The Armory paused on a ridge of red rock and looked at the Dahlsvaart. It was more a collection of factories that a town had formed between like lichen in sun-starved cracks. The massive, smoke-stack-studded buildings reached for the sky like fingers on malformed hands. The factories were still, but the reek of burnt steel and oil was still whisping along the faint wind. Two well-maintained roads led to the high walls.

"Looks like they didn't lie about the strike," Saber said, resting a hand on the hilt of one of his swords.

"Why would they lie?" Powder asked, resettling the rifles strapped over her shoulder.

"Could have been a trap," Saber shrugged.

"Trap seems doubtful," Pitch said.

"Why? Plenty of people want to kill us," Saber said.

"Sure, but nobody here knows us," the alchemist answered.

"They're about to," Dagger said and started down the faint path that led down to one of the roads to Dahlsvaart. "Lets move. Somebody's war is running out of bullets."

The guards at the gate gave the band of strangers a nervous look, and stepped into their path cautiously.

"What's your business here?" One of them asked. His uniform was cleaner than the others and pressed. "You can't enter Dahlsvaart with those weapons." Past him, The Armory could see slogans painted on the buildings in shaky letters, and discarded leaflets dusting the street. One of them blew through the gate on a fateful wind and fetched up between Dagger's boots. She bent to pick up the tattered scrap. Most of it was too weathered and dirty to read, but block letters shouted "Wurkers' Ryts." Pitch peered at it over Dagger's shoulder.

"They got the punctuation right," he said with a chuckle.

Dagger handed the newspaper advertisement to the guard. "We're here at your mayor's invitation."

"I wasn't told about that."

"Does your boss tell you everything?"

"I work for the city."

"This isn't a city, constable. It's a business."

"You can't bring those weapons inside."

Vice walked up to stand beside Dagger. "This town has forgotten its purpose. People must serve a town if it is to survive, but a town should remember that without people it is just a shell for hermit ghosts."

"What?" The guard said with a nervous look at Vice, whose words issued from the shadow of his hood. The guard stared at the monk's gnarled, armored hands.

Dagger gave Vice a sidelong glance. "We don't have any weapons, constable, we have tools. We're here to repair your machinery. Now, which way to the mayor's office?"

*

"Ah, the mercenaries. Excellent."

The mayor was a tall, slender man who would have towered over Dagger if he'd been able to stand up straight. He looked like a dandelion struggling with a broken stem.

"Now, you're the third band of mercenaries I've hired to do this job. What makes you think you'll be successful?" Roth said as he stared at Dagger over grasping fingers formed in a steeple. Dagger wondered what the pose was supposed to signify. Maybe it just made him feel better. If her fingers had that many joints, she'd keep the mutinous things occupied too.

"We cost more," Dagger said.

"I only pay once the job's done. And there are rules," the mayor said.

"That's your right," Dagger said. "But too many rules and this problem won't get solved."

"No damage to my factories. The workers have created enough havoc with their petty sabotage."

Dagger waited. When the mayor said nothing else, she spoke.

"Anything else?"

"That's it."

"Loss of life?"

"I have men and women waiting in nearby towns without our opportunities. They're eager to work, but there's no point in bringing them in now." The mayor reached into an open safe behind his desk and took out a stack of thin gold bars. He put them on the table. "If you're successful, this is yours."

Dagger looked at the stack of metal. "No deal. We work for coin."

"This is a king's fortune! Any money changer in town can convert this to coin without blinking. "

Dagger looked at Pitch and then nodded toward the gold on the table. Pitch picked up one of the bars. "It could be purer," he said.

"The money changers in town work for you, Mayor Roth," Dagger said. "Turn that into coin. We're here to get paid, not pay you."

Pitch set the gold back on the desk. "And we know what this is worth," the alchemist said. "Short us and we'll sell our servives to the workers. Cheap."

Mayor Roth nodded. "You have a deal. But cross me and you won't leave this town alive."

"As if that matters," Dagger said.

The mayor looked at her strangely but let the comment pass.

The Armory decamped to an inn. It had been nearly emptied by the workers' boycotts, but the landlord was still sour to his new guests. They weren't paying either. He sent food and drink up to their room carried by a sullen employee who looked like he could have been his son. The Armory took the food and shooed him out.

"This is business as usual," Dagger said as she picked at the lukewarm stew with a scowl. "Who wants what?"

"I'll take the leaders when they're in the open, captain," Powder said. "Shouldn't be too much trouble. All of the buildings have windows and the plazas are near rooftops. Probably good sight lines."

