men who’d attacked her. Sespian had disarmed her second foe without killing him, but the first… She swallowed. It’d been too much to hope that they could destroy the weapons and escape without killing anyone. She shoved the thought to the side for later. “Sespian and Books, come with me. The ones outside may have cut their way in by now.”
Reminded of the fact, Amaranthe rushed toward the front of the stage.
“ Also,” she added over her shoulder, “thank you for coming. Excellent timing.”
“ You’re welcome.” How Books managed to beam when his six-and-a-half-foot frame was bent into a three- foot-high space, she didn’t know, but he looked pleased with himself. “It’s not often we get to save her,” he whispered to Sespian. “Sicarius usually handles that.”
“ I don’t need rescuing that often,” Amaranthe said.
“ Is that why she moons after him?” Sespian asked.
“ Most likely,” Books said before Amaranthe could manage a flushed protest. “If I rescued her every week, she might have started mooning over me instead.”
“ I don’t need rescuing every week,” Amaranthe protested again, though the notion of all the men thinking she mooned after Sicarius bothered her more than the rescuing bit.
“ Bi-monthly?” Books suggested.
“ All right, I’ll give you that. Though-” she glanced back at Sespian, “-sometimes I’m the one rescuing other people on the team.”
Books offered an agreeable nod.
They’d reached the front wall, and she picked her way along, searching for what she expected to be a gaping hole by now. She hoped the enforcers weren’t already streaming inside, but feared her delay had given them the time they needed. Had she known her own team was inside the cargo area, she would have left the escaped prisoners for them to deal with.
In the dim area, spotting the light ahead wasn’t difficult. As Amaranthe had expected, it seeped through a jagged hole in the front wall. A hole with a head sticking through it. With his face tilted up, the man sawed a serrated blade back and forth, trying to widen the new entrance. Amaranthe hoped the partial progress meant nobody had made his way inside yet, though the opening appeared wide enough that a small or medium-sized man could have wriggled through it.
A soft clunk came from behind, Books or Sespian bumping something. Amaranthe winced, fearing the noise would give away their approach. The enforcer kept sawing, perhaps not hearing anything over the rasp of wood, but she didn’t want to take another chance. Leaving the others behind, she surged ahead. The darkness allowed her to approach unseen.
Focused on his work, the enforcer didn’t notice her approach. She rushed toward him, thinking to tear the saw from his hands and shove him back outside, but spotted a dark figure at the last moment. Tucked between two crates, another enforcer stood guard across from the hole.
He spotted her as soon as she entered the light. He raised a short sword. Amaranthe whipped out her dagger and flung it toward the beam his hair brushed against. He jerked back, clunking his head on the low ceiling. Amaranthe dove in beneath his sword, grabbing his wrist to slam his knuckles into a crate even as she smashed the heel of her hand into his chin with her other hand. The blow drove his head back into the ceiling yet again, and his sword clattered to the floor. She silently apologized for the headache he’d endure in the morning, but it was better than the fate his comrade had met. She dragged him into the open, wrenching his arm behind his back. He tried to fight back, swinging at her face with his free hand, but his knuckles clunked against another beam. In the tight space, her smaller size gave her an advantage. When he tried to stand to achieve better leverage, she drove her elbow into the back of his knee. He dropped to the deck and scrambled toward the hole, apparently having had enough.
While she’d been busy with the guard, Books had handled the man in the hole. He’d torn the saw away and had a fistful of the enforcer’s hair. “Thank you for attempting to join our small but elite group, but you’ve been uninvited.” Books shoved the sawyer back through the hole.
“ Small but elite?” Sespian asked mildly.
“ Yes,” Amaranthe said. “Haven’t you seen our fliers?”
“ Shoot them!” someone hollered from the other side.
“ You’ll hit your own man,” Amaranthe yelled back. “Get out,” she told her prisoner, poking her dagger into his back.
He couldn’t claw his way out fast enough. His head smacked the wall one more time before he escaped through the hole. He’d barely cleared it before a barrage of crossbow bolts zinged through the opening.
Amaranthe and the others had anticipated it and weren’t in the line of fire, but she gulped at the array of quarrels that sank into a crate. Through the hole, she glimpsed uniformed men reloading their crossbows and moving around, trying to find angles that might allow them to hit their targets. Amaranthe guided her men by touch, pushing them back several feet so those random shots wouldn’t find flesh.
“ What now?” Sespian whispered.
“ We guard the entrance.” Amaranthe patted about, found a crate, and heaved it in front of the hole. That wouldn’t deter the enforcers for long, but it would make it harder for them to fire inside. “I’ll handle it. Why don’t you two check on Akstyr, see if he’s subdued the other men? Then… what’s your plan for the cement, Books?” She didn’t know how long the new hole from engineering would remain undiscovered-Basilard might already be fighting to defend it-but she questioned whether they’d be able to, under any circumstances, tote the weapons out now. All it would take was one stray crossbow bolt…
“ We dragged as many bags of cement in with us as we could before someone asked why enforcers were helping unload the cargo,” Books said.
“ Dragged them in where?” Amaranthe asked.
Books thumped his boot against the deck. “Down with the rockets. We grabbed some tools too. If we can cut through to one of the water tanks in the boiler room, we might be able to mix the cement right down there.”
“ Might? ”
“ It was a hastily composed plan,” Books admitted.
“ It’s a good compact space. We can set the cement right in there.” Sespian thumped on a crate. “There’s plenty of wood around here to make a mold.”
“ And then what?” Amaranthe asked. “The weapons are still-”
A series of thunks interrupted her. Another barrage of crossbow quarrels.
“ Stop firing,” someone barked. “They’ve blocked the entrance. Get more smoke bombs.”
“ That’s not enough, Sergeant. We need to light the stage on fire, smoke ’em out.”
“ That’ll light the entire steamboat on fire, you idiot.”
“ Then we need bigger cutting tools. There has to be something in engineering.”
Amaranthe grimaced. If the men hadn’t found the hole Basilard guarded yet, they would soon. “That plan will leave the weapons on board,” she continued. “Once the cement hardens, they’ll be on board forever.”
“ We plucked a blow lamp out of engineering,” Books said. “I thought we might cut the hull away beneath the cement block once it hardens.”
“ Cut the hull away? There’s nothing but water under there.”
“ Yes, that’ll leave a hole in the bottom of the ship, through which the block can fall and find a resting spot in the mud at the bottom of the river.”
If Amaranthe hadn’t been holding weapons in both hands, she would have rubbed her face or massaged her temples. Or something. “You’re the one who’s lectured me about prudence, Books. That sounds… imprudent.”
“ Our options are limited. As is our time-the cement will take some hours to harden.”
“ Hours? ” Amaranthe blurted. While the enforcers’ attacks hadn’t been effective thus far, she couldn’t believe they wouldn’t come up with an alternative given that much time.
“ The sooner I get started-”
“ Yes, yes, go,” Amaranthe said. “You’re right. What else can we do?”
Thumps and grunts sounded as Books groped his way back to the grate.
“ I didn’t take as many engineering courses as I should have, given my architecture interests,” Sespian said, “but I’m fairly certain cutting a hole in the bottom of a ship will cause it to sink as well.”
Amaranthe sighed. “That’s my understanding of holes and boats too.”
