Blood and Betrayal

by Lindsay Buroker

  Without responding, Sicarius shimmied into the vent, his boots soon disappearing from sight.

  “We’re not supposed to follow him, are we?” Maldynado asked. “I don’t think I’d fit. I’m a bigger man than him.” He propped a hand on his waist, fingers pointed downward, and added, “In all senses of the word.”

  Yara snorted.

  Basilard signed, Should you say things like that when he might still be in earshot?

  “Er.” Maldynado dropped his hand. “Perhaps not.”

  Sicarius’s head popped out of the vent, cobwebs cloaking his short hair. “This way. Do not bring the light.” He slithered into the main tunnel long enough to turn around. Before heading back in, he paused to add, “Someone should stand watch, but there’s room for everyone,” with a dismissive glance toward Maldynado.

  After he disappeared again, Maldynado muttered, “I may be in trouble when our training exercises start up again.”

  Basilard signed, My grandfather used to say bees are worth braving for their honey, but only fools delve into a hornets’ nest.

  Amaranthe, not certain Sicarius would stop to ensure everyone had followed him, didn’t wait to see where the conversation would go. “Who wants to stay and stand—”

  “Me,” Books said.

  Amaranthe had figured he wouldn’t be enthused about crawling into that tight vent, but she couldn’t agree with the choice. “If we do find a way to spy on the Forge people, we may need you to help us figure out what they’re talking about.”

  “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.

  Sicarius lifted a finger, directing her attention upward.

  Some twenty feet above them, a clear convex ceiling served as a window into the lake. Enough light filtered down from the surface to reveal schools of fish drifting past.

  “How is that possible?” Amaranthe whispered. Other than the crater walls themselves, the hundreds-of-feet-wide “window” lacked visible support. It couldn’t possibly be made from glass.

  Sicarius shook his head once.

  “Thank you for allowing me to speak, my colleagues,” the woman in the center of the circle said, the acoustics of the chamber making her voice easy to hear. Amaranthe made a note to limit her own words. “And thank you, Thovic, for explaining our plans to move the ranmya from a gold-backed currency into a fiat money system.”

  Sespian had settled in on the other side of Books, and his head jerked up. Books’s eyes, too, sharpened.

  “I agree with my colleague that we may need to outlaw the ownership of gold in order to force acceptance by the people. While paper money has become commonplace in the major cities, it’s still viewed with suspicion in smaller areas, and the warrior caste are notoriously hard to sway to new ideas.”

  “New ideas?” Books scoffed. “The Minyar Empire tried a fiat currency centuries ago, and it played a role in their collapse.”

  “Our proposition will solve the empire’s current money shortage problems,” the speaker said, waving toward the binders, “without requiring draconian tax increases that might bestir citizens to revolt. The common man will be unaware of how inflation works, so it’ll act as a hidden tax that benefits the government, allowing Turgonia to maintain its expansive military and infrastructure.”

  Amaranthe hadn’t realized the empire might be in trouble financially. She supposed the slowdown in colonization and outright usurpation in the last fifty years had meant fewer fresh resources to plunder. Certainly industry was still running strong, but much of that belonged in private hands, and Turgonia did have a lot of resources to maintain. She peered past Books to Sespian. He must know all about Turgonia’s current state of affairs. Like Books, Sespian was focused on the speaker. No, he didn’t appear surprised by the talk of financial difficulties, though a wrinkle of concentration drew his eyebrows together, as if he might not have considered manipulating the money supply as a solution. Not surprising. Historically, Turgonian emperors had solved financial problems by conquering someone new.

  “Of course,” the speaker said, “the government is only a concern of ours insofar as we can profit from it. Our plan is to control the money-creation system, ensuring that we benefit handsomely.”

  Sicarius looked at Amaranthe. She wasn’t sure if it was a questioning look or not—he often surprised her with his versatility and knowledge, so she wouldn’t put it past him to have a handle on economics. The history of currency was fairly esoteric information, however, and she couldn’t imagine that Hollowcrest had felt the need to include it in his studies. She had only a basic understanding herself and suspected she’d be asking Books for clarification.

