Emperor's Edge Republic (33 page)

“In most nations, that would earn a man a court-martial,” Tikaya said. “I suppose that’s grounds for respect here.”

“It depends on the officer being punched. Some men admire that sort of forthrightness, and some don’t. I, of course, prefer straightforward honesty, even if I’ve learned to deal with deceit and trickery.”

“Yes, I remember you didn’t care for the Kyattese government officials at first because they wouldn’t attack you openly.”

“At first?” Rias asked lightly.

“Just promise me you’ll keep an eye on him. If he’s a Starcrest, I’m sure there’s a brain beneath that crusty exterior.”

“Oh, there is. I wouldn’t have brought him into the office if there weren’t. Although he has made it clear that he’s a field man and doesn’t particularly care for desk jobs, especially one that involves supervising a lot of other people doing their desk jobs.”

Tikaya fluffed up her pillow and cut out the lamp. “I’ll let you know what I find as soon as I find it.”

“Good. You should also prepare a suitcase in the morning,” Rias said, “though I’m loath to give up ground and admit defeat.”

“What? Why? And admit defeat to whom?”

“To that plant. I received word this evening that it’s in the sewer system not five feet from the basement of this hotel.”

That explained Serpitivich’s research.

“I sent Dak on a reconnaissance,” Rias went on, “and it’s breaking through buildings’ foundations and destroying their plumbing up to Fourth Street so far. This is all in addition to the surface damage. I’ve ordered all of the factories, warehouses, and canneries on the first two blocks abandoned. The owners are not pleased. I expect we’ll have riots outside the gates soon, and those religious zealots are using this to their advantage to cow people into joining their cause.”

“I suppose when you say pack a suitcase, you mean so that we can move your headquarters farther up the hill, not so we can hop onto the first steamer heading out to sea and back home.” Tikaya thought he might laugh or at least chuckle wryly, but he was utterly serious when he responded.

“That remains an option for you. For me to leave would be the greatest cowardice.”

“Maybe you could simply invite the vice president to replace you—he ran against you, so he must want the job. Then it would be more like a stately resignation rather than a fleeing of a battlefield with one’s tail between one’s legs.”

“He seems... rather bookish for the job. The other day, I caught him reading up on the new religious cult, which is apparently a very old religious cult, when he was supposed to be perusing papers distributed by the chief of financial affairs. He didn’t see this as inappropriate in the least; rather he launched into a lecture.”

“I’d choose a history book over finance reports too,” Tikaya said.

“In the middle of a staff meeting covering those finance reports?”

“Perhaps not, but I’ve found his knowledge interesting when he’s shared it. Did you let him talk?”

“I asked him to have a paper sent to my desk.”

Tikaya snorted. “Learned that trick from Mahliki, did you?”

“Perhaps so. Regardless, I can’t leave. There’s too much...
much
.” He yawned, and Tikaya resolved to let him go back to sleep.

She patted in the darkness, finding his arm atop the blankets. “I was teasing, love. I know you can’t leave. And I won’t leave you here to face these madmen alone, either.”

“The madmen don’t concern me greatly. I’ve been dealing with such men for a long time and understand their ways. That plant is another matter.”

Chapter 12

“H
ere.” A brutish man in wrinkled clothes and with missing teeth thrust a shovel into Maldynado’s hands.

“I... have familiarity operating heavy machinery. Do you need anyone for the steam shovel or dozer?” Maldynado waved toward the equipment on the edge of the construction site. Yawning firemen were loading the furnaces and heating up the boilers for the day’s work. The sun hadn’t come up yet—and thick black clouds that smelled of rain suggested it might never make it—but fire barrels brightened the sprawling lot.

“No. Your job is to shovel that into that.” The man pointed at all the debris left from the razing of the doddering building that had formerly stood on the site, then pointed at the nearby dumpsters. Wheelbarrows leaned against them, waiting for the morning’s workers.

