Encrypted (the emperor's edge)

by Lindsay Buroker

  CHAPTER 4

  Clouds blanketed the sky the next day when Tikaya came out for her exercise session, but the darker weather didn’t dampen the curiosity humming through her. Her ally-even if he did not yet know she had dubbed him ally-would join her soon. What would he look like without all that hair and dirt? Would the guards give them enough space to talk privately?

  She walked around the outside edge of the exercise area, struggling for patience. The captain was out again, this time trading sword blows with his navigator. Tikaya wondered who ran the ship when these Turgonians spent so much time exercising. Some prisoners of war were probably chained down in the boiler rooms, shoveling coal into the furnaces day and night.

  The clamor of crashing steel halted, and Tikaya stopped walking to search for the reason.

  If not for the guards surrounding him, she would not have recognized Five. Now clean-shaven with military-short hair, he wore the same boots and black uniform as the marines, though no rank or insignia marked the collars. Taller than the men accompanying him, he strode across the deck, hands clasped behind his back, head up, alert eyes taking in every aspect of the ship.

  Tikaya’s stomach did an anxious flip. Her putative ally had turned into someone who looked every bit like one of the officers who had tried to take over her islands during the war. Even with no rank on that collar, he seemed more the captain than the sweaty bare-chested Bocrest, who was also staring. A chilling thought gripped her. What if Five had been a captain during the war? Someone who fired on her people? Took prisoners? Tortured them.

  Five’s gaze stopped on the sails nearest the smokestack. A faint sooty black dulled the canvas, and he raised an eyebrow at Captain Bocrest.

  For a moment, Bocrest’s cheeks flushed, and an excuse seemed on his lips, but he halted it with a scowl. He stalked across the deck, bare chest puffed out, muscles flexed. He barked at anyone foolish enough to cross his path and stopped in front of Five. Bocrest gestured sharply while spitting words out in a low voice.

  Tikaya resumed walking, more briskly than earlier, so she could steer close enough to eavesdrop. Before she neared them, the captain thrust his arm out, pointing his index finger at her. She stopped, feeling self-conscious when both men, and everyone else in the area, turned to stare at her.

  Only Five’s gaze was friendly. The right side of his mouth quirked up in a bemused half smile, and she felt the need to brace herself on a nearby weapons rack.

  Bocrest growled, “Convince her,” just loud enough for her to hear.

  Though Five did not acknowledge the order, those words drove wariness into Tikaya’s heart. Presuming Bocrest’s relationship with Five was entirely antagonistic may have been a mistake.

  He left the captain’s side and strolled toward her, his smile widening as he approached. A few strands of silver threaded his black hair, laugh lines crinkled the corners of his brown eyes, and a narrow scar bisected one eyebrow, but Tikaya had no doubt women of all ages swooned at his feet. Experience made her stifle her own urge to swoon. Handsome men did not look at her and smile; they looked through her, usually not noticing when they bumped her out of the way to close in on some buxom damsel with cleavage like the Inarraska Canyon. Most likely, he had an ulterior reason for that smile.

  Tikaya folded her arms across her chest and kept her face neutral as he closed the distance.

  Five’s first words destroyed her attempt at equanimity. “You’re the cryptomancer?”

  “ What? I, uhm, no. I mean-”

  Tikaya winced. Even if he had no ulterior motives, her almost-ally would surely turn against her if he knew. Like the rest of the marines, he would resent her, hate her, glare at her and…

  He was staring, not glaring, at her, and not with hatred. Was that-her eyebrows arched-awe?

  “ It’s your people’s term,” she said, “not what the name plaque on my desk says.”

  Hoping for nonchalance, Tikaya stuck out a hand to lean casually on the weapons rack, but her focus was on him, and those gold flecks in his brown eyes, and she missed the target. Her fingers clipped the corner and slid off, giving her no support. She pitched sideways with a startled, “Errkt,” and would have landed on the deck, but Five lunged and caught her.

