Forged in Blood I

by Lindsay Buroker

  Sicarius swam for the surface. He’d no more than popped up when a burning piece of wreckage splatted into the water, not three inches from his eyes. He blinked up at the sky, not certain if more would pour down, and not knowing at first what could have exploded.

  Oh, he realized, as he swam for the dock. The lorry. He snorted and pulled himself out of the water. The smoldering wreck in the shallows was still spitting burning coal and shrapnel into the night. Amaranthe would be proud.

  A stiff gust of wind battered at Sicarius’s damp clothing. He needed to strip and find a place to warm up, or he’d be in danger of losing digits—maybe more—but he had one more task to complete.

  He raced to the base of the dock and around the building to find the crane. He’d stoked the furnace before he’d left, and it didn’t take much to stir the coals to life. The water in the boiler was still hot, and it held enough steam to drive the crane down the dock and out to the red paint. He maneuvered the arm with numb, shaking hands, trying to find the hook in the top of the trap by feel. His legs were numb, too, and when he tried to wriggle his toes in his boots, he couldn’t feel them. Blood as well as water ran down his leg.

  Sicarius finally found the hook, and lifted the trap out of the water. Numb hands or not, he could feel the reverberations as the construct flung itself against the steel walls of its new cage. As soon as it cleared the water, Sicarius maneuvered the vehicle toward the end of the dock. He drove it as far as he could, then swung the crane back and forth a couple of times. The cables creaked and the crane groaned beneath the weight, but he managed to use the momentum to release the trap at the right time, hurling it into deeper water. With luck, the construct would remain down there for a very long time. He’d have to deal with the practitioner to ensure nobody would find it and release it any time soon, but not tonight. He gazed north over the placid black waters of the lake, toward Fort Urgot. The sky was brighter there, an indication of all the lanterns and perhaps fires burning in that direction.

  He hopped out of the crane, intending to run all the way to the fort, but a massive gush of water sounded behind him. He whirled back toward the end of the dock… and stared. A massive dome shape was rising from the lake, its body blocking the entire view of the city on the opposite shoreline.

  The Behemoth.

  Amaranthe. Sicarius swallowed. Was she on it? Was she the reason it was coming out of the water? Or had Forge chosen this moment, when the city was all indoors, staying out of the cold night, to move the craft? Maybe they’d captured Amaranthe and decided they had to run before someone else came down after them.

  Sicarius had never seen the Behemoth lift off, and he didn’t know what to expect, but the craft had an unanticipated wobble to it. It lurched, half of it dipping back toward the water, then recovered. He backed up, feeling vulnerable on the dock. But the craft wasn’t heading his way. It continued to climb until he could see the city lights again beneath it. He thought it would keep going, disappearing into the starry night, but it lurched again, one side dipping.

  Then it plummeted, not back into the lake, but downward at an angle. His breath froze. A northward angle. Toward Fort Urgot.

  • • •

  Amaranthe didn’t waste words as they raced through the corridors. She simply ran, Books and Akstyr pounding after her, and they veered onto the nearest ramp leading up. Reaching this lifeboat wouldn’t be enough. They’d have to figure out how to get inside and how to fly away. Or swim away. Or… who knew? She had no idea if the Behemoth was in the air, on land, or in the water. The blasted thing could at least have a window here or there.

  “That should be it.” Books pointed to a short dead end.

  Amaranthe raced to the far wall.

  Akstyr hesitated in the intersection. “Are you sure? Those cubes are right behind us. We’ll be trapped if we get stuck down there.”

  “Books?” Amaranthe waved uselessly at the wall.

  “Oh, I see. I’m the expert here now.” He tapped about, trying to illuminate the runes that should be there somewhere.

  “You’ve opened two doors to my none. That makes you a downright professional.”

  Books found the runes, this time on the left instead of on the right and in more of an orange color.

  “Uh oh.” Amaranthe didn’t recognize any of them.

  “Cubes are in sight,” Akstyr called from the intersection.

