Forged in Blood II

Chapter 18

It was strange walking at Sespian’s back as he marched around the Imperial Barracks in full dress uniform. Sicarius had pictured himself in this role numerous times in the past, in particular on the day when he’d grown tired of letting Raumesys torment his son and had arranged the poisoning that would simulate a heart attack. He’d set things up for Emperor Sespian to rule as he believed right, to march about with his faithful assassin guarding his back. Too bad Sespian had fired him on his first day free of Raumesys’s shackles. Or… perhaps not. Odd how the years had changed Sicarius’s perspective of that fantasy. Not only would he find it difficult to take orders from his own son, but he’d come to realize that he’d never truly wanted the throne for Sespian. That much responsibility was nothing kind to be chained with, especially not for the young. Leadership should be given to one who’d proven himself over and over and whom the people already respected.

Sespian stopped before an unadorned door in the back of the building and adjusted his collar. “I wish your team had collected these people when they were unconscious.”

“This office was locked,” Sicarius said. “Also, they weren’t familiar with the Barracks layout and didn’t know its significance.”

“The officers inside won’t be easy to lure back.”

Sespian looked at Sicarius, expecting… what? Encouragement? Support?

“It is within your capabilities to regain their loyalties,” Sicarius said.

“And if I don’t?” Sespian eyed Sicarius’s daggers.

They hadn’t worked together privately or spoken one-on-one since Sicarius’s return to the factory. He didn’t think Sespian had been avoiding him, but perhaps he’d been reminded of his father’s ability to kill-and his willingness to do so.

“The decision is yours,” Sicarius said. “This is your milieu.”

They’d already confronted a handful of young soldiers, men who’d gasped-then squirmed in discomfort-when Sespian had appeared before them. He’d given them a chance to return to his side that night, that moment, or to resign from the service forever. He hadn’t threatened them, but the men had seen Sicarius hovering behind him and had nodded vigorously in agreement. Sespian had ordered them to form up in the courtyard with most of the rest of the team-Books, Akstyr, and Yara-and prepare to protect the city from makarovi. The young men had drawn themselves up straight and ushered an enthusiastic, “Yes, sir.” They must not have appreciated their commander’s orders to hole up in the Barracks, their tails tucked between their legs.

Amaranthe and Maldynado were questioning that commander right now. Sicarius trusted she would learn as much from Ravido using her own methods as he might using his.

Sespian pulled a key ring off his belt, selected a key, and tried the lock. It didn’t turn. “They’ve replaced it.” He lowered the ring. “Maybe we should leave this office and try again later.”

“Those who’ve been plotting against you will have time to escape then. Better to confront them now.”

Sespian’s grimace suggested he might be happier if they did escape.

“You said it yourself, Forge controls, or controlled, many of the intelligence officers in the department. It would be unwise to let them run free where they might reunite with their remaining employers and cause other trouble. You must either win them back or-” Sicarius stopped himself from using the word kill, “-imprison them.”

“I’ll let you open the door then.” Sespian stepped aside.

Sicarius didn’t try kicking it open; he remembered the office well and knew the door was reinforced. “Watch my back.” He pulled out his lock picks and knelt.

“You’ve never given me that command before.”

“I’ve given you few commands. Previously you were my emperor.”

“Hm.” Sespian pulled out a pistol, ostensibly watching the hallway, but asked, “At my fath-Raumesys’s funeral pyre, when I was officially acknowledged as his successor with Hollowcrest as my regent, were you… Well, you were there. Would you actually have served me? Obeyed my orders?”

“That was always my plan.” The lock had numerous pins, and it took concentration to wrestle them into submission, but Sicarius forced himself to go into more detail-Sespian had never asked about that time. “I thought you might employ me differently than Raumesys and Hollowcrest had, and that you might eventually consider me as an adviser, not simply a tool. I did not think you would fire me before Raumesys’s body had finished burning.”

Sespian cleared his throat. “I didn’t think I could trust you.”

