Forged in Blood II (17 page)

“Do not force me to do so then,
He shu.
”

“Do you think my father will care? We’re not here to settle old grudges. We’re here because our people are hungry, and our resources are limited. Our soil is depleted after thousands of years of farming, there’s scarcely any coal or ore left in the mountains, and few of the great forests remain standing. My father wants a deal with the Turgonians, some of the resources they have so many of, and that is
all
that he cares about.”

“He’ll be more likely to get that deal if all of Flintcrest’s enemies are thwarted. Starcrest can only be here to cause trouble.”

“We don’t know why he’s here. Maybe he heard about the nascent fighting and came to collect whatever family he has left in the area.”

“Don’t be naive.
Let
me send the assassin.”

“What honor is there in killing a gray-haired old man, Kor Nas? It’s been over twenty years since he bothered us. He probably walks with a cane, has three teeth left in his mouth, and can’t remember half of the crimes he committed against our people.”

“He is
my
age,
He shu
.” Sicarius had never heard the practitioner so dry. “I know at thirty it seems that anyone over sixty must be doddering and infirm, but I assure you this isn’t so.”

The diplomat had the grace to clear his throat, but he didn’t give up his argument. “Yes, but you’re a practitioner, not a warrior. You will retain your power as long as your mind remains sharp. Enemy Chief Fox was a marine.”

Kor Nas grunted. “He did not receive that moniker because of his sword arm, boy. I
know
you know that. He will be dangerous as long as
his
mind remains sharp. Are you not worried about
why
he is here? It may be true that your father didn’t care about him so long as he was on that island, but now that he is back in the empire… I’m warning you, to leave him alive be would be treason.”

“If his mind
is
still sharp, maybe he’ll have no trouble defeating your assassin, leaving you out here without a pet to watch your back while you work your craft.”

“Oh, I’m confident in the abilities of my assassin.” Kor Nas raised his voice—he needn’t have bothered. “Enter, my pet.”

Had Sicarius been capable of ignoring the derogatory summons, he would have. Even as his feet led him through the flap and into the tent, he longed to sling the heavy bag at the practitioner’s head, yank out his dagger, and drive the blade into his heart. All his arms would do, however, was lower his burden. He untied the cord binding the stained canvas shut and dumped the contents.

Seven heads rolled onto the carpet between the two Nurians.

The diplomat, fully clothed, shaved, and dressed with his flute and pipe ornamentation despite the early hour, didn’t stumble backward or flinch at the grisly trophies, but he did stare down at them for a long moment, his mouth set in a hard line. When his gaze lifted to Sicarius’s face for a wary few seconds, Sicarius read the fear in his eyes, though he tried to mask his features.

You don’t have to fear me, Sicarius wanted to say, for I’ll not raise a hand against an ally, acknowledged or not, of Admiral Starcrest’s. But he couldn’t.

“As you can see, Prince Zirabo,” Kor Nas said, “he is effective.”

The name, used for the first time, didn’t surprise Sicarius. He’d guessed from the conversation that this was one of the Great Chief’s sons, the youngest if he recalled correctly. With several older brothers, Zirabo wouldn’t likely be put in a position to rule Nuria, but he should have some sway. Not enough to daunt Kor Nas, it seemed. Kor Nas must be high up in the power structure over there as well. The Nurians had sent their best to ensure they received the concessions they wanted.

“Enemy Chief Fox won’t have a chance to apply his clever mind,” Kor Nas continued, “because he won’t see my pet coming until the dagger is plunging into his heart.”

“Then you’ll forgive me,” Prince Zirabo said, striding toward the tent flap, “if I hope the seer doesn’t find him.”

Kor Nas’s smile gave Sicarius little reason to share that hope, not when the man had already located so many of the Forge leaders that had eluded Amaranthe, Books, and Sicarius himself over the last six months. He stared down at the sightless eyes of Worgavic and couldn’t help but imagine Starcrest’s head in an identical position.

• • •

“Where’d everybody go?” Maldynado whispered.

“I don’t know.” Amaranthe headed for the dark intersection, holding a lantern aloft. “But if this place was eerie when it was lit, it’s even more disturbing now.” Her meager flame wasn’t much of a beacon against the black, windowless tunnels. It felt as if the oppressive darkness could reach out and snuff the single flame.

