“Thank you, Dray,” Starcrest said. “I see you’re as much the flatterer as you always were.”
“It’s just that I don’t know how useful a naval commander can be in a city siege. All those pesky buildings are wont to get in the way.”
This conversation caused the rest of the room to drop to silence, most of the men gaping at Ridgecrest for his audacity. Amaranthe recognized the teasing for what it was and guessed the general and the admiral had gone to school together or otherwise known each other for a long time. Starcrest appeared a little younger, but a missing eye could certainly age a man prematurely.
“All of those pesky buildings seem to be confusing Marblecrest,” the other general said—his tag simply read Wranz, making him one of the rare men to rise to such a rank without a warrior-caste surname. “Why is he bothering with the Imperial Barracks? The railways, river, and aqueducts will be the key to controlling the city, especially at this time of year with limited food stores within its boundaries.”
“Because his soft backside prefers imperial suites to camp cots,” Ridgecrest said. “Last I heard his priority was shopping for new uniforms for his troops, so they’ll look good while they’re parading around the city.”
“That’s a Marblecrest for you.”
“Flintcrest has the two major railways,” Colonel Fencrest said, “and Marblecrest does have the river mouth blockaded. I don’t think anyone has considered the aqueducts yet. It’s possible we could start with that. With the lake freezing over, the underground water supply will be all the more important. My lord?” the colonel asked, tilting his face toward Starcrest. “What are your thoughts on the situation? You haven’t voiced them yet.”
A dozen sets of eyes turned toward Starcrest. Amaranthe would have quailed beneath all those gazes, but Starcrest merely gazed back, hard to read. Something about his silence, and his position in the room, made her think he might consider the succession issue the secondary problem, at least for the moment. He’d had firsthand experience with that ancient technology and must have a good idea exactly what the Behemoth could do. Amaranthe may have denied Forge its two foremost experts on it, but as long as it was sitting out there in the open, anyone could come and poke around.
“I’ll want to see reports from your intelligence analysts before suggesting targets and troop placement strategies,” Starcrest said, “but laying siege on the city… nobody wins there. Not when it’s our own city. I’d guess the people are already restless and irritated at the martial law. Civilians will be starting to see uniformed men as enemies rather than allies. It wouldn’t take much to uncork the bubble cider bottle and let the contents overflow.”
Amaranthe nodded to herself. She, too, had thought the answer lay with the populace. The tens of thousands of soldiers out there seemed like a lot, but there were hundreds of thousands of civilians living in the city. If one could win their minds…
General Wranz shifted. “It’s true. There have already been incidents.”
“We don’t want to try to turn the population against the army though,” Ridgecrest said. “That would set a horrible precedent. Whoever takes the throne next would inherit a mess.” He glanced at Sespian. “Though we haven’t decided on an heir yet, I suppose.”
“You make the job sound so appealing, General,” Sespian murmured, then raised his voice, facing Starcrest. “It sounds like you think we need someone with the ability to charm people to his or her side.”
He didn’t look at Amaranthe, but her belly did a queasy flip, for she had an inkling of what was coming. The last thing she was qualified to do was to try and sweet talk an entire city, especially now.
“You think you’re that person?” Ridgecrest asked Sespian.
“No, but I have a skilled diplomat on my team.” He spread a hand toward Amaranthe.
Every head in the room swiveled toward her. She felt more like a deer caught on the railway with a locomotive barreling at her than some sort of smooth-talking diplomat.
“Diplomat?” Colonel Fencrest asked. “We tied her up on the train. She’s an outlaw, Si—Sespian.”
Amaranthe caught the slip. Out of habit, these men were still apt to think of Sespian as their leader. She hoped he could take advantage of that.
“Did she stay tied up?” Sespian asked.
“Yes,” Fencrest said at the same time as Starcrest said, “No.”
The colonel frowned at him.
“By the time I went back to question her, she’d freed herself.”