Saber nodded at Powder. "I'll take the ones hiding inside."

"I'll handle the strikes themselves," Pitch said. "The pot's boiling. We just need to turn up the heat. If one of you can get hold of a shotcaller. They'll talk to me."

"I will get you your leader to speak with, Pitch," Vice rumbled. "The workers are men of faith. I will shatter their symbols and cast down their false deities."

"This isn't a holy war, Vice," Dagger said.

"All we do, we do in the Vigil's name. What is that if not a holy war?"

"Fair enough," Dagger said. "When that's done, I'll break the force that assembles outside the mayor's office."

"So, the easy job then?" Saber said with a smirk.

"Know your role, Saber." Dagger said. "You want me to do the creeping and cutting, you'll have to wait until somebody hires us to kill a giant."

Saber laughed. "You'd still get Pitch to poison it."

"I wonder how much poison I'd need to kill a giant," Pitch mused with a faraway expression.

"Go get some sleep," Dagger said. "Busy days ahead."

PITCH

Pitch sat up on the lumpy mattress and groaned into his hands. Mornings were loathsome and he preferred to pretend didn't exist. But if they had to, there was no reason to let the dawn have all the fun. With mumbling fingers, he dropped several leaves and a crystal into a rough steel bowl and ground them with a pestle until they were finer than flour. He snorted most of the powder off a reasonably clean book, and rubbed the rest of it into the whites of his eyes. In moments, the room's colors took on a much more pleasant hue and he could have counted every crack in the old floorboards after a single glance. He gathered his equipment and stepped out the door with all the dash of a royal bantam rooster.

The first of the gatherings had assembled outside a dry goods shop the workers patronized, paying with scrip that made for half their wage and was useless beyond the walls of the town. Pitch hover around the edge of the crowd and looked for late arrivals and stragglers. Most of the demonstrators seemed genuinely impassioned. He wanted one just there for the show. He skipped the big ones, and angry ones, the ones moving with the nervous, excited energy of the firestarter. There. Watching from a far corner, shaking her fist and howling with a dull-eyed enthusiasm was a stout, drink-aged woman. She was about his size. Pitch made his way over to her, shouting inarticulately as he went. She grinned at him as if they were watching some sporting contest, and swayed unsteadily. Pitch showed her a little stoppered vial in the palm of his hand. Her eyes widened. She looked around and back at him. Pitch nodded encouragingly and she went into the alley behind them to open her present.

Pitch counted to fifty and followed her. She was snoozing happily with a smile worthy of a saint's portrait.

"I envy you the dreams you are having," Pitch said to her as he removed her jacket and cap. "My gift to you. Now, for your gift to me."

He could have bought the clothes, but then they'd have looked new. With his disguise in place he slithered into the very center of the protest, listening for the cadence of their shouts and matching them until he'd gotten the words right.

"Scrip won't grip! Fuck the company coin!"

"Pay in silver! Copper's for kettles!"

"No more sweat and callous for scrip and malice!"

Vice wondered who among them was the failed poet writing their chants.

Above them on a hastily erected stage was one of the leaders. He was leading the chants like conducting an orchestra, screaming through the mouthpiece of a tin speaking horn. The crowd seemed to move in slow motion around Pitch as he rode the wave of his own chemicals. This particular blend created a hyperfocus that turned the grains of sand in time's hourglass into molasses. The tranquilizer he'd cut into it was about to be vital. He took a cloth bundle from his pocket and unwrapped six vials of paper-thin glass barely sealed with red wax. As he shouldered his way through the thick of the crowd he dropped them one by one. They landed in the dirty street where the stomping, shuffling heels of crowd would find them. The first broke. Chemicals hit air. They blended and smoked. The fumes traveled up past the workers boots to their dirty trousers, climbed past their belts and used the buttons of their shirts like stairs until they entered screaming mouths and flaring nostrils. Excited pulses and hot blood would carry them the rest of the way.

The fumes hit Pitch too, but bounced off the sedative in his bloodstream.

There was no ardor like the chemical, Pitch thought. Take one crowd, add passion. Sprinkle with years of frustration from sore backs and hungry bellies. Dash with righteous fury and deglaze with herd mentality. Pitch's blends would put beneath that stew a blaze worthy of a dragon's throat. He felt the crowd's vibration change when he was halfway through. Better hurry, he thought, and dropped the last vial as he popped out the far end of the mob. Tossing aside his stolen coat and hat, he went to lean against a building across the street. The mob's shouts fell out of sync and became angrier. They shoved and pushed each other. They began to look away from the stage and toward the guardsmen lingering at the edge of the plaza. Arguments and scuffles broke out. He saw a hand flash a knife. A large worker knelt to pry loose a paving stone.