“Maybe we should wait here.” Maldynado pointed to the translucent membrane, the snowy field and nighttime sky visible beyond it. “We don’t have any longbows and whatever it was the professor thought could be used against the cubes.”

“Agreed, they might never find us if we wander off, but I want to see if we can see any sign of them from the corner.”

Amaranthe stopped at the seven-way intersection. Those ancient people hadn’t cared much for standard geometric shapes. Too basic for their tastes? She peered down each passageway until she spotted something on the floor. She almost leaped back. It was one of the cubes. But it wasn’t floating. It was…

She dared to shuffle closer for a better look.

Two of the sides had been melted away, the exterior crumpling in on itself, revealing a mess of innards made from the same black as the shell, but with thin boards and fine cables snaking about. An arrow shaft stuck out of the mess, the fletching still attached, though the head had either broken off or perhaps melted as well. A tendril of smoke wafted from the innards.

“That’s heartening,” Maldynado said.

“It’d be more heartening if our comrades were standing here over the broken husk, beaming with pride as they showed off their victory.”

“I don’t think Bas knows how to beam. His face is stuck in that saturnine expression of his.”

Amaranthe would be saturnine, too, if they couldn’t find the others. The tunnel stretched away beyond the cube, and if anything else waited down it, she couldn’t tell. She wondered if there was anyway to return power to the lights. In crashing the ship, had she broken the entire thing? Given what she’d seen of the technology, it seemed incomprehensible. But, then, it
was
fifty thousand years old. Maybe the furnace had run out of coal.

“There must have been more than one cube,” she said. “They’ll probably take care of it and circle back.”

“I hope there wasn’t a
lot
more than one cube,” Maldynado said. “The professor didn’t have
that
many arrows.”

Her quiver had been stuffed, but that didn’t mean much. Twenty arrows perhaps. And how many cleaning cubes existed in the vastness of the
Behemoth
? “I wonder why she didn’t ask us all to bring some.”

“Maybe they were only able to make so much of… whatever was in that jar.”

“Something applied to the arrowhead,” Amaranthe guessed. “That must be it, or maybe she expected me to be able to guide her right to the control room before we had to face many problems.”

“Can you? From here?”

“I might have been able to if we’d gone in a door I’d been through before, but this is a new one.”

Amaranthe was contemplating sticking her tongue out at the confusing seven-way intersection when she noticed a scratch on one of the walls. More than a scratch—something had gouged a centimeter-deep hole in the impervious metal. No arrow could have done that. She probed the dent with a finger and found it slightly warm.

“Oh, right,” she murmured, remembering the damage in the control rooms.

“Hm?” Maldynado prompted.

“Whatever Retta’s assistant did to change the cubes caused them to do more than incinerate people. Their beams started damaging the walls, punching
through
the walls to whatever equipment lay behind them. That’s why we crashed.”

“That wasn’t your fault then,” Maldynado said. “I can tell you’re blaming yourself for all of this. You shouldn’t be.”

“Enh.” Amaranthe didn’t feel like explaining the chain of events that had led to Retta’s assistant
making
those changes, a chain she had started as surely as she was breathing now. Instead, she wandered about the intersection, searching for more signs of damage. The number of shots marring the walls confirmed her suspicion that there’d been more than one cube attacking the team. At least two, but maybe more. Tikaya had used her bow to destroy one, but the other must have overwhelmed them and they ran. “I think they went this way,” Amaranthe said after a few more moments of study.

Maldynado nodded toward the scarred walls. “Follow the holes, and we find them?”

“I’m assuming the cubes were shooting at our people as they fled.”

“You sure you don’t want to wait here for them to come back for us? What if they circle back by some other route and we miss them?”

“You’d think they would come back the same direction to stave off that very possibility. We can meet them in the middle.”

“Unless they’re still fleeing cubes and they
can’t
come back in the same direction,” Maldynado said. “We could get very lost in there.”

“They have exactly one effective weapon between the three of them. I’m not going to stay here and wait when they could need our help.”

