Beneath the Surface

CHAPTER 7

Dawn approached as Amaranthe and the others jogged through a light snow, heading back to their cabins. Sicarius lifted a hand before they reached their block of doors, though, and slipped into the shadows along the rail. Amaranthe, Sespian, and Akstyr followed his example. She checked her hood to make sure it hid her face. It was still early enough that she’d expected only her men to be about, but perhaps that was not the case.

She stood on her tiptoes to whisper, “What is it?” beside Sicarius’s ear.

There wasn’t anything to hide behind on the narrow stretch of deck before their cabins, not so much as a lounge chair. If anyone were standing there, even the dim lighting wouldn’t have hidden them. Maybe someone was inside the cabins.

“ Visitors,” Sicarius said.

“ Are they still here?”

Sicarius tilted his head back, eyeing the deck above, or perhaps the framework below the deck. Amaranthe squinted into the shadows over her cabin door. Did that dark smudge have a human form? Or was it her imagination? She couldn’t remember anything significant to hang from up there, but Sicarius was focused on the spot. It must be some thing.

The “smudge” dropped from its perch, a human form distinguishing itself from the shadows. Before it hit the deck, Sicarius sprinted across the intervening meters. By the time the figure’s feet touched down, Sicarius had circled behind, a knife in hand. In an instant, he’d turned the person into his captive, the blade pressed to a pale throat. Sicarius nudged the cloaked figure forward, into the light beneath one of the low-burning lanterns.

After a quick scan of the remaining dark spots, Amaranthe walked over. The figure’s hood dropped about its neck, revealing Basilard’s scarred face.

Amaranthe propped her hands on her hips. “You’re not an enforcer.”

Basilard eyed the blade at his throat before signing, No, but I thought you might be. They were just here. Enforcers and steamboat security, using a master lock to open doors.

By the time Basilard finished signing, Sicarius had removed the knife and returned it to its sheath.

“ They didn’t catch Books, did they?” Amaranthe asked. That was a further complication they didn’t need.

No. I heard them searching the other cabins. Basilard pointed at doors farther up the deck. I slipped out, warned Books, and helped him pack all his work.

“ How’d you manage to pack that library before the enforcers caught up with you?” Akstyr asked, joining the group. Sespian lingered behind, watching the nearest set of stairs.

He had to leave a few things behind, Basilard signed. He was most distraught.

“ What about the rest of our stuff?” Akstyr asked, probably realizing he’d left books on magic in his cabin.

They confiscated everything and positively identified it as belonging to us. I watched from above. Basilard nodded to his spot. I thought about attacking, but Books had already left, saying he had to protect his work, and it would have been me against eight men.

“ That’s a problem for you? Have we not been training enough of late?” Amaranthe smiled, though she was running through their inventory in her mind, trying to think if they’d lost anything they needed to get back. The Forge ledger book? No, she’d already read it, and it hadn’t held any condemning evidence.

I know of your aversion for killing enforcers, Basilard signed. I wouldn’t have wished to irreparably harm anyone in my haste to deal with them all.

“ Yes, of course,” Amaranthe said.

Your training apparatus did cause much speculation.

“ Oh?”

“ The what?” Sespian asked.

“ The chin-up bar,” Amaranthe explained.

There’s more than a bar. The corners of Basilard’s eyes crinkled. They wondered… Basilard thrust his chest forward and enacted a haughty attitude, mimicking, Amaranthe assumed, one of the enforcers. What kind of sexual deviants employ chains and weights?

Akstyr snorted.

Amaranthe pointed a finger at Sicarius’s chest. “I told you.”

If having his fitness equipment mistaken for the apparatuses of a deviant bothered-or amused-Sicarius, he’d never show it, at least not in front of this many people.

“ Where is Books?” he asked.

“ Yes, we need to talk to him,” Amaranthe said.

Follow me, Basilard signed.

Instead of heading for the stairs, he hopped up on the railing, grabbed the deck above and pulled himself up. Without questioning, Sicarius followed the example.

“ Is this a common method of transportation for outlaws?” Sespian asked as Amaranthe headed for the railing to make the same climb.

“ We’d rather not crash into security and be forced to fight.”

Perched on the railing, Amaranthe found her balance, straightened, and gripped the edge of the deck above. She had to reach for the horizontal railing bars. It was a good thing she’d been practicing those chin-ups. One hand at a time, she pulled herself up the bars, then shimmied over the top and onto the deck. Sicarius and Basilard hadn’t stopped there. They were already climbing the wall between two cabin doors and heading for the roof.

“ Not Books’s usual studying place,” Amaranthe said.

As soon as Sespian came into sight behind her, she climbed after the others. The icy metal hull numbed her bare fingers. She supposed the enforcers had confiscated her gloves along with the dubious training equipment.

