Conspiracy (55 page)

“
Unfortunately, they’re in
here and the enemy is way out there. Not only did Lady Buckingcrest
betray us by sending along ambushers, but she gave us a tub with no
weapons. Unbelievable. Pleasuring a woman all night doesn’t count
for as much as it used to.”

Amaranthe hadn’t mentioned
Books’s hypothesis that Maldynado might somehow be behind the
stowaways and the fact that this black craft had found them in the
first place. She trusted Maldynado and couldn’t believe he would
betray her. Besides, if by some remote chance he
was
a spy, wouldn’t he
have arranged things so that he wouldn’t be
on
the dirigible when it was
attacked?

“
Maybe you’re getting older
and less appealing,” Amaranthe said as she dug through lockers,
hoping to find useful equipment that had come with the
craft.

Maldynado sniffed. “We’re about to face
death together. Do you really think this is the time to insult
me?”

“
Sorry, you’re right.
Insults after battles. Come help me with this, will you?” Amaranthe
waved to a locker where she’d found long, wide strips of
canvas-like fabric and buckets of a black tarry goo. “Repair
supplies for the balloon, I’d guess, though maybe we can—” A
shudder ran through the floor. “Actually, why don’t you check on
navigation?” Amaranthe might tease Maldynado about his proclivity
for crashing vehicles, but most of those crashes had been a result
of her orders. In truth, she’d always found him competent at
working machinery. She knew less about Basilard and Yara’s
capabilities. “Send Basilard back to help.”

“
You got it, boss.”
Maldynado jogged for the corridor.

“
And keep this boat as
steady as you can,” she called after him. “That’s a delicate
surgery they’re performing on the emperor in there.”

Amaranthe eyed the cargo bay door, wondering
if they could open it while flying.

Maldynado paused inside the corridor. “Maybe
we should put off the surgery. What if those blokes start attacking
us?”

Amaranthe frowned. She trusted Maldynado,
she did, but now that Books had brought up his suspicions, she
couldn’t help but think there might be a reason Maldynado didn’t
want that device out of Sespian’s neck. If his family was angling
for the throne and was in position to seize it if Sespian
disappeared...

She shook her head. “If that’s their plan,
Sespian will want that thing out of his neck before we crash and
get captured by someone who can make it kill him at any time.”

“
That’s not a very
optimistic thought.”

“
Sorry, we haven’t had much
sleep, and I’m finding it hard to remain hopeful about the future.”
Amaranthe pulled out one of the fabric strips and tugged at it
experimentally. No stretchiness, hm. Maybe she could find some
rubber.

Maldynado muttered something in parting, but
she was too focused on her new plan to hear the words. By the time
Basilard joined her, Amaranthe had buckets, fabric strips, and
rubber cords strewn across the deck in front of the cargo door.

Basilard signed,
What are we making?

“
Slingshot,” Amaranthe
said. “I could use some help.”

Basilard’s eyebrows rose. That probably
meant she should be worried about her plan, but there wasn’t time
for self-doubt. She peeked through the porthole. Its massive size
might mean the black ship was farther back than it appeared, but
either way it had halved the distance between them. The sun’s light
glinted off the snowcaps on the last of the mountains, but its rays
failed to reflect off of that craft. It almost looked like a black
hole in the sky, coming to swallow them.

“
I’m going to fly lower,”
Maldynado called down the corridor. “Maybe we can lose them in the
wetlands.”

That other craft could likely do anything
the dirigible could do when it came to navigating, but Amaranthe
kept the thought to herself and simply pointed for Basilard to come
help her. She hoped her slingshot idea wouldn’t end up being
laughable to the enemy. Whatever that craft had fired at the cliff
to collapse the railway tunnel could doubtlessly pulverize the
dirigible, perhaps from a great distance. It might never need to
get within range of Amaranthe’s weapon—and calling the clunky
slingshot a weapon was surely delusional. She kept working
anyway.

