Conspiracy (11 page)

Sicarius snorted. “The empire is nothing to
me. If Sespian were some deviant crime lord, I’d still kill those
who meant him harm.”

His words failed to steal Amaranthe’s grin.
“It’s all right. I won’t tell the world you’re not quite the
malevolent butcher everyone thinks.”

He looked like he might glare or otherwise
object to this softening of his image, but he caught himself.
Instead, he said, “Just tell one person.”

“
I will.” Amaranthe took
the rifle’s bolt from him and studied the interior. By the poor
light of the lantern, it was hard to see inside, but she thought
she detected raised bumps to fit the groves in the cartridge. It
seemed like an odd addition from a functionality standpoint. Why
not simply keep the bullet smooth? Wouldn’t it have better
aerodynamics that way? Then something clicked in her brain. “It’s a
proprietary design, isn’t it?”

“
What?”

Amaranthe waved to the racks of weapons and
crates of ammunition. “If they made all the rifles the same way as
this one, then only these particular cartridges will work in them.
No smith could simply reproduce these. It’d take a sophisticated
facility like this one to duplicate the design. So, the buyers of
these weapons will have to continue to order ammunition from the
sellers for life.” She picked up one of the bullets and rubbed it
between her fingers. “Maybe this is a Forge plot after all. That
seems like the sort of quasi-shady business practice one of their
people might try.”

Three thumps came from behind and above
them.

“
Books,” Amaranthe said.
“Someone must be coming.”

Sicarius started toward the
door, but Amaranthe caught his arm. “Wait, you have to put the
rifle back together. We don’t want anyone to know we were
here.
Especially
not if there’s a link to Forge.”

“
I opened a crate,”
Sicarius said, but he returned to the table and started
assembling.

“
Maybe they won’t notice
that right away.”

While he worked on the weapon, Amaranthe
slipped a handful of the cartridges into her pocket. Being able to
show someone the unique bullets later might prove useful. She
tucked the ammo box back into the crate, trying to hide the fact
that it had been opened, and affixed the lid. She manhandled the
crate back onto the rack.

Ker-thunk!

“
Uhm.” Amaranthe lifted her
eyes toward the ceiling. That had been much louder than the earlier
thumps, and if she had to guess where the sound had originated,
she’d say above them and outside of the carriage house. “I don’t
think that was Books.”

Sicarius finished reassembling the rifle and
returned it to the rack. He jogged toward the door, pausing briefly
to test the booby trap and make sure it had not reset.

Amaranthe waved to the cement slab. “Can we
open it from in here?”

Sicarius patted about the walls, but he
didn’t find a lever.

“
Maybe the hoe is the only
way in.” Amaranthe thought about knocking on the door, but if Books
hadn’t caused that second noise, she didn’t want to alert whoever
had to their presence.

A long scrape grated at the rear of the
chamber, in the dark back half they had not yet explored. Tendrils
of unease curled through Amaranthe’s belly. That noise hadn’t come
from above. Something was down there with them.

Maybe someone already knew about their
presence.

Soft whirs and clanks emanated from the
darkness. A grinding followed, and Amaranthe thought it sounded
like wheels or treads rolling over the cement floor.

“
Oh, good, it’s been a
while since I’ve been chased by a machine. It ought to be good
training, right?” Amaranthe smiled.

Sicarius did not.

Amaranthe shifted from foot to foot while
watching the darkness behind the racks of weapons. The grinding
noise and soft clanks were growing louder.

Sicarius was trying to
lever his black dagger into a crack to open the door, but it didn’t
sit flush with the jamb—the cement slab had slid a couple of inches
into an indention. Amaranthe had a feeling they weren’t getting out
that way, not unless Books returned and let them out. She also had
a feeling that someone up there was keeping him from doing just
that. She hoped he was only hiding and hadn’t been captured.
Amaranthe cursed herself for standing down there and
burbling
when they
should have been getting in and out as quickly as
possible.