He didn’t add, I was afraid of you, but Sicarius knew and understood.

“Would you have told me the truth?” Sespian asked. “If I hadn’t pushed you away?”

“Eventually. Preferably after you’d decided…” Sicarius wrangled the final pin into place and turned the lock. He replaced his tools.

“Decided what?” Sespian asked. “That you weren’t a, uhm.”

“Monster?”

Sespian nodded.

“I didn’t know if that would be possible, but I thought you might come to accept me as your monster.”

Sespian didn’t have a response for that, so Sicarius pressed an ear to the door. It was thick wood, but he thought he heard a faint drip of water. That was odd. He’d expected voices. It might be the middle of the night, but these rooms were supposed to be manned around the clock, if only to protect the centuries of secret files contained within the cabinets and vault. Even the makarovi shouldn’t have driven everyone from their posts.

Still kneeling on the floor, he touched a hand to the smooth marble, seeking the vibrations of footsteps. All he felt was the cool stone.

He stood to one side, waved Sespian to the other, and pushed open the door. Nobody fired a gun, or shouted, nor did a single sound come within, save for the drip of water. A lamp burned somewhere, so the space hadn’t been abandoned for long.

Sicarius blocked Sespian from stepping inside first, taking the spot for himself.

A large room full of tables and desks waited inside, with doors opening to interior offices. Cabinets and shelves filled the windowless walls. The headquarters for the Imperial Intelligence Network hadn’t changed much since he’d last visited, save for the contraption sitting on the same table as the lamp.

“What’s that?” Sespian whispered.

A cylinder wrapped with wires lay on its side, strapped to a block of ice. The corners of the block had worn smooth as water dripped off and trickled over the edge of the table. A puddle lay on the floor. Some sort of stiff string stuck out of the cylindrical device, hovering an inch above the flame. Not a string, Sicarius realized. A fuse.

“Blasting sticks.” He strode toward the table.

“They booby-trapped the office?”

Sicarius’s first instinct was to yank the lamp away, so the fuse wouldn’t descend into the flame, but the ice was melting slowly, so he took the time to walk around the table and examine the bomb, lest it hold extra surprises.

“Why?” Sespian asked. “To blow up the records? Some angry bit of sabotage?”

“More than the records.” Sicarius counted twenty blasting sticks in the bundle. Old blasting sticks with crystals of nitroglycerin edging the sides. He’d have to move them carefully. “There’s enough power sitting on the table to take out the back half of the building.”

Sespian’s head jerked up. “The dungeons too? And the basement? Amaranthe’s almost directly under us, down two stories.”

“The blast itself might not, but the building could implode in the aftermath of supports being blown out.”

Sespian stared at him. “In other words, Amaranthe and all the people we just put in the dungeon would be crushed.” He reached for the lantern. “Get it out of there.”

Sicarius caught his hand. “Wait.”

His first walk around the table hadn’t revealed anything more untoward than the bomb itself, but with only the single lantern in the windowless room, the lighting was poor. He inhaled, smelling the sweet scent of the glycerin and a hint of black powder as well. “Interesting.”

He crouched low. A second device-more like a soft pouch-was pasted to the bottom of the table, right under the lamp. Though he couldn’t tell exactly what it would do, he spotted the firing mechanism from a flintlock rifle, a string wrapped around the trigger. The other end of the string disappeared through a tiny hole in the table. Ah, lift or move the lamp, and the string would be pulled taut, firing the trigger and causing a spark that ignited the powder. That would, in turn, ignite the fuse on the blasting sticks as surely as the flame from the lamp would.

“See if there’s another lantern you can light,” Sicarius said.

Sespian had squatted down on the other side of the table. His face grew pale. “All right.”

A minute later, he returned with another lamp. With it shedding illumination under the table, Sicarius stuck a finger into the firing mechanism to keep the trigger stationary and sliced through the string. He laid the pouch on the table and did another study of the area, searching for hidden trip wires. When he was convinced he’d caught everything, he cut off the flame in the lantern on the table. Sespian stepped back, a hand raised, as if that would provide any protection if the blasting sticks exploded.

