“Do you have any idea how close together the explosive charges are?” I asked. The metal spikes that held the trawling lines werecloser to each other than I liked. I had thought Kacha would separate them by some yards, but my initial plan was now thwarted.
I couldn’t swim to the lines and cut them loose, because the explosive charges would immediately crash into the subsequent line, swept up by the current of the river.
We would have to remove the charges from each line before cutting them. It wasn’t safe, and if Tallu had suggested doing it himself I would have knocked him out cold to stop him. But it was the only way I could see to do it. If we had one man on either shore, one loosening the spike and the other drawing the line in, we would be stuck with the same situation. In the fast-moving current, the line would swing into the subsequent explosives.
Maybe that would be fine, but I had a feeling that Kacha was smart enough to leave some men behind. As soon as they heard an explosion, they would rush forward, searching for evidence. We were counting on their dismissing our first scouting boat as nothing more than fisherman who got caught at the wrong place.
Kacha, overextending himself by trying to claim more territory, likely hadn’t left more than a few men. If they were smart, they were hiding much deeper in the forest so that if we sent a search party to land, we wouldn’t find them.
It was too much supposition, too much guesswork, but I knew Kacha. This was a gamble, one that he was hoping would pay off, but he wouldn’t risk sending more men than necessary.
“I’m going to swim out to the first of the charges, cut it loose, and begin stockpiling them here in the boat. Will that be safe?” I looked first at the scout, but he shrugged, immediately looking at one of the other soldiers. The man frowned, considering.
Lerolian said the soldier worked mostly in munitions. It had been the reason he qualified for the mission. After a pause, he nodded slowly.
“Bring me one, if you can,” he said. Then his eyes widened and he looked around the boat before returning his gaze to me. “Wait,youplan to go?”
“Yes,” I said simply. I began taking off my boots, standing to shed the heavy outer layers of my clothing.
The man immediately tried to stand, but the motion nearly overset the boat, so he sat down. “Your Highness, I cannot let you do that. If something were to happen to you, His Imperial Majesty would kill me.”
“At this range, if I set off one of the explosives, it would catch all of us in the blast.” Having stripped off everything except my underclothes, I winked at him. “So let’s hope that nothing happens to me, because I enjoy all of my limbs, and I would hate to be the reason General Saxu lost so many of his most talented soldiers.”
Taking my favorite blade, I placed it between my teeth. Then I stepped on the edge of the boat with one foot, feeling the rest of them lean to the side, giving me counterweight. With a swift motion I dove off the edge, plunging deep into the river water.
In the near darkness, I couldn’t even see the bottom. Tallu had said most of the rivers used for travel had been dredged over the years, dug deeper and deeper to handle larger and larger boats.
The current tugged relentlessly at me, but my muscles were strong enough to keep me in place. I swam forward a few yards before breaking the surface. Neither of the boats had lit their lanterns, in accordance with the plan we had come up with earlier. I waited for my eyes to adjust to the dusk before lowering my head into the water and slowly kicking forward.
No one would call the river waterwarm;it raised goose bumps on my skin, but I was used to the frigid northern waters. In comparison, this was nearly relaxing.
Even swimming slowly, the trawling line hit me across the middle, surprising the breath out of me. I exhaled sharply, feeling the bubbles float up my cheeks.
I surfaced again, reaching out with my hand to feel the taut line. Slowly, I swam along it until my hand encountered a thick knot and a canister hanging from it.
I kept my touch gentle, bumping it little more than the river water would move it. I couldn’t see under the water, so I let my fingers trace along the knot. I had been taught how to read most situations in the dark: how to wrap a garrote around a man’s neck even when I couldn’t see, how to pick a lock by feel alone.
It took me only a moment to realize the thick knot wasn’t in the rope itself. Instead it was a separate line that attached the canister to the one stretching across the river. I took the blade from between my teeth and gently went to work on the knot.
The water had swollen the rope, and it took me some time to wear away at it enough that the canister came loose in my hand, floating into my palm with an unexpected weight. I put the knife between my teeth and returned to the scout boat swimming with only one arm, the other cradling the explosive.
I grabbed hold of the edge of the boat, and when the soldiers made a move to pull me in, I shook my head. Carefully, I lifted the explosive canister up and the expert took hold of it. In the water, I had only known the explosive by feel, and now I could barely see the outline of it in the moonlight.
The expert’s fingers were gentle and efficient, but he didn’t hesitate as he examined it, squinting so that his brow furrowed. He brought it closer, turning it in his hands.
“I need light,” he said.
“Do it,” I said.
One of the other soldiers lit a lantern, holding it low and trying to guard the light with his body. I finally caught sight of what I had spent so long freeing from the rope. The metal cylinder had small divots in various locations. They looked almost decorative, but I couldn’t see the pattern.
Three seams went around the canister, marking where it had been sealed. The explosives expert traced his fingers over the thin seams in the metal before gripping tight and twisting the bottom. River water poured into the boat, and he caught three rocks that fell free before they could hit the hull.
“There’s electricity stored in the rocks. They’re the same sort of stones we use in our lanterns.” He held up one of the rocks, and in the darkness all I could see was wet river rock.
“They explode when they impact each other?” I asked, kicking my legs to keep some warmth in my body.
“No. There is purified alcohol in an airtight section of the canister,” he tapped at the top with his nail, and I could hear something inside muffling the sound. “Our boats hit the line hard enough to jostle the canisters, the rocks hit each other, releasing the electricity, and that sets the alcohol alight.”
