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

here. A force of Commonwealers had turned up at the rear of Thalric’s men, either sent to relieve the castle or just very lost. The Empire’s response had been swift and predictable.

Serge Volente stood and looked out at it all, and she saw him tremble. Her secret heart exalted at it.

“Behold,” she told him, “the glorious field of valour. Here did the gilded lords and ladies of the Commonweal bring their righteous battle against the craven brutes of the Wasp Empire.”

She was exaggerating, of course: courage was one thing the soldiers of the Empire never lacked. She was telling him the story as the old tales were told, though, where the heroes of those days had walked through a world that bled superlatives.

The Wasps had removed their own dead for cremation, of course. What was left was the history of the Wasp-Commonweal war in miniature: dead Dragonfly-kinden and their allies, strewn and abandoned.

“Here, these were noble retainers,” she went on, picking her way forwards and drawing him with her. “See how their bright armour gleams.” Where it isn’t shattered. “See the swords and bows and lances, the tools of their ancient and exquisite skills.” Broken now, fallen from lifeless hands. “And here, the great and loyal populace of their farms and fields, banded together in the loyal service of their masters,” she went on, showing him where the peasant levy had been mown down, hacked down, crushed beneath the grinding wheels of the war automotives. “And here –” but for a moment even her jibes failed her, staring at the cracked and half-dismembered carcass of a praying mantis twelve feet long, killing arms splayed and twisted. Around it, the spined corpses of Mantis-kinden lay where they had fallen, the most feared killers of the old days brought down by crossbow bolts and stingshot.

“Stop,” whispered Serge Volente, although she already had. And then, “but who are these that have come here.” He was clutching desperately for hope. “Have they come to honour the fallen?”

There were a score or so tattered and hunched figures, creeping sidelong across the field of ruin like crabs. At his assessment of them she laughed.

“Oh my princeling, my poor innocent, they have come to rob the dead of what little dignity remains. They are the carrion-pickers, here for rings and broaches, treasured keepsakes, ancestral heirlooms. Because trinkets are the only things of value left to your people.” She was going to laugh again, but for a moment one of those shabby ring-cutters was looking at her, and she thought she saw red, bulging eyes beneath its cowl.

“How can you be on their side, the ones who have done this?” Volante’s voice brought her back to herself. “You’re one of us.”

And he was clutching at her arm: even her support was better than no support at all. He was pressing close to her because the alternative was the dead or their parasites.

She took him by the shoulders, feeling him shiver. “There is you and me,” she told him, with all the gentleness she could scrape together, “but there is no us. There is no great age of magic for you to inherit. All the futures your father saw were lies.” And tears came to his eyes at last, as though he had only just understood his parents were dead, “The engines of the Wasps grind forwards,” she explained, “and leave this in their wake: this is all that is left of magic now – its corpse.”

“Then what are you?” he asked her desperately.

“I am a maggot in that corpse,” she told him. “But, if you let go all your foolish futures and give yourself to me, I will save you.”

His face clenched, and the sobs took hold of him and shook him. Scyla gathered him in her arms, let him bury his face in her shoulder. He was not hers, not quite: he had not stepped through the doorway of that gilded world he had been born to, but the door was open. All she had to do was wait.

She took him to a sheltered dell: within sight of the high castle, close enough to the battlefield that the air bore a faint scent of festering decay. She was stage-managing Volante’s fall from grace expertly. She got a fire going, while he sat on the hard ground and stared up at the glittering and cheerless constellation that the Wasps had made of his home. Their little artificial lights were out in force, burning with their acrid, unnatural flames and lighting the way for the Wasps’ poor, dull eyes. Eyes that could not see the wonder of the world as Volante’s could. Eyes that saw only mundane and pragmatic things, like profit and victory.

“What do you want with me?” His voice was thin, still ragged with weeping.

“You know what.” She drew him to her; they sat shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip, her arm about him, and yet the last of that distance still remained.

“But I don’t,” he complained. “You want this flesh? You want this face, to add to your collection? And then what? How will I live, then?”

“At least you will live,” she told him. “You’ll live like me. And I will teach you my mystery.” As she said the words, it was as though she were a seer herself: the future unfolded before her. “And we will walk together through the lives of others. I will teach you how to live as a maggot, princeling, if you will learn it of me. If you will step down from your broken throne to stand in the dirt with me. For I am all that is left. The Wasps pillage your home of its treasures, and you are what I carry away from the wreck. But you must surrender to me. You must be mine.”

And he stood at the threshold, trembling at this new world she offered him. It was a world of bones and dust, but it was all the world there was.

Then a new voice came