Conspiracy (The Emperor's Edge Book 4) Read online

  Once the three of them were back inside, Maldynado shut the trapdoor, found a lantern, and lit it. He kept the flame down low, but not so low that Akstyr didn’t see his grin.

  “What?” he asked suspiciously.

  “They called you a witch,” Maldynado said.

  Basilard smiled faintly too.

  “That’s because they’re idiots,” Akstyr said.

  Perhaps, Basilard signed, you should consider a haircut.

  Akstyr scowled and patted his locks. Because he hadn’t bothered greasing them into spikes for the train adventure, his hair hung limply to his shoulders. He was positive it didn’t look girlie though.

  “Now, now, Basilard,” Maldynado said. “Not everybody wants to go through life with a head so shiny it can confuse ships if it’s near a lighthouse.”

  Basilard made a sign Akstyr didn’t recognize, but he noted it for later use since it seemed to indicate Maldynado could stuff something somewhere unpleasant.

  “We get to go back to sleep now?” Akstyr asked.

  Maldynado shrugged. “Until the rest of those people start wondering where their comrades went and come looking.”

  “Guess we gotta put someone on watch then,” Akstyr said.

  “Excellent idea. Thanks for volunteering.” Maldynado promptly lay back down and closed his eyes.

  Basilard winked and did the same.

  “What?” Akstyr scowled again. “That’s not fair. You know who should stand watch? Whoever owns the underwear that started this whole problem.”

  Overzealous snores answered him.

  “I hate you two.”

  Chapter 3

  Amaranthe woke to sunlight on her face. It was slanting through a gap in the canvas flap hanging over the lorry gate. The vehicle still bumped and thumped over dirt roads, and an uneasy feeling crept into her stomach. How far were they going? As Sicarius had said, the team needed to return to the city in time to catch the train that would allow them to intercept Sespian’s transport.

  Books lay flat on his back, eyes closed, mouth agape. Fortunately, he wasn’t snoring. The drivers might notice their stowaways if thunderous nasal noises competed with the engine reverberations.

  Sicarius lay next to Amaranthe, propped against his rucksack. The relaxation of sleep softened his face, and, not for the first time, she caught herself thinking how young he looked for a man with a son who would be twenty this winter. No creases lined his forehead or mouth, and no lines edged his eyes. Maybe it was because he never laughed or changed expressions. Or maybe those horrible travel bars he ate had rejuvenating properties.

  Sicarius’s eyes opened and focused upon her. Amaranthe blushed, embarrassed to be caught staring.

  “We’re slowing down,” Sicarius said.

  Amaranthe nodded, as if she had noticed the same thing and had been about to wake him. She lifted the flap to peer outside. She wasn’t sure what she expected, but she got more fields. Rows of butternut squash and pumpkin, some harvested, some still on the vine, stretched on either side of the dirt road.

  Sicarius rose to a crouch. “If we don’t wish to be discovered, we should get out now.”

  “We might just be slowing for a turnoff.”

  “I’m hungry as a bear fresh out of hibernation,” came one of the men’s voices from the front. “Think we can filch some eggs and ham off Ma Kettle?”

  “She’s getting paid to look the other way, not feed your fat caboose,” the second man replied.

  “The woman can do both.”

  Amaranthe waited, hoping the conversation would steer into more illuminating areas, but the men were done talking. The lorry turned and slowed further.

  Amaranthe shook Books’s foot. Sicarius already had his pack over his shoulders and was poised to hop out. He pushed the tarp aside, checked behind them, and then climbed onto the gate so he could gaze out over the front of the vehicle.

  “Come,” Sicarius said, ducking back in. “There’s little time.”

  Books lifted his head. “Huh?”

  Sicarius leaped out.

  “Time to go,” Amaranthe whispered, shrugging into her own pack.

  She waited for Books to grab his gear before jumping out. They’d timed it well, since the lorry was rolling past a cross section of split-rail fencing. Amaranthe ducked low and followed its contours. While it didn’t provide full cover, it was better than streaking through the pumpkin patch. Books clambered after her. She had already lost track of Sicarius.