* * * * *

Akstyr sat next to the bed,
his hands clasped in his lap, his eyes half closed. He could see
the faint bulge at the side of the emperor’s throat, but he needed
to sense it as well. Unfortunately, he was having a hard time
concentrating. Sicarius stood on the opposite side of the emperor’s
bed, his black dagger in hand. His role might be to cut out the
implant, but Akstyr couldn’t help but remember his earlier words
and wonder if Sicarius might cut
his
neck, should he fail
here.

“
No pressure,” he
murmured.

“
Should I be worried that
you look more nervous than I do?” the emperor asked. He was lying
on the bed, his hands folded over his belly, as if in relaxed
repose, but tension tightened his interlaced fingers.

“
Nah, I’m not nervous,”
Akstyr said out of some notion that doctors should be brave for
their patients. “Just...”

“
Pensive?”

“
Right.”

“
There may be little time,”
Sicarius said, his tone hard, the words clipped.

“
Right,” Akstyr
repeated.

Sespian sighed, lay his head back, and
closed his eyes. The tension didn’t ebb from his fingers.

“
Is there anything I can
do?” Books asked softly from behind Akstyr.

“
No,” Akstyr said. “I’ve
memorized everything you’ve translated for me. I just need
quiet.”

He took a deep breath and
closed his own eyes. He stretched out, trying to sense the artifact
without letting it sense
him
.

Since Akstyr knew what the
devices looked like, he was able to picture the buried one in his
mind. He imagined it nestled beneath the skin, a knot burrowed into
the muscle, and slowly the made-up picture in his head coalesced
into the real one. It had life of a sort. An awareness. It
emitted... a question or perhaps a probe, as if it knew something,
or
someone
, was
there.

Akstyr fought for calmness. It wasn’t
certain yet, or it would have already moved. He summoned energy in
his mind, like coiling one’s body before springing into the air. He
was about to unleash the energy, to attempt to stun the device,
when the floor tilted. It nearly threw him from his seat, and he
only caught himself by grabbing the emperor’s footboard. The
dirigible groaned and tilted back the other way.

“
Check on it,” Sicarius
said.

At first, Akstyr thought Sicarius was
talking to him, but the door slammed, and he realized Books had
left. Akstyr shifted on his seat, not thrilled at being left alone
with Sicarius. Well, Sicarius and the emperor, who was sitting up,
frowning.

“
Lie down, Sire,” Sicarius
said. There was no deference in the way he said sire, and it was
clearly an order. “Continue,” he told Akstyr in the same
tone.

“
Maybe,” Akstyr said,
directing his words to the emperor instead of Sicarius, “we should
wait until—”

The floor titled again, this time toward the
nose of the craft. Akstyr’s heart jumped. They weren’t heading
toward a crash, were they?

“—
someone besides Maldynado
is driving,” he finished. Nobody smiled at his attempt at humor. It
didn’t amuse him much either. He wanted to lunge to his feet and
run up to the navigation cabin to check on what was
happening.

“
Continue,” Sicarius
repeated. The way he said it made Akstyr suspect he didn’t have the
option to leave. “Before this gets worse,” Sicarius
added.

Sespian nodded grimly. “Do it,” he told
Akstyr and lay back down.

As if it was so easy. Akstyr closed his eyes
again and struggled to regain his focus. He probed the area beneath
the scar tissue, trying to find the device. He frowned. It wasn’t
there.

Amaranthe, using clamps she had scrounged,
fastened one end of the slingshot to a vertical strut to the left
of the cargo door. Basilard was doing the same on the other side.
The already tilted floor angled more steeply toward the nose of the
craft, and Amaranthe found herself hanging onto the strut as her
feet threatened to skid out from beneath her.

“
I didn’t think a dirigible
could tilt that much,” she said.

Though Basilard was
struggling to hold on as well, he managed to one-handedly
sign,
Maldynado’s driving.

“
Good point.”