Only one ingredient left to add to his stew.

He approached the guardsmen who'd been sent to form a loose ring around the edge of the demonstration.

"Constable," Pitch said to one of them.

"What do you want?" the uniformed guard said.

"I'm not from here, just came to do some business. Just thought you should know I saw weapons in that crowd."

"They're armed?" One of the other guards asked.

"I saw at least one pistol," Pitch lied. "Three of them have knives. It's not the whole crowd. But there's a group in the middle."

The guards looked at each other and fingered the truncheons hanging from their belts. Pitch could almost hear their brains doing the math of conflict. There were few less appealing equations than a club divided by a bullet.

"Get moving, merchant," one of the guards said, "can't vouch for your safety anymore."

"I understand completely, constable. Thank you."

Pitch walked away from the protest. He heard a gun go off. Screams spiked.

The final ingredient his mixture had needed was beyond even his ability to replicate. What did any brewing conflicted need to boil over, froth and smoke?

Authority.

He hurried down a side street. He had four more protests to visit.

VICE

Vice rose in the morning. He drank half a flagon of water and ate a plain, dry cake of barley and knelt to speak with the Vigil. As usual, his god didn't answer, even in his imagination. Such was the nature of a dead god. He left his room to begin the day's work, and passed Saber's. The duelist was sharpening the tools of his trade. He looked up as the big monk loomed in his doorway.

"Morning, Vice," Saber said, and returned to his ablutions. "I'll be ready when you are."

Vice nodded.

The town's was a worker's god, so nondescript that Vice did not even bother to remember its name that the laborers and artisans had torn themselves from their shops and assemblylines to pray it into existence. Its principles were all borrowed and stolen, scraps picked from the pockets and lips from a hundred other faiths. Their leaders, these weak priests, had calloused, stained hands and regurgitated their tenets from hazy memory and remembered euphorias. They didn't even have a afterlife yet, they were too concerned with the small, dirty machinations of this one. Their churches were union meeting places in the back rooms of silenced factories and the corners of stocked warehouses. Sermons were desperate and fragmented, each a grasping at a freedom only imagined, a deliverance spoken of aspirationally. If they succeeded here, if the Armory failed, there's might be a true new faith. Vice wondered which scrap of the next life their god would claim as their own if the issue wasn't irrelevant.

The Armory had arrived.

He had arrived.

Vice met the mayor's bullymen in a coffee house. He walked to their table of uniforms and stood over it until they stopped talking and looked at them.

"Yeah?" One of them said.

"Would you make us both look foolish by demanding that I ask?" Vice reached out one armored hand and snapped his fingers. They made a dull clang. One of the guards took out a piece of paper and handed it to the monk. On it were four addresses.

"Just four?" Vice said.

"That we know of," the guard said.

"What a timid faith," Vice said. "Nascent. Unborn. What could it change and become if allowed to grow? If I was not here to abort it, to strangle it with its own birth cord?"

One of the guards winced. Vice pinned him with a hard stare. Was he a sympathizer with the workers and their faith? Or just a father?

"The loss of a child is a terrible tragedy," Vice said to him, "know that yours slumbers in the arms of a god of the true faith."

"What in the fuck are you talking about?" The guard said with a scowl.

"To the ignorant all truth sounds as blasphemy. If you do not understand, don't be concerned. That truth was not for you."

"What?"

Vice turned and left the confused guards to their coffee. What small lives to have and be so unexamined, he thought, for by aggressive study did a small life become vast. He followed the note in his pocket to the first address, walking among the workers and pedestrians of the morning with his hood up. Feeling as he always did when he walked among men, as one forever apart. Not even my foosteps sound the same among the unguided, he thought. The first church was in a tenement and Vice paused to watch the faithful file in. He walked around the building to one of the ground floor windows and listened as chairs squeaked and the workers took their seats. A portly man huffed his way up a short set of stairs to a podium.

"The sermon begins," Vice muttered.

"As many of you know," the man said in harder voice than his form suggested, "we lost Lucious, Kenell and Darvish in the riots yesterday. I know many of you are worried and afraid. But you must stand strong. Roth's shown us he's growing desperate. It means the strike is working, but as I've told you so many times, this fight once started can't be stopped. But we'll win. As long as you all stand strong. Grieve, but know we'll keep going in their name. You must have the strength to walk on, even when the distance is unknown!"

