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

while he had fought it, it had lived. This was like magic, the sort of magic the world no longer held.

Ellery was beside him before he remembered her, reaching out a hand and painting one fingertip with red from his sleeve.

“And you thought I did not understand you,” she whispered. “Magnificent, beautiful, and yet I have bound your mystery in brass and steel. I have challenged you, my fierce Mantis.”

“Your machine –”

“No, not the machine! I! I have taken the weapon of my choosing, and I have called you forth, and bloodied you. I am the world’s greatest artificer, but now I have proved myself in your world too. Can you deny me?”

Her hand fell on his gashed forearm and then clasped, hard enough to make him wince, her fingers curling about his spines. She was looking up at him, this girl who had everything in the world save one thing, and who had coveted and desired until that, too, was within her grasp.

“I have won you,” she told him, and her other hand was reaching to cup his head and draw him down to her lips, but he twitched away, stepped from her grip as though he was smoke.

“No,” he told her.

“No?” she demanded. “You can’t say ‘no’. I know how it is, for your kinden. I have researched you, ransacked every library for your secrets. I have seen you fight. I have understood you as no other can! And I have challenged you, and proved myself worthy. I know how this works.”

He felt the bonds of his honour pull taut, seeing that pride in her and knowing that everything she said was true, so that when she threw at him, “Because of my kinden? Is that it? You dare to judge me only for that?” he could only shake his head.

“There was another,” he said.

She would not accept it. “Liar! I know you! I have watched you. I have paid your agent for morsels of your life. No other have you looked at, here in Helleron. No whore, no magnate’s wife, no swordsmistress.”

“Because there was another.”

“No! Because nobody has challenged you, before now!” Ellery insisted desperately.

He had no way to tell her save the hard way, the true way. “A long time ago, there was a woman. Just the one. For my people, there is only ever the one. Then she betrayed me and left me with nothing but ashes. Why else would I be living this life in Helleron, save to blot out that?”

She had started to shake, just a little. “Nobody lives that storybook life, not even you. There is never just the one. There is no destined love. So there was another, and she is dead or gone, left or abandoned or betrayed you. I am here, Tisamon!”

At that moment he bitterly wanted to be anything but what he was, standing there with his honour rising in his throat to choke him. For a moment he saw himself through Apt eyes, bent beneath a burden of his own making, ridiculous in his assumed gravitas, the clown that thinks he’s king.

But if he unbent from that load, if he cast off the chains that shackled him, then he would not be what she had set her heart on any more. He would be one with the grime and the graft of the Helleron streets, just an exotic thug with a penchant for murder. The thing she desired was what stood between them.

He wanted to reach out to her. He wanted to beg forgiveness. Most of all he wanted to not be who he was, and yet give her what she wanted, but those were opposing poles, and he could not make them meet.

A month later, when his agent, Palasso, told him that Ellery had paid for his time, he sought within himself for how he felt, and found something hollow and hard, as though he had been the automaton all the time.

The treacherous thought: Perhaps it’s not too late, though he did not know whether he meant her, or the next iteration of the deadly machine.

It was too late, nonetheless. When she did not open the workshop door to his knock he pushed it inwards, and saw the ruin the device had made of Ellery Mainler.

He could never know if she had been repairing it, or improving it, or just winding its springs, stoking its fires. When its blade had ripped into her, it had finished with one of those boneless flourishes he remembered, doubling back along the length of its own arm to pin her to its metal body, her arms encircling the cold plating of its trunk. Over her shoulder, his own face cast in brass seemed to smile at him.

So we travel from the Commonweal, by way of occupied Myna, to Helleron to set the stage for what comes next, and at this point in time, Helleron is the personal hell Tisamon is putting himself through, just as Ineskae seeks redemption in the Commonweal. Tisamon, Atryssa (his betrayer/lover) and even Rowen Palasso have their role to play in Shadows, but, although Ellery Mainler’s story ends here, her work lives on in the books. Her ratiocinator – the clockwork difference engine which gives her fighting machine a semblance of conscious thought, will see a lot of use when the Empire gets hold of it in The Air War and beyond. Although much of the journey through these stories has been through the shadowy world of the Inapt, therefore, we end, as we began, with Aptitude, and not the Wasp Empire’s brutal militarism but Beetle-kinden imagination. Lial Morless conquered the sky. Ellery Mainler set out to conquer something far more nebulous, and if she had not died at the hands of her own obsession she’d have given Drephos and Totho a run for their money.

About the Author

Adrian Tchaikovsky was born in Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire before heading off to Reading to study psychology and zoology. He subsequently ended up in law and has worked as