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

Sympathy for the devil? Three major villains of the early books turn up here, but in the novels Scyla never quite gets the moments of redeption that Thalric, and even Uctebri, are allowed. This story goes some little way to making up for that. And the war, of course, goes on. The great battle at the start of this story hreaks the back of the Commonweal resistance and it’s all downhill from there. What remains, then? The renewed age of magic that Uctebri predicts. For those who reach the end of Seal of the Worm, you decide.

The Dreams of Avaris

Roven was a tough guy and Merric was a killer and Skessi was just an annoyance, and they were the bad part of the deal, but me and my partner had been in Wasp cells at the time, and finding a couple of Wasps willing to go absent without leave for a private errand had been all the luck we could scrape together. It was better than slavery. I’d been born poor in Siennis, way down south, and I know everything that one Spider-kinden can teach another about slavery. I was bought and sold from when my mother had parted with me at age five to when I’d cut the throat of the latest merchant to offer me for sale, and I fled the Spiderlands after that because the merchant was an Aristoi man. Back then the Commonweal had seemed a nice peaceful place to pull a few scams and get rich. That was right before the Wasp Empire got the same idea, only on a much larger scale.

From that point, the Dragonfly Commonweal had become an overly exciting place, and I’d have made tracks south, or north, or anywhere, if not for the money. There was money in other peoples’ suffering. The Wasps were chewing up great tracts of Commonweal land, scooping up whole villages’ worth of slaves, winning hard-fought battles, enduring the keen Commonweal winters. They were men, those Wasp soldiers, and men had needs. A light-footed trader in certain luxuries could make a living out of drink and whores and second-hand Dragonfly souvenirs. If I watched my step: watching one’s step was a difficult proposition even for a Spider-born. The Wasp officers had short tempers. Every so often a trader in dubious goods would be taken up, stock confiscated and leg-irons applied with professional speed and care. There was no appeal. The Wasps accorded other kinden no rights, nor even the status of a human being. Everyone else was fair prey.

My name’s Avaris, and I’ve never stayed still long enough to have to change it. My partner was a lean old Dragonfly called Gatre Fael who’d been robbing his kinsmen up and down the roads and canals since long before the Wasps took an interest. Our game was black guild trading and a lot of different versions of selling the Monarch’s Crown to people, which makes sense when you know there’s no such thing, but you’d be amazed how many people don’t know. We’d been working together three years now: my mouth and his knowledge of the land, until we landed up in the north-eastern end of the Principality of Sial Men, and in irons, and in trouble.

We’d done a fair trade, and had missed just one step. We’d passed through the Wasp camps peddling our seedy wares, bringing flesh and firewater to bitter, bloodied soldiers who had been fighting, some of them, a full ten years without seeing their homes and wives. It was not that the war was going badly: to the generals and the folks back home it was stride after stride of victory for the legions of Black and Gold. To the soldiers it was fighting a numberless and fiercely determined enemy, bringing Imperial rule to village after village of bitter, surly peasants, months of trail rations and harsh discipline, the bite of each year’s snow and ice, the red-washed memories of what war had made them do. Even Wasp-kinden started to feel the bloodstains, after ten years without mercy.

We never knew what it was that had seen us taken up, stripped of our goods and slung into slave-cells. It was simply one of those things that happened to people, that you heard about, and this time the people it happened to were us. We had planned for this, though. Gatre Fael had a caper, a good one we had been waiting months to spring, and with slavery our only other option, why not spring it now? Riches beyond riches, Fael had said. Riches beyond riches indeed, but our target was behind Wasp lines, now, and somehow it had never seemed worth the journey.

“It’ll be worth the journey,” I had explained to Roven and Merric. “It’s a fair step, but riches, Sergeant, riches. They used to bury them well-heeled back in the bad old days.”

It helped that Roven, the sergeant, had heard something of this. He opined, offhand, that some officer in the engineers he knew had struck old gold excavating some Commonweal lord’s broken-up castle. “Vaults of it, he said,” Roven explained. “Just bodies and gold.” Merric had looked interested.

“I don’t know, though,” Gatre Fael had said, his lean face twisting, the colour of gold itself. “Disturbing the dead.”

“Disturbing the dead what?” Roven had grunted.

The Dragonfly had shrugged. “They say... bad things happen, when you open the oldest tombs. The makers protected their wealth with curses, and the dead aren’t always that dead.”

And the Wasps had jeered at that, and the seed was planted in their minds.

I could talk forever and Fael knew the land, and that got both of us sprung from the cells and travelling overland north, heading for the mountains. Roven and Merric were sick of campaigning, they said, or of campaigning places where there was too much risk and not enough gold. Both of them were swearing blind they wished they’d signed on with the Slave Corps. Who