They remained inert.

“How fortunate that we thought to check here,” Sespian breathed. “All those people below…”

“There may be other bombs.” Sicarius removed the wire-wrapped cylinder of blasting sticks from the ice.

“In here?” Sespian frowned at the office doors.

“They could be anywhere. If the rogue intelligence officers wanted to strike a last blow against you, they might have set multiple traps.”

“How… encouraging. If their Forge people can’t have the throne, no one can.” Sespian frowned again. “That’d be a likely place for a bomb. The throne room. Even if it’s decorative these days and only used for ceremonies.” He licked his lips. “How long do you think it would have taken that ice to melt down?” And for the bomb to go off, he left unspoken.

“A half hour perhaps.” Sicarius picked up the blasting sticks. “Come, we’ll gather the others and search the Barracks.”

Sespian followed him out of the office, but said, “Evacuating the Barracks would be a better plan, don’t you think? It’s not worth risking lives for a building, however historically significant.”

“How will you keep people imprisoned then? You have few men you can rely on to guard them.”

“I’ll think of something. But we can have them search for twenty minutes and then evacuate the building if we still need to.”

Sicarius headed for the nearest set of stairs. He would have broken into a jog, but the nitroglycerin crystals that had seeped out to the sides of the old blasting sticks meant they were even less stable than usual. Intelligence must have done a rushed search of the armory and found them in a back corner.

Sespian glanced at the bundle. “Is there a reason you’re cradling that like a baby and bringing it with us?”

“To show the others what to look for. You should run ahead and warn the rest of the team. We’ll want as many men as possible searching the building.”

“Just don’t trip and blow yourself up. That’d be an ignoble way to end after all the scrapes you’ve survived.”

“Your concern is noted,” Sicarius said.

“What concern?” Sespian smiled briefly. “I don’t want the building to collapse on top of me while I’m down in the dungeon warning everyone else.”

• • •

“Good evening, Lord Marblecrest,” Amaranthe said. “My name is Amaranthe Lokdon, and I work for Sespian Savarsin. You’re familiar with my associate.” She inclined her head toward Maldynado.

He stood next to the furnace, one hand on his hip and the other leaning against the top of the canister. A scowl she’d rarely seen stamped his face, and none of his usual warmth softened his brown eyes. His older brother had the same eyes, and they were even harder as he glared back and forth from Amaranthe to Maldynado. Kneeling, his wrists and ankles still bound by strips of curtain, Ravido wasn’t in a position to do anything more threatening.

“As you can see from our new threshold decoration-pardon the stench, by the way-we ran into a few makarovi on our way to visit you.” Amaranthe clasped her hands behind her back and smiled invitingly at him, though it wasn’t a sincere smile. If he had anything to do with those makarovi, she wanted to unleash Maldynado to pummel him. Sicarius would have been preferable, though he’d do more than pummel. “You wouldn’t happen to know how they got here, would you? And how they came to be adorned with those fetching silver collars?”

“Does this confused girl truly think I’ll answer her inane questions?” Ravido asked Maldynado.

“Do you think I’ll answer yours?” Maldynado asked. “Treasonous idiot.”

Ravido blinked a few times. Amaranthe had the feeling Maldynado hadn’t insulted his older siblings, at least not to their faces, many times.

“Whose idea were the makarovi?” Maldynado demanded. “Yours? Or Father’s? I didn’t think you’d be cruel enough to unleash such beasts on the city, but nothing Father does surprises me.”

“They weren’t supposed to be unleashed on the city,” Ravido snapped. “Just those meddling women.”

“The women who were going to be kind enough to put you on the throne?”

“Kind! Those bitches wanted to use me as a figurehead. Father wanted to let them, so long as the Marblecrests were on the throne. I wasn’t going to be made a play thing for a committee of sniveling females.” His shoulders flexed, the muscles straining against his uniform jacket, but the velvet bonds proved sturdy.