Question her? That wasn’t exactly what he’d been doing. Why did she have a feeling Ridgecrest, Fencrest, and the others weren’t on the list of people who knew about Starcrest’s mission to those tunnels? Or the tunnels’ existence at all, for that matter.
“What are you— She’d only been back there five minutes, my lord,” Fencrest said. “And they were all tied.”
“Indeed. When I entered, the guards were smashed face-first into the floor, and her team… was not.”
Sespian smiled at Amaranthe. “Had a chat with those guards, did you?”
Not sure what to say—after all, it’d been Akstyr’s gift that had allowed them to get the best of those men—she only offered a weak return smile. Or a bleak return smile, perhaps. She didn’t want this mission. She wanted… she didn’t even know what. To find Sicarius and fade into the background. Let the experts finish this. “Given my outlaw status, Sire, I don’t think I’d be the best person to give speeches.” Oh, and the fact that she’d killed thousands of people the night before. Emperor’s teeth, she wanted to throw up again.
“We have some work to do before we’re ready for that regardless.” Starcrest headed for the door. No, he was heading for her. “May I speak with you for a moment, Corporal Lokdon?”
Had she given him her rank? Her history as an enforcer? No, someone had filled him in.
“Yes, sir. I mean, my lord. Admiral.” Erg, why was she fumbling her words in front of him? She was no military history fanatic with a zealous love for naval strategists. Maybe it was the fact that he was the one man Sicarius openly respected.
Before her tongue could trip her up again, she ducked her head, and led the way onto the catwalk. She’d planned to take him to her office, but he walked the other way, to the one other private room up there. The last time she’d been in it, Akstyr and Books had been using it as a study.
Only one small desk remained, the others having been purloined for the conference table. Starcrest’s wife sat at it, the contents of an upturned valise sprawled across the top: journals, pens, pencils, crinkled pages of hastily scrawled notes, and a fist-sized black sphere. Chin in hand, she was frowning down at a small notebook held open in the other hand. She obviously hadn’t come to the empire with the intent to take up winter sports and get massages from the spas on Mokath Ridge.
Amaranthe’s fingers twitched at the unorganized mess, wanting to bring order to the desk. She did allow herself to pick up a few slips of papers that had fallen to the floor. Indecipherable runes had been copied onto the pages. She recognized the style from the Behemoth.
Starcrest shut the door and touched Amaranthe’s shoulder. “If we stand here and talk, she’ll notice us in a few minutes.”
Amaranthe glanced at him, certain he was joking. One corner of his mouth twitched upward in a wry half smile, but Professor Komitopis hadn’t looked up yet. Maybe he wasn’t joking.
“What shall we talk about?” she asked.
“I understand you’ve been in that ship.”
Ship, was that how he thought of it? None of the words in her vocabulary seemed sufficient, though she supposed she couldn’t think of it as simply an aircraft now, since it could go beneath lakes too. Or maybe it wasn’t going anywhere else. Ever. It’d end up being a tourist attraction, like the pyramid in the middle of the city.
Starcrest was waiting for an answer, she reminded herself.
“Yes. Twice now, though the first time was as a prisoner rather than as a…” She thought
about saying guest, but that wasn’t apt. Besides, she didn’t want anyone thinking she was aligned with Forge. “Spy.”
“Hm. And you had something to do with it being placed in its current locale?”
In other words, had she crashed it? What a tactful way to put it. Maybe he should be the diplomat giving speeches. “It was on the bottom of the lake. In hindsight, that was a better spot for it. I had thought to have it flown to the South Pole where we could bury it in a glacier or at the bottom of some distant ocean trench. I wanted to get it out of Forge’s hands. I’ve seen some of what that technology can do. No organization should control it. Forge is already close enough to owning the world as it is. If nobody stops them… Well, I’ve been trying to stop them. My team and I have, that is. For the last year.” She was, she noted, doing a good job of not answering the question he’d asked. “As for its current locale, Retta, one of the Forge scholars of that technology, was trying to fly it for us. I talked her into helping us.”