  Chortles burst from the surrounding marines, and flames torched her cheeks. Five straightened and released her with a pat on the shoulder. She groaned and avoided his eyes. If there had been awe there before, that was surely gone now. In avoiding his gaze, she had a clear view of the marines pointing at her and nudging each other. Even Bocrest’s rock-eating jaw flapped with guffaws.

  “ Walk?” Five suggested gently.

  “ Dear Akahe, yes.”

  She departed the scene at a vigorous pace, and Five, with his long legs, easily matched her. His guards fell in behind. At least they proved stolid and silent save for the clatter of gear and synchronized thump of boots on the deck.

  “ I must thank you for this.” Five gestured at himself, encompassing the clean uniform and haircut. “I got the story from Corporal Agarik. It was kind of you to include me in the reward for your wager.”

  “ You’re welcome,” she muttered, knowing her thinking had not been purely altruistic. “Though I’m surprised the captain let you out, lost bet or not.”

  “ He made me promise not to make trouble during the exercise periods.”

  “ Ah.” Interesting that Five’s word was enough for the captain to trust him. She glanced at the guards. To some extent anyway.

  “ It was worth it.” He stretched his arms overhead, then windmilled them, something the confines of his cell would make impossible. “I almost feel like a human being again.”

  It had certainly improved his mood. She thought of the silent, brooding man she had spoken to the first day and could not help but feel pleased her request had lightened his spirit. She gave him a smile and missed a step when he smiled back. Oh, that was nice.

  Stop it, Tikaya, she chastised herself. Prisoner or not, he was one of them. That uniform fit him like he had been born into it. Best get some answers from him while he was in an affable mood.

  “ Given the reception I’ve gotten here, I’m surprised you aren’t…” She watched him sidelong. “Does my wartime hobby not bother you?”

  “ Actually…” He met her sideways gaze. “It impresses me. A lot.”

  “ Oh,” she breathed, then looked away, not sure she wanted him to see her reaction. She had wanted an ally; she had not expected an admirer. She was not sure how to deal with that. Parkonis, though he had loved her personally, had been a little jealous of her professionally. They had worked in the same field, with her discoveries often eclipsing his, and his praise had always sounded grudging.

  They passed under men in the rigging, adjusting sails to take advantage of the wind. Only a faint smudge of black wafted from the smokestack today.

  “ As far as we’ve heard,” Five said, “cryptography isn’t taught on Kyatt, so I just assumed what we called the cryptomancer was a team of mathematicians learning as they went. But your specialty is linguistics, right?”

  The question sounded casual, but a trickle of wariness returned to her thoughts. Just because he pretended to be an admirer did not make him one. Maybe the Turgonians had simply decided to substitute honey for vinegar, and had talked him into delivering it.

  “ Yes,” she said. “Philology, really. I work with the anthropology and archaeology departments in the Polytechnic.”

  “ Interesting. How many languages do you know?”

  “ Sixteen modern, and I can read a few dozen dead languages.”

  “ Few dozen?” Five halted and gaped at her. “You must be a genius.”

  The proclamation startled her, and she lurched to a stop beside him, conscious of the guards’ gazes on her back. “No, no, trust me I’m not. It’s just something I’ve a knack for.”

  He lifted a single skeptical eyebrow.

  Tikaya shook her head. “A world-exploring uncle gave me a copy of the Te
kdar Tablet when I was a child, and I fell in love with solving language puzzles. My parents encouraged it, so I had a head start when I started formally studying in school. That’s all.”

  Five was still standing, gazing at her, and when she met his eyes, she found that admiration there again. It was disarming. Maybe he meant it to be. What had the captain told Five to convince her of?

  “ Hm.” He resumed walking. “My family gave me swords and toy soldiers when I was a boy.” Bemusement laced his tone.

  “ You would have preferred something else?”

  “ Oh, yes. I kept asking for drawing pads and building materials. I wanted to design a treehouse with a drawbridge to my room and a steam-powered potato launcher for defense.”

  “ Sounds like every boy’s dream.” Despite her determination to remain chary with him, the change of topic set her at ease. She could not reveal something she shouldn’t if he was talking about himself.

