Amaranthe shifted her weight as a new image popped into existence in front of her. The professor’s enthusiasm disturbed her; it was too akin to that which Retta had displayed.
The image wavered and coalesced into a map of Stumps, the lake, and the surrounding area. Not just a map, Amaranthe realized when she spotted trolleys moving along Waterfront Street, a display of the living world around them. Daylight had come, and the city was awake with more troops than ever roaming the streets.
“Fascinating,” Mahliki murmured. “You wouldn’t think that’d be possible without some sort of…” she groped, searching for an adequate word, “floating observatory in the sky above us somewhere.”
“Mkor Mratht,” Tikaya said.
“Pardon?” Amaranthe asked. Mahliki didn’t look enlightened either.
“There’s no word for it in either of our languages, but that’s what these people called it. I am, of course, taking liberty with the pronunciation.”
“Of course,” Amaranthe said.
“Floating observatory, yes,” Tikaya said, “but in space, orbiting about our planet like a moon. They left them there tens of thousands of years ago. I read about it in the encyclopedia.” She waved toward the unassuming sphere. “Until now, I had no way to know whether they were still functioning—after all this time, I certainly wouldn’t have guessed that to be the case—but… it’s magnificent, isn’t it?”
“Ah, yes,” Amaranthe said. “About that trench…” She trailed off, taken in despite herself, when Tikaya swiped her fingers through the image, shifting the view. Instead of the waterfront, they were now looking down at the Behemoth, an aerial view of it, the snowy field, and the lake to the south of it. Along with a whole crowd of people. “Emperor’s eyeteeth, where’d they come from?”
Men and women, mostly in civilian clothing but with a few army uniforms mixed in, circled the base of the Behemoth, staring up at it. There were a few children too, though mothers had them pulled in close. Afternoon sun gleamed off the snow—Amaranthe had indeed slept for some hours—but failed to make so much as a glint on the inky black hull of the ship. It swallowed light instead of reflecting it.
“Tourist attraction?” Mahliki mused.
“Indeed,” Tikaya said. “When it first appeared, everyone must have been too scared to investigate, at least en masse. But now that it’s been sitting here for more than a day, without anything deleterious occurring since the crash…”
“Communal gawking?” Amaranthe shook her head. “They’ll run off when we lift this monstrosity from the ground.”
“You want to move the ship with all those people watching?” Mahliki asked. “Give them a demonstration of what it can do, and people might get it in their heads to go looking for it.”
“If that trench is as deep as your father says, it won’t matter. Besides, it already flattened an entire fort and thousands of men. I’m sure the brighter people out there already have an idea as to what it is.”
“I believe I’ve found something that will more completely do what must be done with this ship.” Tikaya exchanged a long look with her daughter, a look tinged with reluctance and sorrow.
“Oh?” Amaranthe prompted.
“There is a sequence in here that commands the ship to destroy itself from within.”
Amaranthe perked up. That would be an ideal solution. “The way a Turgonian captain would blow up his own ship, rather than letting it be taken by enemies?”
Tikaya frowned at her, or perhaps at Turgonian military practices. “We can only guess as to their motivations, but perhaps so. It’s taking much searching to figure out how to initiate the sequence. I gather it was designed to be accessible by a limited few, such as the captain and first mate.”
“You wouldn’t want some disgruntled private fresh off a reprimand to be able to blow everyone across the stars,” Amaranthe said reasonably.
“While I keep researching, Mahliki, why don’t you and Amaranthe use the mapping device to figure out where the rest of the troops are currently located? Rias will doubtlessly be pleased to gain that information.”
It was a brushoff—the stop-bugging-me-so-I-can-work kind—but in this case Amaranthe didn’t mind. She should have thought of intelligence gathering herself when that map had first popped up.
“Yes, Mother.” Mahliki, too, sounded a tad disappointed at the brushoff.
Amaranthe tried a sisterhood-of-the-underappreciated smile on her and got a wry twist of the lips in return.
“I’ll take notes,” Amaranthe volunteered, leaving Mahliki to manipulate the image.
