A sharp rock struck her temple, and she grunted in pain. Amaranthe felt like she was breathing dirt instead of air, and a spasm gripped her lungs. Coughs wracked her body. She fought against panic and the urge to run outside and take her chances with the enemy craft. By now there might not be an outside to run to.
A light weight settled on her upper back. She peeled open one eyelid and found herself looking at Sicarius’s jaw. He’d draped himself over her, protecting her head.
Amaranthe took comfort from his presence and forced herself to stay calm, to breathe slowly, to pull as much air from the dust miasma as she could. What seemed like an hour of quaking and falling rubble was probably only a minute. The noise finally faded, and other coughs-and more than a fair number of curses-filled the air. At least, if her men were cursing, they were alive.
“Emperor’s balls,” a raspy Maldynado said, “we’re trapped.”
Amaranthe lifted her head, and Sicarius shifted away. Her first thought was to check on the emperor and her team to make sure everyone was alive, but the walls of rubble surrounding them on all sides stunned her. Rocks blocked one doorway and half of the other, and boulders had rolled into the cabin. The windows were broken. A single wan lantern had survived the rockfall, and its weak flame flickered, half-choked by the hazy air. Weak or not, it revealed plenty. As Maldynado had said, they were trapped.
“Emperor’s what?” Sespian lifted his head and brushed dirt and pebbles out of his hair.
“Uhm, never mind,” Maldynado said.
Basilard’s fingers flickered, their movements exaggerated so the signs were readable in the poor light. You’ll have to rework your curses, given the present company.
“Maybe so.” Maldynado poked Yara who hadn’t yet lifted her head. “You alive, Grouch?”
Yara stirred, and rubble sloughed off her as she sat up. She looked at Maldynado’s hand, but was apparently too battered to bother berating him for touching.
Sicarius had his eyes closed, head tilted to the side. Listening for more attacks? Amaranthe didn’t hear anything except for periodic shifts of dirt and pebbles trickling to the earth.
“Are we going to be able to get out of here?” Sespian asked.
He sounded calm, despite their position and the blood trickling into his eye from a gash on his brow. Good, nobody was panicking yet.
“Of course.” Amaranthe bumped Sicarius’s arm with the back of her hand. “Right?”
Sicarius eyed the walls of rock. “We’re not far from the tunnel exit, though bringing down the cliff might have compromised the entrance area and caused a landslide.”
“I’m going to call that a yes,” Amaranthe said.
“Optimistic,” Sespian said.
“Yes. Yes, I am.” She flung open the toolbox, or tried to. Flying rocks had dented the lid and warped one of the hinges. The box creaked open slowly. “Grab tools, everyone. Let’s see if we can dig our way out of here.”
“Uhm.” Maldynado looked back and forth from the toolbox to the walls of boulders surrounding them. “Unless you’ve got a steam tractor tucked inside there, I don’t see how-”
Amaranthe cut him off by pressing the coal shovel against his chest. “We’re getting out of here.”
“What if the enemy is waiting outside?” Maldynado asked.
“I doubt they’ll stick around all night.” Amaranthe selected an axe for herself. It wasn’t an ideal tool for digging, but it ought to be sturdy enough to lever rocks aside. “They’ll probably think they’ve buried us alive.”
“Then… they’ll probably be right,” Maldynado said.
She scowled at him. “You aren’t digging yet?”
Maldynado lifted his hands. “All right, boss, I’m digging.” He headed for the side of the cab that was only halfway hemmed in.
The rubble appeared less dense on that side, and Amaranthe spotted an open area at the top of the tunnel. Though no drafts of cool air whispered down from above, she thought that might be a route of less resistance. Basilard and the others were rooting through the toolbox for something suitable. Sicarius had slipped out past Maldynado and was squeezing through a gap between two boulders. If there was an escape route there, that’d be fantastic, except that it was pointing in the opposite direction, to the rear of the train instead of toward the exit.
