“Let me do it.” Starcrest opened his palm, asking for one of the blasting sticks.
“She can throw it that far,” Sicarius said, not understanding Starcrest’s objection, but sensing it might stem from a doubt in Amaranthe’s abilities. “And with accuracy.”
Starcrest’s smile held no joy. “That is not my concern.” He met Amaranthe’s eyes. “Enough blood stains your sword for this lifetime.”
In the second while she was puzzling this out, Starcrest took a blasting stick from her. Her eyes widened with understanding, but he’d already lit it, stood, and hurled it toward the tanks beside the building.
This time, the stick did not explode on impact. Unnoticed by those in the streets below, it skidded to a stop beneath the closest tank. Sicarius watched the fuse burn down, curious as to what the results would be. Nothing if the tanks were empty, though the shrapnel from the explosion might damage those near the intersection. If there was liquid inside, would getting “sticky” truly deter the makarovi?
A heartbeat before the stick blew up, his mind caught up with Starcrest’s, the estimates for a volume equation forming in his thoughts.
The tanks dampened the explosion, and Sicarius worried the force hadn’t been enough to damage the sturdy walls. But a resounding pop sounded over the fading boom from the blasting stick. Rivets shot in a hundred directions with the velocity-and destructive power-of bullets. Screams burst from the people crowding the intersection, and no less than two dozen fell to the ground, struck by the shrapnel. One of the makarovi was hit, and its roar turned to the squeal of a pig gone to slaughter. Those who died in the initial blast suffered the least.
In a chain reaction, both of the tanks were destroyed, their bellies ruptured. One was empty, but the other… was not. Molasses, brown and thick and almost as fast-flowing as water, gushed into the streets. Sicarius had never seen a tidal wave, but he imagined it must look like this: channeled by the surrounding buildings, the liquid rose ten feet high and bore down on the people in the street. Too fast to outrun, it swept over them, the force knocking them from their feet and pulling them under. Even the heavy makarovi couldn’t resist its power, and the beasts roared in terror as they were tugged into the deadly flow.
Like water, the molasses obeyed gravity and found the path of least resistance. It gushed down to the waterfront, then broke like a wave, its height diminishing as it flowed across the docks and into the lake. Sicarius stared down at the intersection and the streets leading up to it, at the swath of brown gunk left behind, and at the disappearance of the crowd. Oh, a few beslimed people lay unmoving in the streets, and a survivor clung to a lone standing lamppost-the others had been flattened and torn away. From the shouts within the warehouse, a few more had survived by being on an upper level when a gush had torn down the doors and broken the windows to sweep through the building. Those who hadn’t been swept away were hacking to rid their lungs of fluid and staggering away from the scene. A few cast stares of disbelief up at the warehouse roof, but most simply scurried into the shadows as fast as they could.
“Are they gone?” Amaranthe rasped, a hysteric edge to her voice.
Sicarius knew she meant the makarovi, not the people. She never would have, of her own volition, chosen to kill human beings, not even gang thugs who were trying to kill her.
“Guntar,” Starcrest called to a soldier on the far side of the roof, someone with a better view of the waterfront. “Makarovi?”
“Looks like they all drowned, sir. Lots of those gang brutes did too. We shouldn’t have any trouble getting out of here.”
“Understood,” Starcrest said. “Thank you.”
Amaranthe dropped her face into her hand. To cry? Sicarius couldn’t tell, but surely she deserved a release after all this. His own gaze lifted toward Arakan Hill. The flames had died down-or been put out-but the night sky didn’t hide the black plumes of smoke pouring from whatever remained of the Imperial Barracks. He wanted to race up there and find Sespian, but he wouldn’t leave until he knew Amaranthe would be all right. She was strong, but she’d been through so much, and Sicarius didn’t think she’d be able to let Starcrest accept the blame for the deaths her idea had wrought. She’d never failed to feel for those who had died at Sicarius’s hand, after all, not when he’d been in her employ.
“That was…” Akstyr was staring down at the carnage in the street. Sicarius expected him to say, “brilliant,” or, “the best revenge ever,” but he wiped his eyes instead and finished with, “not worth the price.” He walked over, sat beside Books’s body, and buried his face in his hands.
“If this is how it had to end anyway,” Amaranthe whispered, staring at the barren streets, “I wish I’d thought of it sooner.”
She lifted her head to find Sicarius’s face. Her eyes were like pools with rivulets escaping down her cheeks. Her hand twitched toward him, and his feet swallowed the three steps between them. He pulled her into a hug, wishing he’d thought to do so immediately, but she always tried so hard not to let her emotions or her… human fallibility show in front of the others. This time was different, he realized, and lifted his hand to the back of her head, letting her cry into his shoulder.
• • •
The enforcer wagon crawled up Arakan Hill, and trepidation tightened Sicarius’s fingers on the steering controls. Starcrest sat in the seat beside him, with his family, Amaranthe, Akstyr, Mancrest, and the soldiers in the back. Books’s body was back there too. Amaranthe and Akstyr had refused to leave it behind, and both had glared at Sicarius when he’d pointed out that nobody would take it.
As the Barracks walls came into view, with the heavy double doors charred and blown half off their hinges, Sicarius wondered how many people they’d be preparing a funeral pyre for. Not Sespian. Sespian had known the danger, known there might be more bombs. If he’d gotten himself killed…
A pair of enforcers standing outside the warped gates frowned at their approach. It was still a few hours until dawn, and Sicarius doubted they could tell who occupied the shadowy interior of the cab, but he watched their eyes-and their hands-nonetheless. A sergeant wearing the reds of the Imperial Fire Brigade jogged up to them, and Sicarius drove through into the courtyard without being stopped. With so many enforcer wagons and army lorries, one more shouldn’t seem strange. Besides, Sicarius thought, as the front of the Barracks came into view, what was left to protect?
Black bricks and charred wood lay all about the slushy courtyard, along with pieces of furniture, clothing, and a set of purple velvet draperies that were wrapped around the flagpole. The face of the building had been blown off; the remaining walls and floors, their edges crumbling, stood open to the elements, laid open like a giant diorama. Water dripped from it all, courtesy of the Imperial Fire Brigade’s hoses. With the fire quenched, they’d been turned off, but they still snaked across the ground to fire plugs in the corner of the courtyard, and steam still rose from the rubble crowding the base of the building.
Sicarius drove to one side, passing the vehicle house he’d taken a different vehicle from earlier. That vehicle remained on the street where they’d parked it; molasses had reached three feet up the side of it, leaving a sticky mess of the engine.
Though he remained alert for danger from the enforcers they passed, Sicarius searched the rubble for bodies and searched the courtyard for signs of Sespian.
“The back half of the building is relatively undamaged,” Starcrest observed.
Sicarius didn’t care about the building. Where was Sespian?
“I don’t see any bodies,” Starcrest added quietly.
A more useful observation. If Sicarius hadn’t been busy hunting for his son, he would have realized it too. Sespian-or someone-must have succeeded in evacuating the Barracks.
“Where is everybody?” Sicarius asked. He had rounded the back of the building and come out on the other side. He could almost see back to the courtyard gate, but he hadn’t spotted Sespian or anyone else on the team. Enforcers and Fire Brigade personnel roamed everywhere, taking notes, searching the inside of the building, and making inspections to figure out if the rest would collapse, but where was everyone else?