Vice scoffed and shook his head. Ah, Pitch you did your work well, didn't you? Vice thought. With chemicals you earn your place in one hell and another heaven. What a winding path is faith.

Vice examined his armored fists and made sure the cords were taught.

He clasped his hands below his chin and bent his head in prayer before the doors.

"Watcher in the Darkness, I know you are looking from somewhere," he whispered. "Only a weak man demands his god's protection. I am not weak. For you have made me strong by leaving my steps unguided. Still, know that I do this in your name and as it is spoken, so do you live on."

Vice lifted his head and opened the door.

The workers sat in chairs arranged in rows before the podium. The portly leader paused his monologue for only a moment, but he watched Vice sharply. Ah, Vice thought, as it was with every dissipated priest. They show their worshippers with every gesture that they are different, that they are better. Who could trust a man of faith unsharpened by life, unsullied by action? Did he mean to present his visage as the dream, the goal? As the embodiment of successful deed?

The man fell silent and stared at Vice. The workers turned in their chairs to stare at him.

"Are you the keeper of this faith?" Vice asked the fat man behind the podium. Across the turned heads Vice saw the sunken cheeks and hollow eyes of fear, fatigue and deprivation and before them stood this talking head, this visage of plenty with his straining belt and groomed mustache. "Is he your paragon? Your guide?"

"Faith?" The leader said, "There's no faith here, sir. This isn't a church. It's a private meeting."

"No faith?" Vice said with a sweeping gesture for the room. "No faith!? You open your mouth and lies pour out like a waterfall. No faith. Bah! You drip with faith. This temple overflows with faith. Look at you all, in neat rows eagerly supping from the table this man has laid out for you!"

"Look, I don't know who you are, but this is a private meeting for the mistreated workers of Daalsvahrt. I know you're not a laborer so..."

"How?" Vice asked as he walked up the central path between the rows of chairs. "How do you know that I do not labor? How can you guess my trade, priest?"

"I am not a priest!"

"Of course you are. You stand before a congregation and preach. What is that if not a priest?"

"This has nothing to do with any of the gods. We are..."

"You are here," Vice interrupted him, "to make these men believe that they can change their fates. That at the far side of this long trial there is a better life waiting. What is that if not a religion? What is such an idea if not godly?"

"Fitz, Jons, get this nutcase out of here. We've got shit to do," the man behind the podium said and two large men approached Vice from the back of the room. They shoulders were so wide they had to walk between the chairs single file. Chairs squeaked as some of the workers made space around Vice. Soon there was a circle a few feet from the podium.

"C'mon, old man. Time to go," one of them said to Vice.

Vice spread his arms wide. Each of the big men glanced at his armored hands and paused. "Is it time to go? Are we called to the beyond this day? Because I tell you, I have been there and returned. There is nothing at the end for me."

"Boys, get this crazy prick outta here," the man at the podium yelled.

"He calls you boys," Vice said. "Are you his sons to be so spoken to?"

The two large men got closer. Vice could have reached out a hand and touched either of them. He shook his head sadly and threw back his hood. Most of his face was gray beard and piercing, mad eyes. "I tell you now, your faith is weak. You follow men incapable of taking up the banner they so casually ask you to suffer under. This is the way of most priests," Vice said and paused to give each man a significant look. "Most, but not all."

"You a priest?" One of them asked and glanced at the fat man behind the podium.

"I am," Vice said, "a man of faith bereft. But though my god is dead, its power is greater than your own because my faith has never died. Your nascent faith toddles from its cradle on its first, unsteady steps, a feckless, celestial child. When you need it most, it will abandon you."

The union leader slammed his hand down on the podium. "Why are you two still talking to this lunatic? Get him the fuck out of here!"

The men took Vice by the arms and began to walk him toward the door. Halfway to the opening that showed the street beyond, Vice whispered to the men who had him by the arms.

"Faith must be strongest in the dark. The unshakable pillar beneath the world when all is chaos, when all is devoid of light, of meaning. It must be the golden rope that lets one climb from the depths of life's dry well. Is you faith as pure as mine?"

"Probably not, buddy. Sorry about this. If you are a priest."

"No, my son," Vice said to him with a beautific smile, "it is I who am sorry. I have come to test your faith, an unenviable task. But fear not, I bring deliverance. I bring truth. I bring a breaking after which there will be nothing but light."

"Whatever you say," the other large man said as they neared the door. But then Vice stopped and though they tugged, they could not move him any closer to the door. The men grunted and tugged, but Vice stood firm.

"C'mon, old man. Don't make us get rough."

