Encrypted (26 page)

Though nothing but drifts adorned the
plateau, Rias strode across it as if he expected to find something.
He stopped at a protruding edge and pointed.

“
Perfect view of the fort
from here,” he called.

“
But there’s nothing
here.” Bocrest gestured for his troops to fan out and
investigate.

Tikaya floundered through deep snow to join
Rias. He held a thermometer and a round bronze device she had seen
him consult a few times. She had thought it a compass, but the
numbers on its circular face did not represent degrees.

“
Barometer?” she
guessed.

Rias nodded once, though his eyes rolled
upward as if he were busy with some calculation. Bocrest shuffled
up behind them.

“
Worried about a storm
coming in?” she asked when Rias’s attention shifted to
her.

He chuckled. “No, calculating our elevation.
As long as you know the temperature, the air pressure at sea level,
and the air pressure where you are, you can—”

Bocrest jerked his hand up. “Nobody cares,
Five. Is this the spot or not?”

Rias’s sigh had a long-suffering quality,
and, as he turned to face the captain, Tikaya wondered how many
times in his career he had been cut off by officers with Bocrest’s
temperament.

“
We’re either here or
we’re very close,” Rias said. “I was expecting a launching
platform, but I suppose it’s possible the rocket was
self-propelling.”

“
You brought us up here to
find nothing?” Bocrest demanded.

While the men debated, Tikaya removed her
spectacles to clean them. She tilted them toward the sky to check
for specks and almost dropped them when she spotted a sliver of
familiar black metal on the cliff top above.

“
Gentlemen.” She pointed,
ending their argument.

“
Ah.” Rias put away his
tools. “Another fifty feet.”

“
Thought your math was
better than that.” Bocrest smirked.

Rias’s eyebrows disappeared under his wool
cap. “My math is impeccable. The tools are imprecise.”

Tikaya grinned, always amused when his
Turgonian arrogance peeped out.

Bocrest only snorted and called to his men:
“Get some grappling hooks out. We’re climbing.”

“
We’ll go first.” Rias
pointed to his chest then at Tikaya. “I don’t want overeager young
men thundering around up there before we’ve ascertained the
danger.”

“
I’ll
go first,” Bocrest said. “You can come after and pull your
wounded librarian up.”

Tikaya grimaced. She held her own on the
walkable terrain, but even without a shoulder injury, she would
have needed help up the cliffs. Already, Rias had pulled her up
two, while she scraped and pushed with her crampons, trying use her
legs and burden him as little as possible.

“
Doing all right?” Rias
patted her on the back as Bocrest stomped away.

“
I’m fine. Do you always
volunteer women to lead the way with you into potentially dangerous
situations?”

He winked. “Only if I know they can handle
it.”

Not for the first time, she wondered if he
thought too highly of her.

* * * * *

When Rias pulled Tikaya over the edge, she
knelt to catch her breath. Even with his help, the climb had been
taxing.

The first thing she noticed was the dead
man. The second thing she noticed was that he had not died the same
way the marines in the fort had. An enormous amount of blood
spattered the snow around him, and methodical cuts marked the body.
Bocrest already stood over it, arms crossed, lips dragged down in a
scowl.

“
Tortured,” he said. “Same
as the one in the fort.”

“
Nurian?” Tikaya
asked.

Bocrest was too busy cursing under his
breath to answer.

The ledge, similar to the one below, offered
another ideal view of the tundra—and the fort. A second cliff to
the rear shadowed a tent and a fire pit. The source of the black
metal Tikaya had spotted rested near the edge: a flat circle
mounted on tripod legs. A shaft tilted upward from the disk and
appeared the right size for cradling the rocket. The launching
apparatus was not large, but it would have taken more than one man
to carry it up there. Or a telekinetics practitioner.

Tikaya walked over to look at the body.
“Uh.”

“
Uh?” Rias
asked.

“
I recognize this one
too.”

“
Can’t be a practitioner,”
Rias said. “He looks Turgonian.”

