Deadly Games (22 page)

“Is that a yes?” Books asked.

“Yes. Looks like I found the trapdoor.”

“Looks like,” Maldynado drawled.

“We can’t see anything,” Books said, leaning
forward and patting around the trapdoor entrance. “How far down are
you? Is there a ladder?”

“Maybe ten or twelve feet, and I don’t know.
I’ll see if I can relight the lantern. After I find it.”

Amaranthe knelt and swept her hands across
cold, smooth stone. Cool air whispered past her cheeks. Above
ground, it had been a warm summer evening, but down here, she
shivered in her thin trousers and half-sleeve shirt.

It took a few moments to find the first wall,
and she determined she was in a room, not a corridor. Some sort of
preparation area for priests performing ceremonies on the altar
above?

She found the lantern. A soft thump came from
behind her.

“Who—” she started to ask.

“Me,” Maldynado said. “Can’t let a girl
wander around a dark pit by herself.”

“You can if you don’t know if there’s a way
out,” Akstyr said. He and Books waited above.

“Want us to go grab some lanterns?” Books
asked.

“Let me see if I can get this one relit
first.” Amaranthe patted her pockets down. “I have matches.”
Somewhere.

“Is one lantern sufficient lighting for
pyramid spelunking?” Books asked, his tone implying he hardly
thought so.

“It’s a long jog to the boneyard and back.”
Amaranthe struck a match and lit the lantern. “And I think you
should join us since you’re the pyramid expert. Akstyr can stay out
there in case we...” Got themselves hopelessly lost or trapped by
the enemy? No, she shouldn’t say that. Too demoralizing. “Need
backup,” she finished.

The lantern light revealed a chamber filled
with cobwebs and layers of dust that made her long for the giant
steam-powered cleaning machines she had described to the thieves in
the tenement building. Rows of niches on the walls had long since
been emptied of their contents, though cobwebs cloaked them like
cocoons, and one could almost imagine this place still held ancient
treasures.

“Not very likely when we’re in the middle of
a city with a population of a million,” Amaranthe told herself.

“That’s why I came down,” Maldynado said.

“To treasure hunt?”

“No, to keep you from talking to yourself.
That’s a sign of a lonely, disturbed mind.” He drew his rapier and
swiped at a cobweb curtain dangling above a narrow, low-ceilinged
stairwell leading down. “This way, you can pretend you’re talking
to me.”

“Oh, good.” She turned her head toward the
trapdoor again. “Books, are you coming? We need your insight.”

“Since I so rarely hear those words, I’d best
join you.”

“We’d crave your insight more if you gave us
less of it,” Maldynado told him. “They say scarcity creates
desire.”

“I’m heading down,” Amaranthe said. The men
could snipe at each other all night if she let them.

She drew her short sword, but waited for
Books to shimmy over the side of the hole, dangle from the lip for
a moment, then drop down. He landed in an easy crouch. She smiled.
He might not realize it, but Sicarius’s training had brought Books
a
long
way in the last six months. Whether one had natural
aptitude or not, constant repetition and an unrelenting taskmaster
did tend to encourage improvement.

A couple of steps down the stairs convinced
Amaranthe to return her sword to its sheath. The narrowness and
steepness made her want to brace herself on the wall as she
descended, and the lantern seemed the more important thing to hold
aloft. Blackness swallowed the bottom of the stairs, but she
imagined the fall could be long and far should she lose her
balance.

“What kind of tiny-footed people built this
place?” Maldynado asked after a bout of cursing when one of his
boots slipped.

“Actually,” Books said, “it’s quite
fascinating. The Pey’uhara, the first lake dwellers, were—”

“No, no, never mind,” Maldynado blurted. “I
didn’t mean it. I don’t want to know.”

“It’s a shame you prefer to wallow in a mire
of ignorance when knowledge floats by within reach,” Books
said.

“Isn’t it?”

“Let’s practice our stealth mode,” Amaranthe
said. “In case there
are
kidnappers or trap-setters
about.”

The men mumbled sheepish apologies and fell
quiet.

Silence surrounded them, stirred only by the
soft padding of their feet and their own breaths. One could forget
a modern city lay less than a block away.

