by Joseph Lallo
Sespian frowned. What kind of answer was that? “I know. I read your file.”
“Most officers are. The Imperial Service Academy is costly, but I was fortunate enough to find someone to finance my education.”
“Who might that be?” Sespian had read Dunn’s service record before choosing him but hadn’t thought to look into who paid for his education. A mistake, apparently.
“The same people who made it possible to blindside Hollowcrest. Did you honestly think some lowly lieutenant could get all the information you asked for so quickly? Half the intelligence department belongs to them.”
“Who?”
The carriage turned and headed downhill. Where were they going? To the smelter Dunn mentioned, or had that been a lie?
Sespian bent forward slightly. His dagger was in his left boot. Since Dunn was to the right, maybe he could draw it without being noticed.
“I always knew there’d be favors expected later.” Dunn sighed. “I didn’t image they’d be treasonous, and I’ve been wrestling with that the last few days. I liked you. But then as it turns out, I’m not being treasonous at all here.” He turned accusing eyes on Sespian.
“How not?”
“You know what I’m talking about—you must.”
Sespian sighed deeply, using the expression to justify a slump. His forearms dropped onto his knees and his fingers dangled near his boots. “No, I’m quite lost in this entire conversation. Will you at least tell me what we’re doing?” He let his left arm fall to his ankle.
“You’re going to meet Sicarius,” Dunn said.
Sespian winced. He had hoped that was a lie too. “The people who paid for your education hired Sicarius to kill me tonight?”
A few days ago, Dunn had seemed as chipper and willing to please as a puppy. Now he was as masked and guarded as every other lackey with an agenda.
“I’m sorry, but you’re not going to live past dawn,” Dunn said, probably the first straight answer of the ride.
Sespian’s fingers fastened around the hilt of the dagger. Unfortunately, the cursed pistol was still pointing unerringly at him.
“People will miss me soon,” he said. “Your employers couldn’t have bought off everyone.”
“They’re not my employers, just people I owe. But I understand a confusing scene has been arranged to befuddle those who might follow.”
Dunn shifted and slid a hand into his parka. The pistol never wavered as he pulled out a small brown bottle filled with liquid. He set it on the seat, withdrew a folded kerchief, and laid it down as well. With one hand, he unscrewed the cap of the bottle.
A grimness settled over Sespian as he watched. He suspected his time for wrestling his freedom from Dunn was coming to an end. He had to act soon.
“Dunn, I can appreciate your loyalty to those who paid for your school, but arranging my death?” Sespian eased the dagger out of the sheath. “It’s...not a very nice thing to do. I liked you too. I thought I could trust you. Surely, you could have had everything you ever wanted working at my side.”
“It would have been a lie.” Dunn placed the kerchief atop the bottle and, one-handed, tipped it to soak the cloth. “You’re not the rightful—”
Sespian lunged. Dunn saw him but hesitated before firing. He was probably supposed to deliver a living emperor.
Sespian’s momentum took him into a tackle. He and Dunn slammed against the carriage door. The pistol struck the wall, then clattered to the floor. Sespian drew back his arm and stabbed, but Dunn dodged and the dagger clanked against the door. A boot hooked Sespian’s legs and jerked him off his feet. He crashed into a bench. Before he could move, Dunn’s weight leaned into his back. Cheek smashed against the velvet upholstery, Sespian pushed but could not budge. A hand snaked around his head and pressed the cloth to his face.
A sweet, cloying smell flooded his nostrils. He plunged his elbow behind him and caught ribs.
“Ooph!”
The grip relaxed for a moment, and Sespian tried to yank free. Dunn recovered and the kerchief smothered Sespian’s face. The sweet smell invaded his lungs, and his heart thundered in his ears. Blackness encroached on his vision. The sound of the wheels chugging beneath the carriage changed; they were crossing a bridge. The last thing Sespian was aware of was brakes squealing.
