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.
A lot of mights and maybes, Amaranthe admitted, but it was worth checking out. Yes. If her idea proved fruitful, then, when she told Sicarius about the implant, she could also offer him a solution. That’d be the more humane choice. He wouldn’t worry as much then. And-she admitted there was a selfish component to her considerations-he wouldn’t be tempted to abandon her and go off on his own. Now she had even more reason to question Yara, though she’d have to make sure and do it without Sicarius around.
“Are you coming?” Sicarius asked from outside the cab door.
Amaranthe flinched, nearly falling off the seat. “Er, yes.” She barely kept herself from snatching the newspaper and hurling it into the furnace, where it’d burn before Sicarius could see it. Feigning calm, she told Books, “Better put that away so we can complete this errand and return to the road.”
“Hm, yes.” Books folded the paper and tucked it away with his journal. He didn’t seem to notice the desperate don’t-say-a-word-about-this-to-anyone look Amaranthe implored him with. She’d have to remember to pull him aside later and make sure he knew.
Amaranthe led the men down a side street and up a stairway to the residential entrance of the smithy. The lamp was burning behind the shutters near the door, so Amaranthe paused on the landing to listen. Footsteps sounded, someone walking into the room. She couldn’t tell if the treads were male or female.
Amaranthe knocked softly. Without hesitation, the footsteps approached the door. It swung open. A man stood there, tall, burly, and wearing enforcer grays. His uniform tag read YARA, though he bore the rank of a corporal instead of a sergeant. He had a strong, square jaw and angular face similar to that of his sister, and he regarded Amaranthe and the men with narrow suspicious eyes also reminiscent of Sergeant Yara.
“Good morning,” Amaranthe said, “sorry to disturb you so early, but we were passing through and wondered if-”
The door slammed shut in her face.
“Am I losing my knack for chatting with people?” Amaranthe wondered.
The door whipped open again. This time the corporal had a repeating crossbow pressed to his shoulder, the quarrel targeting Sicarius. Or at least it was in the process of targeting him. Between one eye blink and the next,
