The Armory paused on a ridge of red rock that loomed high over Dahlsvaart. It was less a town than a collection of factories that a town had formed between like lichen in sun-starved cracks. The smoke-stacked buildings reached for the sky like fingers on malformed hands, and though the factories were quiet, the reek of scorched iron and oil still whispered on a faint wind. A well-maintained road led to a gate in the high walls.

"Looks like they didn't lie about the strike," Saber said. "Industry town like this? The sky should be full of smoke."

"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 we've never been here before," the alchemist answered.

"You sure?"

The alchemist frowned. "Actually, no."

"Let's move," Dagger said. "Somebody's war is running out of bullets."

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

"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. Discarded leaflets dusted 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 over the advertisement she'd found. "We're here at your mayor's invitation."

"I wasn't informed about that," the guard said.

"Does your boss tell you everything?"

"I work for the city."

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

The guard shifted his feet. "You still can't bring those weapons inside."

Vice walked up 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 an uneasy look at the monk, whose words issued from the shadow of his hood. The guard stared at the Vice's armored hands.

Dagger gave Vice a sidelong glance. "These aren't weapons, constable, they're tools. We're here to repair the most important part of your machinery. Which way to the mayor's office?"

*

"Ah, more mercenaries. Excellent," Mayor Roth said.

He was a tall, slender man who might 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 were that long and strange, she'd try to keep the mutinous things occupied too.

"We cost more," Dagger said.

Roth grunted. "I could see to raising the amount, but I only pay once the job's done. And there are conditions."

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

Roth pointed a finger that looked like a spear with gout. "No damage to my factories or the town. My workers have created enough havoc with their petty sabotage."

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

"Anything else?"

"That is all of it."

"Loss of life?"

Roth waved the question away. "I have men and women waiting in nearby towns that don't have our opportunities. They're eager to work, but there's no point in bringing them in now." The mayor reached into a 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 barely glanced at the stack of metal. "No."

Roth raised an eyebrow. "This is a king's fortune. Any moneychanger 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 amount is fine," Dagger said, "but the money changers in town work for you, Mayor Roth. We have a deal, but that had better be coin by the time we're finished. We're here to get paid, not pay you."

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

Mayor Roth nodded. "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 went to an inn to prepare. It must have been empty for weeks because of the workers' boycotts, but the landlord was still sour over his new 'guests.' They weren't paying either. The landlord sent food and drink up to their room carried by a sullen employee who looked like he could have been the landlord's son. The Armory took the food and shooed him out.

"Who wants what?" Dagger said as she picked at the lukewarm stew with a scowl. She was not talking about the food.

"I'll take the leaders when they're in the open, captain," Powder said. "Shouldn't be too much trouble. Several of the tallest buildings are near the plazas where they protest. Good sight lines. And when we know where they cached their weapons and supplies, I'll destroy them."

Saber nodded at Powder. "I'll take the ones that go to ground and hide."

"I'll handle the strikes themselves," Pitch said. "The pot's already close to boiling. We just need to turn up the heat. If somebody can get hold of one of their leaders, they'll talk to me. I'll get Saber and Powder the names and locations they need."

"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?"

Saber grinned. "I always wanted to be a holy warrior."

"Saber," Vice said, "you could never be holy, not even if I boiled you for a year in blessed waters."

"Vice, was that a joke? Did Vice just make a joke?" Saber said.

"When that's all done," Dagger said, "I'll break whatever force assembles in response."

"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 just get Pitch to poison it."

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

"Remember that one army?" Powder asked. "The one that worshipped a rabid sheep? It took a whole barrel."

"It's not the same ratio at all, Powder," Pitch said. "That was a lot of small doses in their cook pots. But a giant would need..." He went quiet, doing calculations in his head.

"Figure it out later, Pitch," Dagger said. "Let’s get some sleep. Busy days ahead."

PITCH

Trouble in a bottle.

Pitch sat up on the lumpy mattress and groaned into his hands.

Mornings were loathsome and he preferred to pretend they didn't exist. With mumbling fingers, he dropped several leaves and a crystal into a steel bowl and ground them with a pestle until they were dust. He carefully dumped the powder onto a reasonably clean book and snorted most of it, the rest he rubbed into 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 the dash of a bantam rooster.

The first of the protests was assembled outside a dry goods shop that the workers patronized, paying with the scrip that made for over half their wage and was useless outside the town.

