“I need to find Parkonis and make sure he can get away from the Turgonians,” she said. “And, Rias? Agarik didn’t make it.”
His jaw tightened, but he kept himself to a curt nod.
“He saved my life,” Tikaya said, “so I could come back to help you.”
Rias grabbed a second rucksack and started filling it for her. She glanced at Sicarius.
“He’s almost down,” she murmured. “If we want to take him out, this may be our last chance.” That weeks-long trek would be arduous enough without an assassin hounding them. “If he comes after us...after you... We can’t waste the gift Agarik gave us.”
Rias finished packing. “We won’t.”
Sicarius jumped the last ten feet, landing lightly. Even in defeat, that same stony mask hid his thoughts, his feelings.
Rias handed Tikaya her pack and a fresh quiver of arrows for her bow. He picked up a rifle but did not bother to load it.
“Ready.” He pointed to a tunnel, a tunnel they would have to walk past the assassin to reach.
Metal rang softly as Sicarius pulled a dagger from his belt and stepped into their path.
Tikaya grabbed Rias’s elbow when he did not slow. “Are you mad?”
Rias removed her hand gently and strode toward the tunnel. Tikaya nocked an arrow, but did not fully draw the bow. Rias had to know what he was doing. Didn’t he? Shaking her head, she followed him.
Sicarius’s grip tightened around the dagger hilt. “You never intended to help. You had the chance to redeem yourself, but you betrayed the emperor again.”
Rias stopped a few feet from him. “Yes.”
Sweat dripped down the sides of Sicarius’s dust-streaked face and dampened his pale hair. For the first time, he seemed uncertain, frazzled. Young. “Why?”
“I couldn’t let him have those weapons. There’s no honor in destroying one’s enemies like that. Nobody should have that kind of power.”
“That wasn’t for you to decide.”
“Yes, it was. Sometimes the only person capable of such a decision is someone who stands on the outside, someone who has nothing left to lose, nothing to gain, by the outcome.”
“Nothing to gain?” Sicarius asked. “You could have had your life back, your lands.” The faintest hint of longing entered his voice. “You could have been a hero again.”
Tikaya lowered the bow as it dawned on her that Sicarius had yet to point the dagger at Rias. Not here and not at any point since he had shown up.
“That’s never been a goal of mine,” Rias said. “The definition of a hero changes depending on the needs of the person with the dictionary. And of late I’ve become more aware how much being a hero to the empire means being a war criminal to the rest of the world.” Rias smiled sadly at Tikaya before turning back to Sicarius. “For twenty years, I served Turgonia. I think it’s time now to see if I can serve the world.”
“I see,” Sicarius said, and Tikaya had a hard time telling if he truly did or not.
Rias unsheathed a dagger, flipped it in his hand, and held it hilt-first toward Sicarius. It was utterly black, one of the tools they had gathered for working on the cubes. The keen edge would probably never dull.
Sicarius considered it for a long moment before accepting it. Peace offering, Tikaya guessed.
“Are you returning with Bocrest and the others?” Rias asked.
“Yes,” Sicarius said.
“Parkonis is no threat to the empire. Will you see to it that he escapes when the ship docks in Port Sakrent?”
Tikaya’s eyes widened, not in surprise that Rias would care enough to make the request, but that he was asking Sicarius for a favor. After they had defeated him.
“If that is your wish,” Sicarius said, stunning Tikaya even more.
The kid was going to be in trouble already for not completing his mission, for letting Rias go. Earlier, she had been thinking of shooting him, but now she found herself hoping the emperor had invested too much in his education to dispose of him over a failure.
“Thank you,” Rias said. “And one last request: will you relay a message to the emperor for me?”
Sicarius tilted his head.
“Though I may never see them again, I have family and friends in Turgonia. It is not my intention to make trouble for the empire. But I want him to know that if he bothers them or—” Rias angled toward Tikaya, directing Sicarius’s eyes to her, “—if he sends anyone after her or her family, I will become trouble.”