The soft flame of the lantern revealed a
short landing below with three options. To the right and the left,
more stairs descended. If they continued straight ahead, they would
enter a narrow corridor. A low stone ceiling promised much ducking
for Maldynado and Books should she choose that route.

Amaranthe stopped on the landing. “Have we
gone far enough to be at ground level?”

“I don’t think so,” Books said.

He touched cryptic hieroglyphs carved into
the wall. One looked like a dog mounting another dog, but she
supposed that was her imagination. Nothing so crude would be
represented in two-thousand-year-old glyphs.

“Also the tunnels at the floor level are
wider and easier to navigate. I believe that corridor leads to the
Graveyard of the Fallen Enemies.” Books lifted a finger, perhaps
wanting to explain the place more thoroughly, but he glanced at
Maldynado and said no more.

“Doesn’t sound like a place we need to
visit,” Amaranthe said.

“Is that a dog humping another dog?”
Maldynado to pointed the hieroglyph she had noticed. Leave it to
him to have a mind at least as crude as hers.

“Actually, yes,” Books said. “It’s a sign of
dominance. These people were letting everyone know they had
dominated and vanquished their fallen enemies.”

“Dominance, eh?” Maldynado said. “If you say
so.”

“Left or right?” Amaranthe asked. “Any
thoughts?”

“Not from me,” Books said.

“There’s an uncommon event,” Maldynado
said.

Amaranthe lifted the lantern and examined
both stairwells. The right held fewer cobwebs, and soft gouges and
stirrings on the dusty steps might be footprints. “It looks like
that way has seen traffic more recently.”

When no one disagreed, she led the way
downward again. The stairs did not descend far before they reached
a T-section with wide corridors.

A faint rustle came to Amaranthe’s ears. Her
imagination? She dimmed the lantern in case it was not.

The blackness to the left seemed less
absolute than the blackness to the right.

Nothing on the smooth granite floor would be
an obstacle for their feet if they moved forward in darkness, so
Amaranthe signaled to her men with a finger to her lips, pointed,
and dimmed the lantern the rest of the way.

Darkness swallowed them. She waited for her
eyes to adjust to the gloom. There was not enough light for her to
see anything except that it was less dark in one direction than the
other, but that would have to be enough.

A hand reached out and found her shoulder.
Maldynado’s, she guessed, because he had a tendency to be less
tentative than Books when touching people, especially female
people. She hoped Books had a hand on Maldynado’s shoulder as well.
She did not want to lose anyone down here.

With one hand on the wall, she felt her way
down the corridor. She found an edge—a corner. The light increased
when she turned down the new passage, though she could not see its
source.

“...longer?” a male voice asked ahead.

Amaranthe halted. The grip on her shoulder
tightened in warning.

She turned an ear toward the passage, but
whatever response the question garnered was too quiet for her to
hear. She tried to decide if that had been Mancrest’s voice. It had
not sounded familiar, but it was hard to judge anything from one
word.

“Want me to check it out?” Maldynado
whispered in her ear.

“No,” she whispered back. Basilard would be
the first to tell Maldynado he was not the stealthiest man on their
team. She pressed the lantern into Maldynado’s hand. “I’ll go. Stay
here. Fetch me if I get myself in trouble.”

His snort was soft, but audible. She patted
him on the chest, then eased her short sword free and continued
down the passage. Toe before heel, she walked, making sure there
was nothing on the floor that might crunch or be kicked before
committing to each step.

Cobwebs brushed at her face, and she stifled
an urge to sneeze again. It was hard to sneak up on someone while
discharging dust from one’s nostrils.

As Amaranthe walked, she let her fingers
graze the wall, and she twitched in surprise when they found a gap,
then bumped against metal. She slid her hand up and down it. A bar.
One of many. Some kind of gate?

She continued on, passing several of the wide
gates, and finally reached a corner with the warm yellow of lantern
light glowing beyond it. Trusting the darkness to hide her,
Amaranthe eased her head around the edge. The illumination, several
lanterns’ worth, came from inside an open gate. From her angle, she
could not see inside, but impatient mutters and shuffles came from
the cell beyond.