Pitch hovered around the edge of the crowd and looked for late arrivals and stragglers. Most of the demonstrators seemed genuinely impassioned and far too alert. He wanted one who was just there for the show, but not the big ones, the angry ones, or the ones moving with the nervous, excited energy of the fire starter.

There.

Watching from a corner on the edge of the action, shaking her fist and howling with a dull-eyed enthusiasm was a stout, drink-aged woman. She was about his size and dressed like the other workers. Pitch made his way over to her, shouting inarticulately as he went. When he moved beside her, 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 snatched the vial and ducked into a nearby alley to open her present.

Pitch counted to fifty and then followed. He found her slumped and snoozing happily with a smile worthy of a saint's portrait.

"I envy you the dreams you are having," he said. "My gift to you. Now, for your gift to me." He took off his coat and hid it behind an empty refuse can, then removed her jacket and cap and put them on. He could have bought 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.

"Copper's for kettles! Paper is for books! Pay in silver!"

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

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

Pitch wondered what failed poet had written that last chant.

Overlooking the protest on a hastily erected stage of wooden planks and sawhorses was one of the leaders. He called 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 hyper focus that turned the grains of sand in time's hourglass into molasses, but this morning he'd also cut a sedative into it which was about to be vital.

He took a cloth bundle from his pocket and unwrapped six four-inch vials of paper-thin glass sealed with red wax. As he shouldered his way through the thick of the crowd, he dropped the first vial. It landed in the dirty street where the stomping, shuffling heels of crowd would find it. It 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 were smothered by the sedative.

He dropped another vial. Then another.

There is no ardor like the chemical, Pitch thought. Take one crowd, add passion. Sprinkle with years of frustration, sore backs and hungry bellies. Dash with righteous fury and deglaze with herd mentality.

Pitch's blends would put beneath that protest stew a blaze worthy of a dragon's throat. He felt the crowd's vibration change when he was halfway through it. He dropped another vial and then another. Better hurry, he thought, and dropped the last of his payload and popped out the far end of the mob.

He returned to the snoozing woman and laid her coat and hat beside her, then collected his own from their hiding spot and went to lean against a building across the street to watch.

The mob's shouts fell out of sync and became angrier. They shoved and pushed each other. They looked away from the stage and glared at 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, Pitch thought.

Pitch approached the guardsmen who'd been sent to monitor the demonstration. What did any brewing conflicted need to boil over?

"Constable," Pitch said to one of them.

"What do you want?" the uniformed guard said, his eyes focused on the mob. That clears up another question, Pitch thought. They don't all know who I am. He wondered why Roth hadn't told all his hardcases that there were mercenaries here to quell the strike.

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

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

"I saw at least two pistols," Pitch lied. "And knives. It's not the whole crowd. But there's a group in the middle. I think they're planning something."

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."

"Understood, constable. Thank you for your service."

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

The final ingredient was beyond even his ability to replicate.

Authority.

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

VICE

Gimme that old time religion.

Vice rose with the dawn and drank half a flagon of water. He ate a plain, dry barley cake and a cold chunk of mutton left over from last night. He 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 monk loomed in his doorway.

"Morning, Vice," Saber said. "I'll be ready when you are."

Vice nodded. He commandeered a cart that the innkeeper used to shop for supplies at the market and pushed it through the streets. He considered the task ahead of him.

The town's god was a worker's nondescript deity: Fairness. The laborers had prayed it into existence when they'd left their shops and assembly lines.

Its principles were all borrowed things — scraps of a hundred other faiths, picked up over the years like coins found in the street — and their leaders would be weak priests all, regurgitating these tenets as if they were their own, from hazy memory and half-remembered euphorias. They didn't even have an afterlife. 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 empty warehouses. Sermons were desperate and fragmented, each a feeble grasping at an imagined freedom, a deliverance spoken of in an aspirational manner. But if they succeeded here, if the Armory failed, it was possible theirs might become a true, new faith with an infant god, still slimy from the womb. Vice idly wondered which scrap of the heavens that god would have claimed for itself, but the issue was irrelevant.

The Armory had arrived.

He had arrived.

Vice pushed the cart to a coffee house where the mayor's bullymen waited for him. He walked to the table of uniforms and stood over them until they stopped talking and looked up.

"Yeah?" One of them said.

Vice scowled. "Would you make us both look foolish by demanding that I ask?" He reached out one armored hand and snapped his fingers with a dull clang. One of the guards took out a piece of paper. 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 birth cord?"