“
He is Turgonian. That’s
Lancecrest.”

“
The fort commander?”
Bocrest asked. “He’s too young.”

“
No, the Lancecrest I told
you about. And actually I think he
did
study the mental sciences at the
Polytechnic. Along with archaeology.” She filled Rias in with the
information she had given Bocrest the night before.

“
Huh,” Rias said. “That
he’s here is not wholly mystifying—Colonel Lancecrest could have
taken command, found out about the tunnels, seen an opportunity for
the family to improve its fortunes, and told his little brother to
prepare for a relic hunt. But why would the younger Lancecrest have
launched a rocket at his older brother’s fort? And why is he now up
here tortured and dead? This is...unexpected.”

Bocrest spat. “If
something
expected
happens at any point in this mission, I’ll shit myself in
shock.”

Tikaya shook her head at the lurid speech.
“Is he truly married?” she asked Rias.

“
Last I heard.” Rias knelt
to examine the body more closely. “The empire has failed to keep me
apprised of the latest gossip surrounding its officers.”

“
It’s hard to imagine that
tongue wooing a woman.” Tikaya headed for the launch
pad.

Bocrest dropped his arms. “Was that an
insult? Did she just insult me?”

“
I believe she did,” Rias
said.

“
I never know with her.
She gives insults in the same tone as a scientist analyzing an
experiment.”

Tikaya dug out her journal. “You do remind
me of the lab rats they keep in the science wing of the
Polytechnic.”

“
That was definitely an
insult,” Rias said.

“
I know,” Bocrest said.
“It’s hard to be offended, though. She’s so civilized when she
delivers them. Tidy job on Lancecrest. Whoever ran the torture
session was experienced.”

Tikaya scratched her head at the abrupt
topic shift. Only Turgonians could go from casual chit chat to
analyzing dead people in the same breath.

“
Body’s stiff but this
doesn’t look like it happened long ago,” Rias said. “Yesterday
maybe.”

“
There’s a mess in the
tent,” Bocrest said. “Like someone searched it, same as the
colonel’s office in the fort.”

Rias leaned over the ledge. “Koffert, come
up. We need your tracking skills.”

Bocrest frowned at this presumptive order
giving. Tikaya wondered when Rias had found the opportunity to
learn people’s names and skill sets.

Long before the tracker reached the top, the
launch device swallowed her attention. Runes ran down the tripod
legs, giving her plenty to study. She sat in the snow with her
journal, gloves off. Not knowing how much time Bocrest would give
her, she risked the cold to make copying the symbols easier. The
men’s conversations faded from her awareness as she worked. She
brushed her fingers along a complex grouping of seventeen symbols,
and a faint hum teased the edge of her mind. It startled her, and
she dropped her journal. Surely the sensation did not come from the
launch pad. The artifacts had not yet made her suspect the mental
sciences were involved in their creation. Yet something here teased
her sixth sense, reminding her of the communications pendant on the
Nurian ship. The residual tingle of a practitioner-made device.

“
Tikaya?” Rias touched her
shoulder. “The tracker is done. Are you ready to leave?”

She blinked and stood, surprised by the
stiffness in her limbs. How long had she sat? Rias removed his
gloves and held her hand in his warm ones, and she noticed white
tipping her fingers.

“
Frost nip.” He rubbed her
hands and raised an eyebrow. “Keep your gloves on. You’d have a
hard time taking notes if you lost your fingers.”

“
Sorry, that was dumb. I
needed to use the pencil, and, uhm.” She blushed. Of all people, he
could probably understand an absent-minded streak, but she still
avoided his eyes.

“
What I don’t understand
is how someone else found this ledge,” Bocrest said, apparently
resuming a conversation she had missed. The tracker stood before
him, a sergeant with a lined face and beaky nose. “How many math
geniuses are roaming around up here?” Bocrest added.

“
Perhaps our mystery man
saw the rocket being launched,” Rias said.

