Conspiracy (15 page)

“
I don’t know.”

Akstyr didn’t know much about the army,
except that the only job open for ex-gang members was infantry.
He’d heard they put anyone with a branded hand up front, where he
could take the fire and shrapnel from the enemy’s artillery
weapons. Some people thought that was better than being on the
streets, but Akstyr couldn’t imagine it, and, sure as dogs pissed
on lampposts, he couldn’t have studied the mental sciences in a
barracks full of soldiers.

Who is this man in
black?
Basilard further wondered.
He seems important. The general is speaking to
him as if he were an equal.

“
Dunno that either,” Akstyr
said.

Marblecrest
, Basilard
signed.

“
Huh?”

Officer’s name.
Basilard must have used the spyglass to read it
off the man’s jacket.
Do you recognize the
family? Is it notable in your history?

“
How should I know?” Akstyr
said. “Nobody cared a whole lot about warrior-caste dung-sticks
where I grew up. You should ask Maldynado. It’d have to be his
name, too, wouldn’t it?”

He and Basilard peered into the darkness
below, but Maldynado had disappeared into the shadows.

* * * * *

Before dawn worked up any enthusiasm for the
day, Amaranthe, Sicarius, and Books pulled away from the enforcer
headquarters building in a tiny town in Ag District Number Three.
Amaranthe clutched a piece of paper with an address in her
hand.

Out here in the country, the enforcers
didn’t maintain a jail, and nobody worked a night shift. A sign on
the door informed those with an emergency to report to a lieutenant
who lived a few doors down. It had been a simple matter of picking
a lock to get inside and search through a file drawer for employee
addresses.

“
Left at the fountain,”
Amaranthe said.

Sicarius was still driving, while Books sat
with the newspaper in his lap, making contented grunts as he read
by lantern light.

According to the purloined address, Sergeant
Evrial Yara resided at the edge of town with her father,
grandfather, and an older brother. Her personal record said she had
three other married brothers who lived on the same street.
Amaranthe hoped she could manage a meeting with Yara without having
to subdue a whole clan of protective male family members.

The lorry rolled past a two-story building
with a smithy on the first level and the windows of a residence on
the second. A light burned behind shutters in a room upstairs. The
light of an enforcer who had to rise early to be at work?

A wooden plaque near the double-door smith
entrance held a name as well as a picture of an anvil, but darkness
obscured the lettering. This little town did not have gas lamps
along the streets, and the sparsely hung kerosene lanterns had long
since burned out.

Amaranthe leaned across Books and squinted
at the plaque. Fortunately the name was painted white on the dark
wood, and she made it out. YARA.

“
Park down the street,
please,” she told Sicarius. “I’m guessing privately owned vehicles
aren’t that common here.” Bicycles leaned beside most doors, and
railway tracks ran through town, providing transportation for
anyone who needed to go farther.

Sicarius parked with the vehicle facing down
the main road out of town, and Amaranthe wondered if he anticipated
having to leave in a hurry.

He grabbed a shovel and checked the coal
box. “Empty. I’ll see if there’s more in the back.” He hopped out
of the cab.

Amaranthe waved for Books to open the door
so she could get out, too, but he was frowning down at the
newspaper and didn’t seem to notice that they had stopped. “Books?”
she asked. “Are you coming?”

“
Yes, of course,” he
murmured, eyes still focused on the paper. “I never met Sergeant
Yara, but I owe her a thank you for arranging to have the bounty on
my head removed. I should like to take this opportunity to offer
it.” Despite his words, he did not move.

“
Something scintillating?”
Amaranthe noticed he was looking at a tintype of Sespian that
dominated the front page. The emperor stood before a stone wall,
perhaps in front of some military outpost, his face inscrutable as
he gazed toward the camera. The headline read, “Emperor Sespian
Soon to Return to the Capital. Festival Plans Underway.” Imperial
citizens liked to work and train hard, but they were quick to find
an excuse for a holiday too. “Everything still going according to
schedule?” she asked.

