Basilard, who stood back where he could keep an eye toward the camp, signaled: Time.
“It’s a long tale,” Amaranthe said, “one you wouldn’t believe right now.” Perhaps ever. “But I give you my word we’re here to help. Both of us. Do you know how the artifact got in the lake? Do you know who made it?”
“Of course, I know. My partner and I were the ones to come across his lair. How do you think enforcers got involved in all this?”
“What lair? Where is it? Who’s responsible?’”
But Yara seemed to have decided she had said enough. Her lips flattened, and she lifted her chin.
“Please,” Amaranthe said. “Tell us what we can do.”
Yara snorted. “You want to help? Get that thing out of the lake and those monsters out of the dam.”
“We will,” Amaranthe said, drawing another snort of disbelief from the woman. “Tell us more about the person who did this. Is it a single man? A magic user? Is it a Mangdorian?”
“Find your own answers, rogue.”
“Sergeant Yara,” a man called from the camp. “Where’d you go?”
“Let her go,” Amaranthe told Sicarius.
She expected an argument, but he released her without comment. Yara sprinted toward the camp.
“Time for us to disappear,” Amaranthe said.
Sicarius led the way into the woods. Amaranthe hustled after and left Basilard to cover their trail. She did not know if Yara believed anything or not. Either way her duty would demand she try to capture-or kill-Sicarius and Amaranthe.
Thrashing sounds behind them verified her guess. Sicarius pressed deeper into the woods. Twilight descended, casting darkness across the forest floor. Basilard had fallen behind, so Amaranthe called a halt. Fog curled in from the lake. She no longer heard their pursuit.
Sicarius crouched with his back to a tree to wait. Amaranthe sank down beside him.
“Did you learn anything?” he asked.
She puzzled over the question. Since he had been there and heard everything she had heard, she feared it might be sarcastic, though that was not an attitude she associated with him. He was dry on occasion but rarely sarcastic, unless he was irked at her.
“Are you saying that was a waste of time?” she asked.
“No.”
“Oh.”
Frogs croaked out in the marsh. The bird chatter had fallen silent, but mosquitoes whined.
Sicarius gave her a sidelong look, his face cloaked with shadows. “Do I ever not say what I mean to say?”
“Well. You never say what I wish you’d say, and you frequently say nothing at all when it’s clear you should say something, so it’s not entirely fantastical that you’d say a certain thing when you mean something else entirely.”
He opened his mouth, shut it, and considered the ground briefly before responding. “I remember studying Fleet Admiral Starcrest’s Mathematical Probabilities Applied to Military Strategies as a young boy and finding that less confusing than what you just said.”
Now it was her turn for a stunned pause before answering. “Sicarius?” She laid a tentative hand on his shoulder. “Was that a joke?”
“A statement of fact.”
“Hm. It tickled me, so I’m calling it a joke. Stick with me, and I’ll help you develop your sense of humor.”
He sighed.
She withdrew her hand but not her smile. “I didn’t understand your first question. You were there, so you know what I learned.”
“You learn things others don’t when you speak to people.”
“If that were true,” she said, “I’d get a lot more from you.”
“You get more from me than most.”
Though it sounded like another “statement of fact,” the words warmed her. “Maybe you give me more than you give most.”
Basilard caught up before Sicarius could deny her comment. Amaranthe had to squint to make out his signs in the dim light.
Injured soldier comes from dam. Tells enforcers go to fort, bring reinforcements. They leave search, leave camp.
Amaranthe thought about taking her team into the dam and helping those soldiers, but Sicarius was right: the artifact in the lake was more important. The creatures had likely been put in the dam as a distraction or to keep the workers from reporting to the city.
An agitated howl echoed through the darkening forest.
Basilard gripped Amaranthe’s arm and pointed toward the water. She let him lead them through the trees to a nearby beach.
Out in the center of the lake, a subtle green glow emanated from the water.
• • • • •
Books shifted from foot to foot as Maldynado stroked back to shore. He was an adept swimmer, and he had been underwater a long time. Long enough to get a good look at the submerged device?
With night’s fall, the location was unmistakable, but its distance from shore suggested depths one could not reach by swimming. Unless, instead of lying on the bottom, it hung suspended somewhere beneath the surface. The fact that the light was visible gave him hope. He had already run the calculations, figuring the brightness an object had to possess to be visible through twenty, fifty, and one hundred feet of water.
Across the lake, the large fire at the soldiers’ camp was burning down. Books paced about the beach, nominally on watch, while Akstyr read his healing tome. The eyes of youth apparently had no trouble picking out sentences in the deepening gloom.
Naked and shivering, Maldynado splashed out of the shallows. Books handed him dry clothes.
“Did you see it?” Books asked. “What did it look like? Fragile? Destructible?”
“Mind if I dress first?” Maldynado’s teeth chattered. “Nobody wants to be interrogated in his brothel suit.”
Books paced. He had let Amaranthe down by sleeping with Vonsha instead of investigating the house, and he felt the need to redeem himself. She was too nice to do more than raise an eyebrow at his bedroom exploits, but he knew. He had failed. He wanted to succeed here.
“It was too deep for me to see,” Maldynado finally said. “The glow got brighter as I went down, but that’s it.”
“Emperor’s eternal warts.” Books clenched his fist. “We can’t stop it if we can’t get close to it.”
“I reckon they’ve had the same problem.” Maldynado waved toward the camp across the lake.
“If we could fish it up somehow,” Akstyr said, “and I could look at it, maybe I could figure out a way to destroy it.”
“Not happening,” Maldynado said. “It’s got to be one-or two-hundred feet down.”
“We do have that much rope back in the lorry,” Books mused. “And I imagine we could fashion a hook. It’d take a lot of luck to find it down there, but the light would be something of a beacon. I wonder if it’s magnetic.”
“It’s big,” Akstyr said. “Probably too big to lift. I can sense that much.”
“Someone lifted it to chuck it in the lake in the first place,” Maldynado said.
“Telekinetics,” Akstyr said in Kendorian, a word Books knew only because he had been teaching the young man enough of the language to read those magic texts. Turgonian had no terms to describe the different mental sciences. It was all “magic” in the empire, and none of it existed supposedly.
“Huh?” Maldynado asked.
“He said we either need to hire a gifted shaman,” Books said, “or we need to physically get down to the bottom of the lake to examine this artifact up close.”
