Conspiracy (48 page)

“
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.

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.”