“Oh.” Books’s shoulders drooped. “Of course.”
“I’ll stay,” Akstyr said.
“Good,” Amaranthe said. “Maldynado, you and your big body back him up, please. If people come, hide. If deadly technology comes… warn us somehow, please.”
“And then hide?” Akstyr asked.
“Precisely.”
Maldynado smirked. Amaranthe frowned at him to let him know she meant the bit about hiding. She hadn’t seen anything worry Sicarius the way those black cubes had, not even the deadly makarovi or Arbitan Losk’s soul construct.
Amaranthe crawled into the vent on her hands and knees. She trusted that Sicarius wouldn’t take them somewhere they’d all get stuck, but it was hard not to feel the panic of claustrophobia in the utter darkness of the tight passage. Especially after his warning about those cubes. This would be an awful place to get trapped.
The uneven walls jabbed at her shoulders, and she had to run a hand along the ceiling to locate protuberances before her head smacked against them. At times she had to drop to her belly to avoid them. The incline grew steeper, evoking images of sliding backward and crashing into the men below. Scuffles and grunts floated up from behind her as the rest of the team followed. Sicarius didn’t make a sound. He might have been five feet in front of her or fifty.
Whispers of hot air flowed from cracks and heated the rock beneath Amaranthe’s hands. Unlike the machine-hewn tunnels below, the vent had the rounded contours of a passage carved by water over thousands of years. She tried not to think about what would happen if a crack opened up in the lake floor, one that would allow water to enter the cavity once again.
“Just keep climbing,” she muttered.
Maldynado leaned against the wall next to the vent, the lantern dangling from his arm. If he were the one crawling into a black shaft of indeterminate length, he would have taken a light with him.
A few feet away, Akstyr sat cross-legged on the floor, eyes closed, doing whatever it was fledgling wizards did when they were supposed to be on watch. Maldynado didn’t know how much time had passed since the others had disappeared up the hole, but it had been a while. He thought of Yara’s words about statues and who deserved them. Maybe he ought to do more than stand around.
“Stay here, and pay attention,” Maldynado said. “I’m going to check ahead, see if there’s anything useful.”
Akstyr opened an eye. “You mean you’re going to look for good hiding places?”
“Ah, sure.”
Maldynado dug a second lantern out of someone’s pack, lit it for Akstyr, then headed deeper into the tunnel with the other light. More of those vents, appearing at all different levels, dotted the walls. He wondered if they were a result of water passing through or the remnants of lava flows. He seemed to remember some vague trivia about the lake being part of an extinct volcano.
After passing through two excavated chambers with nothing in them, Maldynado came to another vehicle storage area. This one held a steamroller and a couple of haulers. A workstation scattered with boxes and parts lined one rock wall. He perused the latter, though he wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Something that might prove useful if some lackey stumbled across the team and sounded an alarm. Nothing in the work area inspired him, but the steamroller did draw his eye more than once. The horizontal rolling tube at its front was taller than he was. He smirked as he imagined barreling through the tunnels, rolling over any Forge minions who dared to stand in the path with guns raised.
Maldynado started to dismiss the thought, but propped a fist on his hip. “Enh, why not?”
Given how long it took to fire up a steam engine, one couldn’t simply grab a truck on a whim. Why not start it now, and if the team didn’t end up needing it, who cared? Forge could afford to waste a few pounds of coal.
The smirk returned as Maldynado crawled about the machine, checking fuel and water reserves. He decided it wasn’t a sign of immaturity that he found himself tickled by the idea of Forge people flinging themselves out of the way to avoid being flattened. They’d tortured Amaranthe after all. He was just returning the favor.
Chapter 22
Amaranthe was utterly and hopelessly lost. Sweat beaded on her forehead and dripped down the sides of her face. The vent had crossed other vents, widening and then narrowing again, as it continued an upward path. How far upward, she didn’t know, but she worried that they’d come out on one of the Marblecrest beaches instead of anywhere useful.
Her knuckles brushed against something that wasn’t as hard as the surrounding rock. Sicarius’s foot? It moved before she could be certain. Thinking of that giant eel in the pool, she hoped it had only been his foot.
Faint voices drifted to Amaranthe’s ears. At first, she thought they came from the men behind her, but the sounds were farther away than that. Nervous excitement ran through her body. Maybe they were going to succeed at finding a spy hole after all.
A draft brushed her face, a faint sulfuric scent hanging in the air. Maybe it was her imagination, but it didn’t seem as warm as the earlier drafts. As Amaranthe continued forward, the blackness lightened to gray. The vent opened onto a rocky shelf with three or four feet of clearance overhead. A ledge with a drop-off was to the right. She couldn’t see what lay at the bottom, but the light came from that direction.
Sicarius, belly-down on the far end of the shelf, faced the open area. He waved for her to join him. The shelf was less than ten feet wide and lacked any other exits. Amaranthe thought her team might fit if they lined themselves up with Sicarius and didn’t mind temporarily storing their elbows in each other’s pockets. Turning around and climbing back out again wouldn’t happen quickly. She crawled toward Sicarius, but halted when she glimpsed what lay beyond the drop-off.
The cavernous chamber that opened below them was so large that she felt as if she was perched on the rim of a volcano. The crater sloped inward and downward on all sides, its porous rock shells containing more gaps than Mangdorian bubble cheese. The team’s shelf was not unique.
At the bottom of the crater, a polished black-tile floor gleamed beneath dozens of lamps. It held a circle of desks three tiers deep. Most of the men and women occupying the seats possessed the olive to bronze skin of Turgonians, but there were a few foreigners as well, some with features as pale as Basilard’s and others with flesh almost as dark as the vent Amaranthe had just left. Each desk held an open binder with a stack of papers and a pen holder. The double doors Sicarius had mentioned stood closed at the end of a short access tunnel recessed into the concave walls. In the center of the desk circle, a man was in the process of leaving the floor to sit down while a woman in a hand-tailored skirt and jacket replaced him.
Someone touched Amaranthe, reminding her that she’d have to scoot to the end so the others could squeeze in. She crawled over to Sicarius and lay down on her stomach beside him. His eyes were toward the floor, his face unreadable, and she imagined him studying each person, gauging the threat.
“Fascinating,” Books murmured as he settled in next to Amaranthe. “This must be where they found the aircraft.”
“Oh, of course,” Amaranthe said. It was obvious once he had said it. If that tracking tool had a way of conveying the magnitude of the artifact it was pointing to, Retta, or whoever had originally mastered the device, must have been giddy at the idea of unearthing something so large. To think, while Amaranthe had been going to the enforcer academy and learning how to put men into joint locks, one of her old schoolmates had been mastering the language and technology of an ancient, alien race and learning how to, among other things, fly. Amaranthe tried not to feel like an underachiever.