Free Conspiracy by Lindsay Buroker

belt. The
practitioner’s eyes widened, and his hand dropped in a startled
jerk for his trousers.
    The pressure weighing down Akstyr vanished.
He lunged to one knee and hurled his cutlass. He ran in after it,
not expecting the blade to do more than surprise the practitioner
and keep him from reapplying his spell, but the sharp sword cut
into the man’s neck. He dropped, clutching at his throat as blood
gushed out between his fingers.
    Akstyr grabbed his fallen cutlass and
finished the man off. One couldn’t be too careful when
practitioners were involved, though this fellow didn’t look much
older than Akstyr himself, and he’d sounded like a Turgonian. An
unfamiliar sense of remorse touched Akstyr as he watched the man’s
life fade away. What if this had been someone like him? A Turgonian
trying to teach himself the best he could?
    “ Nice work,” Maldynado
said.
    The praise surprised Akstyr
out of his musings. Maldynado never praised him.
    Yes , Basilard signed. Good
work.
    “ Uh, thanks,” Akstyr
said.
    “ That move with the cutlass
was smooth,” Maldynado said. “You were like a little
Sicarius.”
    Akstyr snorted. “Whatever.” Despite the
snort, he had to wrestle with his lips to keep them from a grin.
Sure, he wanted to be a practitioner, not a warrior, but being
compared to an assassin was nice.
    Basilard gestured to the
fallen men—he and Maldynado had finished off their three—and
signed, Now what do we do?
    Unsecured crates of ammunition and bundles
of firearms bounced with the train’s vibrations. Akstyr was lucky
he hadn’t tripped over something on his way to the back. Behind the
dead practitioner, the bigger artillery weapons were strapped to
the wall.
    “ The original plan was to
see where these weapons were being delivered,” Maldynado said, “and
I imagine we can still do that. I’m curious myself, now that we’ve
seen these people weren’t above employing magic to help things
along. That’s not exactly standard imperial operating
procedure.”
    “ I think he was a local boy
keeping his skills a secret, to most of his comrades anyway.”
Akstyr thought of the way the first two men they’d subdued had
seemed terrified by the idea of magic, not like people who’d been
exposed to it often.
    Someone must have known
about his skills and hired him, Basilard
signed.
    “ If we want to find out
who,” Maldynado said, “we better remove the bodies and clean up the
mess. If the people receiving the delivery think someone forgot to
send the help, they won’t suspect we’re around.”
    “ It’ll take a lot of
cleaning to make it look like people didn’t die in here.” Akstyr
eyed blood puddles on the floor and spatters on the crates. “Too
bad Am’ranthe isn’t here. She likes cleaning.”
    I doubt she’d enjoy mopping
up blood , Basilard signed. That’s an unpleasant task for anyone.
    “ I don’t know,” Akstyr
said, “she likes spending time with Sicarius, and that’s about the
most unpleasant thing I can imagine.”

Chapter 4
     
    Twilight descended upon the farm, and
someone lit lanterns in the house. Amaranthe watched from behind
trees lining the stream a few hundred meters away. After her
failure to win a meeting with “Ma,” she and Books had retreated to
the area to wait for Sicarius. Fallen leaves carpeted the banks,
and old gnarled roots that had survived more than a few floods rose
hip-high in places, offering cover from farmer eyes.
    Under the dying light, Books sat on a fat
root, squinting and scribbling notes in a journal he had been
carrying everywhere for the last couple of months. It contained the
information he’d been compiling on Forge and its members.
    Amaranthe nodded toward his work. “Any new
thoughts?”
    “ I think ,” Books said, “that it’s
wretched that one can’t acquire a fresh newspaper anywhere out
here. Don’t these rural bumpkins care about what’s going on in the
world?”
    “ We won’t stay much
longer.”
    “ I can’t be