  “Horrible leader,” Amaranthe grumped, heading for a small shed.

  Ahead of the lorries, a two-story farmhouse waited. A number of outbuildings dotted the property as well. Carriage house, canning facility, smoking sheds, a bunkhouse... Amaranthe didn’t see anything remotely resembling a weapons manufacturing factory. Smoke drifted from the stovepipe of the farmhouse and also a chimney on the canning building.

  Amaranthe slipped behind the shed and waited for Books. Morning sun beat against her face. Normally she would appreciate it, but not when it would make sneaking about difficult. Rolling hills started to the east, and a few deciduous trees with brown and red leaves lined a distant stream, but fields dominated the nearby landscape.

  The two lorries rolled into the carriage house. The tall doors stood open, apparently awaiting their arrival. Though it was hard to see inside the building from her vantage point, Amaranthe spotted a tractor and a wall full of hand tools. No rifles. Nothing that even looked like a forge.

  She told herself it was too early to worry that she’d made a mistake and that they were now stuck someplace far from the main road and railway. If nothing else, the men who had driven the trucks would know something. Sicarius might get to question somebody yet.

  “Where’d he go now?” Books asked.

  “I don’t know,” Amaranthe said, continuing to watch the carriage house.

  Two of the men stayed behind to put out the vehicles’ furnace fires while the other two headed for the bunkhouse. Usually such a building would be used by workers hired to help with the harvest. Was it possible these fellows were hired hands who had taken the farm’s lorries to deal with their insidious side business? But, no, the one had said “Ma” was being paid to look the other way.

  Books removed his pack and sat on the ground. “It’d be nice if he stayed with us, especially to help with such fraught activities as sneaking into the enemy’s transport vehicles.”

  “I imagine he leaves us during such endeavors because we’re more likely to get caught. If he stuck by our sides, he’d be caught too.”

  “So, for self-preservation purposes, he abandons us at every opportunity?” Books asked.

  “Er, yes, but in doing so he puts himself in a position where he can rescue us if we’re apprehended.”

  Books snorted. “I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for him to rescue me.”

  “Didn’t you say he came to your assistance the first time you two met?” Amaranthe eased back from the corner. The last two men had gone inside, leaving little of interest to watch.

  “Because he needed something,” Books said. “I don’t believe for a moment he’d put us ahead of his own interests, or even that he’d bother to ‘rescue’ us if he had something more interesting on his plate.”

  When Amaranthe faced Books, she found Sicarius leaning against the far corner of the shed behind him. She wondered how much of the conversation he had heard. All of it probably. Oh, well. By now he knew his aloof ways had not won him many friends in the group.

  “I doubt that. Have you seen the sorts of meals he puts on his plate?” Amaranthe met Sicarius’s eyes and smirked at him. “I wouldn’t call any of those interesting.”

  Sicarius held her gaze in return. “Only because your palate is accustomed to sweets.”

  Books jerked his head around and cursed under his breath.

  “I know,” Amaranthe said. “The worst part about being out here is the distance from Curi’s Bakery.” She hadn’t told him that she paid a university
student to buy sweets for her a couple of times a month—she wouldn’t risk going to Curi’s on her own, not when it was a popular stop for enforcers—but a girl couldn’t let outlaw status get in the way of apple cinnamon tarts.

  Sicarius said nothing, though she knew he disapproved of her vice. Time to get back to work.

  Amaranthe waved to encompass the farm. “I don’t see anything blatantly inimical happening here. It seems I was a tad impulsive in assuming that following those boys home would lead us to the source of those weapons.”

  “Perhaps not.” Sicarius crouched and placed the flat of his palm on the ground.

  Amaranthe lifted an eyebrow but did the same. Dry tufts of grass scrapped at her palm. She focused on the cool earth beneath them, trying to feel... whatever he thought was worth feeling.