* * * * *
A quick check of the carriage house out back proved Larocka, or perhaps the servants, had taken off with the steam vehicles. Arakan Hill and the Imperial Barracks loomed three or four miles away. With no other alternatives, Amaranthe loped off on foot. Despite her attempt to dismiss them, the others puffed along behind her.
The smell of wood smoke hung in the crisp air, and bare branches turned the moonlight into a latticework of shadows. Last time she walked this way, enforcers had ambushed her. Tonight, no one else lurked on the long street paralleling the Ridge. The city felt oddly quiet, as if it was holding its breath.
They had gone no more than a mile when an explosion boomed into the silence. The cracks of firearms followed, and Amaranthe halted to listen, trying to pinpoint the origins.
Maldynado stopped beside her. “It sounds like it’s coming from the Midtown River.”
The rest of the men caught up.
“They’ve already got Sespian,” Amaranthe said.
Books bent over and sucked in a gulp of air. “It could...just be a...coincidence.”
More firearms bawled in the distance. Up on Arakan Hill, an alarm bell pealed.
“Want to bet on it?” Amaranthe asked.
“No,” Books said.
Running again, they turned west at the next street and raced off Mokath Ridge toward the river. She wished the trolleys were running, but it was too late at night.
Before they made it halfway there, the firing stopped, and only the alarm bell disturbed the silence. Amaranthe fought the urge to zip along faster, leaving the others behind. Her lungs were not yet burning, but she could hear the ragged wheezes of Books and Akstyr. She would probably need their help for whatever they stumbled across.
They rounded a corner, and the 52nd Street Bridge came into view. The street lamps illuminated a ghastly scene, and Amaranthe paused in the shadows.
Black smoke poured from a collision site. Two steam carriages had struck each other at the base of the bridge, one painted in imperial black and gold, the other nondescript. Another of the emperor’s vehicles had crashed through the rail of the bridge, and wobbled tenuously, the front half hanging out over the frozen river twenty feet below. The bodies of imperial soldiers—no, the emperor’s personal guard—littered the blood-smeared street.
“We’re too late,” Amaranthe whispered.
“What was the emperor doing out in the middle of the night?” Maldynado asked.
She touched the communication stone in her pocket. “I bet someone on Larocka’s payroll talked him into coming out. Let’s see if he’s...” She gulped, unable to finish the sentence. She did not want to see Sespian’s broken body on the street.
Despite the late hour, the noise had drawn a crowd from nearby tenements. A handful of enforcers struggled to establish barricades on either side of the bridge, but this had just happened and few men had arrived. Reinforcements would show up shortly, but perhaps Amaranthe could sneak close enough to investigate the crash first.
“Books, come with me, please. The rest of you, a distraction would be good.”
“What kind of distraction?” Maldynado asked.
“The kind where you do something creative to keep the enforcers from noticing us snooping.”
“Creative, eh?” Maldynado tossed a speculative look at his comrades.
Afraid to wonder, Amaranthe grabbed Books and angled toward the river. They passed between two street lamps and skidded down the snowy bank. She flailed but caught her balance on the ice. Books landed on his butt. She paused long enough to help him up, then ran and slid for the closest of the two piers anchored in the rive
r.
Black against the starry sky, the truss bridge loomed overhead. Steam screeched, another vehicle approaching. A truck delivering more enforcers, probably.
Amaranthe clambered up the cement block, but hesitated when she looked up at the steel supports.
“Maybe you should wait down here,” she told Books.
“I’m coming,” he said.
She shrugged. One vertical and two diagonal steel beams rose from the concrete, and she took one of the diagonals. The angle made the climb doable, and she soon peered over the floor of the bridge. The tottering steam carriage wobbled to her left with the two crashed vehicles at the base to her right.
“Yo, when’s this bridge gonna be cleared?” Maldynado’s voice came from the crowd.
Feeling exposed under the starlight, Amaranthe hoped her distraction was forthcoming. She grabbed the rail and pulled herself over.
All the doors of the tottering carriage were open, and one hung from a sole hinge. The front of the vehicle was smashed. The driver had been thrown free.
