For Love of Distant Shores (Tales of the Apt Book 3) by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Author:Adrian Tchaikovsky [Tchaikovsky, Adrian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9781910935712
Publisher: NewCon Press
Published: 2018-04-09T22:00:00+00:00

When one thinks of Ant-kinden, the Lowlander sort anyway, one imagines a plodding, inexorable advance – men and women in a great heavy load of mail with big shields just tramping forwards in silence. The silence was the only thing that image had in common with the Alethi. Their progress through the forest was swift enough to test my employer’s stamina until he was dragging at the end of the column, wheezing and relying on the charity of passing Ants to help him along. Nor did they simply cover distance. The Alethi were constantly at work, parties of them ranging ahead and on either side, hunting and harvesting everything the forest had to offer. I thought at first that they must be a kind of plague, stripping the trees bare of everything but the leaves and leaving a denuded desert behind them. After a day’s progress I realised that they were not raiders but a curious breed of farmers, the whole forest their plantation. They chose precise paths, going where no Ant column had passed in sufficient time for the fruit and game to regenerate, and they took precisely as much as they required. I even had the sense that they planted seeds behind them, shaping what the forest would turn into so that, next time around, there would be more of use to them. They cut timber as well, and gathered vines for weaving. They shelled game for chitin and hide, and all without letting up their progress.

Doctor Phinagler, as I say, was rather left behind by all this fierce industry, and might actually have ended up devoured by something if the Ants had left anything in their wake large enough to devour him. In truth, I think they kept an eye on him, and the returning foraging parties kept lending him a shoulder to boost him along. For a people who lived on a rope stretched over the unpredictable jaws of nature this seemed remarkably charitable to me, but Corvaris Blaze explained it thus: “They are masters of this place not because of their strength or their ferocity, but because of their community. Each looks out for the rest and, because we travel with them, we come somewhat under their protection. Of course, we don’t mesh minds like they do, so they will forget about us from time to time, but they make good hosts. They have cousins all the way south, ranging over most of the forest and beyond. A frontier the Spider-kinden’s vaunted diplomacy has never managed to breach, because we have little they need, and because they are very many.”

“I wonder that they don’t turn up in force at someone’s gates,” I mused.

“Perhaps one day, but they’re not like city-dwelling Ant-kinden. Lacking a permanent home that needs constant defence, they don’t see everyone as enemies in the same way. And lucky for us.”

Now that our presence on his expedition was accomplished, Blaze was all smiles again. He had no difficulty keeping up with the Ants,

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