  Slight tremors pulsed through the ground, similar to what one might sense touching a railway track when a train was still miles off. More, faint rhythmic clanks reverberated through the earth as well.

  “It could be machinery in that canning building.” Amaranthe pointed to the smoke wafting from its chimney.

  “We wouldn’t feel that this far away,” Sicarius said. “Also, the banging is irregular, made by man, not machine.”

  Books also placed a hand on the ground. “An engine... and a smith at a forge?” he guessed.

  Amaranthe stood, her interest in the farm rekindling. “Like someone hammering steel into gun barrels?”

  “That process is usually automated these days,” Books said, “but, yes, a smith would still be required for fastening the stock and firing mechanism.”

  “And where would this be happening?” Amaranthe waved toward the bucolic setting.

  “Underground,” Sicarius said. “There are a number of sleeping areas in that bunkhouse, far more than there are people visible working on the farm right now.”

  “People on the day shift, eh?” Amaranthe said.

  “It’ll be difficult for us to explore with the sun out,” Books said.

  Sicarius flicked a glance down at him, and, though his expression never changed, Amaranthe thought she read “Speak for yourself” in it.

  “Maybe you can scout around,” Amaranthe said to Sicarius, “while Books and I seek out...”

  “Trouble?” Sicarius suggested.

  Books’s eyes narrowed.

  “Not necessarily. I thought we might have a chat with this Ma Kettle.” Amaranthe smiled and took up her idea of a backwoods drawl. “On account of how we come up from the south, hoping to help with the harvest, and mayhap she has some work left here for a couple of sturdy hands.”

  “Trouble,” Sicarius said.

  “I concur,” Books said.

  “So nice when you two are in agreement.”

  * * * * *

  Amaranthe adjusted her borrowed straw hat, pulling it lower over her face, then walked up the porch steps to the farmhouse’s front door. To her side, Books alternated glancing over his shoulder toward the bunkhouse and fidgeting with his own straw hat, one she’d embellished with feather-and-bead tassels dangling from the brim. “So they won’t recognize it,” she’d told Books while he glowered fearsomely at her. They’d found the headwear in the shed, and, while hers was plain and forgettable, his had blue flowers on the brim, flowers now hidden by the tassels. She was glad Maldynado wasn’t there to comment, though she wasn’t sure whether it would have been to mock or approve; she’d seen him wearing hats as silly, and he had no qualms about donning tassel-bedecked clothing.

  To further their disguises, Amaranthe and Books had smeared dirt on their faces—after the night’s adventure there’d been no need to add grime to their clothing. Amaranthe’s fingers kept straying toward a kerchief in her pocket, and she had to clench her fist to keep from grabbing it and cleaning the mess off.

  She knocked on the door, putting the fist to good use. Books checked over his shoulder again.

  “Relax,” Amaranthe said, ostensibly to him though the word could have been for her as well. She worried that the information they might get out of this woman wasn’t worth the risk of being identified later. She glanced at the shuttered windows on either side of the wooden porch.

  “I’m not very good at extemporaneous mendacity,” Books said. “Or carefully rehearsed mendacity either.”

  “Think of it as acting.”

  “What, in the credentials I gave you when we met, suggested I’d be good at acting?” Books asked.

  “You can’t be any worse than...” Amaranthe inclined her head toward the field, though naturally they could not see Sicarius about anywhere.

  “He acts?”

  “He stands there and goes along with me, answering my prods in a monosyllabic monotone.”

  “So, the same as usual,” Books said.

  “Essentially.” Amaranthe knocked on the door again. She’d seen a woman come out onto the porch earlier to beat dust from a rug, so she knew someone was home.

  A shutter on one of the windows opened an inch. Amaranthe pretended not to notice, figuring the person wanted to make a secret inspection of them. Though she doubted rural farmers were up on the latest wanted posters, she kept her chin tilted downward, so the hat would hide part of her face.

  Wooden floorboards creaked on the other side of the door.

