Conspiracy (31 page)

A cry of surprise and pain came from the
darkness above. Maldynado.

Amaranthe rushed up the last few steps.
Lighting the lantern had affected her night vision, and she almost
didn’t see the dark shape sprinting toward her.

She leaped to the side. Instincts screamed
in her ears, and she lifted her blade. She couldn’t see much, but
she judged the figure’s height and path and angled her weapon so it
had a good chance of deflecting a dagger or sword, should there be
an attack.

Even so prepared, the clash of steel
surprised her.

Amaranthe reacted instantly, with reflexes
honed from hours of training with Sicarius. Before the blades had
parted, she grabbed the person’s forearm with her left hand and
yanked. Her opponent was lighter than she expected, and Amaranthe
pulled the figure off balance. She twisted the person’s wrist while
ramming her knee upward, angling for the groin.

But her foe was too quick. Finding the gap
between Amaranthe’s thumb and fingers, the person tore the captured
arm free even as a thigh came up to block the groin attack.

Amaranthe shifted, trying to get around to
her opponent’s back, to wrap her arm around the vulnerable throat.
She was only partially successful and caught her assailant by the
shoulder instead of the neck. She latched on, gripping with the
ferocity of a pit bull, and pulled her short sword back to jab at
the kidneys.

The blade met only air. Amaranthe still
gripped the shoulder, meaning her opponent had remarkable
flexibility. She whipped her short sword toward the person’s side,
but it collided with metal in a screech. Her foe twisted to face
her, wrenching Amaranthe’s fingers. She was forced to release the
shoulder grip and did it with a shove, thinking to put space
between her and her attacker, so she could restart the encounter
from a neutral position. Surely, Maldynado and Yara had to be
running up to help.

Luck favored her, though, or perhaps she
could claim greater awareness of the terrain. A startled grunt rose
over the noise of the train’s engine, and the figure’s arms
flailed. The stairs. The person’s heel must have gone over the
edge.

Knowing the agile fighter would recover
quickly, Amaranthe pounced. She drove her short sword into flesh.
The blade scraped past ribs, angling into the tender flesh of the
abdomen.

A cry came, and the person
fell away. The
woman
, Amaranthe corrected, her mind catching up to the fact that
the voice had been feminine.

She managed to keep her sword, though it was
almost pulled out of her hand when the woman tumbled down the
stairs. The falling figure almost crashed into Sergeant Yara who
was on her way up, the lantern in one hand, an enforcer-issue short
sword in the other.

Despite the gut wound, the injured woman
found her feet. She jumped off the stairs, one hand clutched to her
abdomen, and tried to bypass Yara and sprint for the door.

Yara raised her sword, but the other woman
lifted a bloody hand, and steel glinted. A throwing knife.

“
Look out!” Amaranthe
barked.

Yara dropped to her belly, flatting herself
to the stairs, evading the knife by inches. The blade clattered off
the brick wall. Yara’s lantern escaped her grip and landed on the
flagstone floor. The flame winked out, and darkness engulfed the
shed again.

The fleeing fighter yanked the door
open.

Grimly determined, Amaranthe judged the
distance and hurled her short sword. They couldn’t let anyone
escape and draw attention to the refueling station.

In the darkness, she couldn’t see her sword
spinning through the air, but she could tell from the dark figure’s
reaction that it struck. The woman collapsed in the doorway.

Amaranthe ran down the stairs, jumping to
the floor to bypass Yara, and dragged the woman inside, away from
the threshold. She checked the square outside, afraid someone might
have heard the fight and would be running to investigate, but
nothing stirred nearby. Everyone at the station was probably
focused on the train.

The train! Reminded of the need to hurry,
Amaranthe shut the door, groped about to find the lantern, and ran
for the stairs.

At the last second, she remembered Yara and
kept from crashing into her. “Are you injured?”

“
I’m fine,” Yara said.
“Your warning saved me.”