“So the makarovi were your idea?” Maldynado stepped forward, the hand at his side curling into a fist.

His pistol and his rapier hung at his belt, and it was the sway of the weapons that caught Ravido’s eyes. He shrank back after glancing up at the lividness in Maldynado’s face.

Amaranthe didn’t say a word. She had planned to lead the questioning, but Ravido was revealing more to Maldynado than to her. She’d never seen Maldynado this angry either-in fact, she couldn’t remember seeing him angry at all. Frustrated occasionally, but nothing like this. Judging by Ravido’s concerned face, he hadn’t seen Maldynado angry before either, not since he was old enough and strong enough to be a threat.

“Padji found the collars in the other shaman’s collection, and learned the details from Forge about how they were used before. The rest of the family-” Ravido dared a small sneer, “-those who matter, went hunting for the creatures with her.”

“Is Padji the same shaman that put the wards in the Imperial Barracks and who’s been seen wandering around with Ms. Worgavic?” Amaranthe asked.

Ravido might be intimidated by his younger brother-she wondered how badly he might have treated Maldynado in decades past-but this did not extend to her. The sneer she received was much larger.

Amaranthe shrugged. “I ask because there’s a dead female shaman on the floor in Raumesys’s old office. I thought you might mean her.”

“Dead? You killed her?” Ravido tried to surge to his feet and might have made it, even with the bound ankles, but Maldynado shoved him in the back, and he pitched face-first to the ground.

Maldynado followed him down, leaning his weight onto his brother, jamming an elbow between his shoulder blades. Ravido couldn’t lift his face from the cement. “This position remind you of anything, old boy? Like the way Dak and Histan used to smash me into the ground, and the way you used to encourage them, saying I needed to toughen up? You were in your twenties then, you sadistic bastard. You shouldn’t have egged on boys to torment other boys. There’s no way I was going to let you become emperor.”

“How were you going to stop me?” Ravido managed, one side of his mouth mashed into the floor. “Screw ugly old women for the money to hire mercenaries?”

“You mean like your wife? Do you know how many times she tried to jump into bed with me? It’s a pity she-”

Amaranthe cleared her throat. The argument-could it be called arguing when one of the arguers was pinned to the floor? — had devolved, and they weren’t getting any new information. Worse, reminding Ravido that his wife was dead at their hands wouldn’t convince him to help them.

“Who are the makarovi going after, Ravido?” Amaranthe asked. “Who are they supposed to go after?”

He didn’t answer at first, but Maldynado leaned harder into him. “Sespian is upstairs collecting your army right now. It’s over, old boy. You might as well answer her questions. Maybe she’ll let you live if you cooperate. You know that the assassin Sicarius is her man, right? And that he’s here too. He’ll be down any moment…”

“I don’t care, you little brat,” Ravido said. “You’re not going to kill me. Disowned or not, you’re still family, and you already owe Mother. If you rob her of another of her children, her spirit will stalk you for all eternity.”

Maldynado had bristled at the “little brat” comment, but he paled at the promise of a vengeful mother. Ravido must have known he’d scored a point, for he locked his lips together.

Amaranthe lifted a finger. “I don’t care if your mother is mad at me. I can kill you.”

Ravido snorted.

Why did men never believe her when she suggested such things? Must be those wholesome eyes Sespian and Sicarius had mentioned. Well, he was a Marblecrest, and if he was anything like Maldynado, there were other threats that might sway him…

She strolled over to the canister and set a hand on it. “You’ve experienced one of the gases we have loaded in here, Ravido. How did you like it?”

“One?” Maldynado mouthed, but he didn’t say the word aloud, and he was still leaning on his brother, so Ravido couldn’t see his face.

“A sneaky and cowardly way of fighting,” Ravido said.

“Braver, I’d suggest, than hiding in a building while unleashing monsters on the city.”

“I didn’t unleash them, that idiot Heroncrest did. Burrowed right up into their cage. I hope they ate him first.”

