The Assassin's Curse

The Assassin’s Curse

by Lindsay Buroker

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Lindsay Buroker

The afternoon sun beat onto ducks floating in
the lake shallows and turtles basking on logs. Amaranthe Lokdon
would have turned herself over to bounty hunters for a chance to
float or bask. Instead, out in the middle of an inlet, she
struggled to keep her head from going under as waves sloshed into
her mouth and eyes.

Using both hands, she held a ten-pound brick
in front of her face while her burning thighs rotated beneath the
surface, kicking furiously to keep her afloat. Barely. Despite the
cold lake water, sweat dribbled down her face. Her leaden arms
ached and threatened to let the brick dip below the surface.

A few feet to her side, Sicarius, notorious
assassin and fellow outlaw, held a heavier brick higher out of the
water. No hint of strain flushed his cheeks, and a calm,
expressionless facade masked his thoughts. He didn’t disturb the
water with his kicks, and neither his face nor his short blond hair
were damp. The summer heat might be enough to wilt normal men’s
ambitions toward physical activity, but apparently this miniscule
workout wasn’t enough to make him sweat.

Though Amaranthe appreciated his fitness and
dedication to his training, there were times when she wished he
were less perfect. More... human.

Feeling all too human herself, she groaned
and ducked her head beneath the water to cool her face. The brief
reprieve felt good, but she was careful not to let the brick dip
below the surface. If she failed to keep it up there for long
enough, he would make her start over. For the third time.

Amaranthe was in charge of their group of
mercenaries, but she bowed to him in matters of training. She
wasn’t sure whose idea that had been, but she was beginning to
regret it.

“How much... longer?” she asked when she came
up.

“You grow weary?” Sicarius asked.

“Of course not.” Amaranthe tried not to pant
or gasp as she spoke, or at least not to
sound
as if she
were panting or gasping. “I’m just... concerned that... if we’re
out here too long... we’ll get sunburnt. A bad burn... could
inhibit our... ability to train tomorrow.” There, he wouldn’t see
right through that. Of course not.

“It’s been three minutes.”

Dear ancestors, was that all? “Three minutes
already? This isn’t... a very challenging exercise, is it?” A wave
shoveled water down Amaranthe’s throat, and she sputtered, almost
letting the brick drop before she recovered.

“Shall we switch weights?” Sicarius held his
brick out toward her.

Why she always insisted on bravado with him,
she didn’t know. Some deluded feeling that he would be more
impressed with her that way, she supposed. “I wouldn’t want to
deprive you of
your
training. It’s—”

A great crash boomed, drowning out
Amaranthe’s words. At first, she thought it sounded like metal
ramming against metal, but then a thunderous crack of wood echoed,
like a tree snapping in two during an ice storm.

She lowered the brick and scanned the nearby
shoreline. This far south of the city, rocks and trees dominated
the coast with the land being too craggy for farming or building.
Roads and the main railway to the capital did cut through the
terrain, and she wondered if there might have been a train crash,
or perhaps someone had run a steam lorry into a tree.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t see rails or roads from the secluded
inlet.

Amaranthe looked south, thinking a boat
coming out the mouth of the river might have crashed into the rocks
around Darkcrest Isle. The newspapers reported such incidents more
often than one would think, and the island
was
supposedly
haunted. Though she put little stock in such notions, the craggy
landmass, gone wild with evergreens and brambles,
did
have a
tendency to appear dark and brooding even on a sunny day.

Sicarius’s gaze was toward the mainland
though, and he pointed at a hillock dotted with pine trees.

“Is that smoke?” Amaranthe asked.

“Yes.”

“A wreck? Shall we check it out?”

“It is unlikely that it involves us. Your
brick.”
He
had not lowered his, of course.

Amaranthe hid a grimace. Her shoulders ached
at the notion of holding that thing out of the water any longer.
After all, they had swum two miles before this. Thanks to a couple
of her men complaining about the difficulty of training due to the
heat, she had been inspired to suggest water workouts. Her
mistake.

“It
could
involve us,” Amaranthe said,
smiling. “What if someone is in dire need of aid? Some
warrior-caste patron or soldier on an errand for the Imperial
Barracks? If we rushed to the assistance of someone like that, he
could put in a good word for us with the emperor, a word that might
help in our goals of exoneration. What do you think?”

“I think you seek to cut out the last half
hour of your training.”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking
about.” Amaranthe flipped onto her side and stroked toward the
mainland with the brick on her hip. She was tempted to drop the
thing, but he’d probably make her fetch it.

A boom roared through the hills, its power so
great it sent ripples across the lake.

Amaranthe gaped. Where a gray wisp had
floated into the blue sky before, great black plumes now wafted
upward.

“That was more than a crash,” she said.

“Catastrophic boiler failure,” Sicarius
said.

Despite his indifference, he was swimming
after her. Good. If Amaranthe chanced upon a platoon of soldiers,
they might be less interested in the fact that she had good
intentions and more concerned about the fact that she was an outlaw
with a death mark on her head. Sicarius’s head was even more wanted
than hers—to the degree of a million ranmyas instead of ten
thousand—but he could handle a platoon of soldiers, probably
wearing nothing except his soggy trousers.

When they reached the shore, Sicarius put on
his black boots and started strapping on his ample collection of
daggers and throwing knives. The small armory never left him
without the right tool for the job—a job that had been
assassinating people until Amaranthe recruited him for her team.
The dagger that rode on his right hip had a plain black handle and
a matching blade made from some alloy she’d never seen anywhere
else. He’d never told her the story of where he’d found it, but
she’d seen him cut through rock, bone, and even metal with it.

Amaranthe stripped out of her smallclothes
and tugged on dry trousers and a sleeveless shirt she had left
folded on a rock. She didn’t worry about modesty. Sicarius had seen
her nude before, and unfortunately he never seemed inclined to ogle
her. She, on the other hand, had to make a point not to stare when
he was walking about shirtless, with water snaking down his lean,
muscled chest...

Amaranthe realized he had finished donning
all of his gear and was waiting for her. Blushing, she stuffed her
feet into her boots, tugged her wet brown hair back into a
ponytail, belted on her short sword, and grabbed her repeating
crossbow.

Sicarius took the lead, choosing a route that
wound through trees instead of following the path. They passed the
road, railway tracks, and the running trail that circled the lake
without seeing anyone. Perhaps because sane people didn’t wander
about in the late afternoon heat. Amaranthe was already sweating,
and she was glad they didn’t tramp uphill for long before Sicarius
raised a hand and dropped into a crouch behind a stout pine.

Amaranthe knelt by a stump a couple of feet
away, crinkling her nose at the scent of scorched metal and burning
wood. Flames, visible through the trees ahead of them, licked at
branches and devoured brown needles carpeting the rocky
terrain.

“We’d better not get too close,” Amaranthe
said. “A forest fire is a possibility this time of year.”

Sicarius was gazing off to the left.
Amaranthe leaned around her stump and caught her breath. The
remains of a bipedal army steam tramper lay on its side, dwarfing
the surrounding ferns and logs. The explosion had torn its boxy
chest open, leaving metal peeled back like flower petals.

“That, on the other hand,
shouldn’t
be
a possibility,” she muttered, referring both to the destruction and
the location of the machine. Fort Urgot was ten miles north of
their position, at the opposite end of the lake, where the 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.