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

bit far. All this just for his Lordship? Cordwick wondered, but then he recalled just how much of a legend Darien had built about himself. His appearing over a hilltop with a thousand Commonwealer spearmen was not entirely impossible.

For an intinerant Consortium agent, however, the doors were opened, and Tesse’s draftsmanship bore the weight of the gate-guards’ scrutiny. With as little difficulty as that they entered Del Halle.

Once inside, there were a few more hoops to fly through, of course. There was the hoop of kicking their heels in a barren antechamber while someone was found to deal with them. There was the hoop of explaining to the duty officer the exact same business that they had given over to the gate guards. Then there was the fortress quartermaster, who was all fat-man joviality on the surface whilst being viciously suspicious about someone trying to pry into whatever rackets he had going. Cordwick had done it all before. He had the imperial speech off perfectly, not quite an accent so much as a rhythm to the words: attack and defence, now pushing his own importance, then giving way to authority: the perfect picture of an ambitious Beetle in a Wasp’s world.

After that they got the governor. The man was mid-supper when they were ushered in. Cordwick had timed their arrival for the appetisers, but the quartermaster had been more suspicious than expected. The governor himself was an old soldier, as the place merited: a battlefield major jumped up to colonel for the post. He was broad-shouldered, just starting to thicken at the waist, and he wore bracers and a gorget even eating in his own hall. His greying hair was short and neat and there was a sword slung over the back of his chair, as though he was prepared for an attack on the very heart of his power. Cordwick saw it, and saw that this was not the general readiness of the fortress but the man’s personal campaign to cling to his younger days of beloved strife.

“Colonel Borden,” he was named, and Cordwick, as Cardwic, saluted him.

Borden’s gaze passed over him, finding nothing of interest. He continued eating, something highly spiced and with plenty of meat, from the smell and look of it, letting his visitors stew for a while before grunting, “What do you want?”

“Well, sir, I’m conducting a survey of this principality for my factor...” Cordwick started, anticipating the interruption.

“Who?” Borden snapped.

“Obden Bellowern, sir,” came the prompt, prepared reply. Whether there was an Obden of that family, Cordwick had no idea, but the Bellowerns were a Big Noise in the Consortium, a name to conjure with.

Borden inclined his head, sullen but satisfied. “By survey you mean seeing what’s not nailed down,” he asserted.

“One man’s theft is another man’s conquest,” Cordwick agreed, philosophically. The recently-occupied Commonweal territories were awash with agents of the various Consortium magnates wrestling for control of the new opportunities the invasion had turned up. The fact that Borden disapproved was noted and filed.

“Any special brief?” the colonel asked suspiciously.

“Agriculture, if you can believe it,” Cordwick told him. “I don’t know if you’ve heard, but the East-Empire harvests weren’t so great, the last two years.”

It was a sufficiently innocuous and plausible proposition that Borden just nodded along. “And you want what from me?” he demanded.

“From you, sir? Why nothing, As I’m going to be underfoot, so to speak, I thought I should take the courtesy of introducing myself.”

That drew a few beats of calculating silence from the man, as Cordwick held his breath and hoped he’d got his appraisal right. Then the office nodded again, less abruptly. “That’s more courtesy than most Consortium men show,” he noted. “Most of your lot come and go without so much as a word, but you can imagine the fuss when two or three of them get strung up as smugglers because nobody knew.”

Good. This was a story Cordwick had heard before, enough times to guess that it was probably apocryphal, a soldier’s joke. That was fine because Borden was a soldier’s soldier who didn’t like the presumption of the Consortium merchants. Cordwick had now presented himself as respectful and polite, and it was no surprise when the governor gestured at a chair. Cordwick sat at the colonel’s table, implicitly in.

A scattering of other officers were present, most of them looking as though they had been pried from their armour only reluctantly. Borden surrounded himself with like-minded men. Cordwick nodded carefully to them, measuring each until he came to the discordant note: a man as bald as a stone, sour faced as though whatever he was eating had been laced with lemons. A man, more to the point, with a vacant chair to either side of him. Not one of us, that said, but at the same time he was there, and within two seats of the governor. To Cordwick, that said Rekef as clear as if it had been branded on the man’s forehead. Had circumstances allowed, he would have shot an I-told-you-so at Tesse, currently fidgeting behind his chair. As it was, he just gave the bald man the same polite acknowledgement as the rest. It was not returned.

“You’ll want a roof over your head, while you’re surveying,” Borden dropped in.

“If possible, for myself and my slave,” Cordwick said.

“Knew you’d want something from me.” Borden nodded at Tesse. “She’s all you have, no escort? So you’ll be wanting guards and the like also?”

“Colonel, on my way here I saw a score of dead Slave corps men who’d run into some kind of local trouble. Travelling light and out of colours and, if you’ll forgive me, with no pale Wasp faces to catch attention, is the safest thing for me.”

Borden smiled at that, for the first time. “Prudent,” he noted, and then ate for a while. A bowl and wooden spoon was placed before Cordwick, and he took a few mouthfuls of some kind of stew, so spicy as to be flavourless.

“You’ve done a fair job of turning