“
Welcome. Hurry, upstairs.
We have to get—”

A light flared to life at the top of the
stairs. Maldynado stood, wearing a dazed expression as he held his
lantern up and squinted down at them. Blood smeared the side of his
face.

“
Where’s the cursed coal?”
a voice called from outside.

There was no time to discuss anything.
Amaranthe charged up the remaining steps and grabbed Maldynado’s
arm.

“
Answer,” she said,
figuring a male worker would be more likely than a
woman.

“
Coming,” Maldynado called,
a hint of a slur to the word.

“
Bastard’s drunk,” the
speaker from the train growled. “Inept civilians.”

“
Stand there,” Amaranthe
whispered to Maldynado, pushing him toward open double doors on the
wall closest to the train. “Give them a wave. Here, let me have
your lantern so they can’t see you well.”

“
No, no,” Maldynado said,
wobbling a little. “I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.” He braced
himself against the doorjamb.

“
You can complain later,”
Amaranthe said. “Just don’t let them get concerned enough to check
in here.”

She hunted about for levers to extend the
chute and drop coal into the waiting car below. Bins lined the
walls, leaving little room for moving about. Amaranthe weaved past
cables attached to a lift system for raising coal to the top level.
She was lucky that she hadn’t moved far enough from the stairs to
get tangled in the ropes during the fight.

The largest bin in the room connected to the
chute. Amaranthe ducked behind it and found her levers. A brass
plaque with pictures showed which ones to move to extend and
retract the chute and to dump coal. No need for literacy for this
job.

She pushed a lever, and gears on the wall
rotated, their grinding audible over the idling train. The chute
thunked into place. Amaranthe hesitated, not certain if she should
push the pouring lever to maximum.

“
Take your time, Crisplot,”
the complainer from the train yelled. “It’s not like we’re on a
schedule here.”

Amaranthe shoved the lever all the way
forward. Maybe a landslide would flood out, burying the mouthy man.
Nothing happened.

Grumbling, she poked around the front of the
bin. Maybe there was some flap she had to lift to enable to
flow.

“
Am I going to have to come
up there?” the complainer hollered. “I’ll see to it that your pay
is docked if I do.”

“
I’ll check on him,” came
Sicarius’s voice from the water tower. He and Basilard must have
already extended the hose to refuel the locomotive’s tanks.
Good.

Amaranthe found a safety release up front
and flipped it. A spring twanged, and a door at the top of the
chute slid up. The bin contents stirred and clacked about inside,
and coal poured into the train car outside. There. That ought to
placate the engineer, or whoever was bellowing.

When Amaranthe came back around the bin, she
found Sicarius waiting beside Maldynado.

“
We had a slight delay, but
we’re fine,” she told him.

“
Fine?
” Maldynado touched his temple. “I don’t think it’s right of
you to make general statements like that before a thorough medical
examination has been performed on all members of the
group.”

“
There are two soldiers
riding on the locomotive with the engineer and fireman,” Sicarius
said. “A corporal is directing coal and water loading.”

“
Just one man?” Amaranthe
asked.

“
Yes.”

“
The one
yelling?”

“
Yes.”

“
Trouble maker.”

Sicarius did not deign to respond.

Yara climbed into view, holding a lantern.
She stared at Amaranthe.

“
Something wrong?”
Amaranthe asked.

“
That was an assassin,”
Yara said.

“
Yes, I gathered that from
the dead man she left marinating in his own blood. Do you recognize
her?”

“
The Crimson Fox,” Yara
said.

Amaranthe tried to place the name. “That’s
someone with a bounty on her head, right?”

“
Yes, she
is—
was
—regarded
as the best female assassin in the satrapy. Some say the
empire.”

Amaranthe snorted.
“
Some
say? Like
who? Her?”

“
It’s a
twenty-five-thousand-ranmya bounty.” Yara was still staring at
Amaranthe, her eyes wide with... awe?

