“ The traps are disarmed.” Sicarius withdrew his compact lock-picking kit.
“ Wait,” Akstyr said. “There’s something about that lock. You’d almost miss it, compared with the power oozing off whatever’s down there, but it tingles a bit.”
“ With… magic?” Sespian had joined them around the grate.
Akstyr nodded. “And I think… What is that down there? Beside the mirror. There’s an aura about it too. It’s Made.”
“ It’s a key,” Amaranthe said.
“ In all senses of the word,” Akstyr said. “I bet if you stick a pick in the lock, you’ll trigger a trap. That key’s probably the only thing that works. I wonder how the enforcer got his hands on it.”
“ Maybe they’ve been tracking this shipment for some time,” Amaranthe said. “Any chance you can nullify the trap, Akstyr?”
“ I don’t know. It seems intricate. Good, quality work. Why don’t we just get the key?”
Amaranthe waved at the crisscrossing grate bars. “I’m the smallest one here, and my arm isn’t going to fit through any of those holes.”
“ Do you sense any other Science about the grate?” Sicarius asked.
“ No, just the lock. And the key.”
Sespian poked the grate with one finger. When nothing happened, he tried to pull it open. It didn’t budge. He offered a sheepish shrug. “You never know.”
“ There were nets back there,” Sicarius said. “Someone make a length of rope.”
“ Fishing?” Amaranthe asked, though she didn’t know how they’d hook the key. It didn’t have a hole, and it lay flat on the hull.
Sicarius didn’t respond. He’d drifted off farther down the aisle. He must have some idea.
Amaranthe returned to the bags of ice skates, opened one, and removed a couple of laces. She tied them into a three-foot long string and returned to the grate. Sicarius had found a nail-or, judging by the splinters clinging to the head, pried it out of the stage framework. He pulled out a compass, laid it on the floor, and aligned the nail just so. He unsheathed his biggest knife, a singled-edged serrated blade that could cut firewood if needed, then hammered the blunt side against the nail several times.
“ Uh,” Akstyr said.
Sespian also watched in puzzled silence.
Amaranthe nodded and handed Sicarius the string. Thanks to having seen the trick done before in a drinking house, she caught on, but she kept her mouth shut. Sicarius tied the string around the head of the nail and lowered his fishing “hook” through the bars. When the nail hovered over it, the key wobbled. The nail brushed it, and the key attached itself.
“ Oh,” Sespian said, as Sicarius carefully pulled up the key. “The Inverse Magnetostrictive Effect.”
“ The… huh?” Akstyr asked.
“ Mechanical stress can cause a change of magnetization in a ferromagnetic material.”
Akstyr’s face scrunched up in bewilderment.
“ He made a magnet,” Sespian said.
“ Why didn’t you say that to start with?” Akstyr squinted at Sespian. “You sure you aren’t Books’s kid?”
“ I’m not sure of anything any more.”
“ I’m sure you’d have more job opportunities than you think if you decide to get out of government.” Amaranthe grinned.
Without commenting on the exchange, Sicarius pulled the key through the grate and slipped it into the lock. It clicked open. Everyone held his breath, but no booby traps sprang. Sicarius opened the grate and Akstyr, despite his earlier disinterest in leading, was the first to flatten to his belly and stick his head through.
Amaranthe caught Sespian watching Sicarius with his mouth parted in surprise. Remembering his comments about Sicarius being nothing more than a brutal murderer, she hoped he’d rethink the assessment. She recalled her own early meetings with Sicarius and how she’d also been surprised to learn he’d been educated in far more areas than fighting and killing. She’d been intrigued. Maybe Sespian would share a modicum of that interest.
Akstyr lifted his head and propped himself up on his elbows. “I don’t know what they do, but there’s power in them for sure. They’re long and skinny and remind me of fireworks from the solstice fests, but they’re not solid. There’s glass or something like glass with a yellow gunk inside. There are little clear blocks floating in the gunk.”
“ Clear blocks?” Sicarius asked sharply.
“ Uh huh. Small ones. I think there’s something in them.”
Sicarius took Akstyr’s spot and lowered his head. Sicarius’s sharp tone concerned Amaranthe-when did he ever let emotion seep into his voice? — and she nibbled on a fingernail. It usually wouldn’t take him more than a heartbeat or two to absorb all the sights visible from the grate, but he lay there unmoving for many seconds.
Amaranthe’s patience-and fingernail-ran out. She dropped to her belly beside him, bumping his shoulder in an effort to make room for herself. She lowered her head and peered around a dangling thatch of short blond hair to see a pyramid of long, glowing yellow tubes. Rope woven through the stack tied them to each other, and cloth padding ensured they wouldn’t shift about with the bumps and sways of the steamboat. After the dim lighting of the hold above, the artifacts’ illumination made Amaranthe squint, but her eyes soon adjusted, and she spotted the clear blocks Akstyr had mentioned. Perhaps one-inch wide, they were suspended in the yellow substance like raisins and nuts in the sweet carrot gelatin salad at Curi’s Bakery. She couldn’t tell if any letters or symbols marked the cubes.
“ Get back,” Sicarius whispered and pulled his head out.
As soon as Amaranthe cleared the grate, he lowered it into place with a firm clang. He twisted the key in the lock, considered it for a moment, then tucked it into his pocket. He waved the others back and pulled a crate over the grate.
“ That bad, huh?” Amaranthe had assumed they were dealing with human-made artifacts-Akstyr sensed them after all-but perhaps those cubes came from elsewhere. Her gaze dropped to the knife always sheathed at Sicarius’s waist. So far all of the ancient technology they’d encountered had been black. Was this some exception?
Sicarius crouched, his forearms balanced on his thighs. “I have seen those cubes before.”
“ On your mission up north?” Amaranthe asked.
“ Yes.”
“ What do they do?” Sespian asked.
“ The ones I saw were sprayed via a rocket detonating in the air above Fort Deadend. When the cubes broke open, the substance inside killed everyone within a ten mile radius.”
“ Rockets.” Akstyr snapped his fingers. “Yes, that makes sense. The energy I sensed comes mostly from the base. It must be stored somehow to propel the tubes into the air.”
Nobody looked at him.
“ Killed?” Sespian hadn’t taken his gaze from Sicarius. “How?”
“ I came upon the bodies after it’d happened. Some airborne inhalant, I assume. The effects on the people within range were grisly.”
Amaranthe couldn’t imagine how badly mauled a body would have to be for someone as desensitized to death as Sicarius to feel compelled to use such a word.
“ And those weapons are going to the capital?” Sespian asked. “I can’t allow-I mean, even if I’m not… We can’t allow something like that to be used.”
“ I can’t believe Forge would bring something like that into the city,” Amaranthe said. “A ten-mile radius? So, twenty miles in diameter? That’d devastate the majority of Stumps.”
“ A million people,” Sespian breathed.
“ Maybe they only mean to use the weapons as a threat,” Amaranthe said. “A bluff. They’d be in danger, too, if they set them off.”
“ Not if they’re flying around in their big black aircraft,” Akstyr said.
“ True.” Whatever armor the Behemoth possessed, it’d probably protect those within from any number of attacks. “Still, what would they gain from killing everyone in the city?” Amaranthe asked. “They’re business people, and those are customers.”
“ They may not know precisely what they have,” Sicarius said.