  “ Alas, this was not a paternally approved childhood activity, so I had to find my own building materials.” Five scratched his jaw. “I took it upon myself to chop down some of the apple trees in my family’s orchard, trees that my great grandfather had grafted from cuttings painstakingly acquired when he was a marine sailing around the world. I, being about eight at the time, was unaware of this bit of history.”

  “ Oh, dear,” she murmured.

  “ Yes. There was a lot of yelling that summer.”

  She chuckled.

  “ What is engraved on your name plaque?” Five asked as they started on their second lap of the deck.

  For a moment, the context of the question eluded her, until she remembered her earlier comment. “You don’t know my name?”

  He spread his arms apologetically. “Nobody’s told me much.”

  The salty breeze gusted, and water sprayed the deck ahead of them. A lieutenant bellowed at the men aloft.

  “ Your name for mine,” Tikaya offered with a smile. “I can’t keep calling you Five forever.”

  He glanced at the guards trailing them. Maybe, as part of his punishment, he was forbidden from using his old name.

  He lowered his voice. “My friends and family, back when I had them…” He grimaced. “They called me Rias.”

  “ Rias?”

  Tikaya had a feeling that was a nickname or a truncation. Regardless, it gave her no hints as to his identity. Since she had decrypted all the communications her people had intercepted, she knew most, if not all, of the Turgonian officers with enough rank to command a vessel, and she could not think of any name with those syllables.

  “ My name is Tikaya,” she said. “And, now that we’re on a first-name basis, maybe you can tell me what you’re supposed to convince me of, Rias.”

  Their route had taken them to the archery lane. Rias paused by the rack of staves, and the guards tensed, their fingers finding the triggers of their pistols.

  “ No weapons,” the lead man said.

  “ Captain,” Rias called. “May we shoot?”

  In the center of the exercise area, Bocrest knelt on a young officer’s back, with the man’s arm twisted in a lock. The captain scowled over at them.

  “ May you shoot? What is this, the Officers’ Club? Perhaps I can get you some brandywine and lobster too?”

  “ Captain, are you inviting me to dinner?” Rias rested his hand on his chest. “I’m touched.”

  Red flushed Bocrest’s face, and Tikaya wondered at the wisdom of teasing the man. If the captain had a sense of humor, she had not detected it. But he waved a disgusted hand at the guards.

  “ Let them shoot.”

  “ Sir?” The lead guard’s mouth gaped open.

  “ You heard me,” Bocrest barked.

  “ Yes, sir.”

  Tikaya eyed Rias. “It seems your word means something to the captain.”

  “ He knows it’s all I have left.”

  Bleakness stripped away his humor, reminding her that pain lurked beneath the facade he was showing her today. He caught her watching and reaffixed his smile.

  “ Tikaya,” he said slowly, trying her name out, then nodding to himself as if he approved. “To answer your question, despite his threats — ” Rias scowled, “-the captain has doubts about your intentions. He believes I should convince you to help him wholeheartedly with his mission.”

  She selected the bow she had used the day before. “Why, when he’s keeping you chained in the brig, does he think you’d be inclined to speak on his behalf?”

  “ He believes that my indoctrinated loyalty to the empire will overrule whatever revulsion I feel for him and those who took everything from me.”

  “ They must do a lot of indoctrinating in Turgonian schools.”

  Rias sighed. “Oh, they do.”

  “ And do you think I should help? You recognized something about those symbols when I showed you the rubbing. What was it?”

  He did not answer, though she did not think him recalcitrant. His gaze grew far away, his face grim, as if some painful memories had swallowed him and he had forgotten her.

  Maybe archery would loosen his mind and unlock his thoughts for sharing. She shot a few times, leaving arrows quivering around the red dot in the target. A stiffer breeze scraped across the deck today.

  Rias stirred and selected his own arrows.

  “ Want to make a wager?” Tikaya asked, thinking she might be able to get him to talk more freely about the symbols if he owed her from a lost bet.

  His grimness faded and he slanted her a knowing gaze. “I suspect that would be unwise.”

  “ Captain Bocrest did it.”

  “ Then I’m certain it’s unwise.”

  Tikaya grinned. “Maybe I just got a lucky shot.”

  “ I doubt it.”