“ Stay low,” Sicarius said when she crawled onto the roof.

A thin coating of snow made for slick footing, and Amaranthe almost slipped. A face-first smash into the roof would be one way to stay low.

Sicarius pointed to the lighted pilothouse perched at the front, then headed aft, toward the pair of smokestacks. Basilard’s dark form slipped out of sight behind one. Amaranthe waited until Akstyr and Sespian joined her, then headed for the smokestacks. She expected another stop before they reached Books, but found him hunkered behind one of the big black stacks, his bulging backpack at his side and a blanket wrapped around his shoulders.

“ Cozy.” Akstyr kicked a clump of snow off the roof.

“ It comes with a pleasant view at least,” Amaranthe said.

Looking aft, they could see the river streaming behind the steamboat. The snow dusting the banks made the forest appear bright, despite the cloudy sky.

“ The enforcers have Akstyr’s magic books and know we’re all aboard,” Books said. “It won’t be long before they search up here. We have to get off at Port Medar and wait for the next boat. Or catch a train into the capital.”

“ We can’t leave.” Amaranthe waved for Books to move his backpack, and she crouched in the snow beside him. The others joined them, hunkering close to stay out of the view from the pilothouse.

“ Why?” Books asked.

Amaranthe explained the weapons and finished with, “I thought you might have some ideas.”

Books groaned.

“ Is that a general this-night-is-getting-worse-and-worse groan or a we’ll-never-come-up-with-a-solution-to-this-problem groan?” Amaranthe asked.

Books let his head clunk back against the smokestack.

“ I’m afraid that might be a yes to both,” Amaranthe said to Sicarius.

“ Can we remove the rockets and dump them overboard?” Sespian asked. “If the cubes are set into that yellow substance, you’d think they’d be difficult to inadvertently break.”

Amaranthe brushed aside snow to clear a place to sit. “Once Forge found out they were missing, they’d just send a boat back downriver to retrieve them from the bottom.”

“ But that would take a while, right?” Sespian asked. “They wouldn’t know exactly where we dumped them.”

“ If Akstyr can track them, I’m sure Forge can find a practitioner to do the same,” Amaranthe said.

“ Oh. That makes sense. My mind isn’t accustomed to factoring magical solutions into problems yet.”

“ Even without a practitioner,” Akstyr said, “some farmer that wandered down to the river at night would probably see the glow seeping up from the bottom and tell everybody in town.”

Amaranthe frowned. The possibility of innocent people accidentally setting off the weapons and destroying their entire community was too dreadful to consider.

“ What about dumping them in the lake?” Sespian asked. “There are spots hundreds of meters deep.”

“ And not as inaccessible as you’d think,” Amaranthe murmured. “Although… Akstyr, you didn’t sense that underwater laboratory from the surface, did you?”

“ Nah, not until we got close. Water’s real dense and there’s all those pesky fishes and things clogging it up.”

Books snorted at this description of marine life.

“ You can’t sense artifacts as easily through it,” Akstyr continued, “unless you’re a strong practitioner.”

“ We better not assume Forge doesn’t have access to a strong practitioner,” Amaranthe said.

“ Wait.” Books shifted beneath his blanket to face Akstyr. “The density of a substance surrounding an… artifact affects your ability to sense it?”

“ Yup. There are even practitioners who specialize in making insulated lead boxes to hide items from other practitioners.”

“ Hm,” Books said. “I have an idea, providing Port Medar has sufficient resources. I’ve not been there, but I understand it’s a small town with only a few industries.”

“ How destructive will this idea be?” Sespian asked.

“ I do not come up with destructive ideas,” Books said. “You are thinking of that ignorant buffoon, Maldynado.” Books gazed toward the nearest riverbank and lowered his voice for Amaranthe alone. “I should only need a couple of people to gather supplies for my plan. We could split up the team and search for him. If he and Yara ran all night, they may arrive at Port Medar shortly after us.”

“ We can do that,” Amaranthe said, thinking that it was amazing how men could constantly snipe at each other and yet, beneath it all, care for each other. She hoped Books got a chance to tell Maldynado that some day.

Evrial hiked upriver beneath the early morning sun, smiling to herself as she leafed through the enforcer’s journal. Behind her, Maldynado whistled a cheery tune, drawing enthusiastic responses from birds perched in overhead boughs. She thought to admonish him for making so much noise-after all, the enforcers they’d tossed overboard might have come ashore on the same side of the river-but she supposed that’d be hypocritical of her. After all, she hadn’t been thinking of keeping a watch or paying a whit of attention to their surroundings the night before. There’d been hours — her grin widened at the memory of those hours-when someone could have sneaked up on them.

Her smile faded when she read further in the book. “Uh oh.”