“
Hm?” Books said. “Oh, yes.
I’m simply concerned over...” He touched the tintype.

“
What?”

“
Perhaps it’s simply the
poor quality of the tintype, but do you notice something odd here?
On the emperor’s neck?”

Amaranthe leaned in and squinted. “A smudge
of ink? Or—no, it looks like a little bump. What—” Her mouth froze,
and she couldn’t get another word out. A bump on his neck. She
lifted a hand to rub her face, her mind lurching to her encounters
the previous spring with two people who’d been afflicted with bumps
in the flesh of their necks, bumps that disappeared, burrowing
deeper beneath the skin, when investigated. One of those people had
died in front of her eyes, overtaken by a violent seizure. The
other had been dead when she walked into his cabin, dead in a room
with no one else around.

“
Maybe it’s nothing,”
Amaranthe whispered, taking the lantern from Books. She held it
close to the newspaper so she could get a better look. Her heart
thumped in her chest.

If Sespian had been implanted with whatever
device killed those other people, was he even now Forge’s puppet?
Completely under their control? Worse, did the device’s presence
mean that they could kill him remotely if Amaranthe and the others
succeeded in kidnapping him? Her throat tightened at the thought of
Sicarius pulling Sespian out of the enemy’s clutches only to have
the emperor—his son—die in his arms.

“
It does not appear to be a
flaw of the tintype process,” Books observed.

“
No.”

Amaranthe glanced toward the door Sicarius
had left open. He hadn’t returned. A thump came from the cargo area
behind the cab. The boiler hissed softly, and machinery rumbled and
clanked even with the lorry idling. Back there, Sicarius wouldn’t
have heard Books’s comment. Should she call him up and tell him? Or
wait? He was already irritated by this side trip, and the knowledge
that the emperor was in even greater danger than they’d thought
might anger him further. Amaranthe remembered the one time she had
seen him lose his temper. He’d smashed his fist into a cabinet—at
times, she wondered if he’d been anywhere close to smashing that
fist into her face—and stalked off to handle things on his own. She
didn’t want to see that again. But he had a right to know. Sespian
mattered more to him than anyone else. But what could he do with
the knowledge? Right then, nothing.

Amaranthe gazed toward the
Yara house, remembering that the enforcer sergeant had been part of
the team that had first discovered Shaman Tarok’s secret workshop.
Tarok had made numerous magical tools for Forge along with the
artifact used to sabotage the city water supply. Might he have made
these miniature control devices as well? If he
had
crafted them, maybe there were a
few prototypes in that workshop, prototypes that Akstyr and Books
could analyze. If so, maybe those two could figure out a way to get
the device out of Sespian’s neck without harming him. Too bad Books
had set the mines up to flood. Maybe Tarok’s workshop had
survived—it had been on a higher level of the mine.

A lot of mights and maybes, Amaranthe
admitted, but it was worth checking out. Yes. If her idea proved
fruitful, then, when she told Sicarius about the implant, she could
also offer him a solution. That’d be the more humane choice. He
wouldn’t worry as much then. And—she admitted there was a selfish
component to her considerations—he wouldn’t be tempted to abandon
her and go off on his own. Now she had even more reason to question
Yara, though she’d have to make sure and do it without Sicarius
around.

“
Are you coming?” Sicarius
asked from outside the cab door.

Amaranthe flinched, nearly falling off the
seat. “Er, yes.” She barely kept herself from snatching the
newspaper and hurling it into the furnace, where it’d burn before
Sicarius could see it. Feigning calm, she told Books, “Better put
that away so we can complete this errand and return to the
road.”

“
Hm, yes.” Books folded the
paper and tucked it away with his journal. He didn’t seem to notice
the desperate don’t-say-a-word-about-this-to-anyone look Amaranthe
implored him with. She’d have to remember to pull him aside later
and make sure he knew.

Amaranthe led the men down a side street and
up a stairway to the residential entrance of the smithy. The lamp
was burning behind the shutters near the door, so Amaranthe paused
on the landing to listen. Footsteps sounded, someone walking into
the room. She couldn’t tell if the treads were male or female.

