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

the night dragged away. Even with his good eyes it was hard, peering between the slats and trying to see how many were in there, who lay atop whom, what kinden they were. Towards the centre was a knot of around a dozen cells whose occupants were all dead, every one. Sfayot was growing desperate. He began to move faster, glancing in at each hatch for a glimpse of white hair.

A voice hailed him softly and he froze, unsure where it had come from. When it spoke again he realised that it was from below. A Dragonfly man was looking up at him from out of a tangle of his fellows.

“They tell me that Roach-kinden get everywhere,” said the man, sounding, despite everything, quietly amused. “Now I see it’s true.”

“Please...” murmured Sfayot, horribly aware of all the Wasp slavers, of how close they all were.

“What are you scavenging after, Roach-kinden?” the Dragonfly asked. His voice was cultured, elegant, suited for polite conversation over music. He was around Sfayot’s own age, the Roach saw. The others in his cell were awake now, eyes glinting in the dark.

“Please, sir,” Sfayot said hoarsely. “My daughter. They took my daughter.” He realised how pathetic the plea would sound, to people already in cells.

“Mine too,” the Dragonfly told him. “Although she is out of this place at least. It seems strange to say that the life of a slave in the Empire may be the best she could have hoped for, having come here.” He sounded infinitely calm and Sfayot wondered if he was mad.

“Please,” he said again, but then the Dragonfly said, “I know you, I think.”

In the dark, Sfayot could not have placed the man for any money, but Dragonfly eyes were always keen. He just crouched there above while the prisoner studied him, and at last decided, “Yes. I remember, you were a thief, I think. A vagrant and a thief, like all your kind. You were brought before me. I sentenced you to work in the fields, but your family rescued you. It was a long time ago now, but I remember.”

Sfayot felt like weeping, clutching at the slats with crooked fingers. Now? he asked the heedless world. This man, now? In truth he had no idea whether it was true. It could have been some other Roach. It was not so uncommon a sequence of events.

“I had thought we were all from the battle, or from the villages hereabouts,” the Dragonfly said abstractly. “Do we have a Roach-kinden girl among us?” He did not raise his voice, but Sfayot numbly heard the word being passed back and forth between those who were still awake until at last some reply must have been passed back, for the Dragonfly informed Sfayot, “five cells away, in the direction that I am pointing, is a Roach-kinden girl. May I take it that you intend to remove her from here?”

For a mad moment Sfayot thought the man, in this reeking, hideous place, was objecting to sharing captivity with a Roach. The Dragonfly’s face was sublimely serious, though.

“I shall try.”

“You have the means to get her out?”

The hatches were all secured with padlocks, something the slavers had apparently possessed in abundance, but the fittings themselves were wood. “I do,” Sfayot said. “But it will take time.” He was frowning. “What do you intend?”

“Tell me,” the Dragonfly- the Dragonfly nobleman, Sfayot assumed- asked him. “Were you really a thief, when I tried you?”

Instant easy answers, normally his first line of defence, did not seem to have followed Sfayot when he mounted up here. It seemed impossible to tell anything but the truth to that calm, doomed face. “I can’t recall,” Sfayot whispered. “Sometimes I was. Sometimes I wasn’t. I cannot remember.”

“Ah, well.” The answer had apparently been satisfactory in some way. He turned to a man in the next cell. “Kindly pass this on until it reaches my master of arms, if you would. Tell him that it is fit, after all, that he dies in battle.”

The low-spoken word passed from mouth to mouth in the opposite direction, until all was dark and silence, and then the noble said, “I should stand ready, if I were you.”

Sfayot obediently crawled over to the given cell. Peering in he saw – yes – a flash of white. He called her name, softly, urgently, and again, and at the third time she stirred.

She was half-starved, filthy, bruised and scabbed, but her face was beautiful when she saw that he had come for her.

The padlock holding the hatch shut was solid. The wood, though, was a different matter. His people had an Art that meant they would never starve, that they could live anywhere, on anything.

There was a cry from the far side of the cells, except that the word did not do justice to it. It was a long, howling yell, dragged straight from the pits of someone’s being, a maniac’s death-cry. It went on and on, and Sfayot heard the sounds of someone battering and kicking at the wood, screaming curses and oaths, and it seemed that every Wasp in the area was running that way or flying overhead.

Sfayot set to work, bringing his head low to the foul wood of the cage. He got his teeth to the slat the lock was secured to, and began to chew. His stomach roiled, but then his Art overruled it, and his jaws worked, grinding and grinding away, tearing off splinters and jagged mouthfuls of the cell.

Wasp slavers were in motion from all around, pitching into the air and casting over the labyrinth of cells towards the commotion. Sfayot glanced up, jaws working fiercely, as one of them levered open the lid on that cell, hand extended. Instantly there was a man leaping up from it, Art-born wings flaring: a Dragonfly-kinden, rich clothes reduced to nothing but rags, but there was a brooch, some golden brooch, proudly displayed on his chest now, that surely the slavers would have taken if they