Emperor's Edge Republic (53 page)

The front door banged open before Amaranthe could ask further questions.

Figures in green robes streamed inside, pistols in their hands. Amaranthe leaped from her seat to crouch behind the desk. Deret jumped to his feet, knocking over his swordstick, and cursing as he almost lost his balance. He caught himself on the desk. Amaranthe pulled him down beside her so they would have some cover, albeit not nearly as much as they needed against... eight, no, ten people spreading out in the entryway. Their hoods were all up, their faces hidden by shadows. They were all armed.

Amaranthe had pulled her sword out as she ducked behind the desk, but it would do precious little against men with pistols twenty feet away.

“Deret Mancrest,” one of the figures said, his deep voice resonating as if it were echoing from the walls of a cave. “You will come with us.”

“I’d rather not,” Deret said. “I already attended the meeting tonight. The little sardine snacks weren’t appealing enough to make me want to return again on the same day.”

“Can we get out the back?” Amaranthe whispered, thinking of the door behind the presses as well as the unofficial basement exit they had made the last time she visited.

A clang came from the shadows in the back, and a cool draft whispered into the room. A moment later, six more robed figures strode into the light from behind.

“I think not,” Deret murmured.

The desk offered no cover from these men, and they raised pistols as soon as they spotted Deret and Amaranthe.

“You
will
come with us,” the speaker repeated.

Amaranthe didn’t see many possible escape routes and none that wouldn’t involve dodging fire. She admitted a certain curiosity as to where these people wanted to take Deret anyway. If she went along, she might find the leader she sought that very night.

Deret sighed and stood up, spreading his hands. “It seems I have no choice. Though I would appreciate it if you left this woman behind—”

Amaranthe elbowed him in the side as she stood up, also spreading her hands. “I’ll not have you carted off by these strange men, never to be seen again,” Amaranthe said. “Where you go, I go.”

Deret glowered at her but didn’t argue.

“Very sweet,” the speaker said, the deepness of his voice doing nothing to muffle his sarcasm.

His voice sounded familiar, and Amaranthe thought it might belong to the priest who had called down the lightning. If so, would he recognize her? She hadn’t done anything to stand out at that gathering. Like everyone else, she had been too busy gaping at the lightning strike and the charred plant.

The robed men at the back of the room shuffled forward until they were close enough to prod Deret and Amaranthe in the backs with their pistols. The proximity of those weapons made Amaranthe’s shoulder blades twitch—and her instincts call out for her to do something—but she forced herself to do nothing more than walk in the direction the men indicated. She expected them to lead her and Deret out the front door, but they must have deemed that too public a route, even with the city largely abandoned. She and Deret were poked and prodded toward the back door, where Amaranthe had a chance to see that the floor had indeed been repaired. The big press she had hidden behind was gone—either disassembled and moved to the ridge location or maybe it had been smashed beyond repair when it had fallen into the basement. Poor Deret had inherited a mess. Even if he had helped create that mess, it had been her crazy idea that had prompted him into that destructive route. She told herself that his father had given them little choice, though she could definitely understand why he might want to take a break from the family business.

Outside on the loading dock, Amaranthe grew a little nervous when two of the men hopped down and opened a storm drain cover. This was a more secretive route than she had imagined. Stars gleamed between the clouds, and she eyed the rooflines, hoping to catch a dark figure crouched up there, spying on them. But she had left Sicarius hunting his own assassin. Whatever trouble she had gotten herself into tonight, she would have to get out of on her own.

Chapter 20

T
ea didn’t revive and energize one as effectively as coffee, and Tikaya couldn’t believe the latter wasn’t a popular drink in Turgonia. She wondered if it would be in her prerogative as a president’s wife to request that shiploads of it be regularly imported to the capital to rejuvenate her—and Rias’s staff, of course. As soon as she caught herself wondering that, she grumbled at herself to focus, and returned to the five thousandth report she had gone over. It was probably more like the five hundredth, but it
felt
like the five thousandth.