"Why?" Vice asked. "Why not when I have come to do exactly that? I bring you men the anvil against which your faith might become steel... or scrap."

Vice spun and ripped his arms free of their grip. He darted left, shoulder low, and his bulk took one man beneath the arm, cracking his ribs. He fell gasping and Vice turned to the other, casually catching his punch against his armored forarm. The big fist shattered against the steel. Before the big man could even moan, Vice destroyed his collarbone and shoulder with a falling, overhand strike worthy of a rockslide.

"Rejoice!" Vice boomed as the chairs squeaked and the rest of the workers in the room leapt to their feet and into the brawl. "I have come to shatter the lie of your faith with the golden light of truth! Rejoice for this day you are cupped in the hand of a true god!"

"For the last time, you crazy fuck, this isn't a church!" The fat man behind the podium screamed with mix of new fear and old frustration.

Vice rushed the stage and kicked aside the podium. He took the fat man by the head and drew himself down to stare into his eys. "Look at them. Look at your worshippers, priest, see them come together with the light of the true faith in their eyes!" He turned the fat man's face to the workers as they edged toward the stage.

"What is this," Vice whispered hoarsely, "if not a place of worship?"

"You're out of your mind," the fat man said, struggling to free his head from Vice's plated grip.

"Now watch as I tear it down, stone by stone," Vice said as he dropped the union leader's head and shoved him aside. He turned to the mob slavering before the podium, their shock and uncertainty falling to rage. Vice smiled at them.

"Come then," he intoned, "Tell me the truth of your faith!"

The workers rushed the monk of a dead god. After he'd laid each of them low, he returned to the leader, who was cowering behind his podium. He might as well have tried to hide behind a single blade of grass.

"Walk or be carried?" Vice asked.

"What?"

"Carried then," Vice said and trussed his arms and legs, gagged him and dumped him into a cart outside. He covered the man with a horse blanket and wheeled him through the streets and back to the tavern's basement where Pitch was waiting to make all sorts of discoveries with his chemicals and a few small knives borrowed from Saber.

SABER

Saber looked down on the bed and smirked at by far the prettiest company he'd ever had across a set of rented sheets. It broke his heart a little to have to leave any of them. The candlelight gave them a golden glow. He took a deep breath and sighed. Time to make some hard choices.

On the bed were several swords, a dozen knives of different lengths and types, curved, straight, hooked and jagged. A long sword lay suggestively between a curved saber with a basket hilt and a broad-bladed, single edged short sword with a simple brass d-guard. That one would be short enough to bring. He stripped the scabbards he wouldn't need from his leathers while he sipped strong coffee.

"Sun's down. You ready?" Dagger asked, filling the doorway with shoulders.

Saber nodded. "Nearly. It's a delicate choice, you know."

"You're a romantic, Saber," Dagger chuckled.

"There is a certain poetry in a good departure. How can we appreciate a memory if we try and live it forever?"

Dagger only grunted. "Not much poetry in tonight's work."

"A man can't live on wine alone, there must also be bread," Saber said and drained his coffee. "Did Vice and Pitch come through?"

In answer Dagger dropped a stack of pages torn from a notebook on the table by Saber's bed. "The man was quite the talker once Pitch got hold of him. You've got a long, ugly night ahead."

Saber shuffled the pages. Names. Addresses. Maps. Directions. Even guard rotations. This was a very organized strike.

"Has Powder left already?"

Dagger nodded.

Saber sheathed the d-guard shortsword across the small of his back and sheathed several knives under his arms, against his thighs and across his chest. He tightened every buckle and smeared the metal with lampblack to hide the glint. He swept a long coat over all of it, clapped a hat on his head and slipped out the window that led to the alley behind the tavern. At night, Dahlsvaart was hushed. The leaders of the strike had struck a deal with Roth and his guards, a kind of good faith detente, to keep the streets relatively quiet at night.

That bargain would be off the table by sunrise.

Ordinary factory workers wouldn't have been much of a problem, dark alleys or not. But the factories of Dahlsvart did not make engine parts or nails. They made guns, cannons and swords. Roth had reported a lot of missing inventory certain to be stored beneath the floorboards of every worker's house. Saber slunk along the streets, keeping to the alleys. The town had some indoor plumbing, but in the poorer warrens of the workers' quarter, public troughs were more common. Saber covered his mouth with a cloth and waved away the hungry flies. Music wafted from the windows. In some evening meals were being taken with tired, tense families eager for the strike to end. He tucked himself into a corner below a glowing window and held Pitch's first map up to the dim light coming from a curtained window.