Tikaya thought she detected bleakness in the assassin’s usual mask. Yes, all Fleet Admiral Starcrest would have to do to make the emperor’s life unpleasant would be to show up on the Nurian Chief’s threshold, offering to help war against his former nation.
“I will tell him,” Sicarius said.
“Thank you,” Rias said again, and he put a hand on Sicarius’s shoulder. “You would have made a good officer.”
“Not the road fate paved for me,” Sicarius said, but something in the soft exhale that followed his words made Tikaya wonder if he wished things were different.
Epilogue
As the light faded from the mountains, Rias placed the last block of snow on the top of the igloo. There was no wood to make a fire, though a kerosene lantern provided a pool of light.
He stepped back, brushed off his gloves, and quirked an eyebrow. “What do you think?”
It had taken two days to find a “back door” out of the tunnels, and it had brought them out above the tree line with only a couple hours of daylight remaining. Icy wind gusted along the ridge, and the first stars glittered in the clear sky. The night would be long and cold, very cold. Though she had helped build it, Tikaya eyed the igloo dubiously.
“You’re sure we won’t freeze to death?” she asked.
They had enough gear, Rias assured her, to make it out of the mountains and to the nearest town. Still, the lack of firewood and the plummeting temperature made her nervous for this first night.
Rias flattened his hand on his chest. “Are you questioning my engineering skills?”
“No, I’m sure it’s structurally stable. I’m questioning the wisdom of sleeping inside a box of snow.”
He chuckled, ambled over, and kissed her on the forehead. “Snow is insulating, my dear. Once our body heat warms up the igloo, you’ll be able to sleep naked if you want.”
“Sleep naked, huh?”
His eyes twinkled. “The sleeping part is optional.”
A distant boom echoed through the mountains. The marines had apparently found a different way out and were following their orders to seal the tunnels. She hoped they were treating Parkonis well. Leaving him felt like a betrayal, but the reality was he would probably make it home sooner and less eventfully than she. And though Sicarius ranked at the top of her list of People She Never Wanted to Meet Again, Rias trusted him to keep his word, and she trusted Rias.
She wished she had been able to keep her word to Agarik. Leaving him there to be incinerated by that machine... Another betrayal. She wondered what the marines would tell his family. If he even had family. It shamed her that a man had given his life to save hers and she knew so little about him.
Rias shoved their weapons and gear through the igloo’s low entrance, then belly-crawled after. Tikaya grabbed the lantern and managed to get snow down her pants following him. She hissed in frustration as she dug it out in the tiny confines. She could not wait to walk again on a tropical beach.
Inside, there was room enough to lie down if one did not straighten too many limbs. Rias shoved a rucksack in front of the tunnel, leaving them entombed with only a few air holes. The snowy walls gleamed next to the lantern. The single flame brightened the space surprisingly well.
Tikaya lay down, head propped against her pack. “Not bad.”
“Easy,” Rias said, “your lavish praise will inflate my ego.”
Tikaya pulled him down beside her, hoping to shake the gloomy mood that shrouded her. “I’d rather inflate other things.”
“I’m always amenable to that.”
She slid her arms inside his parka. If body heat was the way to warm up an igloo, then she was all for hastening that process along.
Sometime later, and with fewer clothes on, she asked, “How did you know Sicarius would let us go?”
“That was always my plan,” Rias murmured, his lips brushing her ear.
Tikaya chuckled. She lay snuggled in his arms. “And how did you know he would go along with your plan? Especially after we betrayed him and destroyed the weapons before his eyes.”
“I read him.”
“You read him? The kid emoted less than a rock.”
For a moment, Rias did not answer, and she wondered if she had offended him. But, as she formed an apology, he spoke, his tone somewhere between amusement and bemusement.
“What do you think a military strategist does?”
