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

their rounds. Who would buy Roach-flesh when that beautiful golden Dragonfly skin was so cheap these days.

And where was this place to which all the slaves were going? They weren’t sure, but they knew which road the slavers always took, and it could only lead there.

Sfayot spent much of the night in thought, and by dawn he believed he understood, for all the bitter taste it left in his mouth. Ban had a quota, and no doubt the Slave Corps set limits on how many charges any given slaver could mind. Sfayot’s daughter, stolen from him on a brutal whim in Nalfers, had been held up to the light and judged unworthy. She had been cast off in favour of the extra coin that Dragonfly women might buy.

She might be dead, therefore. She might have been used and cast, throat slit, into a trench without another thought on the part of whatever Wasp slaver or soldier had done it. Or she might have fallen into that great melting pot of unclaimed slaves he was hearing of, and still be there. Having come this far, what choice did he have?

He set off that morning. He had some coin in his pocket, little enough after giving away most of his stock, and he sensed that Malic’s papers would not hold much weight this far out. A lone Roach-kinden had no legitimate business in these places. He would most likely be executed as a spy if they caught him.

He saw more signs of war, on the road, but he felt as though his sensibilities had begun to erode under the relentless storm of trauma. Dead men and women, dead children, dead animals, his eyes slid off them. He had no more room for horror. So he thought.

But he found it. He found where the slaves, the myriad captives of war, were going, and he discovered that there was a little room left, after all, for a kind of horror that a connoisseur might savour as Malic had savoured his wine.

The Wasps had built a cage, and the cage was like a honeycomb, and the honeycomb was vast, eight-score cells at least, all wooden-slatted walls and a hatch at the top. There had been a wood here, before, but it had been hacked back for half a mile in all directions, the felled wood going towards this abomination,

There were plenty of Wasps here: some were arriving and departing with strings of slaves, others were plainly the custodians of the place. All of them wore the tunics and full helms of the Slave Corps. There was not a regular soldier, not a Consortium factor or clerk or artificer to be seen, but of the slavers there were dozens, stalking about the perimeter of the thing they had built, or walking atop it, looking down on their massed charges. Sfayot waited until twilight and crept closer, trying to find a vantage to see into the wooden cells.

The sheer size of the construction awed him. They had built cells, and then built more and more, each one borrowing a wall from the last and, as more slaves had come, they had built and built, their labour becoming as mindless and instinctive as that of their insect namesakes. The cells looked to be designed for perhaps four prisoners. Sfayot guessed that none had fewer than eight, and many had more. The stench put the battlefield to shame. That was a smell of death; This was life, the most wasted, pitiful dregs of life: a sour, stomach-clutching stink of sweat and excrement, fear and despair. The slaves went in, he saw, and if they were lucky some slaver came and took them out. Otherwise, they stayed and some were fed and others starved or grew fevered from wounds, and eventually, he saw, some of them had died, and still their remains endured, because the slavers were working all the time bringing more people in. Every cell he could peer into had at least one collapsed form that did not move.

He saw one slaver take his helm off, just the once. The man’s face was hollow-cheeked, haunted. He looked away from the slave pens as though he would rather be a slave himself elsewhere than a master here. They had built something too large to manage, even with the force of slavers present. They had lost control, not to their prisoners, but to entropy.

Sfayot was absolutely sure that he could not simply walk up and offer them money for a Roach girl. They would take his money and throw him in one of those cells, because men who could do this could have no possible shred of civilisation left in them. No papers or promises or appeals would move them. He would have to go about this a more direct way.

Sfayot waited until it grew properly dark, and then he crept forwards. The slavers had set a watch, but it was a desultory one. They were expecting no retribution. The war-front had moved on. He reached the outside edge of the pens, peering in and seeing Dragonfly-kinden bundled together, leaning on one another, without enough room to lie or even sit properly. Some slept, some just stared. None saw him. With creeping care Sfayot ascended, using his Art to scale the wooden wall until he was atop the pens. The stench assailed him anew here, rising up from below almost as a solid thing. He was Roach-kinden, though. His were a hardy people who could survive a great deal. Methodically he began to search.

Sometimes there were slavers up there with him, landing in a shimmer of wings to give the prisoners a look over. And looking for what? Sfayot wondered, because it surely could not have been to check on their well-being. At these times he crouched low and called on his Art to hide him from their view. In truth, they were so careless in their examinations that he barely needed to.

He searched and searched, as the hours of