Amaranthe knocked softly. Without
hesitation, the footsteps approached the door. It swung open. A man
stood there, tall, burly, and wearing enforcer grays. His uniform
tag read YARA, though he bore the rank of a corporal instead of a
sergeant. He had a strong, square jaw and angular face similar to
that of his sister, and he regarded Amaranthe and the men with
narrow suspicious eyes also reminiscent of Sergeant Yara.

“
Good morning,” Amaranthe
said, “sorry to disturb you so early, but we were passing through
and wondered if—”

The door slammed shut in her face.

“
Am I losing my knack for
chatting with people?” Amaranthe wondered.

The door whipped open again. This time the
corporal had a repeating crossbow pressed to his shoulder, the
quarrel targeting Sicarius. Or at least it was in the process of
targeting him. Between one eye blink and the next, Sicarius stepped
inside and tore the crossbow from the man’s hands. The burly
corporal had fifty pounds on Sicarius, but was the one to stumble
back. When he launched a fist, Sicarius caught it in his hand and
twisted the corporal’s wrist while spinning him to face the wall by
the door.

The corporal opened his mouth to yell
something, but Sicarius stopped him with a palm smashed over his
lips. Amaranthe stepped through the doorway and checked to see if
anyone else occupied the room, but only a worn sofa and chairs on a
forest-green rug greeted her. One wall held a fireplace with a
sword and a number of antique smithy tools mounted above it.

“
An admirable collection,”
Books remarked from behind Amaranthe’s shoulder. “That hammer on
the lower left is made from copper, so it predates iron as
a—”

Yara’s brother growled.

“
A discussion for another
time,” Amaranthe suggested.

Footsteps sounded in a nearby room. Sergeant
Yara came out, also dressed in her enforcer uniform, though she had
not yet buttoned her jacket over the black undershirt. She held a
brush to her head and was in the process of taming her short
tousled hair when she saw the scene. She dropped the brush and tore
the sword from its perch above the fireplace.

“
This isn’t precisely how I
imagined my ‘thank you’ going,” Books said.

Before Sicarius could decide he wanted to
incapacitate Sergeant Yara as well as her brother, Amaranthe
stepped forward, hands spread. “Good morning. Your brother is fine.
He just decided to greet my comrade with a crossbow in the
face.”

“
Your
comrade
deserves much worse than
that,” Sergeant Yara said.

In their last conversation—Yara might
consider it a confrontation—Amaranthe had learned the woman lost
some of her vitriol if one didn’t engage in arguments with her. “Do
you have a moment before work?” Amaranthe asked, keeping her voice
pleasant despite Yara’s hostile scowl. “We found something going on
in your district and thought you should know about it.”

“
Mevlar, are you hurt?”
Yara asked.

Sicarius lowered his hand, though Mevlar’s
face was still smashed against the wall.

“
Do you know who these
people are?” Mevlar demanded, ignoring her question. “There’s a
wanted poster out for them,
especially
him.”

“
I know,” Yara said, her
eyes locked onto Amaranthe. “Why are you
here
?”

Amaranthe waved to Sicarius, hoping he would
rearrange Mevlar so the man wouldn’t feel quite so uncomfortable.
Though he gave her a long look first, Sicarius turned his captive
around so they both faced the room. He kept his grip on the
enforcer’s arm and pulled his black dagger out, holding it so the
young man could see it. Though Sicarius’s head only came to the
young enforcer’s chin, Mevlar stood quietly, an eye toward that
inky blade.

Amaranthe reached into a pocket for one of
the cartridges from the weapons manufacturing facility and tossed
it. Yara plucked it from the air with her left hand; the sword in
her right never wavered.

“
Were you the enforcer
investigating the farm at the end of Four Pond Lane?” Amaranthe
asked.

Yara glanced at her brother.

“
You went back out to the
farms?” Mevlar frowned at his sister. “I thought the captain told
you to let that—” Mevlar seemed to remember they had company and
clamped his mouth shut.