Deadly Games (33 page)

Amaranthe grinned. “Finders keepers.”

“You mean we get to have our own ship?”
Akstyr asked. “Nice!”

“Maldynado,” Amaranthe said, “want to come
find the engine room with me? See if things are in working
order?”

“A tour through a part of the ship likely to
be littered with more corpses? Nice of you to think of me.”

“You could stay and help Books with the
suits. Of course, I’d have to leave him in charge since he’s the
underwater adventuring expert.”

“No, thanks.” Maldynado headed for the door.
“Last time he was in charge, he forced me to swim naked in glacial
water.”

A trapdoor in the center of the corridor led
into the bowels of the ship. Amaranthe climbed down a narrow
ladder, descending into a tight space crowded with machinery.
Nothing clanked or whirred, and the cool temperature promised the
furnaces had been dormant for some time. The air smelled less rank
down there, though a faint singed odor came to Amaranthe’s nose,
reminding her of a smelter.

At the bottom, she took a step, lifted her
lantern, and halted. “Uh.”

Maldynado dropped down behind her.
“What?”

She pointed at a contorted lump of metal that
resembled melted candle wax. “That’s the engine.”

“It’s, ah...” He touched an amorphous
protrusion that might have been a flywheel once. “Hm.”

“A brief but sufficient description.”

Maldynado walked around the contorted mess.
“It’s melted right into the deck. You couldn’t even replace it with
a new engine.”

“It looks like someone wanted to make sure
this ship didn’t engage in any underwater adventures while it was
in town,” Amaranthe said. “If they saw it come into port, they
might have seen it as a potential threat. Even if the treasure
hunters had no inkling of what lay below, someone could have
chartered the boat and used it as a base of operations for
investigating.” She rapped a knuckle on the warped engine. “And, if
this ship was a target, it stands to reason the
Saberfist
could be one too when it comes into port. We haven’t had good luck
dealing with Mancrest, but maybe we should warn him that his
brother’s ship may be in danger.”

A clank answered. Maldynado had wandered to
the far end of the engine room and was poking at a lock on a cast
iron box set into the floor.

“Are you listening?” Amaranthe asked.

“Huh?”

She sighed. Maldynado or Books would call her
crazy for missing Sicarius’s company, but he always
listened
when she rambled on, speculating about their enemy’s actions.

“Do you think we should warn Mancrest that
his brother’s ship could be in danger?”

Maldynado snorted. “I wouldn’t worry about a
military vessel. The marines can take care of themselves.”

“Against practitioners?” Amaranthe nodded
toward the melted engine again. “I suppose it’s possible some sort
of acid did this, but it seems more likely the mental sciences were
involved.” She thought of Akstyr’s bug incineration trick above.
She had seen him create a flame to light a candle, too. There must
be an entire field devoted to heat and energy.

But Maldynado had turned back to the lock and
did not respond.

“What’s so fascinating?” Amaranthe squeezed
past a knot of pipes and joined him.

“This is warm.” He perched on a small stool
bolted to the deck next to the two-foot-by-two-foot box. Rivets
secured the corners, steel hinges fastened the lid, and a padlock
hung from a sturdy steel loop.

Amaranthe touched the cast iron. A faint heat
warmed the coarse metal. She checked to make sure the key was not
dangling on a hook nearby, or something equally obvious, before
fishing her lock-picking set from her pocket. “Scoot over.”

“Ah, yes,” Maldynado said. “Books mentioned
that you’d acquired that skill from Sicarius.”

She selected a pick and a torsion wrench and
bent over the lock. “Did he mention it in a tone of chagrinned
concern for my deteriorating morality?”

“Yes, but isn’t that his usual tone for all
of us? And the world in general?”

After a few minutes of wrangling the pins
into submission, the lock clicked open. Amaranthe hesitated,
thinking of Books’s advice. “It’s imprudent to open a strange box
that may be booby-trapped with magic, isn’t it?”

“How magical can it be? It’s part of a
Turgonian ship.” Maldynado removed the lock and shoved the lid
open.

No explosions threatened to sear off their
eyebrows. Good. Amaranthe peered inside, almost bumping heads with
Maldynado.