Steel clashed at the base of the bridge. Maldynado had engaged a pair of enforcers in a sword fight. Amaranthe didn’t see Basilard or Akstyr.
She knelt near the driver’s body, her hand resting on the ground. Cooling blood puddled on the sand-covered ice and dampened her fingers. That didn’t startle her, but the man’s slit throat did. The crash hadn’t killed him; a dagger had.
As she eased around him toward a second body, her fingers brushed broken glass. She plucked up several shards, some curved, some straight.
Behind her, Books lumbered onto the bridge.
“Stop them!” someone cried.
Amaranthe’s head jerked up. Someone must have spotted them.
“They’re stealing our truck!”
Steam squealed from the enforcer vehicle, and it lurched into motion. She almost laughed. She hadn’t been spotted; the enforcers were yelling at Maldynado and the others. Metal crunched, the sound rising over the shouts of the enforcers and the crowd. Whoever was driving the stolen truck had crashed it into another arriving vehicle. Cries of “idiot!” punctuated baser profanities.
“We’ll have to rescue them from jail in the morning,” Books muttered.
Amaranthe slipped the glass shards into a pocket. “Look around. We won’t have much time before someone notices us.”
She slipped down the bridge where more inert bodies sprawled. The fallen all wore imperial uniforms. There was no sign of enemy dead. In fact, there was hardly any sign of a fight at all. She checked body after body, each neatly dispatched. Despite the earlier gunfire she’d heard, these men had all been killed by blades.
It seemed inconceivable that even skilled assassins could so unequivocally dispatch Sespian’s guard, who would have been doubly alert after a crash....
Amaranthe crouched beside one of the last bodies. Moisture—blood—saturated a guard’s black uniform. A dagger stuck into the chest to the hilt.
After a moment of hesitation, Amaranthe tugged it free. Even coated in blood, even in the dim light from the street lamps, she recognized it. Sicarius’s black dagger.
“Who’s up there?” someone called.
This time, the enforcers were looking at her.
“Corporal Tennil,” Books said.
“There’s no...” Hand on the hilt of a sword, one of the enforcers stepped forward.
“Time to go,” Amaranthe whispered.
She stuck the dagger in her belt and scrambled for the side of the bridge. This time, she made Books go first, afraid he would get caught if she didn’t.
Two enforcers pounded toward them. Lamplight glinted on a steel blade.
“Hurry!” she urged.
As soon as Books’s head dipped out of view, Amaranthe slithered over the side. A sword whistled down from above but glanced off the railing.
Her foot missed the beam on her first groping stab, and she almost fell. She found a foothold on the second attempt and released her hand just before an enforcer boot crushed it.
Sliding more than climbing, she made the bottom in seconds. Books landed at the same time with a grunt.
“Next time, I’ll just wait on the—”
Crossbow quarrels clinked into the ice at their feet. She grabbed his arm, dragged him under the bridge, and raced out the other side. They clung to the deep shadows near the bank and didn’t climb up until they were out of crossbow range.
Several blocks later, with the shouts fading behind, Amaranthe finally paused under a street lamp. She pulled out the dagger and held it beneath the light. Yes, it was definitely Sicarius’s weapon, the one she had left in Hollowcrest’s office. Someone was trying to frame him.
“I didn’t see the emperor’s body,” Books said.
“No, there’s still hope.” Amaranthe removed the shards of glass from her pocket.
“Broken vials?” Books picked up a concave piece and sniffed. “Liquid smoke.”
“What’s that?”
“I remember a science professor trying to make some once. It’s a Kendorian concoction that tears your eyes and makes it hard to breathe. They probably modified crossbows to shoot the vials. It’s extremely expensive to make, but that wouldn’t be a problem for Larocka.”
“That’s why the soldiers were dispatched so easily.”
“They must have kidnapped Sespian,” Books said.
“Yes, of course. The note said...” She stopped. Crazy times or not, she could not give away Sicarius’s secret. “The emperor was to be taken somewhere and burned alive.”
“But where?” Books asked.