Sicarius sheathed his blade. “We’ll look for
another way out.”

Amaranthe eyed the shadows behind the racks.
“Back there?”

Sicarius was already heading down the aisle
with the worktable. The source of the clanking sounds seemed to be
coming up an aisle on the opposite side of the rectangular chamber.
Amaranthe jogged after Sicarius. Maybe they could bypass...
whatever it was. But before she reached the aisle entrance,
something metallic rolled out from behind the racks on the opposite
side of the room.

Not rolled... It seemed to hover an inch off
the ground. The two-foot-wide black semicircle looked like a ball
someone had cut in half. Brass shingles plated it like an
armadillo’s shell, and four waving antennae-type structures rose
from each of its quadrants. Small glowing red balls perched on the
tops. The way they moved about gave Amaranthe the impression of
eyes scanning the area.

“
That’s not your standard
farm equipment,” she observed.

The machine turned in
place, and all four of the antennae stretched out, the “eyes”
staring at her. A single word was engraved on the front of its
body:
Deklu
.

Amaranthe stepped backward, and her heel
thumped against the concrete wall. She thought about sprinting down
the aisle after Sicarius—he had already moved out of sight—but she
hesitated. She should figure out what the device could do first. It
didn’t have any obvious weapons protruding from it. Maybe it had
another purpose. Maybe—

A hum emanated from the machine, a strange,
otherworldly sound that raked across Amaranthe’s nerves like a
claws. Her instincts propelled her to lunge into the aisle, putting
three rows of racks between herself and the construct.

Four red beams blasted into the cement wall
where she’d been standing. Smoke blossomed, and chunks of aggregate
flew, cracking against the rifles and racks. As quickly as they had
come, the beams winked out. Amaranthe raced down the aisle without
waiting to see how much damage the thing had done to the wall.
Anything that could shatter cement had to be powerful enough to
burn right through a human.

“
Definitely
not a farm machine.”

Amaranthe came out of the aisle on the far
end and almost crashed into one of four smithy stations spanning
the chamber. She lifted a hand to stop herself from tumbling into
the closest one. The bricks beneath her palm still radiated heat
from the day’s activity, and she craned her head back, eyeing the
spot where the chimney met the ceiling. Maybe that was a way out?
But they’d seen no smoking vents in the yard, so perhaps not. The
smoke was probably diverted somewhere far away.

The construct floated into the entrance of
the aisle Amaranthe had raced down. She’d taken her lantern when
she ran, leaving the machine in darkness, but its glowing red eyes
identified it. She darted to the side, using the racks for cover
again.

A red beam knifed out of the darkness,
slicing into the space she’d occupied.

“
Watch out,” Amaranthe
called for Sicarius’s sake. She didn’t see him—only the hint of his
light somewhere deeper in the room—but she didn’t want him getting
a stray beam in the back. “I made a friend.”

As she spoke, Amaranthe dodged between two
of the freestanding forges, jumped over a bin of coal, and came
face-to-face with a flywheel so tall it nearly brushed the ceiling.
It was part of some towering device for stamping metal. Other
machines loomed in the shadows.

The grinding from the ambulatory construct
grew louder behind her, and she continued into the maze of
machines, picking her way toward the other lantern.

“
Find a door yet?”
Amaranthe asked. “Because we don’t want to be trapped by—” She
rounded a machine and almost ran into a pair of black-clad legs
dangling in the air.

Sicarius hung by one hand from the frame of
a wooden double door set in the ceiling. His fingers gripped a thin
reinforcing board no more than an inch thick, and Amaranthe had no
idea how he could hold his body up that way. He held his knife in
his other hand and was probing the crack between the two doors.

“
It’s secured from above,”
Sicarius said, as calmly as if he were standing beside her. “I’m
attempting to see if there’s a bar that can be
dislodged.”

