into motion, it remained a dead thing to him.

“You must fight it,” she told him, and he saw the articulated legs pick their way sideways, not supporting the machine’s weight but just guiding its progress, so that it seemed to glide over the floor like a crab over the seabed. When Ellergy spoke, the machine stopped and turned towards her.

“What if I leave?” he asked her. “Can you make it stop?” And he had its faceless attention once more.

“I don’t know,” she told him. He remembered her in the gambling den, amongst men and women who would have murdered her for her shoes. A Beetle girl, yes, born to money and education, and not satisfied, never satisfied. A warrior’s heart in the body of a dilettante.

He approached the machine at a rush.

It reacted more swiftly than the previous incarnation, lashing towards him with sword and buckler together, dominating the mid-line like a real swordsman. Still, it was slower than flesh. Still the movements were that fraction of a second late, a hand’s span off, as it tried to keep up with where he was. He led it around the room, getting a feel for this new mobility, fending the blade off when it came in range. The machine pursued him relentlessly, snorting steam, the massed ranks of clockwork within it sounding like grinding teeth.

He struck three times, watching the machine move shield and blade into place, understanding its rhythms. A moment later he had dropped beneath its next swing, putting a boot into its torso that set it swinging on the rails. An upwards blow locked the sword arm rigid where it met the body, brass housings bent into a firm clasp. He had no way of telling its weak points, but he let his blade drive into those parts that seemed less armoured, and finally it stopped chattering and hissing, the last of its steam escaping in a long, disappointed breath.

“It’s still nothing but a thing,” he told Ellery. Her stare was disconcerting, acquisitive. He took his fee and left.

Tisamon’s agent was a pragmatic Beetle woman named Rowen Palasso, and she became very familiar with Ellery Mainler over the next month. Business was slow, and Mainler paid over the odds – indeed it seemed she would pay whatever Palasso asked. Three times more, Tisamon trudged to her workshops to demolish the latest incarnation of her machine. She never seemed to run out of money, though he wondered that there was anyone left in Helleron who would bet against her. More, she never ran out of whatever drove her. She watched him fight with an avid hunger that he felt every moment. She sketched him, not clad as he presented himself, but stripped – to the skin, to the muscle, to the bone, intimate beyond the dreams of pornography. Tisamon knew obsession when he saw it. He had been its victim, in his time. What he did not know was how to cure it.

The machine was still lacking. Even as he engaged it, it failed to engage him. It remained a thing.

After that last clash, third of this series, fifth overall, she asked him to stay with her. Given how much she was paying Palasso, he felt he owed that to her, and she poured out a little wine and asked him questions. At first these were the expected: technique, distancing, balance, a façade of professionalism, as though all she cared about was her pointless, useless fighting automaton. Once the wine had loosened them both a little she segued into darker territories. She asked him about his upbringing, his training, his badge. She asked him a dozen questions about what his fighting meant to him, the Inapt Weaponsmaster, and he did his best for her. His answers slid away from her, just as hers would baffle him if he asked her to explain the workings of her machine. They were from different worlds, and he was bewildered that she, the inheritrix of all that was new and strong and dominant in the world, should yet find herself jealous of the old, pining for a world of uncertainties that she could never be a part of.

He imagined her as she staked her fortune at the card tables, pitting the gleaming steel of her wits against the risk of losing everything. What would her face look like, in the moment before the cards turned? Would he recognize that expression from the fighting ring, from the swordsman caught at the height of his skill, letting his blade bear the weight of a life?

She met his gaze, and he realized that he had been staring at her for some time.

“I will make it better,” she told him. “Come back to me.”

To Palasso’s annoyance, he began to turn down commissions. He did not need the money – though perhaps she did – and he felt off balance, incomplete and without his unassailable focus. He was