“He wasn’t driving the tunnel borer,” Amaranthe said. “A young soldier was. He’s dead now, his chest ripped out and his head torn off. We saw him firsthand.”

Ravido’s jaw moved back and forth in agitation, but he kept his lips shut.

Amaranthe patted the side of the canister. “There are two other gases loaded inside. One causes great pain to a person, eating away at his nose, trachea, and lungs when he inhales it, eventually killing him.” She wasn’t surprised when Ravido’s expression only grew mulish. “The other… I had our scientist load it on a whim, knowing I’d be dealing with a lot men over here. Its effects are felt in the, ah, lower regions.” His lower regions were smashed into the cement, much like his face, but she let her gaze wander in that direction so he wouldn’t misunderstand her.

“What do you mean?”

By now, Maldynado was grinning. “She means she can melt off your balls and turn your pizzle into a dandelion wilted under the first frost of autumn.”

“Thank you, Maldynado,” Amaranthe said, “that was almost poetic, aside from the mention of anatomical parts.”

“It’s hard to find poetical words for man bits. Though Lady Dourcrest has a few. Storehouses for the nectars of love, the sword of his desire, his purple-headed warrior…”

Amaranthe made a cutting-off motion with her hand, though Maldynado issued a few more examples before noticing her and desisting. She feared this devolution from the original threat would have let Ravido relax, but he didn’t seem to be hearing the list. His gaze was focused on the canister.

“I’ll make the switch.” Amaranthe moved around to the back and opened a panel. “Maldynado, check his bonds, then leave the room. I, of course, am immune to the gas, but I’m sure you’d be most distraught if you could never experience physical pleasures with a woman again.”

“Extremely so.” Maldynado tightened the velvet bonds and stood.

“Ravido, are you sure you don’t want to talk?” Amaranthe pretended to make an adjustment inside, though all she did was clink her knife against the interior wall-she couldn’t begin to guess what the various innards did and wasn’t going to unfasten anything in case they needed the gas again. “I’m not certain how long it takes for the gas to start melting off external organs, but-”

“What do you want to know, you vile woman?” Ravido’s snarl wasn’t as fierce as it had been before, and desperation tinged his voice.

“The makarovi target. Who are those collars telling them to attack?”

Ravido sighed. “The rest of the core Forge people.”

“Is that… why some of the creatures stayed here?” Amaranthe asked. “Are there Forge people staying in the Barracks?”

“One of the founders is hiding in here, yes. She wanted protection from that mad assassin slaying all her colleagues.” Ravido glowered up at them. “That’s your assassin, isn’t it? The one you were threatening me with?”

“He was working for Flintcrest then.”

“A real loyal bloke, eh?”

“Didn’t he get all of the founders, already?” Maldynado asked. “There were only five or six to start with, weren’t there? And the papers said he killed a pile of Forge people.”

“I haven’t kept track,” Ravido said. “I just know I wasn’t going to sit on the throne and have a bunch of nattering nags whispering in my ear for the rest of my life.”

Amaranthe stood up slowly, a new realization filling her. “Uh oh.”

“What is it, boss?” Maldynado asked.

“I know where at least one founder is in the city.”

“Enh? Who?”

“Suan Curlev, the woman Deret kidnapped.”

Maldynado stared. “The woman who’s sitting in the fac-our hideout with… all the rest of our allies?”

Amaranthe cursed. If a pack of makarovi turned up at the molasses factory in the middle of the night… Those doors weren’t that strong, and most of Starcrest’s people were out working, the same as her team. Deret, Suan, Starcrest, Tikaya, and their daughter were the only ones there. Maybe a few soldiers, but… Her stomach twisted at the thought of Tikaya and Mahliki being mauled, their insides torn out and eaten. At this time of night, Starcrest and the others were sure to be sleeping. They wouldn’t be prepared for such an onslaught; they couldn’t have guessed about the makarovi. Nobody could have.

“We have to get back there,” Amaranthe rasped.