That means you, old boy, Maldynado thought. When he had asked the president for a job, this wasn’t quite what he’d had in mind. He eyed the shovel and thought about going back to the flat, to the warm covers he had left. Considering it was spring, there was an awful lot of frosty air forming in front of his face after each breath. Too bad Evrial had already left for the day, or they could have stayed in bed together. Maybe. She had been awfully busy of late, since their tiff the night her father showed up, and they hadn’t spoken a lot of words since then. He kept catching her gazing off into the distance, contemplating deep thoughts. Well, if she was going to leave him, it wasn’t because he was some jobless mooch. Maldynado clenched his jaw, tightened his grip on the shovel, and strode toward the debris pile.

He spent the next two hours, laboring amongst the commoners—and trying not to think of them as commoners. After all, who was he now anyway? Those Marblecrests who hadn’t been tried for crimes against the government—and some of those who had—had fled the city. Those who remained were changing their stationery to read from the desks of Such-and-such Márblé in vain attempts to hide affiliation with the warrior-caste family name. Even if he hadn’t been disowned, he would have had a hard time thinking of himself as aristocratic these days.

“Just one of the boys now,” he said.

A worker in baggy clothing walked past pushing a wheelbarrow, his trousers sagging down in the back to reveal full moons no astronomer ever wanted to see.

“One of the more impeccably dressed boys.” Maldynado patted his backside to make sure his suede button-down shirt was still tucked in suitably, then checked the sleeves to ensure they were rolled up the perfect amount: not so much that he grew chilled but enough to display the corded muscles of his forearms. Ladies had started to walk by the construction site on their way to work. If nothing else, he intended to be the most handsome fellow at this dubious place of employment.

A crash and the screeching of metal came from the back of the lot. Strange. Vehicles didn’t tend to crash themselves when Amaranthe wasn’t around.

“It’s going to blow,” someone hollered. “Everyone out of the way.”

That was usually good advice, but Maldynado jogged in the direction of the commotion, curious as to what was happening.

Great plumes of black smoke arose from a vehicle behind a steam dozer. The cement mixer? Maybe it wasn’t too late to solve the problem and keep damage from occurring. A notion of being seen as some hero who saved lives teased his thoughts, though as he passed a dozen men running in the opposite direction, most waving and shouting for him to turn around, he slowed down. Maybe running up onto all that smoke wasn’t such a good—

A great boom blasted the construction site. Three times as much smoke poured into the sky, and shrapnel flew in every direction. Maldynado flattened himself to the ground, throwing his arms over his head and lamenting that he had rejected the hard safety hat a supervisor had tried to foist onto him.

Shards of metal struck the ground all around him, and more than a few pieces pelted his back. Nothing large, thank the ancestors, but he cursed as some of the sharp projectiles sliced through his shirt and into flesh. When the pattering of shrapnel stopped, he lifted his head. The steam dozer had been knocked on its side. Behind it, the cement mixer remained intact, but it was now on the ground ten feet from the rest of the lorry. The cab was gone altogether. The engine too. The boiler had been peeled open like a flower, warped steel still smoking.

None of the other lorries were on fire, nor did anything else seem in danger of exploding, so Maldynado climbed to his feet and headed toward the smoldering mess. He was the first on the scene and poked around, careful not to touch any of the hot metal. Heat shimmered in the air above the wrecked boiler.

“No bodies,” he said. “That’s good.”

The lorry would cost someone a fortune to replace, but that wasn’t for a menial shovel-wielder to worry about.

“What the blast happened over here?” the foreman asked, running up.

Maldynado stifled the urge to say that it had blown up, that being rather obvious. “Don’t know. I just got here.”

“Find the fireman and the operator who were setting this up,” the foreman yelled toward a crowd of workers that was edging closer. Nobody else had come forward to investigate. Maybe they didn’t want to be blamed.

Metal squealed and a blackened panel tipped over, almost flattening Maldynado. He darted out of the way before it smacked onto the ground.

Or, maybe those workers were just smart enough to stay out of a disaster area.

Maldynado wandered over to look at the cab—at what was left of it. The doors had been blown off, and all of the controls inside were warped, melted, or missing completely. Shrapnel crunched under his feet as he drew closer. He almost stepped on a bent gauge with the glass blown off. It was the one that measured the steam levels, letting the operator know if more coal needed to be added to the furnace or if steam needed to be vented because too much pressure had built up.

“Interesting,” Maldynado murmured, picking it up. The needle was stuck in the middle. If an explosion had been impending, shouldn’t it have been pushed up into the red zone?