Maldynado sighed and walked down the corridor at her side. He did not, she was glad, point out that they had exactly
no
effective weapons to help balance the equation. “Just promise me you won’t hurl yourself in front of any cannons. At least not when I’m standing close to you.”

“I’ll try to sublimate any urges to do so.”

They continued down the tunnel, watching the walls for scars. In some spots, there was a clump of them. In others, often around bends where their comrades must have gained ground, there weren’t any. Amaranthe grew nervous in those blank-walled areas, especially when they crossed an intersection and other tunnels branched off. They had to double back twice to find the trail again.

“I hope random cubes aren’t roaming through the corridors, shooting up the walls for their own amusement,” Maldynado said.

“Our people wouldn’t have run off for no reason,” Amaranthe said firmly.

“I’m not so sure. Did you see the way the professor’s eyes lit up when she saw this thing? She couldn’t wait to get inside. Those other two soldiers are probably at the docks right now, wondering where she is.”

Amaranthe stopped walking and lifted a hand. She’d heard something.

A clank sounded in the distance, somewhere ahead of them and… above them? Could that be right?

“Is that—”

“Sh.” Amaranthe held a finger to her lips, then jogged down the tunnel. Listening as she went, she tried to keep her footfalls soft and stop the clatter of her gear, though her rucksack thumped annoyingly on her back.

Maldynado ran beside her, stealing glances at her. Hadn’t he heard anything? Maybe she’d imagined it.

A blocky shape came into sight in the tunnel ahead. Another destroyed cube. Good. They
were
on the right track. They ran past it without stopping to examine it.

“Look out,” someone yelled ahead of them. Mahliki.

“I see it,” came Tikaya’s response, calm but harried.

A sickly smoke scent, something between burning rubber and scorched metal, reached Amaranthe’s nose. Maldynado picked up speed, outpacing her. Lantern light came into view ahead.

His broad back blocked her line of sight, so she didn’t see why he yanked out his rapier, but she trusted he had a good reason. She pulled out her pistol. Neither of their weapons would be effective, but maybe they could distract the cubes.

Maldynado bellowed and took a swing at something in front of him, wielding the blade as if it were an axe instead of a slender rapier. Hugging the wall, Amaranthe went down on one knee and lifted her pistol, expecting a cube to hover in the air ahead of them. She was in time to see his blade clang against something else, something larger but also floating. The blow caused it to bump against the wall and wobble before righting itself. Whatever it was, it didn’t retaliate.

Four feet tall and reminiscent of two big snowballs one atop the other, the black object hovered a few inches above the floor. Two thick white beams shot from its body, painting the wall next to it. Maldynado twitched, almost leaping back, but when he saw that the beams weren’t aimed at him, he swung again. Again, the contraption hit the side of the tunnel, bounced off, and wobbled, but again righted itself and refocused its beam on the wall, a smoldering patch of wall.

Amaranthe raised a hand to stop him. “I don’t think—”

“Not those,” came Tikaya’s voice from ahead.

Amaranthe and Maldynado were at the end of a tunnel that opened into a strange chamber with a spiky floor plan—she didn’t know what else to call it. Long angular alcoves thrust outward in all directions from an open center area, the walls coming together at the shadowy ends of those alcoves like the tips of a triangle with a column of lights at each point. Control stations?

“They’re repairing the damage,” Tikaya went on. Her head was sticking out from one of those alcoves. “They won’t hurt you, but—”

“Look out,” her daughter barked again.

“—the cubes will!” Tikaya finished, ducking back into the alcove before a splash of crimson struck the wall. The sturdy metal didn’t explode or even sheer off in great shards, but flakes did rain to the floor as the beam bore in.

“Where’s Basilard?” Maldynado called.

“Where’s your bow? And that royal gunk?” Amaranthe asked. Now that she’d been told it wouldn’t hurt her, she scooted past the large hovering device, ducking to avoid its white beam, though she paused, startled as a putty-like substance floated through the light and affixed itself to the wall.

Not important, she decided and slipped out of the tunnel. From there, she could see the full room, including two cubes floating toward the alcove Tikaya and Mahliki shared. The two of them were out of sight, but if their alcove was like the others she could see down, it dead-ended at one of those columns. Unless those columns housed secret weapons, the women were in trouble. Where
was
Basilard?