“There’s no way to...” A silvery bump on one of the shards of glass drew her eye. She squinted and rubbed it with her thumb. Molten steel that had hardened. She had seen it all over the scrapyard at the Oak Iron Smelter. She handed the piece to Books. “Looks like they prepped in a smelter. There was one on that list of businesses Larocka owns, wasn’t there?”
“Yestfer,” he said.
Amaranthe thought of the note, the threat to burn Sespian alive, and she gripped the lamppost as a vision rushed over her. Larocka dumping him in a vat of molten steel.
“That’s where they’ll be,” she said. “I have to go.”
“We have to go.”
“You have to go back to the bridge. Try to extricate the others, but most importantly tell the enforcers to get men to Yestfer. If I get killed...someone else needs to know where Sespian is.”
“They’re not going to listen to me!”
“You have to try. Hurry, Books, there’s no time to debate.”
He lifted a hand. “Very well.”
She sprinted down the street, heading for the industrial part of town.
“Be careful!” Books called after her.
The downhill grade made the run easier, but the blocks dragged past. Stars glittered in a dark sky framed by darker buildings.
She turned a corner onto a wide street heading down to the railroad and the lake. The massive chimney of the smelter came into view, black smoke pouring from its rim, blotting out stars. Someone was burning coal for the furnace. It was too early for normal work hours. A queasy lurch ran through her stomach. She was not sure whether to be elated or scared she had guessed right.
Beneath the chimney squatted a vast rectangular building with windows too high to peer through. A twenty-foot sliding door stood open two feet, and several steam carriages were parked out front. Guards surely waited to trap—or shoot—anyone who came through.
Keeping to the shadows, Amaranthe angled around the smelter. There had to be another entrance.
On the scrapyard side of the building, a roll-up door was shut. She jogged closer, but a huge lock secured it. Rounding another corner took her to railroad tracks coming up from the lake and the shipyards. The rails disappeared beneath double doors—also locked. Under them, a gap allowed the tracks to pass through with a couple inches to spare. A man would have a ha
rd time squirming his way through the opening, but maybe she could fit.
Before she could talk herself out of it, Amaranthe flopped onto her belly in the gravel next to the tracks. She peered into the building, but saw only bins and stacks of ingots in the dim light.
She poked her head under the door, and heat washed over her face. She wriggled through the gap.
Once inside, she pushed into a crouch. A railroad car with a slag ladle blocked most of her view. A shoot perched above it, though no molten material poured down at the moment. Amaranthe listened for voices, but roaring fires and hot air pumping into furnaces drowned out lesser noises.
Catwalks overhead followed the walls, crisscrossed the interior, and met at the stories-high blast furnace dominating the building. Bins of iron ore, charcoal, and limestone cluttered the view at floor level. Larocka could be hiding a battalion of soldiers—and her prisoner—in the enormous building.
The catwalks would provide the best view of the facility. Of course, it would also make it easier for people on the ground to view her too. No help for that.
She found a ladder and climbed. A diagonal track running from ore bins to the loading platform above the furnace offered her some cover. A cart waited at the top, but nobody stood up there manning it.
Thirty feet up, Amaranthe reached the catwalk. She still couldn’t see anyone below, but the blast furnace blocked the front door area.
Heavy uniforms and shielded aprons hung on hooks, presumably to protect workers from the heat and molten detritus. Helmets and thick gloves perched on a shelf. On the chance she might need hand protection, Amaranthe grabbed a pair and stuck them in her belt.
Staying low, she crept toward the furnace. The open railings and metal grid flooring would only provide partial cover if someone started shooting.
Once she glimpsed movement below, but when she turned her head, she saw nothing. If someone dangerous and elusive was moving amongst the machinery, she hoped it was Sicarius. Dare she hope he was in the building? Only the metal splattered on the glass shard had made her think of the smelter. If it was up to her to save Sespian alone...
Daunted at the thought, she licked her lips and continued toward the blast furnace. The intensity of the heat increased. By the time she came abreast of the furnace, sweat bathed her torso and stung her eyes.