Amaranthe pointed at the gap near the tunnel ceiling. “I’m going to climb up there and have a look.”
“Be careful,” Sespian said.
Sicarius, who hadn’t quite slipped away into the darkness, paused to look at Sespian and then Amaranthe. She could never guess at the thoughts going through his head, but feared they might have to do with their conversations regarding non-sentimental words to convey sentimental feelings. It wasn’t the time to worry about it, she told herself.
“Thanks, Sire,” Amaranthe said. “I will.”
She thought to send a similar warning to Sicarius, but he had disappeared into the dark crevice.
“Where’s he going without a light?” Maldynado asked.
Amaranthe didn’t answer. She climbed past Maldynado, hands gripping rock cold with the mountain chill. Pebbles shifted under her feet, but she managed to squirm up the stone wall to the gap. There was room for her to lie flat on her belly with her head brushing the stone ceiling, but not much more. She doubted the bigger men could follow her, but it hardly mattered. A few feet ahead of her, the rocks filled the gap, creating a solid wall from floor to ceiling. She crawled toward it anyway. Maybe it was only a couple of feet thick and she could dig her way through the barrier. She refused to believe that it was impassable. She hadn’t put this much effort into rescuing Sespian just to have her team die in a cave-in.
Chapter 18
After an hour of digging and prying at the rocks with the axe, Amaranthe returned to the cab. New gashes adorned her knuckles, and the shoulder wound she’d taken earlier burned like a furnace. Even her back and neck ached as a result of trying to dig from such an awkward position.
Unfortunately, the others had made little progress, unless she could count the dented lanterns someone had found and lit. Sicarius wasn’t back yet, so maybe he’d discovered something, though she didn’t find it encouraging that he’d been heading toward the end of the coal car instead of the tunnel exit.
With shoulders slumped and weary expressions on their faces, Maldynado, Basilard, Sespian, and Yara looked as tired as she felt.
“This could take days,” Maldynado said, leaning on his shovel.
“Unless we run out of air before then,” Yara said.
Amaranthe groped for something optimistic to say. “Books and Akstyr will have missed us by now. Maybe they’ve flown back down the mountain, found the landslide, assumed we were in it, and are seeking a way to help us escape.”
Unless they tangled with that nightmare craft and are now dead, Basilard signed.
So much for optimism.
“Is there any food?” Sespian asked. “Or should I attempt to look particularly unappealing in case your team resorts to cannibalism?”
That earned him a round of surprised stares.
Sespian cleared his throat. “It was a joke. I hope.”
“We have plenty of food, Sire,” Amaranthe said.
Maldynado lifted a hand to his mouth and leaned close to her. “You’re not going to feed the emperor those awful Sicarius bars, are you?”
He wasn’t quiet enough with his whisper, for Sespian asked, “Sicarius bars?”
At that moment, Sicarius appeared out of the darkness and climbed into the cab. So much dust covered him that none of his clothing remained black.
“One bar,” he said, “provides all the fuel you need to perform adequately for the day.”
“But they taste awful,” Maldynado said.
“That is irrelevant.”
“They’re made with brains,” Maldynado said.
“Yes, and liver and hearts,” Sicarius said. “Organ meat is nutrient-dense and rich in fats that can sustain
you for long periods of time. The Zeyzar, a tribal people in Moratt, regularly feast on raw tripe, brain, and heart, and they-”
Amaranthe placed a hand on his arm. “If we’re going convince the emperor to try them, you might want to stop talking now.” She pointed a finger at Maldynado. “And you, shush.”
Maldynado lifted his hands and blinked innocently.
“Not… human brains, right?” Sespian asked.
“Of course not,” Sicarius said. “The average human has an abysmal diet. I wouldn’t wish to fuel my body with meat from such an impure source.”
Yara gaped at Sicarius. Maldynado lifted a finger and opened his mouth, but seemed to think better of commenting, for he shut it again. Sespian looked… horrified. Amaranthe realized it hadn’t been exactly clear that Sicarius objected to cannibalism for more than dietary reasons.