The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

One of the guards winced. Vice pinned him with a hard stare. Did he sympathize with the workers and their faith? Or was he 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 the fuck are you talking about?" The guard asked.

Vice nodded knowingly. "To the ignorant all truth sounds strange. If you do not understand, do not be concerned. That truth was not for you."

The guard who might be a father blinked. "What?"

Vice left the guards to their coffee. What small lives to have, so unexamined, he thought, for only through aggressive study could a small life attain meaning and become vast.

He followed the note in his pocket to the first address, pushing the cart among the pedestrians with his hood up, feeling as he always did when he walked among people — as one forever apart.

Not even my footsteps sound the same as the unguided, he thought.

The first church was a low building and Vice paused to watch the faithful file in. He left the cart near the door and walked to an open window to listen as the workers took their seats. A portly man huffed his way to a podium.

"The sermon begins," Vice muttered.

"As many of you know," the portly man said in hard voice, "we lost Lucius, Kenell and Darvish in the riots yesterday.

Vice sniffed. Ah, Pitch you did your work well, didn't you? With chemicals you earn your place in one faith's hell and another's heaven. What a winding path to walk, paved with the fallen.

"I know many of you are worried," the union official continued. "Some of you are afraid. But you must stand strong. Roth's shown us he's growing desperate, ordering his enforcers to use violence like that. It means the strike is working, but as I've told you so many times, this fight can't be stopped. But we'll win. As long as you all stand strong and stand together. It's fine to grieve, but if you really want to honor them, keep going. You must have the strength to walk on, even when the distance is unknown!"

Vice examined his armored fists and made sure the cords were taut. He clasped his hands below his chin and bent his head.

"Watcher in the Darkness," he whispered, "I know you are looking on from somewhere, no matter how far. Only a weak man demands his god's protection. I am not weak. For by leaving my steps unguided, you have made me strong. Know that all I do, I do in your name. As I speak it through my actions, so do you live on."

Vice lifted his head and walked into the building.

The portly leader glanced at Vice sharply but did not pause his sermon. Instead, he spoke even louder and with greater passion. He shook his little fist and sent ripples through the crowd.

Ah, Vice thought, as it is with every dissipated priest. They show their worshippers with every gesture that they are different, that they are better. But who could trust such a man, such a faith? So unsharpened by life, unsullied by action? Did he mean to present his visage as the dream, the goal? As the embodiment of successful deeds done, when those deeds would always be done by others?

"Are you the keeper of this faith?" Vice called to man behind the podium.

The workers turned in their chairs to glare at Vice, their sunken cheeks and hollow eyes told of fear, fatigue and deprivation. And still they listened to this feeble visage of plenty with his straining belt and groomed mustache, Vice thought.

The monk addressed the workers next. "Is he your paragon? Your guide?"

"Faith?" The leader said, "Nothing like that here. This isn't a church, it's a private meeting for workers. What's your business here?"

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

The man behind the podium rubbed the bridge of his nose. "Look, I don't know who you are, but this is a private meeting for the mistreated workers of Dahlsvaart. You're obviously not a laborer so—"

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

"I'm not a priest!"

"Of course you are. You stand before a congregation. You talk of salvation, deliverance. Of long roads walked blindly. What is that if not a priest?"

"This has nothing to do with 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?"

"Okay, I'm done," the union official said. "Fitz, Jons, get this nutcase out of here. We've got shit to do."

Two big, broad-shouldered men got up and approached Vice. Chairs squeaked as the workers made space around the monk and soon there was a circle a few feet from the podium.

"C'mon. Time to go," one of the big men said.

Vice spread his arms wide. Each of the men glanced at his armored hands and paused. "Is it time?" the monk asked. "Truly? Are we called to the beyond this day? Because I tell you, I have been there and returned again and again. There is nothing at the end for me. What waits for you? Do you know? Has your overfed priest told you yet?"

"Boys, just 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 monk threw back his hood and fixed his piercing, mad eyes upon them. "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. But that is the way of most priests," Vice said and paused to give each man a significant look. "Most, but not all."

"You're a priest?" One of them asked with a quick glance at the fat man behind the podium, who made a helpless gesture in reply.

"I am a man of faith bereft," Vice said. "But though my god is dead, its power is greater than your own because my faith has never died. Yours toddles from its cradle on unsteady feet, a feckless, celestial child ready to knock down the world without a care for you. When you need this infant god most, it will abandon you."

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

The men took Vice by the arms and walked him toward the door. Vice whispered to them. "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 yours such a faith?"