“
I’m not sure there’s time
for that.” Amaranthe checked the route behind her. The machines
offered some cover, but they were not solid obstacles, so it was
possible the construct could fire through them. “I have a...
Deklu
after me,” she
said, naming the word on the machine, though she didn’t know if it
was a description or a name or something else entirely.

“
Sentry,” Sicarius
translated.

“
In what
language?”

“
Mangdorian.”

“
Hm, another machine made
by that shaman who wanted your head?” If so, Amaranthe wondered
anew if Forge might be involved here.

A red beam streaked out of the darkness. A
flywheel on a machine deflected part of it, but it also caught the
side of Sicarius’s arm.

He dropped to the floor. Amaranthe stepped
forward to help him, but he grabbed his lantern and pointed her
toward the side of the chamber. Smoke wafted from his sleeve; she
couldn’t tell if the beam had struck flesh as well.

Before they had gone more than a few feet,
something pounded against the overhead door. Books?

Laughter sounded, muffled by earth and wood.
Not Books.

“
That’s right ya vagrant
thieves,” someone called, “stay down there and die!”

“
Thieves,” Amaranthe said
as Sicarius led her to the wall. “At the worst, we’re spies.” A
wall aisle lay clear for them to run back to the front door if they
wished, but she saw little point in that.

“
You took some of their
ammunition.” Sicarius parted from her side and hopped onto a
machine to check the sentry’s progress.

“
Just a couple of bullets.
That’s more like sampling than thieving, don’t you
think?”

“
Did that argument work on
you when you were an enforcer?” His gaze shifted to the ceiling,
searching for weaknesses to exploit perhaps.

“
No, but I’ve changed this
last year. You’ve influenced me with your law-skirting
ways.”

“
I see your classification
of me as heroic was short-lived.”

The grinding of the sentry drew closer, and
Amaranthe glimpsed it moving through the open space beneath the
overhead door. Sicarius jumped down from his perch a second before
another beam split the air. It burned into the cement wall behind
them, hurling pieces to the floor.

With few other options, Amaranthe and
Sicarius ran past the forges and toward the front of the
chamber.

Sicarius glanced back. “Those beams remind
me of technology I saw once before, a long time ago.”

“
A long time ago?”
Amaranthe stopped before several crates of ammunition. “It looks
irritatingly modern and deadly to me. It’s made from the Science,
I’d assumed.” She tapped a crate thoughtfully, wondering if
whatever was in the cartridges was as flammable as black
powder.

“
The body perhaps.”
Sicarius eyed her tapping fingers. “Causing an explosion might not
be the wisest course when we’re beneath so much concrete and
earth.”

“
How’d you know that’s what
I had in mind?” Amaranthe had been about to ask for his help in
opening a crate. Despite his warning, she held out a hand for his
sturdy dagger.

“
I know you.” Sicarius
waved her hand away and nodded toward the front of the chamber.
“Come, there are kegs of black powder in the middle aisles. It’ll
be easier to work with in free form.”

To their rear, the sentry floated out from
behind one of the forges, still hovering an inch above the floor.
Amaranthe sprinted after Sicarius as its red eyeballs rotated in
their direction. She caught the end of the rack and used it to
swing herself around the corner ahead of not one but four beams.
They shot forth in a scattered high-and-low pattern, taking chunks
out of another wall.

“
At least that thing’s
slow,” Amaranthe said, chasing Sicarius past two rows of racks and
down a middle aisle, though she silently acknowledged that the
device was fast enough to make it difficult to find time to make a
bomb for blowing a hole out of their prison. “We can keep ahead of
it,” she said to reassure herself.

An ominous grating sounded at the back of
the chamber. Another gate being opened, and another sentry rolling
out? Or something else?

“
Spoke too soon,” Amaranthe
said.

Sicarius stopped before a series of upright
kegs and pried the lid off one.

“
Blessed ancestors,”
Amaranthe said, “there’s enough here to blow up this whole
facility.”

“
Unwise while we’re
inside.”