More soldiers were moving about below, going from the lorries to the rail car and moving weapons out. Akstyr lay flat on his back to stay out of sight.
“Looks like this whole side trip was a waste of time,” Akstyr whispered. “This is all legitimate. Weapons for the army.”
Basilard was still watching the scene. He’d produced a collapsible spyglass. Perhaps, he signed with one hand.
“You think there’s something going on?”
Basilard lowered the spyglass. Would a general normally oversee something so simple as a weapons shipment being delivered?
“I don’t know.”
Akstyr didn’t know much about the army, except that the only job open for ex-gang members was infantry. He’d heard they put anyone with a branded hand up front, where he could take the fire and shrapnel from the enemy’s artillery weapons. Some people thought that was better than being on the streets, but Akstyr couldn’t imagine it, and, sure as dogs pissed on lampposts, he couldn’t have studied the mental sciences in a barracks full of soldiers.
Who is this man in black? Basilard further wondered. He seems important. The general is speaking to him as if he were an equal.
“Dunno that either,” Akstyr said.
Marblecrest, Basilard signed.
“Huh?”
Officer’s name. Basilard must have used the spyglass to read it off the man’s jacket. Do you recognize the family? Is it notable in your history?
“How should I know?” Akstyr said. “Nobody cared a whole lot about warrior-caste dung-sticks where I grew up. You should ask Maldynado. It’d have to be his name, too, wouldn’t it?”
He and Basilard peered into the darkness below, but Maldynado had disappeared into the shadows.
Before dawn worked up any enthusiasm for the day, Amaranthe, Sicarius, and Books pulled away from the enforcer headquarters building in a tiny town in Ag District Number Three. Amaranthe clutched a piece of paper with an address in her hand.
Out here in the country, the enforcers didn’t maintain a jail, and nobody worked a night shift. A sign on the door informed those with an emergency to report to a lieutenant who lived a few doors down. It had been a simple matter of picking a lock to get inside and search through a file drawer for employee addresses.
“Left at the fountain,” Amaranthe said.
Sicarius was still driving, while Books sat with the newspaper in his lap, making contented grunts as he read by lantern light.
According to the purloined address, Sergeant Evrial Yara resided at the edge of town with her father, grandfather, and an older brother. Her personal record said she had three other married brothers who lived on the same street. Amaranthe hoped she could manage a meeting with Yara without having to subdue a whole clan of protective male family members.
The lorry rolled past a two-story building with a smithy on the first level and the windows of a residence on the second. A light burned behind shutters in a room upstairs. The light of an enforcer who had to rise early to be at work?
A wooden plaque near the double-door smith entrance held a name as well as a picture of an anvil, but darkness obscured the lettering. This little town did not have gas lamps along the streets, and the sparsely hung kerosene lanterns had long since burned out.
Amaranthe leaned across Books and squinted at the plaque. Fortunately the name was painted white on the dark wood, and she made it out. YARA.
“Park down the street, please,” she told Sicarius. “I’m guessing privately owned vehicles aren’t that common here.” Bicycles leaned beside most doors, and railway tracks ran through town, providing transportation for anyone who needed to go farther.
Sicarius parked with the vehicle facing down the main road out of town, and Amaranthe wondered if he anticipated having to leave in a hurry.
He grabbed a shovel and checked the coal box. “Empty. I’ll see if there’s more in the back.” He hopped out of the cab.
Amaranthe waved for Books to open the door so she could get out, too, but he was frowning down at the newspaper and didn’t seem to notice that they had stopped. “Books?” she asked. “Are you coming?”
“Yes, of course,” he murmured, eyes still focused on the paper. “I never met Sergeant Yara, but I owe her a thank you for arranging to have the bounty on my head removed. I should like to take this opportunity to offer it.” Despite his words, he did not move.
“Something scintillating?” Amaranthe noticed he was looking at a tintype of Sespian that dominated the front page. The emperor stood before a stone wall, perhaps in front of some military outpost, his face inscrutable as he gazed toward the camera. The headline read, “Emperor Sespian Soon to Return to the Capital. Festival Plans Underway.” Imperial citizens liked to work and train hard, but they were quick to find an excuse for a holiday too. “Everything still going according to schedule?” she asked.
“Hm?” Books said. “Oh, yes. I’m simply concerned over…” He touched the tintype.
“What?”
“Perhaps it’s simply the poor quality of the tintype, but do you notice something odd here? On the emperor’s neck?”
Amaranthe leaned in and squinted. “A smudge of ink? Or-no, it looks like a little bump. What-” Her mouth froze, and she couldn’t get another word out. A bump on his neck. She lifted a hand to rub her face, her mind lurching to her encounters the previous spring with two people who’d been afflicted with bumps in the flesh of their necks, bumps that disappeared, burrowing deeper beneath the skin, when investigated. One of those people had died in front of her eyes, overtaken by a violent seizure. The other had been dead when she walked into his cabin, dead in a room with no one else around.
“Maybe it’s nothing,” Amaranthe whispered, taking the lantern from Books. She held it close to the newspaper so she could get a better look. Her heart thumped in her chest.
If Sespian had been implanted with whatever device killed those other people, was he even now Forge’s puppet? Completely under their control? Worse, did the device’s presence mean that they could kill him remotely if Amaranthe and the others succeeded in kidnapping him? Her throat tightened at the thought of Sicarius pulling Sespian out of the enemy’s clutches only to have the emperor-his son-die in his arms.
“It does not appear to be a flaw of the tintype process,” Books observed.
“No.”
Amaranthe glanced toward the door Sicarius had left open. He hadn’t returned. A thump came from the cargo area behind the cab. The boiler hissed softly, and machinery rumbled and clanked even with the lorry idling. Back there, Sicarius wouldn’t have heard Books’s comment. Should she call him up and tell him? Or wait? He was already irritated by this side trip, and the knowledge that the emperor was in even greater danger than they’d thought might anger him further. Amaranthe remembered the one time she had seen him lose his temper. He’d smashed his fist into a cabinet-at times, she wondered if he’d been anywhere close to smashing that fist into her face-and stalked off to handle things on his own. She didn’t want to see that again. But he had a right to know. Sespian mattered more to him than anyone else. But what could he do with the knowledge? Right then, nothing.
Amaranthe gazed toward the Yara house, remembering that the enforcer sergeant had been part of the team that had first discovered Shaman Tarok’s secret workshop. Tarok had made numerous magical tools for Forge along with the artifact used to sabotage the city water supply. Might he have made these miniature control devices as well? If he had crafted them, maybe there were a few prototypes in that workshop, prototypes that Akstyr and Books could analyze. If so, maybe those two could figure out a way to get the device out of Sespian’s neck without harming him. Too bad Books had set the mines up to flood. Maybe Tarok’s workshop had survived-it had been on a higher level of the mine.