  “ Why?” All the marines had been stunned when she hit the target.

  He shrugged. “The Kyattese are bow hunters.”

  “ Well…” She smiled and twirled an arrow in the air. “If you’re afraid…”

  Rias splayed a hand across his chest. “When you were learning our language, did you not also learn that we are a fearless people? I simply don’t want to take advantage of you. I studied ballistics in school, and I can’t imagine such a martial course being taught at your Polytechnic.”

  “ And did you also study arrogance in school?” Tikaya nocked her arrow, aimed, and plunked it into the bull’s-eye.

  “ Of course.” He winked. “I’m Turgonian.”

  She snorted. Arrogance probably was part of their curriculum.

  “ I even wrote a paper on the ballistics of archery for merit points,” he said.

  “ Less talking, more shooting.”

  Eyebrows arched, Rias nocked the first arrow, but he paused as a pair of marines strolled past, one munching the remains of an apple. The man lifted his arm to throw the core overboard, but Rias stopped him.

  “ I’ll take that.”

  The marine shrugged and tossed it to him. Tikaya had an inkling of Rias’s intent and did not question him as he readied the bow again. He nocked the arrow and held it against the stave with one hand. With the other, he lobbed the apple core so it arced toward the target. In one swift motion, he drew the bow and fired. The arrow pierced the apple and hammered it to the target right next to Tikaya’s bull’s-eye.

  “ Hah.” Rias lowered the bow. “After my cocky speech, I feared I’d embarrass myself.”

  “ I hope you got a good grade for that paper,” Tikaya said, staring at the impaled apple.

  “ Me too.” He grinned at her raised eyebrows. “It was twenty years ago. I don’t remember.”

  “ What was it on?”

  “ Oh, the usual. Explaining the equations for general ballistic trajectory, horizontal launch, launch velocity, and the like. The fun part was the modeling I did on the different types of bows used throughout imperial history. I analyzed them to show how the design and materials used would define their accuracy, trajectories, distance capabilities, and…” He must have not
iced her gaping because he stopped, a sheepish expression on his face. “I’m boring

  you, aren’t I?”

  “ No!” Tikaya blurted. “I just wasn’t expecting you to be so…” Dear ancestors, he sounded just like her when she started talking about languages, and it struck her as hilarious that he could not remember the grade but recalled all the details of the topic. “Uhm, garrulous,” she finished.

  A blush colored his olive skin. “Sorry. I haven’t talked to a woman in two years.” He nocked an arrow. “Shall we shoot a few more?”

  “ Sure, tell me more about your paper.”

  Rias’s fingers fumbled, and the arrow clattered to the deck. “Really?”

  “ Really.” She hid a smile, tickled by his surprise. “The only ballistics experiments I ever partook in involved a wager on who could use a spoon to launch a macadamia nut across the lunch room and into Professor Lehanae’s wig.”

  “ Hm, I recall taking part in a similar experiment. Must be a universal education requirement.”

  They shot while he explained his paper, and Tikaya relaxed for the first time in days. She almost laughed at her earlier guess that he might have been a captain in the war. With that passion for mathematics and those childhood fancies, he had to be an engineer. Probably the chief engineer on one of the big warships. He would have been accustomed to going toe-to-toe with captains to keep his steamer in pristine operating order.

  Only after the exercise period ended, and she was again confined in her cabin, did she realize she still did not know what his history was with those symbols and why they stirred dark memories.

  The first earsplitting boom yanked Tikaya from sleep. The second made her scramble out of her bunk so quickly she slammed into the foldout desk. Groaning, she rubbed her hip, took another step, and cracked her toe on the stool.

  “ No one should wake up this way,” she muttered.

  More booms drowned her words, this time a whole round that lasted half a minute. The ship trembled with concussions that vibrated her body like a bell. Cannons, she realized, as she groped about to find her spectacles and sandals. She had heard them from afar, but never standing in a cabin under the gun deck. Shouts sounded through the aftermath of the round, though the bulkhead muffled the words. She peered out her tiny porthole. Clouds obscured the stars, and night’s darkness smothered the ocean.