Maldynado ducked under a branch dripping melted snow onto the muddy trail. “Problem?”

“ We may want to pick up our pace. Can we catch the others at the next port?”

“ The River Dancer is probably already docked at Port Medar. I’m not sure how far away we are, but we lost a lot of time last night, er, warming up.”

Evrial blushed, thinking of just how warm they’d gotten, but she forced herself to concentrate on the journal. “‘Some of those enforcers may have been the same people we fought on our trip downriver, but they weren’t put on this boat to look for us, not originally anyway.” She pointed at a paragraph on the page. “They were spying on the circus troupe because the outfit is suspected of smuggling. Listen to this: ‘ We located the magical contraband in a secret compartment area under the dining hall. They appear to be rockets, and they glow with a yellow luminescence. We believe this forbidden cargo is even more dangerous than the chief thought. It seems likely these weapons are being ushered to the capital to be used in someone’s play for the throne. Unfortunately, Corporal Lutkuv triggered a trap when our search was interrupted. We lost him and will have to return to see if he made it out. We-’ That’s it. It looks like the last few lines were scribbled in a hurry, and he stopped mid-thought.”

Maldynado rubbed the night’s growth of stubble darkening his jaw. “We weren’t far from that area when we ran into those fellows. Akstyr must have sensed the magic near the dining hall. Emperor’s balls, magical rockets?” He kicked a rock into the snow-blanketed ferns lining the trail. “Blast Ravido, doesn’t he have advantages enough already?”

“ Any idea what yellow luminescence would indicate?” Evrial asked.

“ If you want to know about magic, you took the wrong fellow overboard with you.”

“ But would Akstyr have rescued me? He’s rougher than some of the thugs I used to arrest back home.”

“ Oh, he would have gone after you. So long as he thought you had some magical gewgaw in your pocket or knew the secret location to a foreign tome on the subject.” Maldynado waved to the trail, indicating she could go first and set the pace.

Yes, they’d better get going if they hoped to have any chance of catching up with the steamboat. “He’s a true hero.” Evrial set off down the trail at a jog, her boots squishing in the mud, sending brown splatters into the melting snow with each step.

Maldynado trotted after her. “Not everybody has my finely honed sense of chivalry.”

“ Yes… By the way, did you see me go overboard, realize I was in danger, and dive in to save me? Or did one of the enforcers knock you overboard and you figured you might as well pull me off the bottom since you were already wet?”

Indignant huffs and grunts came from the trail behind her, though it was a moment before Maldynado articulated anything word-like. “Will my answer affect whether or not we reprise last night’s performance later tonight?”

Evrial was glad she was running in front, so he couldn’t see her blush. He was worried she wouldn’t want to engage in another… performance with him? She’d feared he might have thought her too pedestrian after all his experiences with women.

“ No,” she said. That sounded safe.

“ Good. In that case, I did see you go over and meant to finish pummeling those enforcers into the deck so I could throw you a rope-at the time I didn’t realize you’d been shot and wouldn’t have been able to grab it. But before I got a chance, two security fellows came out with crossbows the size of cannons, so I decided to take a swim. It was fortunate because I came up right as you were going under. I saw the spot and swam over, but, on account of the darkness, had to go down several times before I found you. I must confess I was alarmed enough at the idea of not finding you that I didn’t pay attention to the men back on the boat. We’re lucky we didn’t get riddled with crossbow bolts when we came up.”

Maldynado’s confession surprised Evrial. He hadn’t made a secret about his interest in rolling around under the sheets with her-or, as had been the case last night, on top of the pine boughs-but she couldn’t figure out why he would have deeper feelings. She’d been nothing but defensive-all right, cold-to him since they’d met. She’d had her reasons, as she’d explained to him the night before, but why would he ever warm up to someone who treated him so? Surely it couldn’t all be about preferring the challenge of taming someone untamable. Though Amaranthe seemed to be trying to do that very same thing with Sicarius.

“ People are strange,” Evrial muttered.

“ What?” Maldynado asked.

“ I said… you’re a good man, Maldynado. Thank you.”

This time a thump and a grunt came from behind her-Maldynado tripping and righting himself? Had her compliment surprised him that much?

“ Right, you’re welcome,” he said. “Ah, just to be clear, it’s for hauling you out of the river, right? Not entertaining you and keeping you warm until the wee hours of the morning?”

“ Are you going to bring up sex in every conversation we have from now on?” Evrial asked.

“ Until the novelty fades, probably so.”

“ And after the novelty fades?” Evrial asked it lightly, but she wondered what he planned for the future. He’d admitted he cared, sort of, and that was promising, but would it last?

“ After that, I’ll bring it up less often. In no more than half our conversations, I should think.”

Not exactly what she’d been fishing for, but she smiled anyway. Maybe that was enough.