The Emperor's Edge by Lindsay Buroker

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    Dreams and reality meshed for Amaranthe, creating a fevered realm of fear and confusion. Nightmares of Hollowcrest, enforcers, and those dreadful bugs mingled in her head. Sometimes she saw a tiny room with wooden plank walls and metal beams on the ceiling. Perhaps those were her waking moments. During them, she was alone and afraid.
    In one of her dreams, Sicarius appeared, accompanied by a pale-skinned man with tattoos and long braids of gray hair. They spoke in a foreign language. The stranger touched her forehead, chanting as he traced symbols on her skin with a gnarled finger. Confused and alarmed, she tried to pull away, but Sicarius held her down. The ritual had the feel of an ancient death ceremony done by a priest to send her spirit off to some hypothetical afterworld. Amaranthe struggled to retain consciousness, afraid every slip into blackness would be permanent, but it swallowed her again.
    • • • • •
    She woke alert and fever-free in the wooden room she had seen in her dream. Surprised, she struggled to prop herself up on her elbow. The effort made her heartbeat leap to double time.
    A kerosene lantern squatting on a desk provided dim illumination. She was lying on a cot against a wall opposite a closed door. The only other pieces of furniture were a wooden chair and a stove burning next to a stocked coal bin.
    A sickly odor permeated the air. Amaranthe lifted the scratchy wool blanket draping her and sniffed. Great. She was the source. Someone had removed her soiled clothing, but she badly needed a bath.
    Abruptly, she laughed. Who cared if she reeked? She was alive!
    But where was she?
    On the nearest wall, a large rectangular panel of wood hung from hinges like some makeshift shutter. Curiosity won out over fatigue. She wrapped the blanket about herself and sloughed off the cot. Despite the heat radiating from the stove, the scuffed and dented wood floor wept coldness. She propped the panel open with a stick apparently there for the purpose. An optimist would have called the rectangular opening underneath a window. She decided “ragged hole sawed in the planks” was more accurate.
    She looked out upon an enormous icehouse. One- to two-foot wide blocks formed a frozen mountain that stretched into the rafters. Her room was almost as high. A metal staircase to her right led down to the sawdust-strewn floor.
    Motion drew her eye. Sicarius. He had pulled out a few blocks and was practicing kicks and punches from atop them. With agility that would have embarrassed a cat, he hopped from one slick perch to the next. Sometimes he spun and kicked midair, yet he never slipped when he landed. She expected him to look up and acknowledge her—without a doubt he had heard that panel creak up—but he continued his routine without pause.
    Amaranthe dropped her forearms on the edge and watched him. Despite the chilly environs, he wore no shirt. Since his usual black shirts were fitted, the sculptors-would-pay-me-to-model physique wasn’t a surprise, but it was…eye-catching. The way his relaxed body flowed like water curling along its course before it contracted into steel for a strike was mesmerizing. He went into a series of open-handed blocks, each a demonstration in economy of motion, each followed by what she imagined were joint locks. With those shoulders, he would have no trouble twisting someone’s arm off.
    After a long moment, she snapped herself out of her gawk with a shake of the head and a self-mocking snort.
All right, girl, we are
not
going to be attracted to the amoral assassin
.
    Amaranthe moved away from the window and noticed a newspaper on the desk. The front-page headline gave her a start.
Rogue Bear Kills Two More on Wharf Street.
    “Bear?” she muttered. “Did a
sober
journalist write that?”
    Paper in hand, she slumped down on the hard chair. Stumps was surrounded by hundreds of miles of farmlands and orchards. One rarely saw a raccoon in the city, and she couldn’t remember ever