Encrypted (13 page)

Briefly, he met her eyes, offering a hostile
glare, but his gaze inevitably drifted downward. She shifted to the
side to stand in the shadow of the door.

“
The rubbings are
missing,” Tikaya said. “I think they stole them—the Nurians who
attacked me in my cabin and killed the young man standing
guard.”

Ottotark’s face frosted at the mention of
the dead marine.

“
Can you tell Bocrest?”
she asked.

“
The captain is busy
directing repairs, cleanup, and funeral services, thanks to the
flotilla of Nurian ships that showed up tonight looking for
you.”

“
While I’m sympathetic to
your lost men—”

He snorted.

“—
you people kidnapped
me,” she continued. “I never wanted to be here, so don’t blame that
attack on me. If you could just tell the captain I’m not able to
continue my studies unless he finds—”

The sergeant stepped forward, shoving the
door further open. “I’m not your messenger boy.”

She stumbled back, glancing around for
something to use as a weapon if she needed to fend him off. The
sparse cabin offered nothing.

“
You’d do best to remember
you’re a prisoner here. Prisoners have no right to the captain’s
time, nor to an officer’s cabin with a busy sergeant as your guard,
a busy sergeant who’s stuck on this duty because your presence here
got one of his men killed.” His low voice was gravelly, and tendons
strained against the skin of his thick neck. “You haven’t done
anything useful since you got here.”

Tikaya wanted to defend herself—she had
helped Rias crash the ship that had allowed the Turgonians to sail
away, hadn’t she?—but Ottotark seemed to want her to argue, to
incite his anger. He stepped closer, and she eased back until her
calves bumped the bunk.

Rage boiled in the sergeant’s dark eyes, but
lust too. He had not looked at her face since she first opened the
door. “The captain ought to chain you to that bunk and let you be
of some use to the crew.”

A throat cleared in the corridor.

The glare Ottotark snapped over his shoulder
could have frozen lava, but Corporal Agarik merely lifted his arms,
displaying boots, a parka, a stack of black uniforms, and a towel.
Tikaya held her breath, aware the sergeant outranked Agarik, but
hoping the corporal’s presence would keep Ottotark in line.

“
The captain said to bring
her these and relieve you as guard,” Agarik said.

Ottotark eyed the stack. “Now we’re
pampering the bitch with extra clothes? Why don’t we invite her to
dine in the officer’s mess next?”

“
Gonna be cold up there,
sergeant.” Agarik walked in, set the clothing on the bunk, and then
stood outside the cabin, in full view of the door, which he left
open.

Ottotark issued a low growl and a backward
glance that promised “later” before striding out.

Even after the door banged shut, Tikaya
could not relax. Her luck would not hold with that one. She would
have to figure out how to abscond with a dagger from the exercise
area and keep it on her at all times. And hope it was enough
against the powerful marine. And that she could use it on him. But
then that should not be a problem now. Her lip twisted bitterly.
She had killed. When she thought of how easy it had been, how
accurate she was with that cursed bow, she had to steady herself
with a hand on the wall.

React later, Rias had said. Well, it was
later.

Tikaya curled on her side on the bunk, her
head in her hands, her eyes shut. Images of her deeds flashed in
her mind, the terrified and pained faces of the people she shot.
She let them flood over her again and again, feeling the need to
punish herself. What would Parkonis think if he were alive? Would
he be shocked—disgusted—that she could release an arrow into
someone’s chest? He never would have killed a human being, probably
not even in self-defense. He would have been horrified to see Rias
beheading those practitioners.

She opened her eyes and stared at the
polished wood floorboards. If she had been transported to that ship
with Parkonis, she would have been dead in the first minute. She
was no longer in his world, no longer in hers. She could adapt to
this world—she had proved that to herself that night—but at what
cost?

Tikaya wondered if she would ever see her
family and her island again. More, she wondered if she would be
someone her parents could still love if she did return.

