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

had been partly within a wood, and that section was mercifully hidden, but it had spilled out across several acres of low, rolling fields. Sfayot was no military man, but he suspected that such a man would have been able to read the history of that battle in the dispositions of the dead. True, most of the Imperial dead had been claimed by now, taken off for identification, recording and cremation. The Commonweal dead had been left there, probably because there were neither hands nor will enough in the victorious army to do otherwise. Drifts of peasant levy lay like snow, like earthworks, in a welter of broken spears and staves. Mounds of Grasshopper- and Dragonfly-kinden who had been sent off to war with nothing but the clothes on their back and a knife tied to a broom-shaft; they lay five, ten deep, there in their scores where the Wasps had halted them. They were sting-burned, stuck with crossbow bolts, impaled on spears, hacked by swords, broken by artillery, crushed beneath the tracks of war-automotives in their hundreds, in their many hundreds. Here and there the dead wore the pearlescent sheen of Dragonfly-crafted armour: hard chitin and harder steel layered together into a surface that would turn a blade or a sting-bolt with equal fortitude. Here they lay, each little knot of dead a noble’s retinue, their mail broken, their long-hafted swords and bows and spears all awash with blood where they had been plucked from the sky or made their last stand over the body of their fallen lord. Scavengers, the lowest camp-slaves and Auxillians, picked over them for anything of value, and their expressions were of such hardened sobriety that it seemed they were performing some funereal duty rather than seeking their own profit.

Noles Mender had gone quiet, was staring straight ahead with his lips pressed tightly together, but Sfayot could not drag his ravaged gaze away. He saw face after face, the men and women of the Commonweal, each locked in a final expression of fear, shock, pain or grief. He saw Mantis-kinden and Dragonfly swordsmen lying dead, the stained, clear earth about them speaking all that needed to be said about their last moments. He saw the broken, husk-like bodies of insects: saddled dragonflies with shattered wings; the curled bodies of wasps riddled with arrow-shafts; fighting mantids with spread limbs, their gorgeous, glittering eyes caved in, their killing claws broken. In the field’s centre a burnt-out automotive smouldered still. A small team of engineers, faces swathed with scarves against the reek, laboured over it, trying to salvage anything of value. And everywhere there were the flies: the finger-long, torpid black flies that coated the dead like tar and arose as Noles’ party passed, in glutted, blood-addled clouds.

Once they had passed the battlefield they found the army camp where Noles’ contact was. The Beetle was obviously anxious to deliver his message and be gone, and the soldiers were likewise keen to return to the delights of Shona. Sfayot bid them farewell and took his last few jugs of wine to see what they might buy.

He had expected fierce celebration, Shona in miniature, but there was none. The battle was too recent, too many men were in no fit state to cheer. He guessed that much of the army must be off routing the remaining Commonweal forces, for fully half the tents in that camp were crammed with the Imperial wounded. Battlefield surgeons, Wasp men with lined faces and steady hands, were working their way through them with fatalistic patience. Elsewhere stood tents of the Mercy’s Daughters, caring for those that the surgeons had not reached yet, or had given up on. The women of that unofficial order – Wasps and of a dozen other kinden - were often the last sight and comfort that a wounded soldier could hope for. Their faces, as they went from pallet to pallet, were calm and fixed, their voices low. Around them the wounded cried out, or begged, wept, slept or died.

Sfayot spilled a lot of time and wine finding someone who had the knowledge he needed. In the end he found a half-dozen Thorn Bug-kinden auxillians at the back of one of the Daughters’ tents. They were engineers, he understood, and from the shiny burns and scars, they had caught the rough end of their trade. He had the impression that the greater part of their company was dead. They were hateful, hideous, spiky creatures, crook-backed and hook-nosed, and the Empire regarded them with as little love as it did Sfayot’s own people. He produced for them his last jug of wine, though, and they passed it around in solemn silence. For them it was a taste of distant, distant home, that briar-riddled place that the Empire ruled only loosely, but tightly enough to conscript luckless men such as they. From their wounds, at least half would likely never return there.

Two of them knew Sergeant Ban, in no uncertain terms. The sergeant was a gambling man, but not insofar as it extended to paying debts owed to lesser kinden. Sfayot guessed that Ban had been gaming with the Thorn Bugs because nobody else would take his marker. They knew him, yes. Had he been through here? Yes, twice.

“Twice?” Sfayot frowned.

“Once out, once back, with a full string of Dragonfly-kinden slaves, good ones too, all decent-looking women.” A Thorn Bug leer has no equal.

“All Dragonfly-kinden?” Sfayot pressed, dismayed that he had managed to miss Ban entirely. “There was one, perhaps, a woman of my kinden? White hair.”

They shook their malformed heads. They had got a good look at those women, yes they had. They would remember if one of them had been something as lowly as a Roach. Dragonfly princesses, the lot of them, all fit to fetch a good price back in the Empire.

“A higher price than any Roach-kinden, of course,” Sfayot said softly. Of course, they agreed, almost laughing at the thought, the last dregs of the jug making