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

to gather my wits. The plan seemed to be going ahead full tilt, but in ways I hadn’t really imagined.

When I looked up, he was there: Galtre Fael in a cloak of blown snow across the fire from me. I nodded wearily and reached to start gathering up the spilt loot.

“Stop,” he said. “Avaris, listen to me. Do not touch the treasure, not even one piece of it. Just go, Avaris, go. Please listen to me.”

A cold feeling came to me, but it was disappointment, not fear. I stood slowly, sensing the end of what little good times I had known. “Fael,” I told him, “Don’t.” I reached down for a piece of treasure, a broach worked into the shape of a beetle with spread wings.

“Avaris!” he insisted. “Not one piece! Please!”

“Don’t play it on me,” I told him. “Fael, I practically invented the ghost scam. There’s enough for both of us to live like Princes Major. Don’t try it on me. There’s no need.” But I felt sad because, whether he tried it on me or not, we couldn’t trust each other now. Our partnership had just been killed as sure as Merric.

“Avaris,” Fael said despairingly, and his friends turned up.

Pale shapes with grey wings, but I can do better than that. Ancient armour, hollow eyes, the military prime of the Commonweal’s early glories, pearly bows and white arrows, crescent-headed glaives and long-hafted swords with inscribed blades. Behind them, and mercifully half-lost in the snow, some taller thing, some greater figure, man-shaped but pale and regal and ten feet tall, armoured in mail that would put to shame a sentinel for bulk and a merchant-lord for precious stones.

“Fael.” I remember very clearly my voice, then, how it shook and twisted.

“It’s too late for me,” Fael said, “But they have let me intercede for you, for they were of my kinden once.” His gesture took in the gaunt-faced warriors about him, most definitely not the looming shadow behind.

And I fled, then. I fled without ever having touched the smallest part of the greatest hoard I have ever seen, and I never saw Galtre Fael again, nor heard any word of him.

And I wonder, now... well, at this remove, I’m sure you can guess what I wonder. I wonder whether my friend truly spent his last free moments, facing absolute annihilation, bartering for my continued life and health, and if so, I cannot measure what I owe him in all the world’s riches.

But I wonder, too, whether the second plan, the plan Fael and I had that contained the first plan we explained to Roven and the others, I wonder whether that second plan might not have been part of a third plan, known only to Fael.

And I will never know.

“They loved to dwell in cold stone...” People do ask how much I planned Shadows of the Apt out in advance, and really I should just point them at this story. This was written with ‘Ironclads’ and ‘Spoils of War’ at around the time Empire was published, and anyone who’s read The Scarab Path will be able to make a stab at what’s going on in the background and who the armoured giant is. Moreover, the business with the Centipede is absolutely pointing at the revelations from the last few books. As a side note, Avaris turns up in Heirs of the Blade as one of Dal Arche’s brigands, and he tells this very story to his fellows to entertain them. So perhaps it is just a campfire ghost story after all...

The Prince

There were two other men in Cordwick’s cell. One was dead and the other was showing far too many signs of life

When the Wasp-kinden had taken Maille Castle from the Dragonfly-kinden they had taken it mostly intact, and Cordwick was given to understand that the task of turning Commonweal fortification into imperial garrison had fallen to the engineering corps. He gleaned this by what the Wasps had done to the cellars, which spoke volumes of the lengths artificers would go to to stave off boredom.

They had converted the cellars into a prison, being Wasps. Their technical difficulty was that Maille Castle was constructed over a subterranean river. The ancient stones of the fort above formed an arch straddling nothing, a bridge over nowhere, each end soundly founded in the rock, and the middle suspended over the hidden watercourse. Architecturally, it was a piece of genius. Defensively it had been less than useless, and the Imperial Sixth had captured it in just a day. Now the war, which they were calling the Twelve Year War, was done, and the border of the Empire had swept on far from Maille.The place had become a storehouse and a prison and a staging post for the Slave Corps.

The aforementioned cellars were a great vaulted space buried beneath the castle’s arch, and floored only with dark water, where the river plunged ten feet into a roiling pool before coursing on between the rocks. Denied a conventional oubliette to store their captives in, the engineers of the Sixth had become ingenious.

Of the men in Cordwick’s cell, the dead one, had been Dragonfly-kinden. He had been wounded before he was lowered in and had died shortly after and, despite Cordwick’s vocal complaints, none of the guards had seen fit to remove him. The third man was the problem. The third man had been brought in bound, wrist and ankle, spitting death and vengeance. His legs were already free, and he was slowly working at the leather thongs pinning his hands, wearing them away against the rough iron of the bars, gnawing at them with his teeth. His eyes were fighting mad. He was itching to kill someone. The barbed spines of his arms, that had made such short work of his ankle-bonds, were twitching and fretting, demanding to be slaked with blood. The problem was that the cell itself was shackled shut, an impediment that was never going to yield to spines and teeth. The