Ahead was the first address.

Saber tested a drain pipe for strength and began to climb, his rubber-soled, soft boots tacking against the tenement's rough stucko skin. He dragged himself onto the roof and froze.

Near low structure that held the doorway leading down into the building was a figure in a chair, a hat casting a deep shadow over its face. Saber waited. He looked from hand to hand for a weapon, but the figure only had a bottle loosely gripped in its fingers. Saber stood and walked closer to the seated man. Then he heard the snoring. Saber knelt by the figure's boots and noticed the sawed-down repeated over its lap.

You lose a lot or range with a short barrel, he thought. Powder would disapprove.

Of course this guard had probably just learned to pull a trigger and been told which end made all the noise before some idiot leader put the weapon in his hands. The guard twitched in some dream, and his hand opened. The bottle shattered. The guard snorted awake and Saber spun around the structure. He waited while the guard swore.

"Who's there!" The guard called. Saber drew one of his knives out and held it against his leg.

"I can see you," the working guard said in a loud, theatrical tone.

Saber frowned. Whatever he's looking at, it's not me.

"That's right, you better run!"

The door to the roof banged open and somebody rushed out, gun up and ready.

"Shilba? What is it?" The newcomer said, a short woman.

"Somebody was trying to get up onto the roof."

"Where did they go?"

"I chased them off. They ran."

"Yeah?" the woman said, but her tone was dubious. Saber took out a second knife and prepared to throw one of them.

"Wait," the woman said. "What's that?"

"Just some broken glass."

The woman sniffed the air. "Were you drinking up here?"

"No!"

"After Roderick told you what he'd do?"

"I wasn't!"

"Shilba, do you want another beating!? He might kill you next time."

"I wasn't drinking," Shilba said.

Saber cornered his way further around the structure. The woman went to the chair where Shilba had been sitting and gathered up the glass. She tossed it over the edge.

"You're lucky it was me," she said. "Somebody else would tell."

"I wasn't drinking."

The woman banged back through the door, leaving Shilba alone with his protests. Saber listened as her steps on the stairs grew fainter and then edged back to the corner of the hut, marking Shilba's position by his faint, indignant muttering. The chair creaked as the man sat down again. He heard the click of wood as Shilba set the rifle stock down on the roof. The he stepped around the corner, slapped one hand around Shilba's mouth and chin. He yanked the guard's head back and drove the point of his knife through his voice box. As Shilba gurgled and tried to swallow steel, Saber yanked the blade free and slammed it into Shilba's chest over and over, digging a well in his right lung. He propped him up and unloaded the rifle before laying it back across his lap.

"Sorry, Shilba," Saber whispered, "you were right."

Saber slipped through the door and down into the throat of the stairwell. It was dark.

Good, he thought. This was such an ugly way to practice his craft, on catlike feet against opponents disarmed by sleep.

He didn't want to watch it either.

POWDER

It had taken a bit of an argument with the inkeeper to move a spare banquet table up from the basement. He huffed like an oxe stuck in a mudhole when she asked for a white tablecloth too, and whined a few choice words that he'd better not be expecting a meal large enough to fill that table just for her.

"Nobody's going to want to eat what I'm serving," Powder had murmered and the inkeeper's eyes had dropped to the pair of pistols holstered under her arms. She smiled at him and patted his shoulder. "Your job's easy. Get me the table. Then go away."

He'd nearly made another comment, she could see it there behind his lips. She stared at him until he nodded. Soon her cramped room was even more so, with barely space for her narrow frame between the cot and the table. She laid the table with the tools of her trade. Two rifles, one longer than the other by several inches, a pair of short-barreled shotguns with wide muzzles tooled to look like dragon's maws, four revolvers and three derringers, two over-under varieties and one with four barrels bound together. She put the shotguns aside and two of the revolvers. She stripped and cleaned the two others, oiled their parts and then loaded each of the chambers. She did the same with the derringers.

She set a rifle in the center of the tarp. She removed the shorter barrel meant for a larger bullet and replaced it. This barrel was slimmer and longer. The smaller bullets she'd be using that night and its heavier weight would make for an easier distance shot.

"Nearly ready?" Dagger asked, coming into the room and setting her hammer down to lean against the wall. She sat on the bed, which creaked under her bulk.

"Just about, captain," Powder said, her eyes on Dagger as her hands gave a second rifle the same treatment as the first.

"How's it look?" Dagger nodded to the weapon Powder held. It had been supplied by Roth's bondsman and had come off an assembly line right there in town.