Amaranthe decided not to mention how much
luck had played into that squabble. A little awe from Yara might
help her position. “We don’t have time to turn people in for
bounties right now, so some soldier’s going to have a good time
this weekend.”

“
Wait.” Maldynado touched
his wounded temple. “You’re saying the person who hit me was
a
woman
?”

“
You’re lucky she didn’t
kill you.” Yara’s awe-struck expression disappeared when she faced
Maldynado. “I’m not surprised to find that your employer does
the
real
work in
this outfit.”

“
When you’re as pretty as I
am, there’s no need to do real work.”

“
You’re calling yourself
pretty?” Yara asked. “You have a black eye, a split lip, and
there’s blood smeared all over your face.”

“
I’d still have an easier
time getting a date than you. What’d you cut your hair with? Your
service sword?”

Amaranthe lifted her hands in a placating
gesture. “Let’s focus, please. We can squabble when the emperor is
safe.”

While they glared at each other, Amaranthe
peeked past Maldynado and into the bin. Coal continued to flow into
the open car while the irritated corporal stomped back and forth
with a rake. Busy pushing and scraping to distribute the load, he
kept his head down. Amaranthe risked sticking hers out to better
see up and down the train.

In front of the coal car, the hulking black
engine idled, its long cylindrical shape stretching ahead like a
hound’s nose. She couldn’t see into the cab where the engineer and
fireman waited, which was good because they wouldn’t be able to see
into the coal bed without leaning out of the side entrances, but
someone watching from the train station would have a decent view.
She checked the boardwalk and grimaced. Soldiers were filing into
some of the passenger cars. Of course, if they were going to the
capital, it made sense for them to get a ride.

“
Reinforcements,” Amaranthe
muttered. “Lovely.” She kept herself from sighing at Sicarius,
irked anew by his string of assassinations. She had certainly
messed up often, and he hadn’t held it against her.

Some of the soldiers on the boardwalk were
stationed at the doors, and they were checking identifications,
orders, and faces carefully before letting people on. No civilians
boarded. As Amaranthe had suspected, this was a private train, and
it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for her team to
walk through a door, even if they’d had sophisticated
disguises.

“
When do we get on?” Yara
asked.

“
Soon,” Amaranthe said.
“After that corporal says he has all the fuel he needs and tells
the engineer to get moving.”

“
Won’t the people on the
boardwalk see us jump into the coal car?”

“
It’s dark,” Amaranthe
said. “We’re hoping not.”

“
Hoping?”

“
Are you doubting the woman
who slew the Crimson Fox?”

Amaranthe was joking, or at least hoping to
distract Yara from her concerns, but the sergeant considered the
body again and said, “I guess not.”

Huh, something to be said for establishing a
sense of awe in one’s colleagues.

“
The Crimson Fox?” Sicarius
asked.

“
Apparently.” Amaranthe
pointed at the body.

“
She’s from the capital.
It’s unlikely her presence here was a coincidence.”

“
Well, I didn’t invite
her.” Amaranthe eyed Yara, but she couldn’t imagine the enforcer
sergeant having anything to do with an assassin showing up. If Yara
had meant to tattle on Amaranthe and the team, it would have been
to her superiors, not a criminal. Nor was it likely Sicarius’s
night of slaying had anything to do with it. Amaranthe feared they
might have Akstyr to thank for the assassin’s appearance. Had she
come to kill Sicarius? Or maybe she’d meant to collect on
Amaranthe’s bounty. She was going to have a chat with the lad
later. Maybe Books was right, and it was simply time to let him go.
“We’ll worry about it later,” she told Sicarius.

Lines creased Yara’s brow as she eyed the
stairs.

“
Problem?” Amaranthe
asked.

“
I was entertaining the
idea of staying here, turning that body in for the bounty, and
going back home a hero for having helped slay such a notorious
assassin. I suppose it’d be ignoble of me to take credit for any of
that though. I doubt ducking when she threw a knife was crucial in
her defeat.”