soldiers had fields and special tracks for practicing maneuvers with their steam vehicles. They didn’t take them for strolls into the woods.
Sicarius lifted a finger to his lips, then signed, We are not alone, using the hand code one of their team members had taught them.
Soldiers? Amaranthe signed back and pointed to the wreck. She wondered if anyone could have survived that if they had been inside at the time of explosion.
Sicarius shook his head once. It could have meant no, or that he didn’t know. He was always hard to read. Before she could ask for clarification, he waved for her to stay put and disappeared into the foliage.
Amaranthe intended to be good and wait for him to return from scouting, but a breeze rattled the branches, and a beam of sunlight caused something to glint amongst the needles. She managed to ignore it for almost five seconds before easing out from behind the stump and creeping over to take a look.
A gleaming metal… thing lay on the ground, half-buried by dead leaves and needles. It was a weapon of some sort, but nothing she recognized. It had the length and breadth of a canon, but the barrel was divided on the inside. Two bronze wheels with spokes were smashed beneath it, one warped into uselessness. A metal lever-a crank? — dangled from the back of the barrel.
Something touched her shoulder, and Amaranthe jumped to her feet, spinning in the air. As she came down, her crossbow came up, finger finding the trigger.
Sicarius stood there, and he caught her weapon before her instincts aimed it anywhere that would have threatened him. It was a little disheartening how easily he did that, but as long as he was on her side, it didn’t matter. A blush warmed her cheeks though; she shouldn’t have been so entranced that it was easy to sneak up on her.
Find anything? Amaranthe signed the words in a rush, so he wouldn’t have time to point out her deficiencies.
He tilted his head toward the wreckage and strode in that direction.
“That’s what I like about you, Sicarius,” Amaranthe murmured. “You don’t over-explain things and ruin the mystery.”
He paused at the smoldering wreckage and pointed inside the toppled steam tramper body before moving aside so Amaranthe could look.
Though she had never ridden in one of the towering machines, she had seen them back in her days as an enforcer, when she could openly jog past Fort Urgot for her morning runs. There was a protected seat up top where a sniper could fire in three hundred and sixty degrees, while the inside held a cramped bench for two soldiers, a pilot and an artillery man, who worked a quad breach-loader with shells the size of cannon balls. The metal body rode on two articulating legs with duck-like feet that could maneuver across all sorts of terrain.
That was how it was supposed to look anyway. With holes blown through two walls due to the ruptured boiler, this one was such a mess that Amaranthe struggled to identify parts. The only thing she could tell for certain was that it had a lot of cargo, mostly weapons and none of them familiar. She pulled out a rifle, thinking it the most normal-looking find, but even it was more advanced than the percussion-cap firearms she had seen. She thumbed open a latch under the hammer to find an empty chamber.
“They’re prototypes.” Sicarius must have decided whoever had crashed the tramper had moved out of the area, for he spoke instead of signing. “The army has been working on cartridge ammunition.”
“Cartridge?” Amaranthe peered about the inside of the tramper, looking for… whatever a cartridge was.
“Bullets, powder, and primer in one shell. Come.”
Before she could digest the implications, he led her around the tramper. A man in black army fatigues lay prone, blood saturating the brown needles and dry dirt beneath him.
“He died in the explosion?” Amaranthe asked, thinking it must be the driver. Had he been stealing a bunch of priceless weapons, including the tramper, to sell to someone?
“No. His throat was cut.”
“Really?” She supposed it was wrong of her to find her interest piqued at the idea of murdered bodies, but if there was some grand scheme going on here, thwarting it could lead to the right kind of recognition for her and Sicarius.
“Two people walked that way.” Sicarius pointed south, toward the shoreline. “They were trying to hide their tracks.”
“But not skillfully enough to fool you, eh?” Amaranthe extended a hand, indicating he could lead. “Have I mentioned recently that I’m glad you’re on my side?”
“Compliments will not get you out of the last half hour of training,” Sicarius said and strode down the hill.
She groaned. “ Why I’m glad you’re on my side, I’m not entirely sure.”
They eased down a hillside that only a goat could have navigated without slipping. A goat and Sicarius. For her part, Amaranthe did her best to keep from knocking pebbles free, pebbles that skittered and bounced down to the trail below, making far too much noise on the way.
Sicarius paused now and then to check some sign on the ground, but they reached the lake again without seeing anyone. The trail wound past a vacant log cabin with more moss on the roof than shingles before stopping at a beach. Sicarius lifted a hand and crouched behind a copse of trees near the water. A rickety dock stretched into the lake where waves glittered like candles beneath the low-hanging afternoon sun. The brightness almost made Amaranthe miss the rowboat gliding across the water toward…
She groaned again. “Darkcrest Isle?”
Two figures sat in the boat, one male and one female. The man rowed while the woman kept watch, her face toward the mainland rather than the island. Did she know Amaranthe and Sicarius were following? She didn’t seem to be looking at them directly, rather her face shifted slowly from side to side, eyes scanning the shoreline, but there was a wary tenseness to her posture, as if she knew someone was tracking them.
“Nurians,” Sicarius murmured.
Amaranthe threw him a sharp look. “How can you tell?”
From this far away, she could see they had black hair and bronze skin, but most Turgonians had dark hair and olive to bronze skin. Even Sicarius, with blond locks that were rare in the empire, had the skin coloring of an imperial citizen.
“Almond-shaped eyes,” Sicarius said.
Amaranthe squinted, but without a spyglass she couldn’t make out facial features, especially with the boat drawing ever farther away. The pair wore Turgonian factory-made clothing rather than the flamboyantly colored silks she associated with Nurians, but they were in the heart of the empire, thousands of miles from their homeland. Of course, they would have disguises.
“I know you’re better than me at… everything,” Amaranthe whispered, “but must you even have superior eyesight to mine? I’ve been wondering if you’re entirely human.” Even as she spoke, her mind was spinning at the possibility of Nurians. The empire had spurned the development of the mental sciences in favor of technology. It had used that technology to dominate the Turgonian continent and thrust back Nurian attempts at infiltration. The empire’s ironclad steamships and black powder weapons had equaled the otherworldly resources those western wizards commanded, but what if Nuria got some of that technology and started developing it alongside their mental skills? Surely that would tip the scales in their favor.
Sicarius bumped her arm, and she tore her gaze from the boat. He held a collapsible spyglass in his hand.
“Oh, I see. You’re not inhuman; you just pack better than I do.”
“Yes, are you scheming a plan?” He nodded toward the island. The two Nurians had hit land and were dragging the boat ashore.
“ Now you’re interested in things, eh?”
“They represent a threat to… the empire.”
Amaranthe smiled. She knew he cared about the emperor, not the empire, but she wouldn’t correct him. “They took the only boat. I guess we could swim over after dark and see what they’re up to. Is someone meeting them there to pick them up, or do they have another craft waiting? Their first plan must have been to steal the steam tramper, and maybe march it all the way to the Gulf where they could find a ride back home on a merchant ship.”