"Dahlsvaart's finest? Serviceable enough. I'll be happy to leave it where I shoot it."

"That's the plan. Job should be relaxing. You won't have to shoot around us," Dagger said.

"That's true. Just me and the barrel. A pleasant little night on the town," Powder said.

"Just don't go dancing on the rooftops and getting seen."

"More Saber's thing than mine, captain," Powder said. "Speaking of which, did he leave yet?"

Dagger nodded and put a sheaf of tattered papers on the table by Powder's weapons. The sharpshooter leaned over to glance at them as she gave the Dahlsvaart rifle a final check.

"He goes low, you go high," Dagger said.

"As ever."

Power set aside her weapon and wiped her hands free of oil on a rag. She looked over the names adorning a series of hand-drawn maps. "Pitch still squeezing that guy in the basement?"

"If you call frollicking in a field of daises getting squeezed. Pitch thinks he's almost empty. The daises are about to go away."

Powder hmmed as she stopped at the second piece of paper.

"What?" Dagger asked.

"Friendly targets?"

"We don't have friends here," Dagger said. "Roth wanted an excuse to use force. We're going to give it to him. Don't kill them, just make a point."

"At twenty meters, I could remove the buttons on his shirt one by one if you like."

"Make a stronger point than that."

Powder chuckled.

"And Powder? It's overcast."

Powder gave a theatrical little shiver. "You know just what to say to a girl, captain."

"Save it for harassing Saber. He's the only one still has those appetites."

"I think he's just going through the motions."

"Sometimes that's all you have."

*

Powder crept to the edge of the roof and looked down on the shouting protesters in a small town square. She took a telescope from her bag and trained it on the shouting faces. The workers had been smart this evening. Organizers stood among them, marked out by their finer clothes and smoother faces, to keep a handle on their little clustered powder keg of foot soldiers. It was subtle, a patted shoulder here, and restraint there, leaning in to talk directly into an ear. Not one of the workers was carrying anything that looked like a weapon, but she knew the odds: You couldn't count on every one of your soldiers to obey orders, and among all that swarming, ragged cloth would be a few knives and clubs. Maybe even a few pistols. She turned the glass. The guards were another story. Their faces were tense, she could almost smell their apprehension. She lowered the glass to their waists and noted the pistols they carried. After the hornet's nest that Pitch had stirred up yesterday, the workers were being careful and calm. Somebody must have told them this protest would be chaperoned by guardsmen with something more than clubs.

That wouldn't do at all.

Powder opened her leather case. The rifles lay inside and she primed one with a half-load of powder and the other with a double load. She wanted one wounded and angry and the other messy and dead. Her normal bullets could easily remove a limb or punch a fist-size exit hole in a target. Tonight the first rifle was loaded with a small bullet that would only kill with perfect shot placement, the second with a 2.7mm round packed with twice the powder. She unfolded a black canvas shroud and fit a pair of narrow leather cones over the ends of her rifle's barrels. They'd hide the muzzle flash when she fired.

She lay down on the roof, pulled the shroud over her body and laid the barrel over the edge. She set the second rifle by her side. She put a pair of dark lenses over her eyes to protect her night vision from the muzzle flash and took aim at one of the clusters of guards.

"Right or left? Odds are you're not a lefty. I'll be nice and leave you an arm to jerk off with."

She aimed at his left shoulder and pulled the trigger. The gun barked, but the leather cone hid the muzzle flash. The guard screamed and dropped, and the guards crouched and pulled their weapons. If they'd been trained soldiers, Powder might have been worried about them guessing her position. They trained their pistols on the protesters, the closest of which had heard the shot over the crowd and turned to look at the guards. She saw them draw knives and truncheons from their clothes as their panicked leaders tried to calm them down.

"Oh no, you don't," Powder muttered. She grabbed the Dahlsvaart rifle and sighted at the protesters. There would be one among them. She watched as the ripple of conflict worked its way through the tide. One by one she saw faces turn. Soon there was one figure among that sea of faces to which all others seemed to look, a woman wearing a metal worker's leather apron who raised her hands and yelled for order.

"There you are," Powdered whispered. This rifle had the big bullet and the heavier powder load. A space opened up around the woman while she spoke. The guards moved in from the other corners of the plaza, turning the edge of the protest into a series of tense standoffs. Powder squeezed the trigger.

The bullet turned the leader's sternum into a broken bowl and ripped out of her back in spurt of bone-flecked gore. The protest shrank in on itself like one organism, and then burst outward. Guns fired, guards fell, truncheon's swung. Powder pulled back from the roof and packed up her weapons. She left the Dahlsvaart rifle where Mayor Roth's agents would know to look for it.