One of the big men shrugged. "I don't know, buddy. Sorry about this. You know, if you are a priest."

"No," Vice said to him with a beatific smile, "it is I who am sorry. I have come to test your faith. Always an ugly 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. The men grunted and yanked, but Vice stood firm.

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

"Why?" Vice asked. "Why not? I have come to be exactly that! I am the anvil against which your faith might become steel... or scrap metal."

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

"Rejoice!" Vice boomed as the two big men fell and the chairs squeaked as 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 truth! Rejoice, for this day you are cupped in the memory of a true god!"

The fat man behind the podium screamed. "For the last time, asshole, this isn't a church!"

Vice bulled through the workers and rushed the stage. He kicked aside the podium and took the fat man by the head and turned his face to the workers. They stopped and watched as Vice whispered to his hostage. "Look at them! Look at your flock, priest. See them come together with the light of the true faith in their eyes! What is this, if not a place of worship?"

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

"No. I am quite sane. Now watch as I tear down your temple, stone by stone."

Vice released the union leader's head and shoved him aside. He turned to the mob before the podium and smiled.

"Come then," he called, "show me the truth of your faith!"

The workers rushed the monk of a dead god. They tried to grab and overwhelm him with numbers, but he had spoken true. He was the anvil. They were barely pig iron. When each had fallen, broken or cowering on the floor in search of their fighting spirit, Vice returned to the leader quivering behind what was left of his podium. He might as well have tried to hide behind a single blade of grass.

"Your altar will not save you," Vice said softly. The man only stared up at this walking, sermonizing cataclysm. "Walk or be carried?"

"What?"

"Carried then," Vice said. He trussed the union leader's arms and legs, gagged him and threw him over his shoulder. He carried him outside and dumped the man into the cart, covered him with a horse blanket and wheeled the cart through the streets toward the tavern, where Pitch was waiting in the basement.

SABER

Doing it in the dark.

Saber looked down at his bed and smirked. This was by far the prettiest company he'd ever had across a set of rented sheets, and it broke his heart a little to have to leave any of them, especially when the candles had lit them with such a golden glow. He took a deep breath and sighed. Time to make some hard choices.

"I'm sorry, my dears," he whispered.

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 half-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 also chose a pair of heavy blades, more like cleavers, and then stripped the scabbards he wouldn't need from his leathers while he sipped strong coffee. Dagger filled the doorway with her shoulders.

"Sun's down," she said. "You ready?"

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

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

Saber winked at her. "There's a certain poetry in a good departure. How can we appreciate a memory if we try and live it forever?"

"We do live forever."

"No, Dagger. We die forever."

Dagger only grunted. "No poetry in tonight's work."

"Alas, but one 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, bloody night ahead."

Saber shuffled the pages. Names. Addresses. Maps. Directions. Even guard rotations. The workers had themselves a very organized strike. "Has Powder left already?"

Dagger nodded.

Saber sheathed the d-guard short sword at his hip and several knives under his arms, against his thighs and across his chest. He slid the cleavers home in overlapping scabbards on the small of his back, and 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 after the sun went down.

Saber knew that bargain — all bargains in fact — 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 Dahlsvaart did not make engine parts or nails — they made guns, cannons and swords. Roth had reported a lot of missing inventory, some of which was certain to be stored beneath the floorboards of the workers' homes.

Saber kept 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. Evening meals and entertainments 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 map up to the dim light.

The first address was just ahead.

The building was seven stories tall, and Pitch's notes indicated the hall past the front door would be lined with guards, even at night. The roof on the other hand...

Saber slipped behind the building, tested a drainpipe for strength and climbed, the treads of his soft boots tacking against the building's rough stucco. He dragged himself up onto the roof and froze.

A wooden hut with a door had been built over the hatch that led down into the building. Next to the door was a man in a chair. Saber waited. He looked from hand to hand for a weapon, but the man only had a bottle loosely gripped in his fingers. Saber edged closer. The man was snoring and there was rifle across his lap. The barrel had been sawed down to the stock.

Powder would disapprove, Saber thought. You lose a lot of range with a short barrel.

Saber grinned and shook his head. This sleeping guard had probably just learned to pull a trigger yesterday, after just enough instruction to learn 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 fell and shattered. The guard snorted awake, and Saber spun around to the deep shadows on the far side of the hut.

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

"I can see you," the 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 of the hut banged open, and a short woman rushed out, gun up and ready.

"Shilba? What is it?" She asked.

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

"Where did they go?"

"I chased them off. They ran."

