Free The Assassin's Curse by Lindsay Buroker Page B

logs. The explosion had torn its boxy
chest open, leaving metal peeled back like flower petals.
    “That, on the other hand, shouldn’t be
a possibility,” she muttered, referring both to the destruction and
the location of the machine. Fort Urgot was ten miles north of
their position, at the opposite end of the lake, where the soldiers
had fields and special tracks for practicing maneuvers with their
steam vehicles. They didn’t take them for strolls into the
woods.
    Sicarius lifted a finger to his lips, then
signed, We are not alone , using the hand code one of their
team members had taught them.
    Soldiers? Amaranthe signed back and
pointed to the wreck. She wondered if anyone could have survived
that if they had been inside at the time of explosion.
    Sicarius shook his head once. It could have
meant no, or that he didn’t know. He was always hard to read.
Before she could ask for clarification, he waved for her to stay
put and disappeared into the foliage.
    Amaranthe intended to be good and wait for
him to return from scouting, but a breeze rattled the branches, and
a beam of sunlight caused something to glint amongst the needles.
She managed to ignore it for almost five seconds before easing out
from behind the stump and creeping over to take a look.
    A gleaming metal... thing lay on the
ground, half-buried by dead leaves and needles. It was a weapon of
some sort, but nothing she recognized. It had the length and
breadth of a canon, but the barrel was divided on the inside. Two
bronze wheels with spokes were smashed beneath it, one warped into
uselessness. A metal lever—a crank?—dangled from the back of the
barrel.
    Something touched her shoulder, and Amaranthe
jumped to her feet, spinning in the air. As she came down, her
crossbow came up, finger finding the trigger.
    Sicarius stood there, and he caught her
weapon before her instincts aimed it anywhere that would have
threatened him. It was a little disheartening how easily he did
that, but as long as he was on her side, it didn’t matter. A blush
warmed her cheeks though; she shouldn’t have been so entranced that
it was easy to sneak up on her.
    Find anything? Amaranthe signed the
words in a rush, so he wouldn’t have time to point out her
deficiencies.
    He tilted his head toward the wreckage and
strode in that direction.
    “That’s what I like about you, Sicarius,”
Amaranthe murmured. “You don’t over-explain things and ruin the
mystery.”
    He paused at the smoldering wreckage and
pointed inside the toppled steam tramper body before moving aside
so Amaranthe could look.
    Though she had never ridden in one of the
towering machines, she had seen them back in her days as an
enforcer, when she could openly jog past Fort Urgot for her morning
runs. There was a protected seat up top where a sniper could fire
in three hundred and sixty degrees, while the inside held a cramped
bench for two soldiers, a pilot and an artillery man, who worked a
quad breach-loader with shells the size of cannon balls. The metal
body rode on two articulating legs with duck-like feet that could
maneuver across all sorts of terrain.
    That was how it was supposed to look
anyway. With holes blown through two walls due to the ruptured
boiler, this one was such a mess that Amaranthe struggled to
identify parts. The only thing she could tell for certain was that
it had a lot of cargo, mostly weapons and none of them familiar.
She pulled out a rifle, thinking it the most normal-looking find,
but even it was more advanced than the percussion-cap firearms she
had seen. She thumbed open a latch under the hammer to find an
empty chamber.
    “They’re prototypes.” Sicarius must have
decided whoever had crashed the tramper had moved out of the area,
for he spoke instead of signing. “The army has been working on
cartridge ammunition.”
    “Cartridge?” Amaranthe peered about the
inside of the tramper, looking for... whatever a cartridge was.
    “Bullets, powder, and primer in one