Starcrest’s eyebrows rose. She needed to be careful how she phrased things or they would think she had a magic tongue. She’d end up in front of a podium, making a fool of herself as she stammered through an inept speech. That hadn’t been one of her best classes in school.
“But there was opposition,” Amaranthe said, “and the other woman on board who knew how to operate the Behemoth—that’s my name for the thing, not theirs—tinkered with those black cubes and—er, are you familiar with them?”
“Yes,” Starcrest said.
“She tinkered with them so they started attacking us, attacking everything.”
“Isn’t that their normal function?”
“I thought so, but Retta had apparently changed the ones on the craft to recognize humans as… something not to be incinerated.”
“Did they?” Starcrest glanced at Komitopis, who was still puzzling over her notes. He walked around the table and nudged her.
The book twitched, and she blinked in surprise when she saw him and Amaranthe. “Hello. Meeting over?”
“No, but we’re discussing that ship.”
“Oh, yes. Good.” Komitopis closed her journal and gazed attentively at them.
Amaranthe couldn’t believe she truly hadn’t noticed them walk in and start talking.
Starcrest nodded to her. “Go on, please.”
“So the cubes had been modified to be less deadly, but they’ve been unmodified now. I don’t know if it’s possible that some of them have left the craft and escaped into the city, but… I’ve seen them outside of the Behemoth before.”
“I’ll instruct the soldiers on how to make a concoction that destroys them.”
“There is such a thing?” Amaranthe asked.
“Through trial and error, I found something that works. A variation on royal water.”
Huh. Amaranthe hadn’t thought anything in the known world could put a dent in any of those relics. This new revelation comforted her an iota. “Anyway, the cubes started shooting holes into their own ship and did some damage to the engines or whatever’s behind the walls in the control room. As I said, Retta was trying to raise us up from the lake and take us to the South Pole, but smoke started coming out of the walls, and Ms. Worgavic’s shaman didn’t help either. She… burned Retta alive. There was no chance of controlling the Behemoth at that point, and we went down. Books, Akstyr, and I escaped on a lifeboat—that’s what Retta called them, though they fly instead of floating—and I didn’t realize where the craft had crashed until we were coming back on the train, and…” She swallowed. No need to explain. They’d seen too.
Starcrest nodded to his wife. “Do you know a Retta?”
“Retta Curlev?” Komitopis asked.
“Yes,” Amaranthe said.
“She was one of the imperial students in the archaeology program at the Polytechnic a few years ago. I wasn’t on the island teaching at the time, but I think they put her into the secret program to study the technology.” Komitopis touched the sphere on the table.
“Random people can simply sign up to study it?” Amaranthe asked.
“No. It’s not spoken of with students and certainly not listed in the course catalogue, though information about the technology isn’t as tightly ratcheted down in Kyatt as it was here. The program is entered by invitation only.”
“So people with enough money could arrange an invitation?” Amaranthe didn’t mean for her tone to sound accusing, but it came out that way. Why had the Kyattese allowed anyone to study that technology? It should have been buried somewhere for another fifty thousand years. Except, she thought with an inward sigh, secrets had a way of becoming unburied whenever more than one person held them. There must have been dozens of people on that mission, and Forge might have found the Behemoth one way or another regardless.
“That shouldn’t be a criteria,” Komitopis said, “but I couldn’t promise that it never has been. As soon as Rias and I returned to my homeland, our gear was searched and the artifacts I’d discovered taken. Though the Polytechnic has kept me as an adviser, and I’ve argued for a tight-lipped policy, I am not now, nor have I ever been, in charge of the study of that race and its relics.”
“I had the tunnel entrances blown up before I left the Northern Frontier,” Starcrest said, “and we never saw anything like that ship, but we’ve since learned there are other deposits of the technology in the world.” He shared a look with his wife. Amaranthe remembered Retta mentioning an underwater laboratory they’d discovered. “Unfortunately, we’ve heard of a handful of the artifacts appearing on the black market. The only boon is that few of the people who acquire them know how to work them.”
