Plus the bomb might not quite do the job: Sula wanted to be on hand in case Makish needed to be finished off, and if she was to be nearby, she wanted a safe hiding place.

Macnamara sweated great stains in his coveralls as he swung his pick and cursed the roots that got in his way, and perspiration poured down Sula’s face as she gasped in air heavily perfumed by sweet blossoms while she hacked at chuchuberry bushes and tried to avoid impaling herself on the diabolic swordlike thorns of pyrocantha. At least her labors kept at bay her nagging suspicion, the silent voice in her ear that told her she was an amateur, that her plan was idiotic and that when this went wrong she was going to share the fate of her superiors.

Her training in building bombs and other items of sabotage had been thorough. How and when to use them hadn’t been a part of the course. Perhaps, she thought, her superiors hadn’t known either.

She and Macnamara had broken out their water bottles, picked some overripe chuchuberries, and were taking a break from their exertions when Spence’s voice whispered in Sula’s ear that Makish and his guards were coming on foot.

It was four hours past noon. Surveillance had shown that the High Court did not keep burdensome hours, which was why Sula had decided to spend all afternoon waiting.

“Comm: acknowledge,” Sula replied. “Comm: send.”

At her command, the message was encoded and sent in a brief burst transmission, lasting a hard-to-detect fraction of a second. The communications protocols were an echo of those used at the disastrous Axtattle action, and at the memory, Sula felt a shimmer of unease pass along her nerves. A fresh sheen of sweat broke out as she and Macnamara tossed their tools in a corner, took refuge behind some bushes, and dug weapons out of their toolboxes.

“I believe this is yours!” came a shrill voice. Sula’s heart gave a leap. She hastily stuffed her pistol into a thigh pocket, parted the branches of a chuchuberry bush, and saw Lord Makish’s servant thrusting a toolbox at them, balancing it on top of the low wall that stood between the sidewalk and the Urghoder garden.

“You careless people left this in the Makish garden!” the servant cried.

“Take cover,” Spence said in Sula’s ear. “Less than half a minute now.”

“Thank you,” Sula said as she rushed forward, arms outstretched for the box and its bomb.

Leaning against the wall on the garden side, she observed, was a saw, a sharp-toothed blade fixed in a metal frame and equipped with a pistol grip.

“Who do you work for?” the servant demanded as Sula claimed the toolbox and lowered it carefully to the ground. “I shall contact your employers with a complaint.”

“Please don’t do that, miss,” Sula said as—her eyes scanning the street—she reached for the pistol grip of the saw.

“Twenty-five seconds,” Spence reported—a quarter minute, more or less.

“You are impudent and careless with your employer’s property,” the servant said as she leaned intently over the wall. “You have—”

Sula slashed her across the throat with the saw. The Naxid reared back as she had when she’d first seen Sula, hands scrabbling for her neck.

“Comm: abort! Stand by!” Sula said. “Comm: send!”

“Abort” and “Stand by” were actually two different orders, but Sula didn’t have time to sort them out. With any luck, Spence would take her binoculars off Makish and see what was happening at the Urghoder Palace.

The Naxid fell to the sidewalk in a tangle of elaborate livery, her polished shoes kicking. Sula peered over the wall and looked down the Boulevard of the Praxis: she saw Judge Makish and his guards, and accompanying them an officer in the viridian green of the Fleet. Badges of high rank glittered on the officer’s shoulders and medals gleamed on his chest.

“Standing by,” came Spence’s reply. Sula was aware of Macnamara emerging from cover, a pistol held warily behind his leg.

She picked up the bomb and vaulted the wall. The servant gasped and sputtered at her feet, black scales flashing red in what Sula hoped were unreadable patterns. Sula turned toward Makish and his group and advanced at a trot.

“Sir!” she called, waving. “My lords!”

The bodyguards swept to the front, alert, hands reaching for weapons. “Your servant is ill!” Sula said. “She needs help!”

The entire group increased speed, bodies weaving as the foremost pair of limbs dropped and began to be used as legs. Sula had to leap out of the way. Surprise swirled through her head as she looked at four receding Naxid backs, at black scales glittering in the brilliant light of Shaamah. Sula put the bomb down and followed the Naxids, her hand reaching into her thigh pocket for her pistol. The two guards—trained in first aid, no doubt—bent over the wounded servant, hands plucking at her livery.

The flat Naxid head served only as a platform for sensory organs: a Naxid’s brain was in the center of its humanoid torso, with the heart and other vital organs being in the lower, four-legged body. Sula would prefer to have shot the guards first, but Makish and the Fleet officer—a junior fleet commander, no less—stood between her and the military constables, so she chose the more dangerous of the two and put a pair of shots into the center of the fleetcom’s back.

As she shifted her aim, a long series of shots rang out, and her startled nerves gave a leap with each angry crack. Had the bodyguards got to their weaponsthat fast? she wondered. She shot Makish, her body braced for the impact of enemy bullets that didn’t come, and then she realized that the other shooter was Macnamara, firing over the stone wall and catching the enemy in a cross fire.

There was a pause in which the only thing Sula heard was the singing in her ears caused by the shots’ concussion. The pistols PJ had given them proved rather noisy. There were Naxid bodies sprawled on the sidewalk and a lot of deep purple Naxid blood.

“Run!” Sula said, the idea occurring to her suddenly; and she sprang over the Naxid bodies, the pistol still in her fist. Behind, Macnamara vaulted the wall and pelted in her wake.

“Comm: stand by! Any second now! Comm: send!”

The bomb was now redundant as an assassination device, but it could still serve as a propaganda weapon. The government might deny a pair of assassins with pistols, but they couldn’t deny a big explosion on the Boulevard of the Praxis, right in the middle of the High City.

A file of Naxid children approached, neatly attired in school uniforms, their bodies snaking from side to side in the wake of an adult supervisor.

Sula preferred not to murder children, not even if they were Naxids, but fate had not consulted her, and she wasn’t about to slow down and explain things. “Run!” she said as she dashed past. “Bad things!”

“Wait!” the supervisor said, her black-on-yellow eyes going wide. Sula didn’t spare her a backward glance.

She skated around the side of the Urghoder Palace and into the narrow lane that ran down its side. The cool shade of the lane was welcome after the afternoon sun. Sula slowed to a trot, and Macnamara slowed in her wake, pausing to pull an emergency flare from his pocket, strike it on the cool sandstone wall, and toss it behind them. Their retreat would be covered by billowing red smoke.

Sula gasped for breath, her hand trailing on the palace wall for balance, and she wondered how much time to give the Naxid schoolchildren to get out of the way. She counted to ten, then spoke.

“Comm: detonate. Comm: send.”

A scant second later the sandstone wall punched her fingers with surprising strength and the ground lurched beneath her feet. She didn’t feel the explosion so much with her ears as with her insides, an uneasy stirring as the shock wave passed through each organ. The red smoke at the end of the lane was blown over them in a thin scarlet fog; and suddenly they were in a rain of rubble and trash blown off the Urghoder Palace roof. Sula tried to knock the stuff off her cap and shoulders as she ran.