An image filled her mind: Rias, leaning over a map-filled table surrounded by his officers. They pushed miniature battleships back and forth while debating numbers of troops, cannons, practitioners, and the like. Then she realized those battleships and troops were commanded by people. People he had never met face-to-face but that he had to analyze and outthink. She thought of the time Rias had spent working with Sicarius on the trebuchet, talking to him when no one else did, treating him like a promising young officer. As worldly and educated as the assassin seemed, he was still a seventeen-year-old boy, one who had doubtlessly grown up hearing of Rias’s exploits. Whether he showed it or not, Sicarius must have felt a little hero worship for the distinguished veteran. Tikaya smirked. All that time, she had thought Rias was succumbing to his fate. He must have seen Sicarius as the one person he could not escape or physically force his way past, and the one person he needed to befriend.
“I see now,” Tikaya said. “I was being obtuse. Military strategist isn’t a career option where I grew up.”
“Sounds like a lovely place.”
“Yes...about that.” She had told Rias she would follow him anywhere, and she would, but—
“You need to go home and let your family know you’re safe,” he said.
“Just for a week or two. Do you want to come or...” When she had learned his name, she told him he would never be welcome on her island, and she suspected that true, at least not until people’s memories of the war faded, but if he had saved the president from assassination, surely Rias could finagle visitation rights. The president owed her too. He had said as much after her decryption work proved so valuable. But maybe she was being presumptuous. “Or do you need to visit your own family? Let them know you’re alive?”
“I’ll write them a letter from some distant port. The emperor will be irked when he finds out about this, and I don’t think it’d be auspicious for my life expectancy to linger on imperial soil.”
Yes, the Turgonian emperor had never come across as the magnanimous type in the orders she decrypted.
“Besides...” Rias found her hand and linked his fingers with hers. “I have little interest in going home. I seem to have fallen in love with an exotic foreigner, and I have the urge to follow her wherever she wants to go.”
Flutters stirred in her belly. She had hoped that would be his response. “Well, we’ll have the sphere to work on, and as far as places to go, I know of all sorts of ruins around the world with unsolved puzzles and mathematical oddities. Of course, many of them are surrounded by dangerous aborigines, crocodile-filled swamps, and pistol-toting relic raiders, all ready to end your life if you let your guard down for an instant.”
“My dear,” Rias breathed, “if you’re trying to seduce me...it’s working.”
THE END
Afterword
Thank you for giving Encrypted a read. If you enjoyed the adventure, you may want to check out the sequel, Decrypted, and a short story that takes place between the two novels, “Enigma.”
The Emperor’s Edge
by Lindsay Buroker
Copyright © 2010
Introduction to The Emperor’s Edge
The Emperor’s Edge is the first book I published and the first series I completed. I’ve written other series since that have sold more copies and made more money, but a lot of my long-time readers first found me through these books. As far as I know, it’s the only series I’ve written that’s spawned a fan-site and forum, along with copious amounts of fan art. I met some great people through it who eventually became beta readers and friends. People often write and ask if I’ll create new adventures with the heroes Amaranthe and Sicarius.
Those characters, as well as the secondary characters, lived in my head for a long time before I actually got around to writing down some stories. This first book was about seven years in the making, and it wasn’t even the first novel I started with these heroes. Of course, I wasn’t working on the novel that whole seven years—among other things, I lost a few of them to a World of Warcraft addiction. It also took me a while to “get serious” about writing. I’d tinkered off and on since I was five or six, usually writing fan fiction or stories inspired by authors I loved. When I joined a writing workshop, I started writing short stories (and two full novels that I never finished editing) with the characters from what became The Emperor’s Edge. I can’t remember what the first title was, but that wasn’t it. One of the titles of one of the novels that I never finished was Mercenaries and Mayhem. I’m saving that to use on another story someday.