She dug a journal out of her rucksack. Maldynado was still snoring. Basilard was facing the women, but his eyes were unfocused, lost in thought.
“Heroncrest’s army was surrounding Fort Urgot two days ago,” Amaranthe said. “It’d be good to know where they went. At the time, they were wearing blue armbands. I haven’t seen more than a handful of Flintcrest’s men yet, but his army was rumored to be gathered somewhere west of the lake. Yellow armbands, I believe. Marblecrest should have forces in the Imperial Barracks, and his men have the river checkpoint at the bottom of the lake and at least one of the railroads into the city as well. White armbands.”
“Understood.” Mahliki manipulated the image, and it was as if she and Amaranthe were flying about in one of those dirigibles, looking down upon the city. They cast no shadows, though, and nobody looked up, able to sense their eyes. How the technology worked was so far over Amaranthe’s head she would have needed a rope and grapple to get close to having a clue, but she had no trouble taking advantage of what it offered, and she scribbled notes as fast as she could write.
Flintcrest’s troops had moved into the Emperor’s Preserve. Heroncrest must not have been close enough to the crash to have lost many of his men, for he’d taken over the University campus, using the student housing for barracks. Classes were, no doubt, on hold. The sheer number of troops clogging the streets daunted Amaranthe. There had to be tens of thousands of uniformed men in Stumps. What could she, Sespian, and Starcrest and their five hundred do against them?
“There’s a lot of fighting going on in the city, especially here.” Mahliki pointed out squads of men in the streets around the Imperial Barracks, blue and white armbands clashing.
“I see it,” Amaranthe said. “Someone must have made a move in the night or early this morning. Things were quiet by comparison when we left. I wonder if they’ve discovered our factory and our people yet.”
A worried expression crossed Mahliki’s face.
“I’m sure your father wouldn’t jump into the middle of trouble,” Amaranthe said, though she admitted that Starcrest might indeed become a target once people learned he was in the city. With hundreds of men in the factory, someone might well be a snitch for the other side. Emperor’s warts, she couldn’t even be certain the snitching wouldn’t start in her own camp, not when those two recruits of hers were new and untried. And Deret… she should have spent some time with him, reassuring him that she was behind him, before haring off with the professor. She hadn’t even gone to check on the captive she’d ordered him to take.
“No, he wouldn’t jump into the middle,” Mahliki said, “but he didn’t come here to work on his suntan. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s already enacting some plan or another.”
Though Tikaya seemed engrossed in her research, her lips flattened at this comment. Yes, she’d be worried about her husband too. Amaranthe wondered how much of an argument there’d been about whether or not to come to the empire and poke their collective nose in this hornet’s nest.
“Can you make the perspective closer to those men fighting in front of the Barracks?” Amaranthe asked. It’d be convenient if Ravido, Heroncrest, and Flintcrest all managed to kill each other in some pointless squabble for Arakan Hill, as if having possession of the physical throne truly meant one were emperor of Turgonia. It might be an important symbol, but surely other things mattered more.
Like a bird
swooping down from the skies, they descended. It was too far at first, and Amaranthe twitched as the perspective focused on a close-up of one of the old cobblestone streets. The wheel of a steam lorry rolled across the frost-edged stones.
“Oops,” Mahliki murmured and twisted her fingers to pull the viewpoint back.
Ah, not a steam lorry, but an armored carriage. One of many rolling up a street toward the Barracks.
“I bet it’s a diversion,” Maldynado said. He’d woken up at some point and was yawning and watching the show. “Like at Fort Urgot. If you hunt around, I bet you’ll find guarded holes where tunnel borers are working. Sespian said that’s Heroncrest’s big plan.”
“If that’s true,” Amaranthe said, “it’d be useful to know the location of the tunnel entrances. A back door for us later, maybe.”
Mahliki manipulated the image, and their aerial viewpoint swept across roofs and up and down streets.
Basilard scratched his jaw. Would they be attempting to bore tunnels during daylight hours?
