Conspiracy by Lindsay Buroker

Sicarius’s sake. She didn’t see him—only the hint of his
light somewhere deeper in the room—but she didn’t want him getting
a stray beam in the back. “I made a friend.”
    As she spoke, Amaranthe dodged between two
of the freestanding forges, jumped over a bin of coal, and came
face-to-face with a flywheel so tall it nearly brushed the ceiling.
It was part of some towering device for stamping metal. Other
machines loomed in the shadows.
    The grinding from the ambulatory construct
grew louder behind her, and she continued into the maze of
machines, picking her way toward the other lantern.
    “ Find a door yet?”
Amaranthe asked. “Because we don’t want to be trapped by—” She
rounded a machine and almost ran into a pair of black-clad legs
dangling in the air.
    Sicarius hung by one hand from the frame of
a wooden double door set in the ceiling. His fingers gripped a thin
reinforcing board no more than an inch thick, and Amaranthe had no
idea how he could hold his body up that way. He held his knife in
his other hand and was probing the crack between the two doors.
    “ It’s secured from above,”
Sicarius said, as calmly as if he were standing beside her. “I’m
attempting to see if there’s a bar that can be
dislodged.”
    “ I’m not sure there’s time
for that.” Amaranthe checked the route behind her. The machines
offered some cover, but they were not solid obstacles, so it was
possible the construct could fire through them. “I have a... Deklu after me,” she
said, naming the word on the machine, though she didn’t know if it
was a description or a name or something else entirely.
    “ Sentry,” Sicarius
translated.
    “ In what
language?”
    “ Mangdorian.”
    “ Hm, another machine made
by that shaman who wanted your head?” If so, Amaranthe wondered
anew if Forge might be involved here.
    A red beam streaked out of the darkness. A
flywheel on a machine deflected part of it, but it also caught the
side of Sicarius’s arm.
    He dropped to the floor. Amaranthe stepped
forward to help him, but he grabbed his lantern and pointed her
toward the side of the chamber. Smoke wafted from his sleeve; she
couldn’t tell if the beam had struck flesh as well.
    Before they had gone more than a few feet,
something pounded against the overhead door. Books?
    Laughter sounded, muffled by earth and wood.
Not Books.
    “ That’s right ya vagrant
thieves,” someone called, “stay down there and die!”
    “ Thieves,” Amaranthe said
as Sicarius led her to the wall. “At the worst, we’re spies.” A
wall aisle lay clear for them to run back to the front door if they
wished, but she saw little point in that.
    “ You took some of their
ammunition.” Sicarius parted from her side and hopped onto a
machine to check the sentry’s progress.
    “ Just a couple of bullets.
That’s more like sampling than thieving, don’t you
think?”
    “ Did that argument work on
you when you were an enforcer?” His gaze shifted to the ceiling,
searching for weaknesses to exploit perhaps.
    “ No, but I’ve changed this
last year. You’ve influenced me with your law-skirting
ways.”
    “ I see your classification
of me as heroic was short-lived.”
    The grinding of the sentry drew closer, and
Amaranthe glimpsed it moving through the open space beneath the
overhead door. Sicarius jumped down from his perch a second before
another beam split the air. It burned into the cement wall behind
them, hurling pieces to the floor.
    With few other options, Amaranthe and
Sicarius ran past the forges and toward the front of the
chamber.
    Sicarius glanced back. “Those beams remind
me of technology I saw once before, a long time ago.”
    “ A long time ago?”
Amaranthe stopped before several crates of ammunition. “It looks
irritatingly modern and deadly to me. It’s made from the Science,
I’d assumed.” She tapped a crate thoughtfully, wondering if
whatever was in the cartridges was as flammable as black
powder.
    “ The