Spoils of war (Tales of the Apt, #1) by Tchaikovsky Adrian

Author:Tchaikovsky, Adrian
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epic Fantasy, Steam Punk, Apt, High Fantasy, Action and adventure
Publisher: NewCon Press
Published: 2016-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

Shadow Hunters

Should never have taken this job, was Gaved’s thought on seeing the forest. He was a man who preferred to trust his instincts, but he also preferred to eat. Being a freelance Wasp-kinden in an occupied land where every other man of your people wore the uniform made it hard to find work. Patrons were scarce when you were hated by the locals and despised by the invaders.

Then he had met the Moth, tucked quietly in the corner of a raucous army drinking tent full of off-duty soldiers, half of them still in their black and gold armour. That one corner had been an oasis of stillness and quiet, and there was the Moth. They were a relic of another land’s mystical past, the Moth-kinden, eking out a living on the edges of the Apt world. Like all the Inapt – like the Dragonfly-kinden that the Wasp army had recently bludgeoned into surrender – the Moths were a people who could not grasp the principles of machines, of logistics, of the modern world. They were the last tattered scraps of the past.

This man of the Moth: grey skin, blank white eyes, slender enough that a burly Wasp like Gaved could have broken him in half, yet somehow his soft voice had slid past all the rowdy jabber of the drinkers. “I have work for you.”

And here Gaved was, following the only employment he had been able to find, doing the bidding of one Moth by hunting down another. Somewhere in this tangle of thorn-barked trees there was a second man of that grey kinden, and Gaved was tasked with bringing him out.

Or kill him, the instructions had gone. Tell him it is better to be dead, than to be what he is.

Gaved had trawled for rumours about the forest his quarry had holed up in. A dark place, he was told; a bad place. The locals never went there, the army had not needed to fight there. Probably it was somewhere the Dragonflies thought was magic, not that a Wasp would care about that. More recently it was a haunt of bandits, because the war had left a lot of armed men with nothing to do,

Gaved didn’t mind bandits. He preferred them to soldiers, most of the time.

They ran into him at the same moment he ran into them, both sides freezing in surprise. Gaved had his hands out instantly, his palms warming with the Wasp Art. A thought from him and golden fire would spit from between his fingers, showing these locals just why his people were feared.

He saw a man and a woman, both Dragonflies, lean and golden-skinned. The woman wore a few pieces of iridescent armour, no doubt prised from a dead noble’s body. She had a sword, and perched on one wrist was the hunting insect of her kinden, a dragonfly two feet long with a carapace of glittering metallic blue, huge eyes regarding him and all the world impartially.

The man wore a ragged greatcoat and he had a short bow in his hands, which concerned Gaved far more than the sword or the insect.

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