Watching the fighting in the streets—a soldier driving a lorry was shot by a sniper on the rooftop of a building right in front of them—Amaranthe did not answer. Bodies occupied the streets, too, and she couldn’t help but wonder what the death count was if one included those killed at Fort Urgot. And how could one not include them? They were victims of this internecine political madness as surely as a man shot in the chest.
Back when she’d vowed to throw her support behind Sespian, to hide his secret heritage and to keep him alive, this was exactly what she’d wanted to avoid. She’d failed. In so many areas, she’d failed. Maybe it had been hubris to think that she, one person, had ever had the power to stop this. It was disheartening to realize it might have been better, or at least less bloody, if she’d kept her hands out of the stewpot. Forge would have slid right into power. But what future would that have given the world? One in which a select few controlled the global economy and inexorably drove the majority of the population into a clandestine sort of indebted serfdom.
They couldn’t turn around the bloodshed now; they could only find a way to end it as swiftly as possible. She hoped Starcrest truly was working on a plan to do precisely that.
“They could have started the boring last night,” Maldynado said. “Gotten the machines underground where nobody would notice them and then thrown something over the hole to block it.”
Amaranthe stirred herself from her thoughts and tried to focus on the larger images sweeping past rather than the bodies. “It wouldn’t be that easy to hide the evidence of the excavations. They’d have a lot of earth to move out of the way. Mahliki, can you take us northwest of the Barracks? To the Emperor’s Preserve? It’s a forested area, the only large one left anywhere near the boundaries of the city. It’d be a long dig from there, but that’s where I’d start a tunnel. Indeed, there are already tunnels that lead from there to the Barracks, though it would take someone with inside knowledge to find them.” Neither Maldynado nor Basilard had accompanied Sicarius on the mission to research his heritage, so she couldn’t get verification, but she added, “They’re supposed to be protected by wards now too.”
Mahliki blinked. “The Science? In the empire?”
“Forge hasn’t been above importing wizards and shamans to work for them. There’s at least one in the Barracks, I understand.”
The perspective had flown through the streets and over Arakan Hill, where squads of soldiers manned cannons and other mounted artillery weapons, and they were now reaching the Preserve. Fortunately, many of the snow-lined tree branches were bare, or they wouldn’t have witnessed much with the bird’s eye view. The scrubby evergreens did blot out some of the ground, but not so much that they couldn’t see soldiers moving about. More soldiers than Amaranthe had expected.
“Tents?” she asked. “Someone’s moved his whole camp into the Preserve.”
Maldynado pointed. “Yellow armbands. Flintcrest.”
“He’s moved a lot closer,” Amaranthe said. “He must have marched yesterday or all night to get around the lake and over to this side of the city. Someone would have noticed that, but maybe he’s planning to make his move soon. While Heroncrest’s men are squabbling at the foot of the Barracks.”
“Is that a Nurian outfit?” Mahliki murmured and adjusted the image, pushing them closer to a silver-haired man in a vibrant yellow and red robe.
“Stop,” Amaranthe blurted. “That gray-haired fellow walking up to him. Is that…?”
Maldynado, more familiar with all the warrior-caste families, nodded. “Yup, that’s the satrap governor, Lord General Flintcrest.”
The man was pointing at something beneath the trees and seemed to be arguing with the Nurian.
“I wish there was a way to hear them.” Amaranthe supposed she should already be tickled with the degree of spy information the Behemoth was giving her. For the first time, she found herself understanding the temptation to study the ship rather than destroy it, or at least keep a few of the useful-in-a-non-deadly-way tools.
“I see it,” Maldynado said. “Ewww.”
Beneath the evergreens, poles had been thrust vertically into the frozen earth, and… Amaranthe’s stomach did a queasy flip. Severed heads were mounted atop them. The branches hid the faces of many of them—there had to be at least twenty—but her breath caught when their perspective drew closer, and she could pick out the features of one of the unseeing visages. Familiar features.
“Dear ancestors, that’s Ms. Worgavic.” She swallowed. “It was Ms. Worgavic.”
