The moot hall was the basement of a dye house, the walls stained with a watery rainbow of hues that reeked of wet wool. The crowd that was jostling and yelling inside it was no less colorful. Delegates from each of the conclaves were present, their personal oddities exceeded only by their outlandish headwear.

Here a black haired and copper-skinned Utregan stood adorned with the skull of a moose balanced on his beaver skin cap, the antlers occasionally poking his neighbors in the eye. There a ten-gallon gnome in a twenty-gallon top hat strove to be heard in the debate that was raging with incomprehensible fury, his tinny voice drawing amused glances from those around him. Tirce nodded to some familiar faces and took her seat in the rearmost pews, drinking it all in quietly.

“Order!” said an ancient man in a throaty whisper, “If you are all quite finished making priceless asses of yourselves, the delegate from the conclave of the Revelry wishes to conclude his remarks, such as they are,” he added derisively, “Baston, you have the floor.”

“Thank you, Speaker Devin,” said a tall, brash and handsome young man in a red muffin cap, “As I was saying before I was so rudely interrupted,” he glared at someone in the crowd, “The time has come for us to lay aside our petty squabbles and take up arms in common cause. For this day is one that is sacred to the slaves of Solarism: Victory Day! As if their efforts had anything to do with our temporary defeat! Though in truth, the cause of Terranism did suffer a grievous wound when our strongest allies, the stalwart dwarves of Nozgorod and the free cities of men, were swallowed up by the mysterious cataclysm—the Wasting whose nature confounds the best minds of our time. Miraculous, our enemies call it. As though the deaths of two and a half million innocents could be reckoned a happy accident!”

Baston clenched and shook his fists in the air as if he was throttling the life out of a particularly annoying child.

“The animals!” cried one terranist.

“Sons of whores!” roared another who coincidentally also wore the crimson colors of the Revelry. Tirce rolled her eyes up at the ceiling. These cheap ploys were to be expected. Ever since Redmaine had gone on the lam after holding a militia paymaster at gunpoint and relieving him of twenty thousand gold semestras, Baston had been the closest thing to an orator the Revelry possessed.

“They died in the name of Terranism! They died so that our peoples could be free of extraplanar influences, could make their own decisions without recourse to the will of cruel stargods and their elvish heralds!”

Baston swiped the edge of his hand through the air as if he were sweeping aside entire pantheons of gods.

“Those arrow-eared swine believe our cause is dead. Let us show them the depths of their ignorance, let us remind them that we are still here, defiant to the last! That not all the arcanum and bullets and crow-decked gallows can silence the truth. We will make this hour a black mark in their histories, a red-letter day! Seize the means of magicka! Liberators of the world, unite!”

Baston ended his speech to thunderous applause.

“But how?” someone asked, “What are you Revelers up to this time?”

“You know me, friends,” Baston winked, “I never kiss and tell.”

The women in the assembly tittered at that, but Tirce felt a sudden stab of worry. She hadn’t liked the sound of that at all. Through the floorboards above them they heard the work clocks clamoring to signal the rotation of the next labor cycle. Hurriedly the revolutionaries doffed their hats and donned their workers overalls, shuffling out through a hidden trapdoor out into the smog-filled streets of the city’s industrial district. The war might’ve been over with and won, but the quotas had never changed.

Leaving the moot hall, Tirce clambered up the nearest rain spout and shadowed Baston and his two friends. From her vantage place on a skylight she watched as they joined the hordes of workers emerged from their many workshops below, undoing their soot-blackened face wraps and taking in grateful gulps of fresh air.

She found her marks quick again enough, the trio of young men guffawing as they hung around the exit of a matchmaking yard. It was hard not to, seeing as matchstick-making was a woman’s trade and they were the only males in the crowd. Baston had a girl under either arm and was pinching their blushing cheeks.

Tirce rolled her eyes. Why did women keep falling for the same shallow tricks? Underneath that chiseled jawline, brown hair and startling blue eyes, that tomfool had little else to offer, with the possible exception of an ego more swollen than his overlarge muscles.

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To her annoyance Tirce found that she was checking her reflection against a broken pane of glass. Her braids looked like a sodden mophead what with all the grime it had gathered from her climb up through the vents. But it wasn’t as though she could afford to let her hair down: the braids were the only thing concealing the three horns jutting from the crown of her head.

