Forged in Blood I (8 page)

“Sorry,” he said, “I could thump them around so they couldn’t say such things, but you mentioned winning them over. I thought that might be easier if we didn’t mash up their faces or perforate any important organs.”

“Thoughtful of you.” Given that spanking comment, she wouldn’t mind some light thumping, but she decided she shouldn’t encourage brutality.

When they reached the wall, Deret was still pushing boxes aside. Amaranthe and Maldynado deposited their loads and went to retrieve more jars of ink. By the time they’d made their last trip, Deret had cleared the area. He stopped to mop sweat from his face and eye the semicircle of giant jars.

“You think the storm tunnel is on the other side?” Maldynado waved to the outline on the wall.

Amaranthe pictured the street, the tunnel, and their location within the building in her mind. “I’d guess ten or twelve feet away.”

“What if this side stub is bricked in all the way?”

“Let’s hope it’s not.”

A resonating bang came from the stairway. Huh, the soldiers might have gotten a battering ram into the stairwell after all.

“Deret, printing press ink is flammable, right?” Amaranthe had better make sure she had her facts right before she started making fuses.

“Yes. It’s made of soot, walnut oil, and turpentine. When we run the presses, we have to be careful not to let the bearings on the rollers overheat or…” Deret’s eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask?”

Maldynado laughed. “The more pertinent question, old boy, is which one of us will get blamed when she blows up your father’s building?”

Deret looked back and forth from the bottles of ink to the brick wall. “Oh.”

Maldynado elbowed Amaranthe. “He’s volunteering.”

“Really?” Amaranthe asked. “I didn’t get that.”

“It was inherent in the lack of a strenuous objection. Please note,
I
am objecting. Strenuously.”

“We can face the soldiers if you wish, Deret,” Amaranthe said, though she fervently hoped he did
not
wish—especially if someone had run off to fetch the elder Lord Mancrest and if Mrs. Worgavic was still with him. She was the last person to whom Amaranthe wanted to reveal her presence.

Still eyeing the ink, Deret rubbed his jaw. She shifted from foot to foot, but didn’t rush him, though the banging at the door surely made her wish to do so.

“No,” Deret finally said. “I meant what I said earlier. I’m done arguing with my father—and those Marblecrest lackeys.” He scowled at Maldynado.

“Don’t look at me like that.” Maldynado prodded his thumb to his chest. “I’m disowned, remember? And when Ravido finds out I was present—though not, I assure you, responsible—for his wife’s death, I’ll be lucky if I’m not dismembered.”

“Mari’s dead?” Deret gaped at him, then turned the gape onto Amaranthe.

“I’m not responsible either,” Amaranthe said. “I was busy being tortured by Hollowcrest’s former master interrogator at the time.”

“
What?
” Deret continued to gape, though his gaze shifted back to Maldynado, as if to check if this were a joke. Maldynado shook his head solemnly. Deret swallowed, pity entering his eyes.

Amaranthe hadn’t wanted that. She’d just meant to—bloody ancestors, she shouldn’t have brought it up at all. They needed to get out of here.

“It seems we have much information we should exchange with each other,” Deret said.

Glad he was ready to drop the conversation too, Amaranthe managed a smile. “That’s why we came looking for you.”

“And here I thought it was because you’d grown weary of the company of that assassin and sought emotionally stimulating conversations.” Deret picked up one of the jars of ink.

Amaranthe tried to read whether there was hurt lacing his flippant words—and whether that hurt might be a problem. She
thought
the humor reached his eyes, but she couldn’t be sure.

Deret must have understood her uncertain silence, for he patted her arm and said, “I’m teasing. I’m actually seeing a nice girl—or I was until Father detained me.” He growled and set the jar down by the wall.

Amaranthe told herself that it was
good
that he’d found someone else, though a silly part of her felt stung that he’d so quickly dismissed her and fallen for another. Come on, girl, she thought, you’re not some spell-bindingly alluring maiden from the stories of eld, the kind soldiers pined over for decades while they were away at war. So long as one certain man didn’t dismiss her, that was all that mattered.

Deret pushed the other jars toward the wall. “You two stand back a bit. I’ll handle this. I’ve inadvertently started enough fires with the presses that I’m practically an expert.”

Maldynado pumped a fist. “
Yes
.”

