Annis suddenly calmed, and sat on the bed. “Emil won’t have his people acting on their own. He might put us out of the company.”
Zanja looked bleakly down upon the crowded street of a community that would never be hers. “He and I are fighting different wars.”
Annis rubbed her hands together gleefully. “You won’t believe what I’ve got to show you. It’s made of paper, like a kite, but it flies like an arrow. It’s got a fuse up the middle and in the very tip a cargo that explodes.”
Zanja said, “That sounds rather startling.”
“Startling? It’ll scare the Sainnites half to death. Come on, we’ve got some work to do, and then we’ll have some fun.”
Zanja stood up. The room moved around her. Her head filled with an appalling pain. Ransel came out of the mist, and put his arms around her. “I knew you would survive,” he said. “Now we shall have vengeance.”
Any wall can be breached, but Zanja had never imagined that it would be so easy to break into the Sainnite garrison. They did it with a spindly ladder that they had cobbled together in the basement of the chemist’s shop. It was a dark night; even starlight was veiled by thin clouds. No one noticed them carrying their ladder through the streets of Wilton. No one cried a warning as they climbed the ladder to the top of the wall, dragged it up, and dropped it to the other side so they could climb down. The wall was nice and wide; it made it easier to maneuver their awkward burdens.
Even as Zanja worked with Annis in the secret factory in the chemist’s basement, she had not really expected that they’d get this far. Surely the Sainnite seer would anticipate that they would arrive, reeking of gunpowder and other less common concoctions, bearing their bags full of brightly colored lethal gifts: packages of fused gunpowder, odd constructions of sticks and paper that Annis swore would fly. But it seemed the Sainnites were not expecting them. Perhaps even a seer could not predict something so unpredictable as this night.
She and Annis tucked their ladder into a shadow. The only light came from the smoldering cords they carried at their waists, which Annis called slow lucifers. The lucifers glowed very faintly, like coals in ashes. A pair of Sainnites scuffed past along the wall, talking amiably in a low murmur. One of them carried a lantern, but its light didn’t travel far. Zanja and Annis hid the faint light of the lucifers behind their cupped hands.
They had entered an ornamental garden that was rank with the perfume of night‑blooming vines. White moon flowers glowed in the shadows, and delicately formed trees drooped across the walkways like lace curtains. They crossed the garden cautiously. Its wooden fence was merely ornamental. They climbed it easily and followed a cobbled walkway between buildings, out into the main yard. Here sprawled the stables and the carriage houses on one side and the barracks on the other, with the headquarters between, facing the gate. The architecture was strange. The rooflines were curved, parts of the buildings jumped forward like arms or wings, and beads of wood dripped from the eaves.
Most of the barracks windows were propped open to let in the night breeze. Annis showed her teeth again, and gestured silently toward the stable. Briefly, her hand was warm in Zanja’s, and then they separated. Zanja set out to find a way to the stables. Since all the passageways radiated out from this courtyard, it took some time for her to negotiate the maze. Finally, huddled against the stable wall, she noticed for the first time that there was a guard at the stable door. However, many of the stall windows were propped open. They were too small to climb through, but when Zanja looked in she could see that the stall walls were only shoulder high, which suited her purposes.
She went as close to the edge of the courtyard as she dared, and signaled with the smoldering tip of her lucifer. She could not see Annis at all in the shadows, but in a moment her lucifer appeared as well, drawing the shape of a flame in the darkness. The flame: transformation, revolution. The collapsing poles of the clanhouses, the burned out shell of the farmhouses. Fire for fire.
Zanja started unpacking her bag of flying explosives, and balanced one on the ledge of each open stall window. She held the tip of the lucifer to each fuse and blew on it to make the smoldering red tip flame and catch the fuse. It was rhythmic, meditative work, easy to do even in the darkness. The horses grew restive as she worked her way around the stable. She used some rockets with medium length fuses, and had switched to short fuses when she heard the harsh hiss of the first rocket. Then she saw it fly in a hissing spray of sparks across the inside of the stable, the horses braying with terror at its fiery passage, and then the rocket exploded with a bang and a blinding flash of light. The horses screamed. Shod heels crashed against the wooden walls. Zanja lit the last fuse and started running, though the crazy woman in her head wanted to stay and watch the rockets soar, trailing fire and a glowing white smoke, carrying their explosive cargo to the many things that are all too ready to burn in a stable: hay, for instance. There would be plenty of hay.
She could hear explosions now from the barracks as well, and shrill shouts. Overhead, a balcony door banged open, and a woman rushed out, cursing as she pulled on her shirt. Zanja paused directly beneath her to light one of her packages and toss it through a street‑level window into the upholstered cushion of a chair. The package was a lightweight thing, made of little more than paper and gunpowder, with a little bottle of liquid fire at its center, but the sharp report of its explosion echoed down the narrow passageway, and it was followed by a blinding white flame. The night stank of gunpowder, and was filled with shouts and the banging of doors.
Zanja hid in the shadows of a side door until it looked as if all the building’s occupants had rushed out to fight the fire, then she went in, pistols in hand. The building was dark and quiet, the stairs easy to find. But as she started up them, a man suddenly came rushing down, and fell into her when she shot him. She managed to catch herself on the handrail and the soldier fell all the way down the stairs.
Zanja stopped in his bedroom, where the bedding was thrown to the floor. She pried a board from the bed, tucked it under her arm, and went out onto the balcony. The drooping roofline was an easy climb from the balcony rail, but after she had put all her burdens onto the roof she went back to set off an explosion in the middle of the straw mattress. The floors were covered with straw mats, as well. No wonder almost every room had a fire bucket filled with water by the door.
The rooflines, which protected the passageways between buildings against weather, seemed almost designed to allow a fugitive to escape across the rooftops. Only occasionally did Zanja have to use her board to cross the gap; usually it was a mere step. She paused at nearly every building to climb in through a window and set off fire bombs in the beds, now that every soul in the garrison seemed to be out on the streets.
From the rooftops she could see the barracks on one side and the stable on the other, fully engulfed in flame. No bucket brigade or even a water engine could have put out those fires; the Sainnites would be devoting their energies to keeping the fire from spreading. As Zanja stood watching, she saw the glowing passage of a rocket shoot across the rooftops. She set one off herself, in reply. It skittered up the slope of the roof and shot into the air, where it exploded in a shower of fire. Almost immediately, Annis replied with another, like a star with wings. “Beautiful!” Zanja cried out loud.
The next time she paused in her aerial journey, she noticed that her backtrail was marked by flames. Some scattered buildings far from her trail also were burning, perhaps set on fire by the burning gobbets that dripped from the rocket. Zanja set off a couple more rockets, but then stopped, fearful that they’d give away her location. Annis set one off as well; she was only a couple of buildings away now.
Zanja climbed off the roof to another balcony, which overlooked the garden. The garden below lay serenely empty; no one patrolled the walls. She could hardly believe her fortune, but clearly the first concern of the Sainnites was to fight the fires. Grinning, she stepped through the balcony door, into the room beyond.