"Where? Right off the edge?" the woman asked, her tone dubious. Saber took out another knife and prepared to throw it.

"What's this?" she asked.

Saber ducked further back into the shadows. He heard the sound of glass grating.

"Just some broken glass," Shilba said.

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

"No!"

"Again? After Roderick told you what would happen?"

"I wasn't!"

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

"I wasn't drinking," Shilba whined.

Saber peered around the edge of the hut and watched as the woman gathered up what was left of Shilba's bottle and tossed it over the edge.

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

"I wasn't drinking," Shilba muttered.

The woman went back into the hut and slammed the door, leaving Shilba alone with his sullen protests. Saber heard another slam from inside the hut as she went through the hatch that led down into the building. He crept slowly around the hut and marked Shilba's position by his faint, indignant muttering, by the creak of the chair as Shilba sat back down and finally by the click of wood as Shilba set his rifle on the ground.

Saber rushed around the hut, grabbed Shilba by the chin and drove a knife through his voice box. As Shilba gurgled and tried to swallow steel, Saber yanked the blade free and slammed it into his chest over and over, digging a well in his lungs. Saber propped the dead man up and unloaded the rifle before laying it back across his lap.

"Sorry, Shilba," he whispered. "You were right. Somebody was trying to get onto the roof."

Saber slipped through the door of the hut, opened the hatch that led into the building and ghosted his way down the shadowed stairwell.

Good that it's dark, he thought. This was such an ugly way to practice his craft, on catlike feet against untested opponents disarmed by sleep and lack of proper training.

He wouldn't want to watch it either.

POWDER

Whatever you do, don't look up.

It had taken a bit of an argument with the innkeeper to get a spare table moved into her room. He huffed like an ox stuck in a mud hole when the gunner asked for a tablecloth too, and whined that she'd better not be expecting him to throw a banquet.

"Nobody's going to want to eat what I'm serving," Powder murmured. The innkeeper’s eyes dropped to the pistols holstered under her arms. She patted his shoulder. "Just get me the table. Then go away."

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, four revolvers and three derringers, two over-under varieties and one with four barrels bound together. She put aside the shotguns and two of the revolvers. She'd be working at range tonight. Then she stripped two pistols, cleaned and oiled them, and loaded them along with two derringers, because she knew you can't always pick your distance. Then she set the first rifle, the longer of the two, in the center of the table and gave it the same treatment as the pistols.

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

"Just about, captain," Powder said. She kept her eyes on Dagger while her hands stripped and oiled the second rifle, even though it was brand new.

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

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

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

"That's true. Just 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 Pitch finish?"

Dagger put a sheaf of tattered papers on the table by Powder's weapons.

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

"As ever."

Powder set aside the weapon and wiped her oily hands on a rag. She looked over the names adorning a series of hand-drawn maps. "Pitch still squeezing the guy?"

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

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

"What?" Dagger asked.

"A friendly target?"

"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."

"I could remove the buttons on their shirts one by one if you like."

"A slightly 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 overlooking the small square and looked down on the shouting protesters. Roth had ordered extra street lamps and the square was bathed in amber.

She took a small telescope from her bag and trained it on the crowd. After Pitch's chemically orchestrated riot, they'd been smarter this evening. More union officials were in the throng, marked by finer clothes and cleaner faces. They kept a stronger handle on their powder keg of foot soldiers: A patted shoulder here, a restrained touch there, leaning in to talk directly into an ear. Not one of the workers was carrying anything that looked like a weapon, but Powder knew the odds. You couldn't count on every one of your soldiers to obey orders, and among all that swarming, ragged cloth there would be knives, clubs and even a pistol or two.

She trained the telescope on the town guards ringing the plaza. They were another story. Their faces were tense. They all carried pistols.

But for the moment, the protest was careful and calm.

That wouldn't do at all.

Powder opened her leather case and took out her rifles. She wanted one target wounded and angry, and the other messy and dead. Tonight she had switched own rifle's barrel for a narrower bore. It was loaded with a small bullet under a quarter-load of powder, it would only kill with perfect shot placement, but the Dahlsvaart rifle held a much larger, crosshatched round under a full load. A scalpel and a bludgeon. She unfolded a black canvas shroud and lay down on the roof, pulling the shroud over her body as she rested the barrel on the edge. She set the second rifle by her side and took aim at one of the guards.

"Right or left, my son?" She noted the holstered pistol was on his left side. "Ah, you're a lefty. I'll be nice. Leave you the arm you jerk off with."