Amaranthe cocked her head at him.

“He
is
volunteering to take the blame.”

Deret snorted and waved for them to back away. “Turpentine is noxious stuff. You don’t want to inhale any more than is necessary.”

“You be careful, too, then. Especially if there’s a new lady worrying about you right now.” Amaranthe pushed Maldynado toward the blocked door. “Let’s get your rowdy friends.”

The two prisoners had been attempting to free each other. One clenched half of a broken pair of scissors in his mouth and was trying to saw the rusty blade across his comrade’s wrist bonds. Amaranthe doubted they’d free each other within the hour—or month—that way, but she removed the tool from the man’s mouth anyway.

“Sorry, gentlemen, but we’re taking a walk.” She nodded for Maldynado to hoist the bigger man to his feet. “You’ll have to try to escape later.”

Amaranthe had no more than helped the second fellow to stand—her pistol nudging his back to encourage alacrity—when an explosion roared through the basement. The ground bucked, and she staggered, catching her balance on a press. Crates and machinery crashed to the floor. The wooden ceiling trembled and groaned. She eyed the old boards through the clouds of dust that arose, choking the little lamplight they had. Maybe setting off an explosion in the basement of a centuries-old building wasn’t a good idea after all.

The noise in the stairwell disappeared. The creaks from the presses on the floor above sounded loud in the new quiet, one broken only by soft wheezing coughs and dirt and debris trickling from the ceiling, or perhaps that brick wall.

Still pushing her prisoner, Amaranthe continued in that direction. “Deret? Are you all right?”

The noxious odor he’d promised clogged the air, a charred burnt smell with a piny underpinning. It stung her throat and eyes, bringing on tears. Her prisoner balked, but she prodded him onward. At the same time, she tugged her shirt up over her mouth and nose.

“Did it work?” Maldynado choked out around a cough. “It better have, because it smells worse than an entire battalion’s worth of unwashed socks piled up behind a field latrine.”

“You’ve been spending too much time with Akstyr,” Amaranthe said.

“Nah, he would have worked donkey droppings into that claim.”

The lantern by the brick wall had either gone out of its own accord or Deret had cut if off. Amaranthe lifted her own light high, trying to pierce the cloak of dusty air. The boxes nearest to the explosion had been blown asunder, and bits of old newspapers and books littered the floor. Amaranthe grimaced at this destruction of property—she hoped some university library had copies of the documents somewhere—but forgot her regrets as soon as she spotted the jagged hole leading to a black tunnel.

“Deret?” Amaranthe peered along the wall in both directions.

“In retrospect,” came Mancrest’s raspy voice, “I should have laid a longer fuse.” He staggered out of a nearby hiding spot, leaning heavily on his swordstick. Soot smeared his face and clothing, and his hair stuck out in blackened spicules.

“Neophyte,” Maldynado said brightly.

“Are you—” Amaranthe had planned to inquire after Mancrest’s health, but the bangs started up at the door again, and she switched to, “—ready to go?”

Mancrest cast a glower in the direction of the cage. “More than ready.”

Amaranthe peered into the dark passage behind the wall. “Is there any more ink left? I think we’ll have to do that again to reach the storm water tunnel.”

Deret rubbed his finger into his eardrum, as if he were having trouble hearing her. “
Again
?”

“Women are never satisfied,” Maldynado said. “Not only do you have to impress them once, but you have to keep doing it again and again. You better learn these things if you’re going to enter into a relationship with one.”

“As if you’re such an expert,” Deret grumbled.

Already on her way back to grab two more ink jars, Amaranthe missed part of the conversation, but came back to Maldynado explaining his new relationship with Yara.

“She’s the tall, muscly one?” Deret asked.

Amaranthe tried to remember if he’d ever met her. She didn’t think so, at least not when Yara had been a part of their group, but it wouldn’t be surprising if, as a journalist, Deret had been keeping track of the team, including recent acquisitions.

“Oh, yes,” Maldynado drawled. “Very athletic.”

“Are we preparing for the next explosion?” Amaranthe asked, dumping a jar into Deret’s hands. “And watching the prisoners?” She gave Maldynado a pointed look.

“Yes, ma’am,” Deret said at the same time as Maldynado proclaimed, “Naturally, boss.”