A bronze-and-iron rectangular device rested
inside. Two small bars—handles?—stuck out from the ends, levers and
dials dotted the sides, and a red, multifaceted glass knob
protruded from the top. There was no bottom to the outer box, and
the device appeared to sit on the deck, but something beneath it
kept it from resting flush.

Amaranthe tapped one of the handles. When
nothing happened, she risked grabbing both sides and lifting. A
collapsible pipe linked the bottom of the device to the deck
beneath it, and she had no trouble raising it three feet. Two round
concave pieces of glass set in the side closest to her made her
think this was something one looked into. She was about to try it
when the knob on top flared to life, emitting a soft crimson
glow.

She dropped the device. It clunked back to
the deck, but nothing untoward happened.

“That’s definitely not standard Turgonian
technology,” Maldynado said. He had relinquished the stool to her
and crouched at her side, his shoulders fighting for space amongst
levers and gauges protruding from a control panel beside him.

“Maybe the
Tuggle
has been outside of
imperial waters and acquired tools to help in its trade,” Amaranthe
said. “Could this be some sort of underwater version of the
Turgonian periscope? Like the ones used on army trampers for seeing
over trees and brush? Only this one lets you see down into the
water?” If so, that might be just what they needed. “These knobs
and levers could be controls for rotating it and raising and
lowering it.”

“You’re an imaginative girl.”

“Is that good or bad?” she asked.

“Mind if I wait to pass judgment until after
we see if you get us blown up by playing with that thing?”

After giving the glowing knob a wary squint,
Amaranthe pulled the device up again and leaned her face in so she
could peer through the glass eyepieces.

Blackness greeted her. She fiddled with the
knob, which she could raise, lower, twist, and push in different
directions. The view wavered, but she still couldn’t see
anything.

“Because it’s the middle of the night and
dark down there,” she realized. “Drat.”

Amaranthe started to draw back, but her
sleeve caught on a small lever beneath one of the handles. It
clicked. A beam of light shot out from somewhere beneath the
viewing display, and it illuminated the water.

“There we go,” she murmured. The blue-painted
hull of the ship came into view, taking up most of the rectangular
display. Not sure which lever or knob to push, she started with the
handles themselves. The box twisted, altering her view below.
“Ah.”

Turning the periscope allowed her to see to
either side around the bottom of the ship. Nothing more interesting
than a couple of fish and the wavy green algae on the dock pilings
came into view.

“I wonder if this can go down deeper,” she
mused.

“Am I supposed to respond to your mutterings,
or are you simply talking to yourself?” Maldynado asked.

“It depends on whether you have an idea.”

Maldynado pressed on the glowing knob.

Bubbles of water streamed past the display
until the view vanished in a swirl of sand followed by
darkness.

“Crashing it,” Amaranthe said, “isn’t what I
had in mind.”

“Oops.” He released the knob.

The darkness faded again, and the view
drifted up from sand, to seaweed, to water, and finally back to the
hull of the tug.

“Huh.” Amaranthe played with the knob and
figured out how to move the viewer, not just up and down, but
laterally as well. She had trouble fathoming how the latter was
accomplished, but reminded herself magic was involved.

She navigated the display farther from the
ship and deeper as well, marveling as fish flitted through the
light. Remembering their purpose on the ship, Amaranthe angled the
view toward the bottom of the lake.

Ruins—the foundations of long sunken
buildings—protruded from the sand and seaweed. Amaranthe remembered
some childhood trivia about the lake level being lower a thousand
years earlier and of previous civilizations that had called this
area home and built places such as the pyramid.

Nothing more interesting occupied the floor,
and she soon passed the last of the ruins. The sandy slope ended at
a cliff plunging into blackness. She debated whether to back up and
search north and south along the shoreline. Wouldn’t the kidnappers
stay close to the surface for convenience? The lake was hundreds of
feet deep out in the middle. While she considered her options, the
viewer’s momentum, or perhaps a stray current, took it over the
cliff. It dropped rapidly, and she decided to let it continue.

Maldynado shifted from foot to foot. “Can I
play with it?”

