someone her parents could still love if she did return.
CHAPTER 7
Ice stretched in all directions, an endless white blanket, unbroken save for a black trail of water stretching behind the ship. Tikaya gripped the frost-slick railing near the bow with gloved hands and peered over the fur trim of her parka, amazed by the heavy iron hull smashing through the inches-thick frozen crust. The pace was slow and the deck vibrated with the efforts of the engine, but their progress continued. Her people’s wooden vessels could never do this and she admitted reluctant admiration for the Turgonian engineers and metallurgists who could build such a craft without help from practitioners.
For the first time during the trip, land stretched along the horizon, white, flat, and stark. To the south, a range of jagged snow-smothered mountains stretched inland. A settlement hunkered a few miles ahead, low buildings and ice-locked docks just becoming visible. On the ship, marines were hauling food and supplies out of the hold, preparing for a land excursion.
“ Good morning,” came a familiar voice from behind.
Tikaya whirled, smiling. “Rias.”
Thanks to the captain’s claim that his men were too busy with repairs to perform extra guard duty, she had not seen Rias for more than a week, not since the night of the attack. Her smile faded at the sight of shackles binding his wrists and guards trailing behind him. She clenched her jaw. How could Bocrest still treat Rias like a prisoner when he had risked his life- their lives-to save the warship?
He joined her at the railing. “I’ve missed you.”
That simple statement warmed her far more than the parka. The captain had allowed Rias a shave, at least, and she had a nice view of the smile softening his face.
“ Me too. I mean you. Er, I’ve missed you too.” Tikaya stifled a groan, avoided his eyes, and reflected on the mortification her linguistics professors would feel at hearing her mangle language so. To cover her fumbling tongue, she nodded at the ice cracking beneath the bow. “That’s impressive.”
“ Hm, the Emperor’s Fist has a strengthened hull, but that won’t be enough to get us all the way to shore. If you want to see impressive, you should see our dedicated ice-breaking ships. They have a double hull and a special steel alloy designed for peak performance at low temperatures. The bows are rounded instead of pointed, so the ship rides up over the ice, smashing it with its weight. And the engines! They…” He blushed. “Sorry, you probably don’t want all that information.”
Tikaya grinned. “I did ask.”
He smiled sadly. “No. No, you didn’t.”
“ Well, I expressed interest in the subject.”
That seemed to mollify him. “I should have asked already: are the men treating you decently? Any sign of those assassins? Any nightmares after our adventure?”
“ As well as can be expected for a loathed enemy of the empire, no assassination attempts, and nightmares…” Tikaya had slept poorly, reliving the killings on the Nurian ship, but she did not want to talk about it here, with guards looking on, so she pretended to misunderstand. “Why do you ask? Are women usually traumatized after an evening out with you?”
He blinked a few times. “No, but I don’t usually take women into battle on first dates.”
“ Ah, I see. You save that until the relationship is more established.”
“ Exactly.” He slid her a sidelong look, and she suspected he understood what she was not saying.
Tikaya propped her elbow on the railing and faced Rias squarely. Though she enjoyed chitchatting with him, she had been waiting all week to ask about the tunnels he mentioned to Bocrest. And how they tied in with the symbols.
“ Will you tell me about these tunnels you’re supposed to guide us through?” she asked. “You’ve asked me to help Bocrest, but you haven’t explained what that will entail.”
His face grew somber as soon as she mentioned the tunnels. This time, though, he nodded instead of retreating into himself. “The place we’re going…the source of the runes… I’ve been there before. It was my first assignment as a raw sub-lieutenant, what we call a ‘testing mission.’”
“ What’s being tested? You?”
“ Yes. Every officer gets something early in his career, a deliberately challenging task that’s meant to show whether or not he has the courage, intelligence, and command ability to go on to become a leader of men. I imagine this was…more than my superiors had in mind. I was attached to an army unit for the month because of studies I’d done on excavation engineering. Forty of us walked into those tunnels. A week later, three of us crawled out-through a ventilation shaft high in the mountains, in the middle of a blizzard. We barely made it back to Fort Deadend, and the major I’d been assigned to wrote a heartfelt report that stated we should never send men into the tunnels again.”
“ They were ancient ruins?” she asked. “With traps?”
“ Ancient, perhaps. Not ruins.”
Rias’s shoulders hunched in an uncharacteristic slouch, his gaze toward the snapping ice. Tikaya thought of the man she followed through the Nurian ship, head up, alert, leading the way with confidence that should not have been there against such lopsided odds, and she regretted drawing him back to what was obviously a dark place for him. Still, she had to know.
“ What happened inside?”
“ The tunnels were in good condition. Too good. No dust, cobwebs, no signs of age other than damage from tectonic shifts. The men with me declared the place possessed by some powerful ancient magic. I thought…not. The ‘traps’ we kept stumbling into-I got the feeling they weren’t traps at all but simply the workings of a place we were too ignorant to understand. We were like clueless rats drowned in the city waterworks when the level rises.”
“ But there was writing? These symbols?”
For the first time a spark of interest entered his eyes. “Not a lot, but things were labeled. If you could translate, perhaps that could keep us safe.”
Tikaya feared the smile she offered was bleak. The rubbings were gone, and she had made zero progress with the language.
“ Well, not safe.” Rias’s shoulders slumped again, independent of her thoughts. “There were strange and deadly creatures roaming those tunnels too. Nothing we recognized, nothing the archaeologists with us knew from the fossil record.”
“ You had archaeologists with you before?”
“ A team of scientists, yes, and a linguist.”
“ Did any of them make it out?” The bleakness infused her tone now.
“ No, and they weren’t particularly helpful while they were alive.”
Great grandmother’s gray locks, what was she supposed to accomplish that a team of archaeologists had failed to do?
A worried expression creased Rias’s forehead. He seemed to realize he had blundered. “But you’re better than them.”
She snorted. “That’d be more reassuring if you’d ever actually seen me do anything and could qualify that statement.”
He bumped her shoulder and smiled. “I’ve seen enough.”
Tikaya blushed.
“ You two relax.” Sergeant Ottotark glared at Tikaya and Rias as he stalked past carrying a massive bag labeled ‘tent: medium.’ “Enjoy the view. Have some rum. Those of us who aren’t prisoners will handle all the unloading and loading.”
“ I hope he’s not coming with us,” Tikaya muttered after he moved out of earshot. Somehow, she did not think she would be that lucky.
“ Despite his bite, I’m told he’s intensely loyal to the emperor and the captain,” Rias said.