Deret grabbed a lantern and disappeared into the tunnel. Amaranthe intended to follow and help him if he needed it, but a thunderous snap rent the air.

“Was that the door?” she whispered. It’d sounded louder and closer than that.

“Must be,” Maldynado said. “What else would it be?” He knocked on a brick. “Hurry up, Deret. I think your old man’s about to join us.”

“I need some cloth and another jar,” Deret called back, his voice echoing in the enclosed tunnel.

Amaranthe eyed Maldynado’s shirt. It had… tassels wasn’t quite the right word, but the fluffy fringes looked like they could be shorn off for Deret’s fuse without leaving flesh exposed. She unsheathed her dagger and lifted a finger, intending to ask.

“Don’t even think about it.” Maldynado took a large step back. “My wardrobe has suffered dreadfully as a result of knowing you. Do you know that I haven’t been able to keep a hat for more than two weeks since we met?”

“Please, you’d find it tedious to wear the same hat for more than two weeks anyway.” Amaranthe veered toward the prisoners, lifting an apologetic hand as she sliced into one’s jacket.

“True,” Maldynado said, “but I prefer to retire a hat to a closet for possible later consideration, not watch it be blown up in a steamboat explosion.”

“Fussy, fussy.” Amaranthe took the purloined cloth and another jar into the tunnel.

At the far end, Deret was hunched over, assembling his bomb. Amaranthe set down the rest of the supplies, grabbed the lantern, and held it up to improve the light.

Another resounding snap came from out in the basement.

“That’s not the door.” Maldynado stuck his head into the tunnel. “I think those are the floor beams.”

A second noise echoed, this more of a boom than a snap.

“
That
was the door,” Maldynado said.

Deret grabbed the second jar. “Going as fast as I can.”

“Can I do anything to help?” Amaranthe asked.

“Yes. If my father barges through that door with the soldiers, shoot him.”

“Really?” Amaranthe wouldn’t have pegged Deret as the type to harm blood relations, even irritating ones.

“Not in the chest. Just blow out a kneecap or two.”

“Is he really the one who locked you up down here?”

“Yes.”

“Because…?”

“I refused to print Ravido Marblecrest’s half-truths. Ravido and his business contacts went to my father behind my back. I wish I could say there’d been blackmail or other coercion, but my father is the sort to believe that warrior-caste families should stick together, and he was never a big supporter of Raumesys or Sespian, so…”

“He was happy to help Ravido?” Amaranthe asked.

“That’s the impression I got. When I confronted him… we argued. With fists. He reminded me he owned the paper and sent me home. That was that, or so I hoped he’d think. I brought some of my workers in late that night, intending to change the typeset and print a lengthy story about everything that’s been going on in secret, at least that I’m aware of—thanks in part to you. I included that there’d been no evidence whatsoever to verify Sespian’s death and that anyone attempting to take the throne was doing so illegally.”

“I haven’t seen that edition of the paper.” Thanks to their travels, Amaranthe hadn’t seen a lot of editions, but she doubted
anyone
had seen that one.

“Nor will you. My father guessed my intentions and barged in on me. He was furious. My basement internment was the result.” Deret backed away from his improvised ink-based explosive. “Time to light the fuse.”

“Are we sure we want to light another one?” Maldynado asked, poking his head inside the tunnel again. “Things don’t sound too structurally stable out here.” A crash punctuated his last word.

“Do we have a choice?” Amaranthe asked. “Sounds like company is coming.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Deret grumbled and grabbed the lantern.

Since he was leaning on his swordstick, his movements were awkward as he bent toward the fuse. Amaranthe wondered if his earlier near miss, as evinced by his soot-covered face and clothing, had come because he’d misjudged how much time he’d need to give himself to get out of range, thinking of how fast he’d once been able to move instead of how fast he moved today.

“Want me to light it?” she offered.

Deret’s glower could have withered daisies on a warm spring day.

“Or… I’ll just wait outside,” she amended.

“Do that.”

Amaranthe scooted out of the tunnel, almost colliding with Maldynado who was loitering at the mouth.

“We need to take cover,” she said.

Maldynado started to jog away, but she added, “Them too,” and waved at the prisoners.

Maldynado huffed a sigh and grabbed the men, propelling them before him. Amaranthe could understand the sentiment. At least they went along without making trouble. Nobody wanted to get caught in an explosion.