They weren’t much more than tiny nubs of bone, but that was all the excuse people needed to rustle up the pitchfork-and-flaming-pyre committee with their cries of ‘forest devil’ or ‘wyrding one’. Satyrs, or shaemish as they called themselves, were the only race that could walk in the Wasting without being stricken by the spell-blight, a fact which did not endear them in the slightest to the other species in the League who already considered them traitors for supporting the Iron Axiom during the war. As for her face, well, there was no helping that at all. Her narrow, almost lupine nose and protruding cheekbones all but screamed pagan shaemish, as if her violet irises weren’t already a dead giveaway.

She covered herself up with cloth wraps and heavy glassblower’s goggles, then clambered nimbly down a drainage pipe to the street below, merging into the river of people as it spilled out into the streets, flowing towards the central avenues that crisscrossed Lufthaven like a crooked spider’s web.

Tailing these dunces presented no trouble at all. Wunther had taught her well. She made sure never to match their pace or shadow them too closely. She had a wand of yew up her sleeve but there wasn’t any need for a witchbrew when the prey was so oblivious.

They only made one stop on their way to the parade, at a row of wheeled stalls where vendors traded ration slips for meat pies, ginger beer and every manner of deep-fried and artery-clogging delicacy. An ogre in a pink apron the size of a tent was stacking crates beside one of the stalls. Baston strode up to him with a wide smile, and Tirce watched as the ogre reached into a hiding spot and passed him a sack bulging with several round objects. Baston said something then, likely a crude joke from the way the ogre threw back his lumpen head and roared, causing some passersby to scatter and flee.

Tirce crept closer, feigning interest in a tub of pickled eels. Now she slid out the wand of yew and reached into her pocket for the tiny pouch. The witchbrew contained among other things beeswax, a sprig of mindwort, and a dried rat’s ear, and was called a farheeder. Pointing the wand at a point on the ground right behind Baston, she closed her eyes and reached for the gift of the wyrdroot in her blood.

Warmth spread through her veins like molten gold. Her eardrums throbbed, and suddenly it was like she was standing right at Baston’s elbow listening in, but deaf to everything in her immediate vicinity.

“…never see it coming,” Baston was saying, “You could clear a whole street with just one of these beauties. All of them going off at the same time…”

“Bloody mayhem,” the ogre promised, “But you are not to be moving around so much. Needing to be careful.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not about to drop these and miss out on the fun. Whoops!”

Baston pretended to lose his grip on the sack. The ogre went stumbling back with a look of unmistakable panic on his face, nearly tripping on the edge of his apron.

“Need a fresh change of trousers, friend?” Baston said as his friends fell over laughing.

“Is not funny!” the ogre said in an injured tone, “Do it again, and I crush you!”

“Anytime, friend,” Baston said, walking away. The two girls followed, looking at him with a mixture of terror and admiration, keeping a wary distance from the sack.

“Uh, Baston,” said one of them, a plain human wearing a bonnet, “Easel and I…we were just thinking. Perhaps this isn’t such the best idea.”

“Whatever do you mean, my poppet?” Baston exclaimed, sounding hurt, “You were happy enough to promise to help yesterday. Has something changed?”

His tone remained light and playful, but Tirce could sense a sharp undertone. The girl cleared her throat, looking to her friend for support, then said:

“It’s just that…well, you know…this is the Vestal we’re talking about here. Priestess of the Diad, Lady of the Celestial Spheres and all that.”

“Don’t forget the Lord Castellan herself,” Baston added in a much lower voice. Tirce’s eyebrows shot up. Before she heard could hear rest of it, a man stepped between them and obstructed her wand with his leg. Now all she could hear was the ticking of the timepiece in his pocket. Cursing, she sped after her marks, thinking furiously all the while. The warm glow in her veins was fading fast. She tried to aim wand at them while simultaneously navigating through the throngs, and was briefly rewarded by snippet of their conversation:

“If you’re too much of a coward,” Baston scolded, “Then get you to a nunnery!”

Tirce heard a slap, then the girl’s broken sobs as she stumbled away clutching her cheek.

“And you?” Baston turned to the one named Easel.

“No, Baston,” she said in a small voice. Then she continued in a firmer voice, “I’m no craven like her. I’ll be with you to the end.”

You’re hardly the first, Tirce thought, and you won’t be the last. Poor fool. She felt the ingredients in her pouch crumble into dust and tossed it into the gutter, then withdrew before they spotted her to collect her thoughts.

It all made sense, albeit in a horribly stupid sort of way. It certainly explained what Baston was doing working at a woman’s trade. After all, a matchmaking yard had muriate of potash, red phosphorus, brimstone…

All the things a growing boy needed to make his first bomb.