She had other stops to make.

Powder descended the wrought iron stairs winding down the side of the building like ivy and collected the satchel she'd stashed under debris and trash. She brushed off the wetter bits of the camoflage, and carefully slung the bag over her shoulder. What was inside could not be jostled. It was why she'd left it there. She went first to two tenements that Pitch indicated on his map with hash marks and numbers. Around the back, she found the public toilet shacks. She covered her face with a scarf before entering, expecting the usual human stench but there was nothing but a faint whisp of uses past. She took down the scarf. The outhouses hadn't been used for their intended purpose in months. She flipped back the lid of one of the toilets and found a ladder. She climbed down to a hard packed, hollowed out basement, took out a piece of slow match and sparked the end. With that slender light she saw the stacks of crates against the far wall. She picked up a nearby prybar and levered open a crate. Inside were rows of matchlock rifles. In another box were soldier's short, single edged swords. The kind of weapon an artillery soldier might rely on once the quarters were close and the gunpowder gone. In barrels she found their stores of black powder. She held the slow match back as she checked the powder's viability.

"Good enough," she said to herself and held the slow match in her teeth as she set her satchel on the ground. Inside, packed among scrap leather and raw, downy wool still greasy with lanolin, she removed the first of two devices she and Pitch had put together. This was a place where their skills overlapped. He worked with chemicals, she with fire. The first device was a box of nearly paper-thin cast iron. A solid blow with a hammer would shatter it. A larger force would turn the box into a burst of slag shrapnel. She removed a wax plug from a circular hole on the top of the box. Inside were four bundles of gunpowder wrapped in cheese cloth and twine. She checked to make sure they hadn't ruptured and then took out the second half of the device. It looked like an hour glass, but one of the bulbs had a flat bottom. The top was filled with liquid, the flat bottom was made with a special wax of Pitch's invention. Holding it carefully, bulb side down, Powder took a deep breath. Once installed, she'd have an hour to get clear. She and Pitch had tested the wax extensively like expectant parents. She set the iron box on top of one of the barrels of gunpowder, and took the lids off the rest. Then she carefully set the hourglass, wax side down into the hole in the top of the device. The liquid began to drip down through the hourglass's slender waist. The wax began to smoke and dissolve. Powder slung her bag and quickly climbed out of the latrine armory and back to the street. She walked with haste but not hurry. She'd want to be well clear of the structure when the acid did its job, and there was one more such cache to visit. She had to get there before the blast woke the town and sent the workers to check on the weapons they'd stolen in the weeks leading up to their strike.

Powder was worried. Pitch's intel had indicated only half the amount of stored gunpowder she'd found. If the other cache was similar, it suggested the strikers' had more weapons than they'd thought. It also meant the devices would do far more damage.

Oh well, Powder thought, no plan survives reality.

She hurried. Behind her, acid chewed wax.

Powder had just planted the second device and climbed to her perch on a collection of runoff pipes coming out of a nearby factory when the first device went off.

She the ground rumbled and then she heard the blast. A gout of fire shot up into the night sky.

She took aim at a ragged hole in the abandonded tenement where the second weapons cache was and where she'd placed the second device. The footing was unstable, and the pipes shook, but she moved carefully and took cover behind the bend in the pipes to watch as a half dozen workers rushed into the tenement. Powder swore. She could take one and perhaps keep the rest pinned inside with pistol fire, but if any of them escaped, they'd all know it hadn't been a random spark that blew the cache. The bomb had been designed to leave behind nothing out of place in a pile of stored arms. It would take a bomber of Powder's skill to look at the scorch patterns and see the evidence of a hidden hand. She was sure there was nobody like that here, not even on the mayor's staff. If there had been, the Armory might never have been hired.

Power heard screams of surprised triumph from inside the empty shell of a building.

"Fuck," she muttered, and worked her way closer on the pipe. She waited. She heard muffled curses from inside the building and then a single, panicked shout of alarm. One figure dashed from the doorway and Powder's rifle snapped. He dropped into the street face down, curling and writhing around the fist-sized hole in his guts. Then thunder as a blast of white light so blinding it took her vision away. When her eyes cleared away the sunspots, she saw the tenement was little more than a pile of rubble. Powder grinned with relief. They'd been stupid enough to fiddle with the device. Power looked at the man she'd shot, but he'd been torn apart in the blast.

"Time for bed," Powder muttered, shouldered her rifle and crept up the pipes to the roof of the silent factory.