“I’m not playing,” Amaranthe said. “I’m
scouting. Our comrades’ lives are at stake. This is extremely
important.”

“All right. Can I
scout
with it?”

An orange glow emanated from somewhere
beneath the viewer, and Amaranthe forgot the conversation. Her
insides twisted. Nothing natural could be making that light; this
had to be the spot.

As the device continued to drop, a great
structure came into view, all painted metal and massive rivets
running vertically and horizontally on the hull. Though the word
hull came to mind, this construction looked nothing like a ship. It
sat on the floor of the lake, reminiscent of a couple of mating
octopi tangled in a tableau of passion. Tentacles—she did not know
what else to call them—spread out on two levels, each tube large
enough that, if they were hollow, men might walk through the
insides. Here and there, bulbous protrusions—rooms?—stuck out. The
two octopi “heads” were bigger, each the size of a house. Some of
the larger protrusions had portholes, and she wondered if she could
slip in close to peep through one.

Cannon-like bristles on the ends of the
“tentacles” stayed her hand. Weapons.

Strange creatures swam about, too. Nothing
she remembered from her science classes in school. A translucent
golden fish glided into view, its sleek body pulsing with inner
light.

Something stirred in the seaweed below. The
fish’s glow increased in intensity, and Amaranthe almost had to
turn her head away, but then, with a flash, a streak of lightning
shot from its body. The charred husk of some innocent lake dweller
floated away.

A shadow fell over Amaranthe’s viewer. She
twisted the knob, pulling the device back and tilting it up for a
look.

A massive purplish blue creature floated
there, tentacles—
real
tentacles—waving around it. A kraken.
She had read of them, but they lived in the depths of the sea, not
in freshwater lakes.

A tentacle streaked toward the viewer. In the
ship’s engine room, Amaranthe flinched, jerking her own head
away.

“Idiot,” she whispered. She leaned back in,
clamped her hand on the knob, and pulled it back as far as it would
go.

But it was too late. The tentacle wrapped
around the viewer, so large it easily blotted out the entire
display. Amaranthe did not hear a crunch or snap—not with so much
distance separating them from the device—but she sensed it. The
view winked out, leaving only her reflection in the glass of the
eyepieces.

She stepped back, lowering her hands.

“Do I get to use it now?” Maldynado
asked.

“Uh, sure.” Amaranthe rubbed her face. She
hoped the kraken could not track the viewer back to the ship.

“Wait, it’s broken.” Maldynado frowned at
her.

“Yes, and it’s possible we shouldn’t stick
around. Just in case what broke it wants to visit.”

Amaranthe jogged for the ladder.

“I can’t believe you broke it before I got to
play—
scout
—with it,” Maldynado muttered as he followed
her.

She almost gagged when she returned to the
death stench of the corridor above. She glanced toward the storage
area where she had left Books and Akstyr, but it was dark, so she
headed outside.

“Over here,” Books called as soon as she
trotted onto the main deck. “We hauled four suits out, and we can
go down tonight. This gear is brilliant. There’s no tubing except
to these packs, which can be filled with compressed air. They must
be magic of some sort. I can’t imagine we have the technology
to—”

“Not now, Books,” Amaranthe said. They had
laid everything out on the side opposite from the dock. “It’s
defended. We’re going to have to—”

The deck heaved, throwing Amaranthe into
Akstyr. She bounced off him and almost tumbled over the railing. It
caught her in the belly, forcing an “Oomph!” out of her lungs. The
far side of the ship rose, slanting the deck further, and she
wrapped her arms around the railing, clinging like a tick lest she
be hurled into the water.

The men cursed, but the sound of wood
cracking drowned their words. Everyone else had tumbled to the deck
as well, and they were bracing themselves against the railing.

“The suits!” Books cried, wrapping an arm
around one helmet and his legs around another.

“Blazing ancestors,” Maldynado yelled.
“What’s going on?”

As abruptly as the far side of the ship had
lifted, it crashed down. Amaranthe flew from her perch and landed
with a painful thump on the deck. The ship rocked, and water surged
over the railings. A suit threatened to float away, and she grabbed
it.