She gripped his arm before he could say anything else, grabbed one of the lanterns, and pointed him toward the gap he’d been investigating. “Why don’t you show me what you found out there?”
Sicarius gave her a curious backward glance but let her push him out of the cab. On their way out, Amaranthe heard Sespian mutter, “That man is a ghoul.”
She winced because she knew Sicarius would hear the comment too. When he paused, Amaranthe waved him toward the crevice. A vaguely puzzled expression put a dent in his usual mask, but he led the way into the narrow passage.
“I didn’t find anything useful,” Sicarius said. “There’s an area that survived the cave-in, but it’s blocked beyond that.”
“Just keep walking.”
That earned Amaranthe another backward glance, but he continued deeper, alternately turning sideways and ducking to maneuver past boulders and jagged slabs of cement.
“I take it back,” Amaranthe said when they came out into an open area-and when she deemed they were out of earshot. “Don’t try to bond with him. You’re too…” She groped for a tactful way to say he was too inhuman for most people to relate to, but failed to find one. “You’re too you,” she finally said with a sigh.
“I see,” Sicarius said.
She might have imagined the stiffness in his tone, but she gave him a quick hug anyway, just in case he thought him being… him bothered her.
“Just stand at his side protectively,” Amaranthe said. “With the way this night has gone, I wouldn’t be surprised if you got a chance to save his life sometime soon. That might do more to endear you to him than words.” Especially words that could be misconstrued as an interest in cannibalism, she thought. “It’s hard not to come to appreciate someone who saves your life.”
Sicarius folded his arms across his chest. Just because he had asked for her advice earlier that night didn’t mean he wanted it all the time now.
Amaranthe lifted a hand to let him know she was done and inspected the chamber. Here, the tunnel walls remained intact, though spider webs of cracks and fissures left her suspecting they were none too stable. She took the lantern and walked a ways, but found Sicarius was correct. A solid wall of rubble blocked the passage from floor to ceiling. For all she knew, it might extend all the way to the far end of the tunnel. There were a few crevices wide enough that she could slip into them-if she turned sideways and was willing to mash important female protrusions-but they didn’t look like they went anywhere.
“You checked these?” Amaranthe asked.
“Yes.”
“And they dead end?”
“Yes.”
Amaranthe walked back to the center of the chamber and lifted the lantern to study the ceiling. Cracks streaked across the cement up there as well. Another blast from the enemy craft might send the entire tunnel crumbling down upon their heads. Uneasy thought that, but she hadn’t heard anything of the sort since the initial cave-in.
“We have a steam engine at our disposal,” Amaranthe mused, “if we can dig it out. I wonder if we could somehow use it to build a drill and go up. No, even if we had the tools to create something like that, there’s probably a hundred feet of rock above us, maybe more. It’d take months, and tons of explosives, which leads me to wonder what that craft could have possibly been tossing at the cliff to bring down the tunnel.”
She leaned toward Sicarius and raised her eyebrows. Before, he’d been focused on getting the train into the tunnel, so she could understand him not answering her questions, but surely they had nothing better to do right now than discuss this new enemy.
“I’ve saved your life several times,” Sicarius said.
“Uh… yes, you have.” That was not what she’d been hinting for him to bring up with her ascending eyebrows.
“Is that why you… appreciate me?”
Ah, her advice. “Well, we know it’s not your tongue that’s won me over.” Amaranthe meant the comment to be flippant or teasing, but tongue had perhaps not been the best word, because it brought to mind the night he’d kissed her in the Imperial Garden. A flush heated her cheeks. She hoped the poor light hid it. “I mean, the way you talk. Or don’t talk. It’s just… a lot of things, all right? A girl appreciates it when…” A handsome man with muscles honed like a steel blade takes her in his arms and… No, no, Amaranthe told herself, concentrate on the current predicament. “We’ll discuss it later. Right now, I need to know everything you know about that craft. You’re obviously familiar with the technology. Why all the secrecy?” There, that was much safer than discussing tongues and appreciation. And more pertinent to the matter at hand as well.