The snippet of conversation she had caught
implied there were at least two people waiting in there, but the
noises suggested more. Four or six maybe.

She eased around the corner and tiptoed
closer. Stacks of boxes came into view first, the closest stamped
with the words “souvenir hats.” Ah, the gates represented shop
fronts. She must be nearing the main pyramid entrance.

Another step took her close enough to see
past the boxes and into the room. A man in black soldier’s fatigues
leaned against the wall, his elbow propped on the muzzle of a
rifle.

“Maybe we should turn out the lanterns,”
someone opposite of him said.

“We’re three turns from Mancrest,” someone
else said. “She won’t see the light.”

“Until it’s too late.”

Soft snickers followed that oh-so-witty
line.

“Unless Sicarius is with her.”

That stopped the snickers. A nervous
shuffling followed.

“Word from the enforcers is that somebody’s
got him.”

Amaranthe curled her fingers into a fist. How
had the enforcers found out? Did they know something she
didn’t?

“I’ll believe that when his head is on a pike
in Mariner Square,” the man in view said.

Clothing rustled—a shrug? “I heard the
enforcers were told to send word to the emperor to get the bounty
money together, because his dead body would be delivered after the
Imperial Games.”

It was just talk, Amaranthe told herself.
Rumors.

“Enough chatter,” an unseen man said. “This
is an ambush, not barracks cleaning day. Nobody’s paying you to
trot your lips.”

The soldier Amaranthe could see sighed and
turned his eyes toward the corridor. She stopped breathing. If
enough lantern light seeped out of the room for him to see
her...

He frowned and squinted in her direction.

Amaranthe slipped a hand into her pocket. Her
fingers found curved glass.

The soldier took a step her way.

Before she could debate the wisdom of the
move, or the danger to herself, Amaranthe held her breath, thumbed
the cork off, and tossed the vial through the metal bars. It
skidded beneath the soldier’s feet, and he jumped.

She scurried back, not sure what the range
was on the powder, or if it would even do anything without some
sort of magical preparation.

The soldier charged into the corridor.

Amaranthe spun and ran. The darkness ahead
kept her from sprinting, but she hoped she remembered the layout
better than the soldier.

Only her outstretched hand kept her from
smashing her face into the wall at the first turn. So much for
memory.

Heavy footfalls followed her, but it sounded
like only one or two pairs of boots, not the entire squad of
soldiers. If only a couple of the men chased her, she and her team
ought to be able to take care of them. They could separate—

“Oomph,” she grunted, hitting another
wall.

Left turn this time. One more corner, and she
should run into Maldynado and Books.

Before she finished the thought, she ran into
another obstacle. Not stone this time, clothing and flesh.

“Boss?” Maldynado whispered.

“Yes, sh.”

The clomping footfalls of a soldier rang out
as the man rounded the corner. Amaranthe turned to face him.

In the darkness, she could see nothing. The
rhythm of the soldier’s run faltered and slowed. He must sense he
was close, or maybe it was something else. The powder? His steps
were heavy, almost labored. He made no attempt to stifle the sound
of his advance.

The gait slowed and grew uneven. Amaranthe
bent her knees, sword ready. A loud thud came from ahead, no more
than a pace away. Something clattered to the floor.

Silence fell.

A flame flared to life. Maldynado held the
lantern high, illuminating the dust-and-cobweb-cloaked tunnel—and
the unmoving soldier at their feet, his rifle a foot away from his
outstretched hand.

“Huh,” Maldynado said.

“You killed him?” Books stared at her.

“No, at least I don’t think so. I threw that
vial you took from the towel boy into their room.” She knelt down,
intending to check his pulse, but a soft snore rumbled from the
man’s lips.

“Ah,” Books said.

Amaranthe took the soldier’s rifle, then
patted him down. She found keys on a clip at his belt and removed
them. “Anybody have rope we can use to tie him up?”

“Not me,” Maldynado said.

Books spread his open hands. No rope. Hm.

“I need to come better prepared for these
meetings with men,” Amaranthe said.

“Yes,” Maldynado said, “you never know when
rope will come in handy on a date. Lots of reasons to tie people
up.”