“Out of the way, big man.” The foreman tried to push Maldynado aside.

Maldynado hadn’t meant to be contrary, but he was focused on the gauge and didn’t move. The smaller man almost bounced off.

“Yo, Shovel Head. This isn’t your area. Get out of here.”

“I thought you might find this gauge interesting,” Maldynado said, holding it up.

An engineer with soot-smudged overalls stood behind the foreman, along with a rat-faced man who looked twitchier than the target in front of a firing squad. The cement lorry operator, Maldynado guessed.

“A broken gauge? I have a broken forty-thousand-ranmya lorry here.” The foreman didn’t try to push Maldynado aside again, but he did pointedly put his back to him. He grabbed the operator. “Come show me what happened. Your job is already forfeit. It’s time to find out if there will be charges of negligence pressed.”

“Boss, please.” The rat-faced man winced as the foreman grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and pushed him toward the destroyed cab. “I can’t afford no charges. Nothing was wrong, I’m telling you. Until the smoke started billowing out, and the lorry started shuddering, I didn’t know nothing. The gauges all read fine, I swear. Ask Donok.” He pointed at the fireman who was doing his best to look as inconspicuous as a post in the shadows of the dozer.

Maldynado walked over to the engineer, thinking he might be more interested in the gauge.

The engineer glanced at it and grunted. “Doesn’t mean much. The needle might have been reset when it was blown out of the cab.”

“Or maybe it’s sabotage,” Maldynado said. He wondered if he had been so quick to speculate about nefarious activities
before
his year with Amaranthe. He thought not.

“Over here, Nossev,” the foreman said.

The engineer shrugged at Maldynado and obeyed his boss.

“Such a cheery group of people I’m working with,” Maldynado said.

“You, Shovel Head,” the foreman hollered. “Get back to work. And get all those other dirt-flingers back to work too. This is the most important job of the decade. There’s
not
going to be a delay.”

“Shovel Head, how witty and original.” Maldynado stuck the gauge in his pocket and tapped his chin thoughtfully, wondering where he had left his shovel. Oh, well. He would find another.

“Maldynado?” a quiet voice called. “What’s going on?”

He turned to find Sespian walking off the street, a sketchpad in hand and a tube for holding maps—or in this case, maybe blueprints—in a sling across his back. Though he had grown up some since Maldynado had come to know him, he was still young enough to look more like a bicycle messenger delivering plans than a former emperor and current architect.

“Mysterious explosion of a cement lorry,” Maldynado said, pleased that Sespian stopped next to him instead of going over to the foreman. Said foreman was still snarling and casting blame about; he hadn’t noticed his prestigious visitor yet.

“
Another
accident?” Sespian lifted his eyes toward the cloudy sky. “Why couldn’t this go well? My first professional gig and probably the most important building I’ll design in my life.”

“Nah.” Maldynado thumped him on the shoulder. “Once you get known for serving presidents, the Kyattese government will want you to come design something snazzy for them. Maybe even the Nurian Great Chief. Oh, or Basilard’s Mangdorian chief. How are you with yurts?”

Sespian smiled, but barely.

“What do you mean another accident?” Maldynado asked more seriously.

“Yesterday, the steam brakes on one of the lorries went out, and it and its operators plunged into the hole excavated for the basement.”

“Did the operators survive?”

“Yes,” Sespian said, “but with broken bones.”

“And the foreman called me a dolt—actually a Shovel Head—for suspecting sabotage... One broken lorry might be bad luck, but two in two days? Sounds suspicious to me.”

“To me as well,” Sespian said.

“Did you tell the president?” Maldynado snapped his fingers as a new idea came to him. “Is that why I was sent here? Old Starcrest knew something was going on, and he wanted me to pretend to be a common laborer all the while mounting a private investigation to find the culprit?”

“Uhm,” Sespian said.

Maldynado thrust a finger into that air. “That’s brilliant. I knew he couldn’t mean for me to simply wither and rot here at the lowest form of menial labor in the city.” A couple of men glowered as they walked past with shovels on their shoulders. “Sorry, blokes. I didn’t mean that. Everyone knows factory work is
twice
as menial.”