She aimed for the edge of his right shoulder. The gun barked. The guard screamed and fell.

The other guards crouched and pulled their weapons. If they'd been trained soldiers, Powder might have been worried about them guessing her position, but instead they pointed their pistols at the protesters. Some of the shouting workers had heard the shot, and they turned to look at the guards instead of looking up. She saw them draw knives and truncheons from their clothes as their panicked leaders tried to keep them calm.

"Oh, no you don't," Powder muttered.

She grabbed the Dahlsvaart rifle and sighted at the protesters as ripples of conflict worked their way through the crowd.

"C'mon," Powder whispered. "Not just any leader. I need the big dog. Where are you?"

One by one, the workers and even the union officials turned this way and that, looking for orders. 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. The apron was spotless. Her laborer's clothes were brand new. She raised her hands and turned rapidly, desperately giving orders to preserve the protest and prevent a mob.

"There you are," Powdered whispered. The guards moved in and tense standoffs sparked along the edges of the throng.

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, held for a moment, and burst outward. Guns fired, guards fell, truncheons swung. Powder pulled back from the roof and packed up most of her weapons.

She left Dahlsvaart rifle where Mayor Roth's agents would find it.

Her night wasn't finished yet.

*

Powder descended the iron stairs down the side of the building and collected the satchel she'd stashed under a pile of refuse. She brushed off the wetter bits of the camouflage, and gently slung the bag over her shoulder.

What was inside could not be jostled.

She went first to two apartment buildings that Pitch indicated on his map with hash marks and numbers. Around the back, she found the brittle shack of a public toilet and covered her face with a scarf. She expected the usual human stench but there was nothing but a faint wisp. The outhouses hadn't been used in months.

She flipped back the lid of one of the toilets to reveal a hidden ladder and climbed down into a hollowed-out basement. She lit a small lantern and by its slender light saw stacks of crates. Inside one were rifles, in another were short, single edged swords — the kind an artillery soldier might rely on once the quarters were close and the guns were quiet. In one corner were several sealed barrels of black powder.

"Shit," she muttered, "that's double what Pitch said was here."

She set the lantern on a crate of guns and knelt with her satchel. Packed inside, among scrap leather and raw wool still greasy with lanolin, were two iron boxes and two hourglasses filled with viscous liquid that had been carefully packed, liquid side down. She and Pitch had created the boxes together after making two prototypes barely bigger than matchboxes, the first of which they used to blow a hole in the paved yard behind the inn. The second, Pitch had kept with a grin, saying "you never know."

Powder took out the first. Made of a thin cast iron, a blow with a hammer would shatter it, while a larger force would turn it into a burst of slag shrapnel. She took out one of the hourglasses. The empty end was flat and sealed with a wax of Pitch's invention. Holding it carefully, liquid side down, Powder took a deep breath. Once installed, she'd have an hour to get clear. She set the iron box on top of one of the barrels of gunpowder, and then carefully set the hourglass, wax side down, into a hole in the top of the box. The liquid dripped. The wax smoked. It started to dissolve.

Powder slung her bag and quickly climbed back to the street. She had to get to the other cache before the first blew and the workers went to check on their stolen weapons.

Pitch's intel was off. If the other cache was the same size, it suggested the workers had more weapons than Roth's men had thought, and far more gunpowder. 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 found the second cache in an abandoned building with a ragged hole in the side. She planted the last device, ran to a nearby factory and climbed the external stairs to the roof. She's just settled when the first device went off. The ground rumbled and a gout of fire shot up into the night sky.

She aimed at the hole in the building and waited. Only minutes later, a half dozen workers rushed up the street and inside to check their cache. Powder swore. The bomb had been designed to make it look like the arms hadn't been stored properly and gone up on their own. It would take a bomber of Powder's skill, or Pitch's education, to look at the scorch patterns and find 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.

But if even one of the workers survived the blast, they'd all know it hadn't been an accident.

"Fuck," she muttered.

She heard a single, panicked shout of alarm from inside the building and then a figure sprinted out. Powder's rifle snapped. The worker dropped face down, curled up and writhing, just before a blast of sound and roaring white light stole Powder's night vision. When the sunspots cleared, the building was a pile of rubble. Powder grinned. They'd been stupid enough to fiddle with the device. Power rubbed her eyes and looked through her scope for the man she'd shot, but the fallen building had buried him.

"Time for bed," Powder muttered. She climbed down and threaded her way through side streets to the inn.