  “Blighted ancestors,” she said, “we’ll have to run, try another lifeboat. If we can find it.”

  Books tapped one of the runes and pushed in and turned another. A door slid upward. “It’s the same pattern as was on that cabinet she opened,” he said.

  Thank his ancestors for paying attention.

  “Is it safe in there?” Akstyr asked, then yelped and raced toward them. “It had better be!”

  A horizontal crimson beam burned through the air in the intersection behind him. Akstyr darted through the doorway and into a dark cubby without stopping to check inside. With few other options, Amaranthe and Books jumped in after him. For all she could see, they might have jumped into a cider barrel without so much as an unstoppered bunghole to illuminate the interior. The only light came from outside, from the door still yawning open.

  “Uh, we might want to close that,” Akstyr said.

  “I’m trying.” Books was patting all around the opening.

  The floor tilted again, down to the left, then quickly back to the right. Were they flying? Or floating on the surface of the lake? Amaranthe wished she knew.

  The cubes appeared in the intersection.

  “Not good.” Amaranthe lifted her rifle.

  They rotated slowly, their crimson orifices coming into view. It’d be useless, but she shot at one. What else could she do?

  The cubes didn’t bother incinerating her bullet this time. It simply clanged off the front of one, and it ignored it. They floated closer, the holes glowing in preparation.

  “There’s nothing in here,” Books cried, desperation in his voice, something that’d often accompanied his words in tight situations early on. They were perfectly justified this time. “I can’t find it anywhere.”

  “Take cover,” Amaranthe said, shooting again.

  As if there were cover. She flattened herself against one wall, while Books leaned against the other, but their chamber was so tiny, there were only a couple of inches of wall on either side of the door. Akstyr had fallen to the floor.

  “Too tired,” he groaned.

  Amaranthe almost grabbed him, but he had as much cover down there as she did. The first beam lanced out, slicing through the air in the center of the doorway. It bit into the metal or whatever comprised the front of their supposed lifeboat. Smoke filled the air.

  A second beam joined the first, and they started moving, one beam to the left, toward Books, and one toward the right, toward Amaranthe. She patted about on the wall, hoping to find a weapon or controls for the door. Anything, cursed ancestors, anything.

  The beam inched closer. She dropped to the floor beside Akstyr.

  “I don’t know who designed a lifeboat without a door that closes, but it’s a severe design flaw,” she growled.

  Inevitably the cubes drew closer, and the beam lowered toward the floor, toward Akstyr and toward her. From her back, Amaranthe fired one more time, uselessly.

  Her bullet landed, not with a clang, but with a concussive boom. The force of the explosion threw her into the air so hard and so high that she struck the ceiling. Or maybe that was the wall—the entire chamber seemed to flip onto its side. Pain bludgeoned her like a locomotive, her hip and her arm pounding into one wall, and then she hit another wall as the world spun again. Had she somehow blown up one of the cubes? How could such a small object contain such an explosive force?

  Cries of surprise and pain came from Books and Akstyr, too, and the lights in the hallway went out. Everything went out. Or maybe the door had finally shut. Amaranthe couldn’t see a thing.

  The world stopped mo
ving, and she dropped one final time, hitting the floor with her other hip. She groaned and had no more than lifted her head—though what good that movement would do just then, she didn’t know—when a soft thrum ran through the chamber. There was a brief surge—acceleration?—and then a wan gray light entered the chamber.

  After the darkness, even the weak illumination made Amaranthe blink, shielding her eyes with her hand. When her vision came into focus, she found herself staring through her fingers at a starry night sky.

  “We’re outside?” she asked.

  A stupid question, she supposed, but she was so disoriented that she couldn’t figure out what had happened. Amaranthe tried to sit up, to gauge her injuries. She didn’t think she’d broken anything, but in the morning she’d have lumps bigger than those love apples Maldynado was always talking about.

  “Books?” She touched a dark form beneath her, and then the other. “Akstyr?”