Outside of Dak’s office, the sounds of chairs scuffing, papers shuffling, and throats being cleared had dwindled. She wasn’t sure what time it was but knew that most of the staff had stayed late, so it had to be later yet. She rubbed the back of her neck and stood for a moment, giving her rump a rest from the hard wooden chair. She added a few calf and side stretches to loosen muscles tight from disuse. Though she shifted about, she didn’t take her eyes from the reports. At least the one she was perusing now was legible. Mostly. Only one in four military intelligence officers seemed capable of passing a simple penmanship test. Tikaya couldn’t bring herself to delegate reading them to anyone else, not being certain who she could trust, but there was so much chaff in the reports that she worried she was wasting her time. Almost worse were the interesting snippets among the chaff, for they could distract her, leading her down roads that eventually became dead ends.

Since it had grown so quiet in the outer office, when a knock came at the door, it startled her into tripping over the chair and falling to the floor. That was what she got for doing calf stretches while reading. When Dak walked in, he found her scrambling to her feet. Tikaya groped for the chair and straightened it.

“Good evening,” she said. “I, ah, wasn’t expecting company.”

“Oh?” Dak eyed the section of floor she had vacated, the “what sort of floor exercises do you do when you
are
expecting company?” going unspoken.

Tikaya flushed, feeling like an idiot. She wished she could show him some piece of brilliance she had discovered, something that would justify any odd research habits.

“Here are a handful of names.” Dak tossed a paper on the desk. “I’ve learned some of the information the snitch has been credited with relaying to others, and these are the only people who would have had access to everything.”

“Oh?” Tikaya picked up the sheet. If she could simply skim the reports for mentions of those names, she would save a lot of time. Though... it was the information about the priests that she specifically sought here. She couldn’t abandon that search. She read the short list. “Your name is on here.”

“Yeah.” Dak picked up a pen and wrote on a notepad on the corner of the desk. “Watch for this name too. Your friends found him dead upstairs. I think he might have been blackmailed, but I can’t be positive he wasn’t involved in something duplicitous of his own accord.”

“Avigart?” Tikaya had seen something with that name on it recently. What had it been?

“Yes.” Dak tilted his head. “Have you found anything interesting?”

He sounded genuinely curious. Maybe even hopeful.

“So far... I feel like I’ve been wasting my time. And yours. I haven’t found anything.” She straightened her own notepad and picked up her pencil; she wouldn’t get anywhere if she allowed herself to be distracted.

“Hm.” Did that hm sound skeptical? Maybe he didn’t think she would tell him if she
did
find something interesting.

“Though, Avigart, I did see that name.” Tikaya tapped the folders piled about her. “Not in here. Where was it? Oh, I remember.” She pushed away from the desk and walked into the outer office. “I wandered around here, reading everything on the bulletin boards and walls when I needed a break a couple of hours ago.” She stopped in front of a duty roster scrawled on a chalkboard. “Avigart requested a change of duty tonight. Instead of working the night shift here in the hotel, he wanted some patrol.”

“He might have had an inkling about what was going to happen to him tonight,” Dak said. “I wish he’d said something to me, or spoken to his lieutenant. Especially if he was being strong-armed.”

“You would think that if he knew his own death was impending, he would have left the hotel, regardless of whether his duty shift was approved.”

“True.” Dak rested a finger next to scribbled initials on the chalkboard. “His request actually
was
approved.”

“Not soon enough to help him, it seems.” Tikaya removed her spectacles and cleaned the lenses as if the act would help her better see clues hovering in the air. “It’s quiet in here tonight.” They were the only ones in the office. “Or is it simply later than I realize?”

“An hour until midnight. We usually only have a couple of people staffing the office at night, someone able to raise the alarm if something happens in the city. The vice president collected some of the men to guard him as he moves his belongings to some friend’s property, well outside of the plant-invasion area. He’s not waiting for Rias to give the word to evacuate.”

“Given that the plant is literally knocking at the windows, it’s hard to blame him,” Tikaya said. “Odd that he’s moving in the middle of the night though.”

