Spoils of War (Tales of the Apt Book 1) by Adrian Tchaikovsky (best young adult book series .txt) 📕

Further progress with the cart would be impossible, Sfayot saw. He sold it and most of his remaining stock to a taverner, and for a price that told him just how much the soldiers were being overcharged. He retained as many jugs as he could safely string from his belt or hide in his pack, because his bribing work was surely not done.

He made for the centre of Shona, adopting a careful, skulking walk that put him beyond the notice of the rowdy Wasps. Sfayot’s Roach-kinden people had a knack for hiding born of long years of spite from most other races.

He could see (for Roach eyes were good in the dark) that the centre of Shona, perhaps the entire original area occupied by Shon Aeres, was an open square, and that there was some manner of entertainment there. Vague, wild strains of music drifted to him, and he followed them around the edge of a crowd until he saw a set of Grasshopper-kinden minstrels plucking and piping as best they could, enduring the occasional kick and missile from the jostling crowd. The square boasted a series of raised wooden platforms, Sfayot saw, and on the nearest there were women dancing. They wore rags only, and he soon saw why: when any of them got too close to the crowd, hands reached for them, to tear off whatever remained. An old, bald Wasp with a pike kept watch, and jabbed at the dancers when they clustered too close to the centre. They were Dragonfly-kinden, all, with that people’s slender grace and elegance, and they wept and shook and went on dancing, unfettered and with the wide sky above them. For a long time Sfayot could not understand why they did not simply manifest the wings their Art gave them, fly free and risk the Wasp stings.

He saw, at last. At one edge of the platform sat an unexpected rank of the audience: a dozen children cross-legged there, some crying, some stony-faced and blank eyed. They watched, he saw. They watched their mothers or sisters humiliated for the pleasure of their captors. They would be too young to have learned that airborne Art. Their presence held their relatives in captivity more surely than locks and chains. Sfayot felt ill and shouldered on past the spectacle. Other platforms boasted fighters, men and women hobbled, bound together, forced to fight each other, or to fight beasts. He saw a nine-foot dragonfly, its wings mere broken stubs, slicing savagely into a pair of unarmed Grasshopper women with its razor mandibles. He saw a tethered, raging Mantis-kinden, one eye out and the rest of her face a mask of blood, killing slave after slave in a heedless, mindless frenzy, carving each up with the spines of her arms until an officer flew from the crowd and seared her with the bright fire of his sting. The expression on the officer’s face as he killed her was the only compassion Sfayot was to see that night.

Eventually he could take no more. He found a Consortium counting house and took refuge in it, buying his tenure with wine. He was shaking, he found. His family had been right. He was losing all hope of seeing his errant daughter again, or whatever the war had left of her.

The clerk left minding the coffers whilst his master revelled was a young Beetle-kinden man named Noles Mender, obviously not long from home and not at ease with the Wasps. He and Sfayot diced for pittance coins, which Sfayot let him win, and by then Noles was happy enough to answer a few questions. Did he know Sergeant Ban? No. Did he know about slavers? Yes. Shona was not fair game for slavers, he explained. Everyone here was for the army’s pleasure, not the slavers’ profit. The army loathed the slavers, and would rough them up and throw them out if they tried anything. Slavers were being sent hotfoot to the front, where there was enough spare flesh to fill all the quotas of the Empire.

Noles was heading there too, quite against his will, as a confidential messenger to more enterprising Consortium factors. He would have an escort of soldiers, but he would be more than happy to have any company that could maintain an educated conversation. He was a stout, dark-skinned, bookish youth, and it was plain that military life did not suit him. Like a lot of Beetles, he had no difficulty with Sfayot’s kinden. Beetles in the Empire tended to judge a man on his moment-to-moment usefulness, not his race.

Noles travelled by mule, with Sfayot and the half-dozen soldiers on foot. The front was not far, he said. He’d heard that there was some central depot that slaves, and slavers, were being sent to, but he wasn’t sure where it was. When they reached his destination he would surely be able to find out. The escort obviously disliked Noles almost as much as they disliked Sfayot, but the bonds of rank held them: Noles was, youth notwithstanding, a sergeant, and despite provocation they took no action against him. Sfayot was willing to bet that matters would have been different if Noles had been carrying much of value.

Noles was explaining how the fighting had been close to here for some while: some Dragonfly prince or other had amassed a big army, and there had been several inconclusive engagements, all quite bloody. Probably they were fighting even now, Noles opined, in the airy tones of one who considers himself a military expert.

He might have been exactly right. Certainly the battlefield they found two days later looked to be about two days old.

The smell got to them before they saw it, and then they started being approached by scouts, Fly- and Wasp-kinden both, all of whom pored carefully over Noles’ papers, and Sfayot’s. Then they came out of a stand of trees and saw where the Dragonfly general had made his stand.

The battle