  They weren’t moving. Everyone was crumpled on the floor, their limbs entangled in the confined space. Amaranthe’s earlier assessment, comparing the space to a cider keg, wasn’t that far off. The rounded walls didn’t possess any visible instruments or gauges, though the front had disappeared, replaced by a window of some sort. A translucent barrier, might be a better term, as nothing so familiar as glass shielded them from the outside. She remembered escaping through a similar door the last time she’d left the Behemoth and wondered if that would become the new exit. The old door, the one through which they’d entered this “lifeboat” was sealed shut.

  Amaranthe disentangled herself from Books and Akstyr. She was alarmed that neither was moving, but curiosity prompted her to check the view first, to see if she could see more than the stars. What if… She gulped. What if the Behemoth had spit them out on some trajectory that would take them to the South Pole? Or, dear ancestors, another world?

  On hands and knees, she crept as close as she dared—she had no idea if she could fall out, but had no wish to chance it.

  Snow and rocks and trees blurred past below them, far below.

  The only other time she’d been airborne had been on that dirigible, and they hadn’t been this high, nor had they been traveling so quickly.

  “Books,” Amaranthe rasped. She picked out cliffs and canyons below, then a river that disappeared almost as soon as it had appeared. They were flying over mountains. That meant they’d already left the capital and the farmlands around the lake behind. “You’ll want to see this.”

  Before he stirred or she could prod him, the speed at which the terrain was passing below slowed down. A queasy empty feeling came over Amaranthe. Had she eaten recently, she might have thrown up. Was the ground getting closer?

  It took a moment for the truth to dawn. They’d reached whatever apogee they’d been hurled toward and were descending.

  “Never mind,” Amaranthe squeaked. “You may want to stay unconscious for this.”

  She refused to accept that either of them could be worse than unconscious. Though if their lifeboat didn’t have a means to soften the landing, they’d all be worse than unconscious. The smoke that tainted the air, burning her eyes and her nostrils, wasn’t reassuring. Maybe whatever means this craft had of landing safely had been destroyed.

  Indeed, they were picking up speed. Not lateral speed this time, but vertical speed. Dropping like a rock, came the unwelcome phrase from the back of her mind. It was the last fully formed thought she managed.

  She stared, terror rising within her as the rocks and trees and snow drew closer and closer. She patted around the walls, frantic to find some control, something that could slow their descent, but the smooth featureless interior of the craft offered nothing. Lastly, she dropped to her knees, curled into a ball, and flung her arms over her head.

  The window disappeared with a hiss and pop. More smoke flowed into the cabin, and blackness dropped over the craft.

  Chapter 20

  Sicarius couldn’t feel his fingers or his feet. Numbness made him stumble as he ran through the snow along the lake. Blood dotted the tracks he left, but he barely noticed. He didn’t care. He couldn’t tear his eyes from the dark horizon.

  There should have been lights, fires, sparks from weapons, but blackness lay ahead. In the aftermath of the Behemoth’s crash, the night had grown utterly silent. Not so much as an owl hooted from the bare icicle-draped branches of the trees lining the running path. The air stank of more kinds of smoke than his nose could identify—burning trees, and coal, and black powder, but more alien scents too. And blood. The scent of blood lingered amongst it all.

  Through no conscious awareness of his own, Sicarius’s pace slowed when he reached the end of the trees, the scant trees that remained standing. The Behemoth had mowed down all the ones by the lake on its inbound trajectory; the closest ones had been topped, such as a logger might do, with only the tips of the trunks torn off, but the ones farther in had been knocked to the snow in their entirety. Wreckage, wood, and bodies littered the white fields. The tents that had housed the invaders were all flattened. And the fort…

  Sicarius stumbled to a stop, his legs numb from more than the icy cold that encroached upon his extremities. Aside from one crumbling corner of the wall, Fort Urgot was gone. It had been completely and utterly flattened beneath the massive black dome of the Behemoth. One side of the craft was buried meters into the earth, while the far side merely lay upon the snow, but that great weight… There was no sign of the buildings, the defenses, or the people who had been inside the fort when it hit.

