He followed her along the ledge, but she had the feeling he thought they were wasting time. Or perhaps, he simply did not think roaming aqueducts a suitable task for his skills.
“If trailing along with me is boring you,” she said, “you could go check on Books and Maldynado in the real estate office.”
He did not speak at first, and she thought he might be considering it, but then he said, “My presence unnerves Books.”
“Your presence unnerves everyone.” Amaranthe grinned over her shoulder to soften the comment.
“Not you,” Sicarius said.
“No, but I’m told my sanity is questionable.”
She wriggled her eyebrows at him. Someday she was going to get him to smile, maybe even laugh. The one and only time she’d seen him truly break his facade, it had been in anger. At her. It seemed fate should offer her the other side of the coin once.
“Huh,” was the only response she got.
The outlet pipe came into view. More than eight feet in diameter, it rose well over her head. This side trip was a whim, and Amaranthe did not expect to find anything, but she lifted the lantern to inspect the pipe’s rim by the light.
Splashing water flung droplets onto her clothing when she edged closer, and she was about to abandon the search, but Sicarius reached above her head. He plucked something from a gouge in the metal.
“What is it?” Amaranthe asked.
He held a soggy chunk of hair up to her light. Human hair.
Amaranthe probably should have been horrified, but excitement thrummed through her. The dark brown hair could have belonged to half the people in Stumps, but she said, “Think that came off one of the bodies the boys found?”
“Impossible to tell.”
“Well, I have a hunch it did. I bet those bodies flowed into the aqueducts through this pipe.” She ticked the cold metal. “I’d really like to know what’s on the other end.” She leaned out, but so much water flowed from the pipe that no air pocket lay at the top. Even if there was air, one could never swim into the current that way, not that she’d be foolish enough to try. Probably.
Sicarius gripped her by the collar and pulled her back a few steps.
“I was just looking,” Amaranthe said.
He grunted.
“Really. Did I look like I needed assistance again?”
“You looked like you were considering…trouble.”
She grinned. “I wouldn’t go for a swim without consulting you first. But, given your past history working for Hollowcrest and skulking around dark places, I wonder if you have any insight into these tunnels.”
“Skulking?”
“Yes, is that not what assassins call it?”
“We call it working.”
“All right,” Amaranthe said. “While you were working, did you ever have reason to travel through our aqueducts?”
“No.”
“Can you venture a guess as to what these cartographical errors could be about?”
“Security,” Sicarius said.
“Security? Like a false map designed to throw off enemy infiltrators who might sneak into the capital to sabotage the water supply?”
“You could ask Books who was emperor when the aqueducts were built. We’ve had some paranoid rulers.”
“True. ‘Paranoia is awareness’ was one of Emperor Vakar’s sayings, wasn’t it? One that’s been oft-quoted throughout imperial history.”
“Yes.”
“So, if the map is intentionally inaccurate, what would it be hiding? It’s not as if it’s a mystery where our drinking water comes from.” She waved in the direction of the Tork. “Though I suppose it’d be hard for a saboteur to poison a river. Maybe attacking a reservoir down here would…”
An expectant cant to Sicarius’s face made her pause. It was as if he was waiting for her to figure something out. She closed her eyes and pictured the topography of the city above her, the direction of the water flow, the location of the pumping houses.
“Our drinking water does come from the Tork, doesn’t it?” Amaranthe asked.
“So your drawing says.”
“Right, and my drawing is lying about things.” She pulled out a knife and scraped a rough map into the mildew on the wall, noting the river, the streets around the pumping house, and then the passages they had explored that morning. “That wall that’s blocked off and shouldn’t be…it runs parallel to this side of the river, doesn’t it? And we’ve got a gap of-what do you think?-fifty, one-hundred meters in between? What if that pipe makes a turn somewhere in the space in between? What if the water is actually siphoned from elsewhere? An underground source. Or even another river up in the mountains. And the aqueducts were purposely built like a labyrinth to hide that fact?”
Sicarius was listening, but, as always, remained hard to read.
“Am I being too fanciful-too paranoid-or do you agree with the possibility?”
“The paranoia of past rulers is a well documented fact.”
“I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me or simply acknowledging that there’s a remote possibility my fancy- filled mind has latched onto the truth,” Amaranthe said.
“You have a lot of hunches. Sometimes they are correct.”
“Well, if this one is right, this water and those bodies could have come from anywhere.” Amaranthe rubbed her face. “They might have been dumped in a river hundreds of miles away. We could be on a purple lumpbat chase. Although…perhaps not. The gambling house is local, and one of those dead fellows had that key fob, so…”
Sicarius was studying the darkness beyond the lantern’s influence, and he did not seem to be listening. Amaranthe cocked an ear, wondering what had caught his attention, but she could hear only the gush of water flowing from the pipe.
“What is it?” she whispered.
A minute head shake. “Perhaps nothing. Perhaps what Akstyr felt.”
“He wasn’t imaging things? Are you going to apologize to him if it turns out he was right?” She knew fully well he would not-if she found out he had ever said “sorry” in his life, she would fall over in surprise-but her playful side, or perhaps it was her unwise side, wanted to tease a response from him.
“No,” Sicarius said.
Well, it was a response. Sort of.
“All right,” Amaranthe said. “Let’s get out of here before something more sinister than you shows up.”
His eyebrow twitched, but he said nothing. It would take a lot of work to get that smile out of him.
CHAPTER 5
T he files were a mess. While the city lot records were somewhat orderly and searchable, whoever had come up with the system for cataloguing rural properties ought to be publicly castrated. Rather than using a grid system, the lots were delineated by their proximity to landmarks: some by nearest town, some by ancient battle sites, some by prominent terrain features, and one by the fact that an appraiser’s uncle had fallen off a cliff and died on the property.
Despite the disorder, Books found himself enjoying the challenge of the research. Here, amongst books, ledgers, parchments, and dusty shelves, he felt at home. He dug a fistful of pencils from his satchel and lost track
