The emperor and his six bodyguards crowded the hallway. At first he appeared delighted to see her, but a startled question flashed across his eyes when he spotted the dagger in her hand. Then he looked harder at it. Those eyes widened and his jaw sagged open.
Amaranthe winced. Sicarius, you didn’t tell me the emperor would recognize your dagger too.
“Sire,” she started, “I can-”
Papers rustled behind her. She whirled. Hollowcrest lunged at her with a knife. Instinctively, she sidestepped and lifted Sicarius’s dagger. Going over the desk made Hollowcrest’s attack awkward, and she blocked it with her own stab. Her blade raked across his forearm. Hollowcrest cursed and dropped the knife.
“She’s a traitor,” he yelled. “Kill her!”
Steel rasped from scabbards, and the guards charged.
“No!” Sespian grabbed at the closest, but none of the men paused. They were following Hollowcrest’s orders, not his.
Amaranthe jumped onto the desk, flung her arms over her face, and leaped through the window.
• • • • •
Sespian grabbed the doorjamb, stunned. The sound of shattering glass echoed through the room. Swords in hand, the guards started to run for the door.
“Nobody leaves!” Sespian blocked the exit with his body, trapping them inside.
The guards looked at Hollowcrest. Sespian noticed they were more concerned about his advisor’s orders than his, but he could only stare at the window.
Had Amaranthe survived? Broken an arm? A leg? Sespian swallowed. Her neck?
Torn between needing to know and being afraid to find out, he hesitated before going to the window. Finally he started across the room. He had to know.
Hollowcrest intercepted him. Sespian tried to push past, but the older man gripped his arm with surprising strength.
“Let go,” Sespian said.
Hollowcrest did not. Blood ran down his arm and dripped onto Sespian’s wrist.
“She’s a traitor,” Hollowcrest said. “She attacked me.”
“You attacked her first. Do you think I don’t have eyes? She was defending herself.”
“She came to kill me, and you as well. I know you recognized that knife!”
Hollowcrest so rarely raised his voice, so rarely showed any emotion at all. His tone made Sespian pause. But, no. It could not be true.
“There’s an explanation,” Sespian said. “There must be. You’re the one who brought her here, sent her on a mission.”
“One which she did not complete. She’s allied with Sicarius.”
Sespian pushed past him to the window. Footprints trampled the snow below. Even from the third floor, the spots of blood were visible. But the courtyard was empty, Amaranthe nowhere to be seen. The front gate was locked, the guards in place. She had not fled that way.
“Where is she?” Sespian whispered.
“Sire-”
Sespian waved Hollowcrest to silence and charged out the door. He raced through the halls and down the stairs. More than once he skidded on the polished marble floors and banged into the walls, but he did not slow.
When he ran out the front door, cold air wrapped around him, but he hardly noticed it. He veered off the walkway and followed the wall of the building. Only when he reached the spot below Hollowcrest’s office did he slow.
The gas lights in the courtyard provided little illumination this far from the walkways. Blood spattered the snow, but only under the window. There was no trail leading away. The darkness, and dozens of boot prints, thwarted Sespian’s attempts to pinpoint Amaranthe’s tracks.
A shard of blackness against the white ground demanded his attention. He bent and brushed aside snow, revealing the midnight black dagger.
A twinge of old fear wound through his gut. What had she been doing with Sicarius’s weapon? Hollowcrest couldn’t be right, could he?
Voices at the front of the building returned him to the moment. Feeling dizzy, Sespian staggered back to find Hollowcrest and two guards talking on the stairs. When Sespian approached, Hollowcrest sent the men inside.
“What happened?” Sespian asked.
Hollowcrest met his gaze. “She broke her neck in the fall. The guards have taken her body away for incineration.”
“No. She’s too good. She wouldn’t… I don’t believe it.” The headache that always lurked behind Sespian’s eyes intensified. Perhaps all that running had been too much. He put a hand on one of the statues for support.
“Sespian,” Hollowcrest said, “she wasn’t what you wanted her to be. She was a traitor. I brought her here because I suspected she was not the loyal enforcer she appeared to be.” He reached out and touched the knife in Sespian’s hands. “She was in league with Sicarius.”
“No,” Sespian whispered.
He leaned forward, panting. The running had strained him more than it should have. Spots floated across his vision, and blackness probed the edges. The constant pain in his head intensified. He hunched over, clutching at his temples-and collapsed into unconsciousness.
Chapter 6
S hackles bound Amaranthe’s wrists behind her back. Two guards dragged her through dark narrow hallways and down a dank stairway framed by walls of roughly quarried stone. Lanterns burned at distant intervals, hanging from old torch sconces. As the group moved in and out of the shadows, Amaranthe felt as if she had stepped back hundreds of years in time.
Warm blood trickled down her temple. Numerous glass cuts afflicted her face and scalp. Worse pain came from her battered muscles, courtesy of the pummeling they received in the three-story fall. This discomfort was only the beginning, she knew. I can survive this. Whatever torture they inflict on me, I will survive, and I will plan, and I will escape.
Then she entered the dungeon.
She was expecting shackles, instruments of pain, and moldy, bloodstained walls. The archaic atmosphere ended at the doorway, however. Inside, a honeycomb of whitewashed tunnels and chambers spread out. They were brightly lit by gas jets and smelled of lye soap. The first man she saw likewise did not meet expectations.
Amaranthe had anticipated towering, monosyllabic guards led by a sadistic, whip-cracking overseer who had not seen the sun in twenty years. Instead, a gray-haired man in crisp black military fatigues greeted her with a smile.
“Ah!” he said cheerfully. “A female. You’re our first. Excellent.”
The pin on the left side of his collar proclaimed him a colonel; the pin on the right bore a needle, the symbol for a surgeon.
A shiver raised the hair along her arms. “First for what?”
“I’ll show you.” The surgeon hummed and tapped his clipboard against his thigh as he led the way down the stark, white corridor. “Come along, come along.”
The guards forced Amaranthe to follow. If her hands had not been bound behind her, she might have tried for one of the swords or pistols hanging from their belts, but she had no hope of reaching them.
Cells lined either side of the corridor, each secured by steel bars and locked gates. Male prisoners occupied most. Some stood and watched her pass, but most lay prone and unresponsive. One had black fingers and toes, symptoms of the advanced stages of frostbite. Another had pox marks all over his skin. Occasionally, medics in military fatigues surrounded the prisoners. One would hold a clipboard and pen while others stabbed and prodded at their victims.
In one cell, a man was stretched facedown on a metal table with a surgeon poking around several inches of exposed vertebrae. He screamed with each prod, and blood flowed from his back. It splashed the floor, ran down a slight slope, and poured into a central drain. Amaranthe experienced the unwelcome insight that someone had angled the floors and placed the drains with exactly that purpose in mind.
Torture, but more methodical than the simple cuts and burns designed to extract information. They were performing medical experiments on these people. She shuddered.