“I thought so as well. I went to ask him about it, but he was mysteriously unavailable for questions.”

“Do you find it... disconcerting that two of the people on your very short list of possible snitches made plans to spend the night away from the hotel?”

Dak gave her a sharp look. “Are you suggesting that it might not be a good night to enjoy a holiday in the Emperor’s Bulwark?”

“I don’t know. Rias isn’t here, so if someone wanted to assassinate him, launching an attack tonight wouldn’t do anything, not here anyway.” Tikaya grimaced, thinking that Rias, for all the men he had taken with him to that waterfront warehouse, was a lot more vulnerable out there than he would be here. “There’s nobody here worth expending effort to kill.”

Dak’s intense look hadn’t faded. If anything, it sharpened further. “
You’re
here.”

Tikaya drew back, not sure what he was implying. “You’re here too.”

“Yes, but
my
death wouldn’t devastate Rias so utterly that he would be unable to finish his submarine modifications.”

“I wouldn’t bet on my death having that effect, either,” Tikaya said, though his point sank in. “He would finish the submarine and
then
mourn.”

“Strangers might not guess that. Strangers might be desperate enough at this point to try anything. If they can’t get at him directly...” Dak frowned, then cursed.

“What?”

“I originally came in here to tell you that I’m going down to check on Rias,” Dak said. “I’ve had men reporting in every hour. Two hours ago, I got a schematic and orders to send that Sarevic woman out to a factory to start working with a team of people on making more electricity generators. One hour ago... I got nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“No report.”

Tikaya swallowed. “You think he’s in trouble?” Rias and Mahliki were
both
down in that warehouse. Though they had been accompanied by a number of armed men, she would run back to the suite and find her bow if she thought she could help.

“I think he can take care of whatever trouble comes, but that doesn’t mean it’s acceptable to miss filing a report.”

Tikaya couldn’t tell if Dak was making a joke or not. She did sense that he was trying not to worry her. That made her worry more. “I can go with you.” He opened his mouth, but she spoke again before he could start. “I’ve been in combat situations.” Remembering she had demonstrated her ability to fall out of a chair not minutes before, Tikaya added, “I’ve been
useful
in combat situations.”

“I’ve heard about your bow skills. What I was going to say is that you should pack a bag too. I’m going to put out orders to evacuate the hotel. Just in case.”

“Based on our hunches? That seems drastic.”

“It was going to have to be evacuated soon anyway.” Dak jogged for the door, but paused before turning into the hallway. He looked back at her. “Don’t take too long packing that bag.”

• • • • •

When Maldynado had imagined setting a trap and catching the villain responsible for sabotaging Sespian’s building, he hadn’t imagined himself crawling out on a six-inch-wide steel beam twenty feet above the ground. If he dropped the jug cradled under his arm, he hoped Basilard would catch it before it crashed to the dirt below and broke into a thousand pieces.

“Should have delegated this to Sicarius. He
likes
this sort of thing.”

Maldynado had no idea which section of the framework would be most structurally crucial, but he doubted the cigar-smoking prisoner would have known, either. This had probably been intended to be one more bit of mysterious sabotage to set back construction, not the ultimate disaster that would halt work permanently.

“How’s this look?” he called down, trying to keep his voice low. They had more than an hour until midnight, so he doubted the sniper they expected would be out there yet, but there was a security guard roaming around the site, a lantern bumping and banging against his thigh. As quiet as the city was tonight, Maldynado had been able to hear it from a hundred meters away. He had timed his climb to avoid being spotted. Even if he was on the side of the law here, explaining his current position might prove difficult, especially to the foreman.

From the shadows below, Basilard waved and pointed. Of
course
he thought the jug should be moved ten feet farther out on the beam.
He
wasn’t the one sliding along the narrow perch on his belly.

“You better not be having fun with me,” Maldynado whispered, scooting farther out. His shirt was rucked up around his ribs, so the cold metal scraped his bare stomach. He couldn’t see any difference between his chosen spot and the other. “All right, what about here?”