“The one who ordered you tortured?” Maldynado asked. “The one who was stroking the senior Lord Mancrest’s snake to get control over the Gazette? The one who happens to be a Forge founder?”
“Yes.” Amaranthe stared at the grisly trophy. Whoever had retrieved the head had brought Worgavic’s spectacles and mounted them appropriately on her nose.
“How is Flintcrest finding Forge people?” Maldynado asked.
Good question. It’d taken Amaranthe and Books the better part of the year to collect names, and even then, it hadn’t been until she’d been forced into that mind link with Retta that she’d learned who the founders were. “That might be why he brought in the Nurians.”
“Are those all Forge people?” Maldynado pointed at the decapitated heads.
“I can’t see all of the faces,” Amaranthe said. “I wouldn’t necessarily recognize them all anyway. One wonders what kind of message Flintcrest is trying to send and to whom with the poles. If they were in a public square somewhere, it’d make sense, however gruesome that sense, but is he trying to alarm his own troops with how dangerous and bloodthirsty he is?”
“Would Turgonian troops be alarmed by severed heads mounted on spears?” Mahliki asked mildly, though her face seemed paler than usual. She’d lowered her hands and was wiping them on her trousers, as if she might clean them from their association with the image. “It was my understanding that your people weren’t squeamish about such things.” She glanced at her mother, but Tikaya was frowning at some incomprehensible display of symbols.
“Oh, we’re not squeamish,” Maldynado said, “but like the boss said, the heads on a stick usually go in plain view of the other bloke’s camp, not your own.”
“Maybe that’s what Flintcrest was pointing out so vehemently,” Amaranthe said. “That his Nurian ally got it backwards. Mahliki can you pull away so we can see them again? Professor Komitopis, is there any chance you recognize the gray-haired man? I’m wondering if he’s someone important or powerful in Nuria. Is he a wizard?”
Frowning at the symbols, Tikaya didn’t respond. She may not have heard.
“Sometimes you have to poke her to get her attention when she’s deep into her research,” Mahliki said. “That’s what Father does.”
“He pokes her, eh?” Maldynado smirked. “It’s good to know the old admiral hasn’t grown too senescent for that sort of thing.”
Amaranthe swatted him. Not only wa
s Mahliki too young to be exposed to his lewd commentary, but no one wanted to hear implications that one’s parents engaged in sexual exploits regardless.
Mahliki surprised her by saying, “Indeed not. Where the poking happens and with what depends on whether we kids are around, of course.” She walked over to Tikaya and tapped her shoulder.
While their backs were to him, Maldynado grinned and signed, I like her.
Amaranthe managed not to roll her eyes. Barely. Allow me to remind you that I’ve become friends with Yara. If you intend to thrust your rapier into someone else’s sheath—
Maldynado waved a quick, No, no. Even if I weren’t slightly intimidated by the fact that Starcrest, the Starcrest is her da, I wouldn’t wish to abandon Yara. Or jeopardize the progress I’ve made with her. I’m this close—he held his thumb and first finger up, a hair’s breadth apart—to getting her to let me use her first name.
Amaranthe snorted, but smiled. Good. Only slightly intimidated, eh?
Gray hairs or not, Starcrest had an inch of height on Maldynado and still looked like a formidable warrior. And then there was all that reputation he could swing about.
Yes, Maldynado signed. I should think he’d have to glower at me for at least three seconds before I wetted myself.
Distracted by the conversation, Amaranthe hadn’t noticed when Tikaya and Mahliki turned in their direction. They exchanged glances, and Mahliki whispered, “Interesting how many of those gestures of theirs are straightforward enough to guess.”
“I didn’t catch much of the exchange,” Tikaya murmured back, “but I do hope we won’t be witnessing more of what was in that cabinet over there.”
Amaranthe cleared her throat, wishing the two had chosen to speak in their native tongue. Although she might have guessed the meaning of the words anyway. “I was wondering, Professor, if you recognized that Nurian with Lord General Flintcrest there.”