Sicarius watched as she fumbled through her response, one of his eyebrows elevating slightly. From him, it was a lot of expression, but she could only wonder at his thoughts. He probably read hers all too well.
“I was sworn to silence on the matter,” Sicarius finally said.
“By whom?”
“Hollowcrest, Raumesys, and Lord Artokian, the Imperial Historian.”
Amaranthe was ready to brush off the first two names-after all, Sicarius had killed Hollowcrest; how much loyalty could he feel to the man’s memory? — but the last one made her pause. “Because whatever you found was so strange, it’d shock the general public if people learned of it?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Sespian must know about it, though, right?”
“Unknown,” Sicarius said. “The artifacts the marines brought back from the expedition to the Northern Frontier ought to be in the Imperial Barracks somewhere, but Sespian, despite having seen my knife before, seemed startled by its capabilities when I lodged it in the floor.”
“What happened in the Northern Frontier? And why were you along on an ‘expedition’ up there?”
“A team of archaeologist pirates was attempting to uncover ancient advanced technology to use against the empire. I was sent to make sure they did not succeed.”
“ Ancient advanced technology?” Amaranthe asked. “How would that be possible? I know there are some lost civilizations out there, but technology is at its peak now, isn’t it? If there’d been a time when humanity had greater means than we have today, I’m sure I would have heard about it in school. Or Books would have brought it up in one of his unsolicited lectures.”
“Humanity is at its peak, yes,” Sicarius said. “This wasn’t human technology.”
“Er, what?”
“The archaeologist working on deciphering the foreign language wasn’t there willingly and didn’t share all of her findings, but, based on the artifacts we returned with and the details the marines and I reported, the Imperial Historian judged that the technology was derived from one of two possible sources. The first suggestion was that the work came from a race that lived in the world so long ago that almost all sign of them has been lost.”
“Huh. And the second possibility?”
“Extraterrestrial beings.”
Amaranthe snorted. “When I told you to start making jokes, I meant for you to do it in front of Sespian, so he could see that you have a sense of humor.”
Sicarius’s face was the epitome of se
riousness.
“Truly? You’re telling me aliens from outer space brought that knife here-” Amaranthe waved toward his sheathed blade, “-and gave it to you?”
“Whichever theory is true, the creators of the technology disappeared from our world long ago. Some of their artifacts remain, and they are extremely dangerous. Floating boxes this large-” Sicarius outlined a one-foot square with his hands, “-killed numerous marines by incinerating them.”
“You saw this with your own eyes?”
“They tried to incinerate me as well.”
“Oh,” Amaranthe said.
“I heard the archaeologist talking with Starcrest, and-”
“Wait, Starcrest? Fleet Admiral Starcrest? The legendary naval strategist?”
“Yes,” Sicarius said.
“Who was the archaeologist?”
“A professor from Kyatt,” Sicarius said. “Tikaya Komitopis.”
The name was familiar, and Amaranthe wriggled her fingers in the air as she tried to place it. “The cryptanalyst who cracked all our encryption codes during the Western Sea Conflict?”
“Yes. She believed these boxes were simple cleaning machines designed to eliminate trash.”
Amaranthe blew out a slow breath. It wasn’t that she hadn’t believed Sicarius exactly, but having two such significant historical figures contributing to the research did seem to lend more credence to the story.
“This flying craft,” Amaranthe said, “is something that was brought back from the expedition?”
“No. We went to a remote area only accessible by dog sled. Nothing large was retrieved.”
“Then someone got it later.”
“The marine captain in charge of the expedition blew up the entrances to the tunnels afterward. Regardless, everything was in the middle of a mountain. Even if such a large craft had been inside, it never could have been flown out.”
“So where did that thing come from?” Amaranthe asked.
“Unknown. Perhaps an archaeological expedition unearthed another site with ruins from the ancient civilization, and Forge learned of it.”
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