  Images of Maldynado and Basilard and Sespian flashed through his mind, with Sespian being in the forefront. Sespian shooting down the cable into the enemy camp. Sespian smiling and explaining how to encourage a girl. Sespian sleeping in his bed as a boy, charcoal sticks and a sketchpad scattered all about the blankets.

  Sicarius closed his eyes and swallowed hard. He willed his legs to carry him forward. There was a chance…

  Maybe Sespian had been out on the field, fighting hand-to-hand with the invaders, or maybe he’d seen the Behemoth coming and there’d been time to run away.

  Sicarius scoffed. Run away. Right. Once it had risen from the lake, the craft had taken less than five seconds to plummet across the water and crash.

  He ran to its side anyway, his legs carrying him over and around countless bodies in the snow. Some had died from the fighting, but others must have been flung through the air as a result of the crash, mangled like the tents and like so many of those trees.

  As he passed, Sicarius glanced at each face, checking to make sure. He didn’t recognize any of them as soldiers from within the fort. These men all wore blue armbands. He ran a full circle around the crashed vessel, just in case… but, no. Nobody inside the fort had made it out.

  Sespian was gone.

  He halted, shoulders slumping, and stared at the ground. He’d never gotten a chance to… They’d barely started to… His chin drooped to his chest. How was he supposed to—

  Someone coughed, the noise loud against the silence that had descended upon the battleground. Sicarius located the source. A man had appeared in the side of the Behemoth, seemingly stepping out of the hull of the ship ten feet above the ground. He slid down the side to land in a ridge of snow pushed up around the bottom. A second person, a woman this time, stuck her head out of the black wall, hiked up her skirts and followed the same route.

  Sicarius pulled out his black dagger and strode toward the invisible escape hatch. The tangled thoughts that stampeded into his mind were hard to follow, and it was more some buried primitive instinct that guided him than intellect. That monstrosity had killed Sespian, and he was going to kill those who had brought it here. And if Amaranthe was in there, he’d find her.

  She must be in there, he realized. Her plan… this was because of her plan.

  He shied away from the idea of blaming her for this, for Sespian’s death. She hadn’t brought this abomination to Stumps. Whatever plan she’d enacted, she’d been trying t
o help Sespian. He’d find her in there and bring her out. If he’d lost Sespian… Sicarius’s fingers tightened on the hilt of his dagger. Amaranthe was all he had left.

  Though he strode toward the Behemoth without worrying about stealth, the man and woman never saw him coming. Sicarius slit their throats and ran up the smooth, curved wall, a feat some would have found impossible. He didn’t think about it. His eyes were focused on his targets, nothing else. He slashed the throat of another man trying to escape the vessel, a guard in a black uniform that reminded him of Pike. The thought filled him with cold fury that propelled him through the intangible wall and into a cargo bay.

  Numerous guards were inside, rushing to evacuate. Sicarius cut down several before the others knew he was there, but then rifles were being brought to bear. In another situation, any other situation, he would have spied before crashing inside, made sure no one would spot him, but he was too numb to care about his own safety. Now his only defense was to sprint, slashing and cutting and ducking and somersaulting to throw off his opponents and draw closer to his enemies.

  Rifles fired, and crossbows twanged. A bullet slammed into his side. He threw a dagger, taking the shooter in the throat. Another bullet clipped his temple before he finished off the room. He paused only long enough to collect his thrown knives, then ran for the corridor. He was being reckless, ridiculously so, but he didn’t know how much time he had. What if Amaranthe had been captured and some maniac held a knife to her throat, ready to kill her for causing the Behemoth to rise from the lake?

  He couldn’t lose her and Sespian. He couldn’t.

  As he’d long ago been trained to do, Sicarius shunted off the part of his mind that acknowledged pain, locking it away to deal with later. He had never been inside the craft before, and wouldn’t have had any idea of which way to go in the maze, but he used the fleeing people and the shouts and calls to evacuate to lead him deeper inside. Wherever they were coming from… it was where he wanted to go.