  “Who is it, Ma?” a voice called from the depths of the house. “That enforcer woman again?”

  For a stunned second, Amaranthe thought “enforcer woman” referenced her, but nine months had passed since she’d been employed in that capacity, and she’d certainly never visited this place. Because there weren’t many female enforcers, her next thought was of Sergeant Yara, the woman they’d dealt with on the dam mission. This was her district.

  “No,” came a voice from the other side of the door. “Go back upstairs.”

  Her mind caught on the notion of enforcers visiting, Amaranthe barely heard the words. If the local authorities were already snooping around, aware of illegal weapons being manufactured in their district, that was good, but it meant this might not be quite the discovery she’d thought.

  “What do you want?” a woman asked, voice directed toward the door this time, though she did not open it.

  “Friendly,” Amaranthe mouthed to Books, before calling out, “We’re two hard workers wondering if you’re hiring help for the harvest, ma’am.”

  “No.”

  “And blunt,” Books mouthed back.

  “We’re real good workers, ma’am, and help for nothing more than a hot meal and a chance to sleep in one of your sheds.” Or perhaps whatever building was hiding the machinery they’d felt...

  “Don’t need no more help,” the woman responded. “Go away.”

  “It seems my acting skills won’t be called upon after all,” Books murmured.

  Amaranthe liked to think she was decent at negotiating, or, as the men put it, talking people into things, but it was hard to get a read on someone through a door. If the woman was already being paid well to look the other way, Amaranthe didn’t know what she might entice her with. Perhaps simply an appeal to her humanity?

  “Please, ma’am, would you let us talk to you for a moment? We’ve come down out of the mountains on foot. Our rations are low. If you don’t have work, we understand, but perhaps you could point us in the direction of—”

  “If you ain’t off my porch in five seconds, I’ll sic the hounds on you.”

  Books scooted down the steps so quickly, Amaranthe wondered if he had a dog phobia. She followed, though she hated admitting defeat.

  “It seems I’ve lost my touch for talking people into things,” she said as they walked away.

  “I don’t know about that.” Books removed the hat and flicked at the tassels. “You got me to wear this.”

  * * * * *

  It didn’t take long for men to come searching for their missing comrades. Akstyr was standing guard—actually he was sitting and practicing some of his mental science exercises—when new footsteps clomped
on the roof. He kicked Maldynado’s boot to wake him up and stop a bout of snoring that had probably already given away their position. He tossed an empty food tin at Basilard, clunking him in the chin and waking him instantly. Akstyr might have woken them more gently, but he wasn’t feeling accommodating after they stuck him with the watch.

  Overhead, the footsteps ceased. Akstyr grabbed one of their new rifles. By the early morning light slanting through gaps in the wooden car walls, he’d figured out that it was loaded with six rounds.

  Basilard squatted next to him and put a restraining hand on his arm. Akstyr squinted to read Basilard’s hand signs in the morning gloom.

  That’ll make too much noise. The engineer might hear and halt the train. We need him to make the weapons delivery, so we can see where they go.

  Akstyr doubted the engineer could hear anything over the noise of the locomotive, but he shrugged and set the rifle aside. He had other ways to deal with people.

  The footsteps resumed, and Akstyr tracked them across the top of their car. It sounded like two men again, but this pair didn’t try to open the trapdoor. They moved on to the next car.

  “What do you boys think?” Maldynado asked when the footsteps had been gone for a minute. “Should we try to pick them off on their way back?”

  Perhaps they will give up and return to their car when they don’t find their comrades, Basilard signed.

  “They’ll think it’s strange that their buddies are missing. It’s not like the train has stopped and people could have strolled away. I think they’ll keep looking. I’d look for you two if you went missing.”

  “Yeah,” Akstyr said, “but you probably like us more than they like each other. We’ve been through heaps together.”

  “Easy, boy, don’t get sentimental on me.”

  Akstyr snorted. He should have kicked Maldynado harder.