Lindsay Buroker: Ice Cracker II

No doubt to keep people’s minds occupied, Tollen started barking orders. “Let’s get this mess cleaned up, our people fixed up, and some food in bellies.”

Until they could take the body outside, there was a limit to what they could do, but Amaranthe helped sweep up the blood-drenched sawdust for later disposal. Sicarius returned to his weapons cleaning. Despite the crowded cabin, everyone gave him space. Merla started fixing soup in a pot over the coal stove.

“Hello,” Amaranthe said, coming up beside her. Time to start looking for information.

The other woman shrank away.

“Rough night,” was all Amaranthe said.

It took more idle chatter before Merla seemed to realize Amaranthe was not going to bring up the earlier attack.

“I was supposed to be home tonight.” Merla sliced potatoes into the pot. “With my girls. Instead I’m here, doing a slave’s work, killing my back, hauling fifty-pound blocks of ice out of the lake, being threatened by mystery beasts.”

Amaranthe made an encouraging sound. Listening to the woman rant probably wouldn’t reveal anything crucial, but one never knew.

“I went to the same school you two did, you know,” Merla said.

“Oh?”

“You probably don’t remember. I was two years ahead, but then I got pregnant and had to quit. I was good at math, great at balancing books. I would have been… I always wished I could go back, but who has the money?”

Behind them, Sergeant Tollen finally sat down. He laid his pistols on the table and withdrew a cleaning kit. While his hands worked, his gaze shifted back and forth from the thuds at the door to Sicarius’s corner.

“Some birthday,” Merla muttered.

“Hm?” Amaranthe asked.

“He turns fifty tomorrow.”

Amaranthe waited until others sampled from the communal soup pot-she did not think Merla still wanted to kill her, but one could not take chances-and took two steaming bowls. She sat at the table next to Tollen and placed one in front of him. He ignored it in favor of glowering at her over his disassembled pistol. He ran a rag through the barrel, and the sharp tang of cleaning oil mixed with the soup’s cider and beef aroma.

“Your father must be disappointed in you,” he said before Amaranthe could start speaking.

She blinked. It wasn’t exactly what she had expected him to bring up.

“I remember talking to him once,” Tollen said. “He was sacrificing a lot so you could go to that school. He must be horrified that you’re walking around with that monster-” a head jerk toward Sicarius’s corner, “-and making pay as a cursed mercenary.”

If Amaranthe had been a hound, her hackles would have reared. As it was, she kept herself to a tightening of her fingers around the soup spoon. Most insults she brushed off, but the ones that thudded into the dartboard close to the target were harder to dismiss.

“Yes, I’m sure he would be disappointed,” she said, “if he hadn’t been dead for eight years.”

“Oh.” The glower softened. “How did he die?”

“Black Lung.”

“That’s right, he was a miner, wasn’t he? A slow, painful way to die, I imagine, but better than suicide.”

Suicide? Amaranthe’s anger drained, and she tapped her spoon on the edge of the bowl, wondering what had prompted the sergeant to mention suicide.

“He did contemplate that near the end, I believe,” she said.

“But he wouldn’t have done it, I’m sure. To destroy one’s soul for eternity…”

Amaranthe nodded. Thanks to the Mad Emperor Motash, atheism was the official “religion” of the empire, but memories of ancestor worship remained a part of imperial history, and the old religion promised an eternal soul for those who died as warriors-or in otherwise respectable ways. Suicide, considered cowardly, destroyed the soul and made it unavailable for descendants to consult.

“Sergeant,” she said, “there’s something I’ve been wondering. As you mentioned, my father made a lot of sacrifices to pay for my education. As a foreman in the mines, his salary would have been comparable to an enlisted soldier’s. We had very modest accommodations. As I recall, Nelli grew up in a nice house with a nanny. And she said you financed the startup of her business.” She did not want this to sound like an interrogation, so she stopped short of asking the question. But she waited expectantly.

“I gambled,” Tollen said.

“Successfully? Really? Was it pit fights? Strat Tiles? The Maze?” She knew numerous gambling venues but few people who beat the odds and won big enough to change their fortunes.

“One time, long ago. Uluaria, her mother, died in childbirth, and I was away so much, for months and years at a time. Soldiering was all I knew, but the border was no place to raise a girl. I had to…take chances, make sure she was cared for.”

“Of course, it certainly seems she’s doing well, present danger aside. And you’re here now to spend time with her. I know how much that must mean to her. My mother died when I was young, too, and I didn’t see my father often either.”

She kept her tone casual, conversational. There was something here, she knew it, but she didn’t want to accuse him of anything and raise his defenses.

Tollen glanced at his daughter, who sat on a stool across the cabin, bandaging a man’s arm. Then he leaned forward, pressing a finger into the table. “Did you ever resent him? For not being there?”

She almost said no, thinking it was the answer he wanted to hear, but he would probably appreciate honesty more. “Sometimes. As a child, I’d wish he would quit mining and get a job in the city, even if it meant having less.”

Tollen winced.

“But now I know he wanted to give me everything he could, no matter what sacrifices he had to make, and I understand. You’re right, I do fear he’d be disappointed with me now, but fate has played a hand in that. I never intended to become a fugitive or a mercenary. It is temporary.”

A clank sounded above them. The metal stove pipe rattled. The cats were far too large to fit through it, but they seemed to be checking every part of the cabin for weakness.

Tollen picked up the barrel and started reassembling his pistol. Amaranthe withdrew a box from her parka and flipped it open. It held quarrels and a couple vials of poison. She liked the repeating crossbow, since it allowed her to fire several shots in as many seconds, but the tradeoff was power. The bolts lacked the chain-mail splitting oomph of a regular crossbow or a pistol.

“If I killed Sicarius, would you shoot me?” Tollen asked.

The question startled Amaranthe so much she almost dropped the vial of poison. Tollen was not looking at her, but staring at the freshly smeared quarrel tip.

“Uhm, if it were after the fact, I’m not sure. I’m not the avenger sort. I’d certainly defend him to the death during a fight.” Still watching his face, she sealed the vial. “But, if you’ll excuse my bluntness, you’re not a match for him.”

“Hm,” was all Tollen said.

Amaranthe finished with the quarrels and padded through the sawdust to sit next to Nelli, who had finished helping the wounded.

“A word?” Amaranthe asked.

“What is it?”

“Your Da. Has he seemed different at all to you since he retired?”

“Well, I’ve seen more of him this last two months than the last ten years.”

Amaranthe nodded, inviting more.

“He seems older, of course,” Nelli said. “And he’s been preoccupied since things started going wrong around here, but I assume he’s just worried for me. He keeps trying to get me to go home, insisting an ‘Operations Manager’ can handle this. I can’t stay home and be safe while my workers are being killed though. For all I know, this curse, or whatever it is, is my fault.”