  “Right now,” Amaranthe whispered, “ranmya notes say they’re redeemable for gold or silver, depending on the denomination. If that backing is taken away, the only reason paper money would continue to have value would be because the government said so. Because there’d be no finite resource limiting the amount of money in circulation, the government could, and likely would, print more as it needed more, and that would lead to inflation. Prices would appear to go up year after year, though it’d actually be a case of the value of the existing currency being diluted so that it’d be worth less and less. The average person would suffer because his or her buying power would be eroded.” Amaranthe glanced at Books, hoping he’d nod to indicate she was getting her information right—it’d been ten years since her classes with Ms. Worgavic, after all—but his eyes were focused on the speaker below. Figuring she had better wrap up and listen as well, Amaranthe finished her explanation with, “Those who gain from the process are those at the source, those who have their hands on the currency first, spending it as it’s printed, before the expansion of the money supply dilutes the value of each note.”

  During Amaranthe’s speech, Sicarius’s expression never changed. At the end, he looked to Books and asked, “They’re not talking about establishing a central bank, correct? They seek to create a private banking cartel that counts the throne as its biggest customer?”

  “Yes.” Books lifted a finger to his lips and pointed toward the floor.

  Amaranthe blushed, realizing Sicarius hadn’t needed her explanation. His look had probably meant he’d been wondering if she knew what was going on. She hunched down and focused on the woman below.

  “As many of you in banking know,” the speaker was saying, “our industry hasn’t been exceedingly profitable in the past. Business mavens are seeing a time of fantastic profits, however, by getting rid of competition and working together to fix prices at levels acceptable to profit margins.”

  “At levels more expensive to consumers,” Books muttered.

  “I propose we do something similar with banking,” the speaker said. “By creating a banking system that handles the creation of money in the empire, we can then handle all the loans that are made, including the loaning of money to the government. Currently, businesses are doing well, too well, and the trend is toward private capitalization. They haven’t needed our loans, but if we can lower interest rates to make loans more appealing… Well, in the current system, that’s not possible, but if money is no longer backed by anything, and we can simply create more when we need it, then we can make interest rates as low as we wish and still earn a handsome profit.”

  A man in the back lifted a hand. “What makes you think the empire will go for this? The idea of a central bank is nothing new, but what government would give up control to private parties?”

  Ms. Worgavic, who had a front row seat near the door, stood and straightened her jacket. Smiling, she said, “That’s already been arranged. We’re handing Ravido Marblecrest the throne, and, in exchange, he’s agreed to this. I doubt he has any idea what the ramifications are, as he seemed quite relieved to be asked for nothing more, but this, my colleagues, is how we ensure our prosperity and the future prosperity of our children.”

  Amaranthe wondered if there was some Forge mandate about addressing everyone as “my colleague.” She’d have to remember that nuance if she ever tried to infiltrate the group.

  “Everyone in this room,” Ms. Worgavic went on, “who wants to be a part of this is invited. You’ll have a position on the board of directors, a hereditary position that guarantees that your descendants will be a part of this organization for decades and centuries to come. Your offspring will not only be very wealthy in this new world, but they wil
l shape how it evolves.”

  The first speaker was nodding. “It starts with Turgonia, but it doesn’t end there. With the ranmya as the world’s reserve currency, it will only be a matter of time before we have a foothold in every nation on the globe.”

  “Few if any of them appear to be armed,” Sicarius whispered. “They left their servants and bodyguards outside.”

  It took Amaranthe a moment to realize where he was going with the comment. She scowled at him, though he didn’t seem to notice. He had crawled closer to the edge and was eyeing the drop-off beneath them. It had to be more than forty feet to the polished floor, but, due to the concave curve, one might be able to slide down it without breaking one’s leg. Still…

  “You’re not going to jump down there and murder fifty people,” Amaranthe whispered.

  “Forty-one,” Sicarius said.

  Of course, he would have counted every person. No doubt he’d judged the fitness and athleticism of all those people and also taken note of bulges beneath jackets that might represent concealed weapons.

  Amaranthe gripped his arm and tilted her head to indicate they should move away from the edge to discuss. As clearly as she heard the speaker’s voice, it was a foregone conclusion that overexcited whispers might float down to the floor as well.

  Sespian was scowling at Sicarius, too, and he scooted back with them. “I forbid you to employ your assassination techniques here.”

  Good. She’d known Sespian wouldn’t be interested in mass murder as a solution either, but she hadn’t known that he’d stand up to Sicarius.

  Two against one odds didn’t bother Sicarius. He merely said, “Those people represent the head of Forge. If they don’t walk out of this room, their plans die with them. Without their support, General Ravido will be—”

  “No.” Sespian chopped downward with his hand.

  Amaranthe winced, fearing the word would carry.