Despite his suggestion that she keep her
gloves on, Rias had not released Tikaya’s hands. Calluses hardened
his palms, but his touch was gentle as he rubbed her skin. She made
no move to pull away.

“
Wouldn’t he have died
from the gas, too, then?” she asked. “And how do you know our
torture-loving person is a man? The Nurians have female
warriors.”

“
Walks like a man, pisses
like a man,” the tracker said.

“
Uhm. All right.” Tikaya
knew nothing about tracking, but supposed squatting and standing
would indeed leave different yellow-snow signatures. “But what
about the gas?”

Rias gazed east. “The pass is that way and
at a higher elevation. The rocket released its load in the air
above the fort, so perhaps that means the gas—or whatever it is
exactly—was heavier than air and wouldn’t have affected someone
above the detonation point. This camp, after all, is well within
the twenty mile radius.”

“
Perhaps?” Bocrest asked.
“You’re just guessing?”

“
Yes,” Rias
said.

“
Good steel used for the
torture,” the tracker said.

Rias and the captain nodded, though it took
Tikaya a minute to follow. Right. The good steel and the possible
entrance through the pass implied a Turgonian. And hadn’t the men
in the dungeon suggested the same thing? That the torture was done
by the book? The Turgonian book?

“
So, you’ve got an ally up
here?” Tikaya asked. “Maybe he’ll show himself, and we can share
your applejack with him.”

She smiled. The others did not. Rias and
Bocrest appeared more grim than anything.

“
Ally,” Rias murmured,
then found Bocrest’s gaze. “Did the emperor say anything about
sending help?”

“
He made it clear he
wanted the mission accomplished.”

Tikaya wondered if Rias derived more from
that answer than she did.

“
You find anything useful
on that rocket, Komitopis?” Bocrest asked.

“
I’m getting some
fantastic data. If we find more samples in this scientific vein, I
believe the shared contexts will allow me to—”

Bocrest hissed in frustration and jerked his
hand up, much as he had to halt Rias’s explanation of the altitude
calculations. “When I ask you a question, I want a yes or no
response.”

“
Then, yes,” Tikaya
said.

Rias chuckled and squeezed her hands.

“
Although if you’d listen
to all I had to say, you’d learn that there’s some science about
the device.”

“
Science?” Bocrest’s
expression blanked.

“
Magic,” Rias
said.

“
Oh,” Bocrest said.
“How?”

“
I’m not sure yet,” Tikaya
said. “Give me a moment.”

She started to bend down again, but Rias
stepped in front of the launch pad. He picked up her gloves and
handed them to her. Not until she stuffed her numb fingers back
into the fur-lined interiors did he move aside.

“
Thank you,” she
said.

Rias saluted her with a wink. Bocrest heaved
a sigh.

She touched the launch pad again, checking
several spots. It was weak, but she did sense something, especially
close to the ground. On a whim, she tried to lift one of the legs.
She expected the black metal to weigh too much, but she raised it
with relative ease, revealing a leather-bound book flattened into
the snow. Her heart sped up in anticipation. Rias grabbed the leg,
so she could retrieve her find.

A pen was stuck in the spine, and it felt
warm beneath her fingers. That was it: the practitioner-imbued
item, probably crafted to never run out of ink or some simple
thing. As far as she could tell, the book—no, journal—was mundane.
She flipped it open, but had scarcely read the first couple words
when someone tore it from her grip.

“
Our people will vet this
and decide if it’s suitable for a foreigner to read,” Bocrest
said.

“
Bocrest...” Rias started,
but Tikaya lifted her chin and spoke.

“
Then I hope you brought
someone who reads Kyattese, because the writing isn’t in your
tongue.”

Bocrest flipped through a few pages and his
lip curled into a snarl. “Kyattese?” His eyes narrowed. “Why would
there be a notebook up here in your language?”

“
He spoke Kyattese.”
Tikaya nodded at Lancecrest’s body.

“
Is it possible that
journal is what our ‘ally’ was searching for?” Rias
asked.