“Except Forge,” Amaranthe said, “though now that…” She took a breath. Confession time again. “Retta and Mia are both dead. I believe they were the only Forge votaries who knew how to control the Behemoth fully. Fully enough to operate it anyway.”
“They must have been quite bright,” Komitopis said, “to learn even that much in a few short years. One could spend a dozen lifetimes studying that ancient race, its languages and technology, and not truly understand it.” She waved to the sphere on the desk. “After twenty years, I haven’t grasped everything in this little dictionary.”
“More of an encyclopedia than a dictionary,” Starcrest said at her self-deprecation. “And even that is a poor term to describe the depths of knowledge inside of it.”
Komitopis wiggled her fingers in acknowledgment.
Starcrest faced Amaranthe again. “What you’re saying is that your Behemoth is stuck exactly where it is until someone figures out how to fly it elsewhere?”
Her Behemoth. Amaranthe cringed at the notion of taking possession of it. “I believe so, yes.”
“Anyone could enter it as long as it’s right there,” Komitopis said, “and they could be inside, gathering artifacts to sell or hold as keepsakes. Knowing what I know of that race, many of those devices will have the potential to be deadly. Few people know how to work them today, but someday, someone will publish books on the language, and…” She spread her hands helplessly.
“It must be moved,” Starcrest said. “The South Pole might work. Or better, put it at the bottom of the Drellac Trench. It’ll be a few generations, at least, before we develop our own technology to the point of making a subaquatic descent of over six miles in depth. By then, we can hope humans have forgotten about the ship.” A twist to his lips suggested he didn’t have much faith in that hope.
“Perhaps it’ll be destroyed by dropping it in there,” Komitopis said.
“Can anything destroy it?” Amaranthe asked. “We know it can survive on the bottom of the lake, and… if it can fly into outer space…”
“The lake is a few hundred feet deep, true,” Starcrest said, “but six miles deep is a far greater order of pressure. At the bottom of the Drellac Trench, the water column above an object would exert a pressure of 15,750 pounds per square inch, over a thousand times the standard atmospheric pressure imposed at sea lev
el.” He didn’t pause as he spoke, and Amaranthe wondered if he was capable of making such calculations between one breath and the next or if he had the facts memorized. “As for outer space,” Starcrest went on, waving skyward, “it’s a vacuum, we believe, with pressure close to nonexistent. Quite a different environment than the depths of the ocean. It would pose its own challenges, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we breach outer space before we roam about in the deepest seas. Of course, entering, or in our case reentering, the atmosphere would be problematic with the friction heat caused by the extreme speeds a craft would…” Starcraft glanced around at his audience, catching a knowing smile on his wife’s lips. “Ah, I wandered off on a tangent, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but an interesting one,” Komitopis said. “I dare say you’d like to put that craft somewhere that you can study it.”
“That is tempting, but I’d wish to publish anything I learned, and everyone’s concerns are deathly real. The world isn’t ready for this kind of power. It may never be, so long as humans walk upon its continents. Though I’d be lying if I said I wouldn’t like to be proved wrong about that.” He waved away his musings. “Yes, the trench, that may be the best bet. Corporal Lokdon, you have some men available here, don’t you? Men who are capable fighters and loyal to you?”
“Ah?” Though they’d been including her in the conversation, Amaranthe had felt like an outsider and hadn’t been imagining herself as being a part of the Behemoth-trench mission. “I mean, yes, I do.”
“I’d appreciate it if you and a couple of your better fighters would go along to the ship and see what can be done. I imagine Tikaya will be able to find some map inside to show her around, but a guide could prove helpful.”
A guide? Her? Amaranthe had accidentally wandered into her own torture chamber the last time she’d been looking for something in there.
“It may be dangerous over there—if they haven’t already, people will soon stop gawking and will see that monstrosity as a prize to be claimed,” Starcrest said, giving his wife a solemn nod.