Something scraped behind them. The box of
blasting sticks sliding across the floor toward the corridor.
Amaranthe’s heart leaped. Those should have been secured when the
men first came on board.

“
What’s going on back
here?” Books clawed his way out of the emperor’s suite and into the
corridor.

“
Grab that box,” Amaranthe
shouted.

Alarm widened Books’s eyes, and she wished
she’d kept her voice calmer. If he fumbled it and didn’t catch it
before it smacked into the wall or slid down to the navigation
cabin...

Books managed to catch the box before it
struck anything.

“
Thanks,” Amaranthe said.
“Secure that, will you? And bring us a few sticks. And that lantern
that’s sliding your way too.”

“
I came back here to see
what was happening, not get pressed into labor,” Books said, though
he headed toward her.

“
What’s happening is we
need someone pressed into labor.” Amaranthe nodded toward the
porthole in the door. “Maldynado’s swerving about isn’t helping
much. They’re getting close.”

“
Dead deranged ancestors,”
Books whispered, staring at the hole.

Amaranthe doubted he could see details from
across the cargo hold, but the black ship now filled the view. It
blotted out the mountains and the sky with its bulk. Amaranthe
couldn’t tell if it was bringing weapons to bear, but, even if it
didn’t, the craft could probably destroy the dirigible simply by
running into it. Like a steam tramper squishing a fly.

“
Has it done anything yet?”
Books was strapping down the box of explosives.

“
It’s just following us,”
Amaranthe said. “Getting closer and closer. Basilard, think we’re
ready to open the door and test our blasting-stick
slingshot?”

Our?

“
You helped me construct
it.”

It’s your idea.

“
Basilard says we’re ready
to go.” Amaranthe extended a hand toward Books. The dirigible
tilted to the side, and her feet slipped. Only her fingers wrapped
about the strut kept her from tumbling toward him.

“
I can... read his signs,”
Books said, his words broken as he focused on climbing on hands and
knees up the slanted floor while he clenched blasting sticks in his
fists. “That’s not what he said.”

The nose of the dirigible rose and the floor
tipped the opposite direction so quickly it nearly hurled Books
into the cargo door. Amaranthe and Basilard caught him before
blasting sticks could fly from his hands. For a moment, the greens
and browns of the wetlands were visible through the porthole before
the craft leveled.

“
That idiot,” Books
growled. “I should be piloting. He’ll kill us before the enemy has
a chance.”

Something flashed outside. Amaranthe and
Basilard almost clunked heads as they leaned toward the porthole
for a look. Maldynado had brought them within fifty feet of the
ground. The tips of trees would claw at the dirigible’s metal hull
if they dropped any lower. The other craft wasn’t quite as low, but
it was far too close for Amaranthe’s tastes. A white beam shot out
of the dome’s black belly. It sliced through the sky and tore into
the earth below. Trees burst into flame or were hurled from the
ground altogether. Marsh water boiled and erupted into geysers. The
beam zigzagged across the ground with clumsy madness, and Amaranthe
thought of a kid scribbling on the sidewalk with chalk.

“
Why’s it shooting the
ground instead of us?” Books asked.

Amaranthe thought of Sicarius’s explanation
for the strange craft’s existence. If the original expedition had
needed Admiral Starcrest and a genius code cracker from an enemy
nation, maybe the technology was so foreign that the Forge people
were struggling to work everything. Except they were having no
trouble flying after her team in that monstrosity...

“
I don’t know,” Amaranthe
said, “but we better take advantage of the fact that we’re not a
smoldering ball of flame yet.”

Even as she spoke, the beam zigzagged again,
striking a stout cypress. The wood exploded beneath the power, or
perhaps the heat, and shards flew everywhere. Flames erupted from
the ten-foot-tall stump that remained.

“
Good idea,” Books
said.

“
Let’s get this door open,”
Amaranthe told Basilard.

“
While we’re flying?” Books
asked. “Is that wise?”

“
Wiser than lighting a
blasting stick in a room
without
an open door.”