“But,” said Minx, as she lowered the hatchet, “I’m all grown up now. And you are an impatient and foolish milksop.” Her left arm emerged from the folds of her cape. Wrapped around the wrist were several gray cotton cords. “I found a storehouse unguarded and unlocked. The hatchet came from there. Also these three fuses, from a crate. The longest should give us fifteen minutes, the shortest about six. Or they can be knotted together as one.”
“Excellent,” said Matthew, who still had the coppery smell of blood up his nostrils.
“I doubt the magazine will be so easy to get into. I’ve seen four other guards making their rounds, but they’re in no hurry and they’ve gotten lazy. There’s a barracks building where the workers must be sleeping. The professor has done us the great favor of not making his men work all night long like slaves.”
“Christian of him,” said Matthew.
“Sharpen your blade,” she said, correctly judging that Matthew’s senses were reeling due to her cold-blooded killing of the guard and her revelation of past mutual acquaintances. She knelt down and went through the dead man’s pockets, presumably searching for keys to the magazine. She came up empty, and stood up. Her gaze was both fierce and frigid. Looking upon her frightened Matthew to his core. “You should follow me,” she said, and she set off to the left without waiting for him to exit his trance.
The first step was difficult. The second a little easier. Then he was following her, and Minx continued on looking right and left but never glancing back.
They came to the magazine, the long building of white stone with the gray slate roof. A distant torch gave enough light to fall upon two locks on the door. Minx broke one with her knife’s blade, but the second resisted her. She told him, “Keep watch!” as she struggled with the more intricate mechanism. “Damn,” she said through gritted teeth, when it still defied her. “Hold this,” she commanded, and she gave him the bloody hatchet the better to concentrate on her lock-breaking.
Matthew heard the voices of two men raised in conversation. It was coming from somewhere off to the left. There was a bray of laughter; something obviously had hit one’s funny bone. Minx continued her task as Matthew turned himself in the direction of the voices. He could see no one, but the men seemed to be coming closer. Minx’s blade worked at the lock, the sharp tip digging at the stubborn innards. Hurry, he wished to say, but she knew what she was doing. The knife jabbed, the voices came closer still, and Matthew thought he might have to kill someone with this hatchet, to burden his soul further with death.
But then the men took a turn away from the magazine, for the voices began to diminish, and a moment afterward there came a metallic click and Minx whispered, “Ah. Got the bastard.” The lock fell to the ground. Minx pulled a latch and pushed the door open.
It was utterly dark within. She took the hatchet from him and said, “Light your tinderbox.”
Matthew took a moment fumbling with the thing. He got a spark in the wads of cotton and from that touched the wick of his candle. He looked to her with apprehension, wondering if the merest flame in that enclosure would set off the powder, but she motioned him in and he gathered his balls from where they’d shrivelled up into his groin and crossed the magazine’s threshold.
She closed the door behind them. “Impressive,” she said, as Matthew’s candlelight showed barrel upon barrel of—presumably—Professor Fell’s Cymbeline. Matthew counted fifteen just in the realm of the light, and beyond it were dozens more. A shipment must be imminent, he thought. The place looked to be nearly full.
He hadn’t realized he was holding his breath. He had the same feeling of dangerous pressure as he’d experienced upon the stone seahorse. If two small Cymbeline bombs could have blown that house on Nassau Street to splinters, what would dozens of barrels of the powder do?
“I’m counting sixty-two,” Minx said. “I hope you’re ready for a brilliant bang.”
He let his breath out, thinking that he’d already had one of those last night.
Minx strode toward the first barrel. She lifted her hatchet and quite readily bashed in the top of it with three blows. Matthew winced at the noise; surely that was going to bring someone running. Then Minx put her shoulder into it, overturned the barrel, and light grayish-white grains began to stream out upon the dirt. She repeated this action with a second barrel, and again the gunpowder poured out of it onto the earth. “I think,” she said, “that will be enough.” She uncoiled two of the cotton cords from her wrist and placed them in the grains of destruction, stretching them out toward the door.
“Light them,” she suggested, sweat sparkling on her cheeks.
Matthew bent down, picked up the end of one fuse and touched the candle to it. His hand was trembling, but at once the red eye opened and the fuse began to sizzle. He did the same to the second. The nitrate-saturated cord began to burn steadily toward its target. There would not be time nor opportunity to destroy the actual chemical works, but no doubt this would be a monstrous explosion and might serve to blast everything in the fort to pieces.
“Now,” said Minx, with just a trace of nerves in her voice, “we get out.”
They closed the door and latched it behind them, just for the sake of tidiness. Then Matthew was following Minx as she ran the way they’d come, seeking the stairway to the parapet. There were no guards in view, but no time for undue caution. They were both aware that very soon a little part of Hell would open on Pendulum Island.
Once up the steps, they sought the vine that had brought them here. It was like searching for a peg in a haystack. Everything from this height looked flimsy, unable to support either of them. In a few minutes they would have to learn how to fly.
“Hey!” someone shouted, from ahead. “You there!” For the want of anything else, the guard began to blow his whistle and then he came at a run toward them with a drawn sword.
His run was stopped by a knife that entered the pit of his throat, thrown from a distance of nearly twenty feet. He gagged and grasped at the knife’s handle to pull it out, but then he was staggering off the edge of the parapet like a clumsy drunk and he toppled into the darkness below.
Another voice, further away, began shouting for someone named—it sounded like—Curland. Minx leaned over the parapet, seeking a way down. Matthew looked back toward the magazine. If the guards got in there, they might yet stomp out the fuses. “I’m here!” he shouted toward the other shouter, just to confuse the issue. “This way!”
“We’ve got to go over,” Minx said, and now her voice did quaver for even her tough spirit quailed at the thought of those fuses burning down to their merry damnation. “Right here,” she told him, and motioned toward thick vines and leafy vegetation that had melded to the stones. Without hesitation she swung herself over the wall, gripped hold of whatever her fingers could find, and started down.
Matthew caught a movement to his left. A heavy-set man carrying a torch was coming up the steps. The gent looked big enough to be a match for Sirki. Minx was almost to the ground. Matthew couldn’t wait. He climbed over, grasped vines and leaves and found places to put his boot-toes into. Halfway down there was a cracking sound and Matthew felt the vines start to pull away from the stones. At the same time the man with the torch leaned over the wall and thrust the flame at him to get a better look.
“The magazine!” the man suddenly shouted over his shoulder. Matthew saw that horror had rippled across the craggy face. “My God! Check the magazine!”
Matthew reached the ground with help from the vines pulling away from the stones. Minx was already slogging into the swamp. Matthew followed her, thinking that if the guards put those fuses out all this had been for nothing. The water rose up past his knees, then over his thighs to his waist, and snakes be damned. He heard shouting from the fort, which filled him with fresh alarm. Damn it! he thought. The fuses should have burned down by now! Where was the—