CHAPTER 7

Ice stretched in all directions, an endless
white blanket, unbroken save for a black trail of water stretching
behind the ship. Tikaya gripped the frost-slick railing near the
bow with gloved hands and peered over the fur trim of her parka,
amazed by the heavy iron hull smashing through the inches-thick
frozen crust. The pace was slow and the deck vibrated with the
efforts of the engine, but their progress continued. Her people’s
wooden vessels could never do this and she admitted reluctant
admiration for the Turgonian engineers and metallurgists who could
build such a craft without help from practitioners.

For the first time during the trip, land
stretched along the horizon, white, flat, and stark. To the south,
a range of jagged snow-smothered mountains stretched inland. A
settlement hunkered a few miles ahead, low buildings and ice-locked
docks just becoming visible. On the ship, marines were hauling food
and supplies out of the hold, preparing for a land excursion.

“
Good morning,” came a
familiar voice from behind.

Tikaya whirled, smiling. “Rias.”

Thanks to the captain’s
claim that his men were too busy with repairs to perform extra
guard duty, she had not seen Rias for more than a week, not since
the night of the attack. Her smile faded at the sight of shackles
binding his wrists and guards trailing behind him. She clenched her
jaw. How could Bocrest still treat Rias like a prisoner when he had
risked his life—
their
lives—to save the warship?

He joined her at the railing. “I’ve missed
you.”

That simple statement warmed her far more
than the parka. The captain had allowed Rias a shave, at least, and
she had a nice view of the smile softening his face.

“
Me too. I mean you. Er,
I’ve missed you too.” Tikaya stifled a groan, avoided his eyes, and
reflected on the mortification her linguistics professors would
feel at hearing her mangle language so. To cover her fumbling
tongue, she nodded at the ice cracking beneath the bow. “That’s
impressive.”

“
Hm, the
Emperor’s Fist
has a
strengthened hull, but that won’t be enough to get us all the way
to shore. If you want to see impressive, you should see our
dedicated ice-breaking ships. They have a double hull and a special
steel alloy designed for peak performance at low temperatures. The
bows are rounded instead of pointed, so the ship rides up over the
ice, smashing it with its weight. And the engines! They...” He
blushed. “Sorry, you probably don’t want all that
information.”

Tikaya grinned. “I did ask.”

He smiled sadly. “No. No, you didn’t.”

“
Well, I expressed
interest in the subject.”

That seemed to mollify him. “I should have
asked already: are the men treating you decently? Any sign of those
assassins? Any nightmares after our adventure?”

“
As well as can be
expected for a loathed enemy of the empire, no assassination
attempts, and nightmares...” Tikaya
had
slept poorly, reliving the
killings on the Nurian ship, but she did not want to talk about it
here, with guards looking on, so she pretended to misunderstand.
“Why do you ask? Are women usually traumatized after an evening out
with you?”

He blinked a few times. “No, but I don’t
usually take women into battle on first dates.”

“
Ah, I see. You save that
until the relationship is more established.”

“
Exactly.” He slid her a
sidelong look, and she suspected he understood what she was not
saying.

Tikaya propped her elbow on the railing and
faced Rias squarely. Though she enjoyed chitchatting with him, she
had been waiting all week to ask about the tunnels he mentioned to
Bocrest. And how they tied in with the symbols.

“
Will you tell me about
these tunnels you’re supposed to guide us through?” she asked.
“You’ve asked me to help Bocrest, but you haven’t explained what
that will entail.”

His face grew somber as soon as she
mentioned the tunnels. This time, though, he nodded instead of
retreating into himself. “The place we’re going...the source of the
runes... I’ve been there before. It was my first assignment as a
raw sub-lieutenant, what we call a ‘testing mission.’”

“
What’s being tested?
You?”