So you can see, the characters were around for a while before they got to star in a published novel. They did change and evolve some over the years. Interestingly, Amaranthe, the female lead throughout the series, was the last to form in my mind and didn’t even exist in some of those early short stories and novels. I had this group of guys (led by the assassin Sicarius) working as mercenaries, and one lady in my writing workshop asked why there weren’t any female characters. I said…. Uh? I don’t know.
I hadn’t even thought about it. A lot of my early writing skewed that way, and I’m not sure if it was because I was a tomboy as a kid and had a lot of male friends or because most of the fantasy and science fiction I read and watched in my youth had mostly male casts of characters (I’m looking at you, original Star Trek). I was also in the army for four years after high school, and that skewed heavily male too. I was the only woman in my section at my first duty station. So, perhaps for a mix of all those reasons, I tended to write stories about guys.
But the idea of adding a female character took root in my mind, and Amaranthe came into the core group of heroes. At first, she was trying to join this gang of mercenaries. Things got more interesting when I decided that she should lead the group. Not only that, she would become the one to assemble them in the first place and get them pointed all in one direction. That became part of the plot for The Emperor’s Edge and the subsequent books. As any woman who’s had to lead a group of men will probably agree, it’s a challenge, and I always tried to keep that in mind. She could have done it by force if she’d been a badass fighter, but I’d seen so many of those Xena kinds of characters in fantasy that I wanted to go another way. (Besides, as a woman who’s participated in a lot of sports, I’ve always found women kicking men’s asses highly unlikely, especially given equal training.) I gave Amaranthe, as her special power, a lot of natural charisma. She’s also a bit of a schemer, as many of my protagonists are, and she has the ability to figure people out and play to their desires. That works for allies (such as taciturn assassins) and enemies. Of course, I couldn’t let her simply talk her way out of desperate situations all the time, but her people skills definitely help her along the way.
For the other characters in the story, I’m not quite sure where Sicarius came from. I’ve always liked the strong, silent types in stories, and he’s definitely that. He’s also logical to a fault, since he doesn’t let mercy or questions of morality get in the way of his actions. If it makes more sense to kill a person than to let him live, he’ll do that. Pairing him with Amaranthe, who’s y
ounger, more naive, and wrestles with wanting to do the right thing, made for an interesting mix. Since I already referenced Star Trek, I’ll say they’re a little Kirk/Spock. If Kirk had been a woman. And taken his shirt off less often.
Akstyr, Maldynado, Basilard, and Books fill out the rest of the group. I don’t think I was specifically thinking of The A-team when I came up with my band of fugitives, but I am a child of the ’80s, and when one reviewer called the Emperor’s Edge series the “A-team of Steam,” I grinned and nodded, thinking that was about right. Amaranthe certainly loves it when a plan comes together.
As far as the “steam” or steampunk element of the stories go, I wasn’t very familiar with steampunk when I started writing these books and wasn’t trying to fit them into the tropes for that genre. I always considered my style fairly swords & sorcery, even if there’s very little magic in this particular world (or this part of the world, I should say), and sword fights aren’t all that common either. I’d read a ton of pseudo medieval, vaguely European fantasy, and I thought it would be fun to advance the technology timeline and have steam-powered vehicles and some more modern elements. I justified the fairly advanced transportation system (advanced compared to some of the other technology and trappings of the world) as something that had been born out of necessity for the world I’d created. An early beta reader who happened to be a horse expert picked on me because I didn’t know much about them and made some mistakes in regard to their care and capabilities. I eventually got frustrated and said, “Fine, no horses then!” I took horses out of the story and decided they’d either never existed in this world (hey, I added lots of species of animals, so taking some away seemed legitimate), or that they’d gone extinct (something that actually happened in North America—horses could have gone the way of dire wolves and mammoths). But I had this empire spanning thousands of miles. I figured the need to move troops across land quickly to defend the borders (or push them outward) might be the mother of invention and push transportation technology.
Beginnings: Five Heroic Fantasy Adventure Novels Page 47