Dark Currents by Lindsay Buroker Read Free Book Online Page B

that came off one of the bodies the boys found?”
    “Impossible to tell.”
    “Well, I have a hunch it did. I bet those bodies flowed into the aqueducts through this pipe.” She ticked the cold metal. “I’d really like to know what’s on the other end.” She leaned out, but so much water flowed from the pipe that no air pocket lay at the top. Even if there was air, one could never swim into the current that way, not that she’d be foolish enough to try. Probably.
    Sicarius gripped her by the collar and pulled her back a few steps.
    “I was just looking,” Amaranthe said.
    He grunted.
    “Really. Did I look like I needed assistance again?”
    “You looked like you were considering…trouble.”
    She grinned. “I wouldn’t go for a swim without consulting you first. But, given your past history working for Hollowcrest and skulking around dark places, I wonder if you have any insight into these tunnels.”
    “Skulking?”
    “Yes, is that not what assassins call it?”
    “We call it working.”
    “All right,” Amaranthe said. “While you were
working
, did you ever have reason to travel through our aqueducts?”
    “No.”
    “Can you venture a guess as to what these cartographical errors could be about?”
    “Security,” Sicarius said.
    “Security? Like a false map designed to throw off enemy infiltrators who might sneak into the capital to sabotage the water supply?”
    “You could ask Books who was emperor when the aqueducts were built. We’ve had some paranoid rulers.”
    “True. ‘Paranoia is awareness’ was one of Emperor Vakar’s sayings, wasn’t it? One that’s been oft-quoted throughout imperial history.”
    “Yes.”
    “So, if the map is intentionally inaccurate, what would it be hiding? It’s not as if it’s a mystery where our drinking water comes from.” She waved in the direction of the Tork. “Though I suppose it’d be hard for a saboteur to poison a river. Maybe attacking a reservoir down here would…”
    An expectant cant to Sicarius’s face made her pause. It was as if he was waiting for her to figure something out. She closed her eyes and pictured the topography of the city above her, the direction of the water flow, the location of the pumping houses.
    “Our drinking water
does
come from the Tork, doesn’t it?” Amaranthe asked.
    “So your drawing says.”
    “Right, and my drawing is lying about things.” She pulled out a knife and scraped a rough map into the mildew on the wall, noting the river, the streets around the pumping house, and then the passages they had explored that morning. “That wall that’s blocked off and shouldn’t be…it runs parallel to this side of the river, doesn’t it? And we’ve got a gap of—what do you think?—fifty, one-hundred meters in between? What if that pipe makes a turn somewhere in the space in between? What if the water is actually siphoned from elsewhere? An underground source. Or even another river up in the mountains. And the aqueducts were purposely built like a labyrinth to hide that fact?”
    Sicarius was listening, but, as always, remained hard to read.
    “Am I being too fanciful—too paranoid—or do you agree with the possibility?”
    “The paranoia of past rulers is a well documented fact.”
    “I can’t tell if you’re agreeing with me or simply acknowledging that there’s a remote possibility my fancy-filled mind has latched onto the truth,” Amaranthe said.
    “You have a lot of hunches. Sometimes they are correct.”
    “Well, if this one
is
right, this water and those bodies could have come from anywhere.” Amaranthe rubbed her face. “They might have been dumped in a river hundreds of miles away. We could be on a purple lumpbat chase. Although…perhaps not. The gambling house is local, and one of those dead fellows had that key fob, so…”
    Sicarius was studying the darkness beyond the lantern’s influence, and he did not seem to be listening. Amaranthe cocked an ear, wondering what had