“
Yes. Every officer gets
something early in his career, a deliberately challenging task
that’s meant to show whether or not he has the courage,
intelligence, and command ability to go on to become a leader of
men. I imagine this was...more than my superiors had in mind. I was
attached to an army unit for the month because of studies I’d done
on excavation engineering. Forty of us walked into those tunnels. A
week later, three of us crawled out—through a ventilation shaft
high in the mountains, in the middle of a blizzard. We barely made
it back to Fort Deadend, and the major I’d been assigned to wrote a
heartfelt report that stated we should never send men into the
tunnels again.”

“
They were ancient ruins?”
she asked. “With traps?”

“
Ancient, perhaps. Not
ruins.”

Rias’s shoulders hunched in an
uncharacteristic slouch, his gaze toward the snapping ice. Tikaya
thought of the man she followed through the Nurian ship, head up,
alert, leading the way with confidence that should not have been
there against such lopsided odds, and she regretted drawing him
back to what was obviously a dark place for him. Still, she had to
know.

“
What happened
inside?”

“
The tunnels were in good
condition. Too good. No dust, cobwebs, no signs of age other than
damage from tectonic shifts. The men with me declared the place
possessed by some powerful ancient magic. I thought...not. The
‘traps’ we kept stumbling into—I got the feeling they weren’t traps
at all but simply the workings of a place we were too ignorant to
understand. We were like clueless rats drowned in the city
waterworks when the level rises.”

“
But there was writing?
These symbols?”

For the first time a spark of interest
entered his eyes. “Not a lot, but things were labeled. If you could
translate, perhaps that could keep us safe.”

Tikaya feared the smile she offered was
bleak. The rubbings were gone, and she had made zero progress with
the language.

“
Well, not safe.” Rias’s
shoulders slumped again, independent of her thoughts. “There were
strange and deadly creatures roaming those tunnels too. Nothing we
recognized, nothing the archaeologists with us knew from the fossil
record.”

“
You had archaeologists
with you before?”

“
A team of scientists,
yes, and a linguist.”

“
Did any of them make it
out?” The bleakness infused her tone now.

“
No, and they weren’t
particularly helpful while they were alive.”

Great grandmother’s gray locks, what was she
supposed to accomplish that a team of archaeologists had failed to
do?

A worried expression creased Rias’s
forehead. He seemed to realize he had blundered. “But you’re better
than them.”

She snorted. “That’d be more reassuring if
you’d ever actually seen me do anything and could qualify that
statement.”

He bumped her shoulder and smiled. “I’ve
seen enough.”

Tikaya blushed.

“
You two relax.” Sergeant
Ottotark glared at Tikaya and Rias as he stalked past carrying a
massive bag labeled ‘tent: medium.’ “Enjoy the view. Have some rum.
Those of us who aren’t prisoners will handle all the unloading and
loading.”

“
I hope he’s not coming
with us,” Tikaya muttered after he moved out of earshot. Somehow,
she did not think she would be that lucky.

“
Despite his bite, I’m
told he’s intensely loyal to the emperor and the captain,” Rias
said.

“
If he kept his bite out
of my cabin, I wouldn’t care one way or another.”

Rias looked at her sharply. “What?”

“
Nothing.” Tikaya lifted a
hand, realizing she had insinuated more than Ottotark was guilty of
at that point. “He’s just an ass. He hasn’t done anything
yet.”

Rias’s gaze did not waver. “Yet?”

What did he expect her to say? “I’m trying
to stay out of his path.”

“
You shouldn’t have to.
Not on a Turgonian warship.” Rias offered a jerky wave, hampered by
the shackles. “I have to go.” He stalked away, his guards hustling
to catch up.

“
Rias?” she called after
him.

He paused, looking back over his
shoulder.

“
Did you pass the
test?”

His lips twisted into a sour expression.
“They gave me a medal.”

He resumed his determined walk. Before she
could consider his words or abrupt departure further, Agarik strode
toward her, a full rucksack in his arms. He plunked it on the deck
at her feet. He already wore a rucksack of his own with a rifle
strapped to the back. His utility belt was loaded with a knife and
pistol, ammo pouches, and powder tins.