The sniper was a semiretired Daimong named Fer Tuga, a hunting guide from the Ambramas Reserve, half a continent away. On his periodic visit to Zanshaa to visit his daughter, he’d take the hunting rifle he left in her apartment and use it to kill Naxids.

The last occasion had gone wrong when the Naxid convoy returned a torrent of accurate fire within a few seconds of his firing his first round. He’d barely escaped with his life.

“The Naxids have got to have something new,” Tuga reported. “Either they saw me behind a darkened window or they saw the bullet in flight.”

It turned out to be the latter. A small mobile phased-array radar system linked by a cleverly programmed computer to automatic weapons platforms.

Sniper tactics at once became much less profitable. Bomb use increased by way of compensation. Bombs began getting larger and more sophisticated, and adapted to different targets.

The Naxids moved more security forces into the capital, which just created new targets.

There were plenty of ways for Project Daliang to fail, and Sula tried to work them all out in advance. She spent long hours with maps of the city and with timetables, trying to arrange for proper rendezvous. Two light earth-moving machines were abstracted from government stores. Prisons were put under observation. Word was passed along the entire unwieldy apparatus of the secret army that action was imminent, and that it would involve taking and holding buildings. Bombs, grenades, and rockets were manufactured and stored in secret depots. Grannies were set to work baking ammunition for the Sidney rifles.

Sula went up to the High City on a day when chill drizzle had turned the funicular’s flagstone terrace dark and wet. She wanted to inspect the empty Ngeni Palace and make certain it was adequate for hiding the Bogo Boys and the other strike troops who were scheduled to come up the cliff.

PJ seemed more cheerful than usual. “I’m happy to show you the old place,” he said, “but when are you going to need it?”

Sula hesitated, sensing something behind his words. “What do you mean?”

“I’ve been evicted. Some Naxid clan has requisitioned the property. I got the notice two days ago, and they gave me ten days to get myself and my belongings out.” He gave her a brilliant smile. “I can be useful now. I don’t have to live in the High City. I can move to the Lower Town and become a soldier in the secret army.”

Already calculations were flooding through her mind. “Can we check the weather report?” she asked.

He led her to a desk, and with a few commands she discovered that the cold drizzle would last for another two days, then be pushed away by a high pressure front from the southwest. There would be at least four days of beautiful, sunny, summery weather.

There’s our window,she thought. She hoped six days would be enough.

She straightened and looked at him. “I hope you’ll employ our trucking firm to move your belongings to your new lodgings.”

He shrugged. “I don’t have any belongings to speak of. Not since my father lost all our money.”

“You’ve forgotten the pile of weaponry that Sidney gave us, and that’s still in storage.”

“Oh.” PJ’s eyes widened.

“And surely Clan Ngeni doesn’t want all their furniture and other possessions to go to the Naxids? Or have the Naxids insisted that everything remain?”

PJ looked as if he hadn’t considered this. “No,” he said. “I suppose I can take anything.”

“Then we’ll remove your clan’s stuff for you. And I’ll need to look at the palace after all—assuming, of course, that you don’t mind if we use the place for one last operation.”

“Certainly. Of course.” Anxiety crossed PJ’s expression. “But I really can join the secret army after I’ve left the High City?”

She looked at him. “PJ,” she said, “you’vealways been in the secret army. You were my first recruit.”

He was flustered and, she thought, pleased. “Well yes. Thank you. But I mean a real soldier.”

“You’ve always been a real soldier.”

Surprised delight flushed PJ’s cheeks. “I’ve only wanted to be…to be worthy.”

“You’re more than worthy,” Sula said. “And as far as I’m concerned, better off without her.”

Her words brought an uncomfortable sadness to PJ’s long face. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “She was so bright and lively, and I…” He fell silent.

Something he’d said came to Sula’s mind.

“PJ,” she said, “you mentioned that your father lost your family’s money.”

“Yes. Gambling, and—” He sighed. “—other sorts of gambling too—unwise investments. Stocks and futures and debentures, whatever those are. My father hid the losses for a long time, and I had a very pleasant life for a while, with cars and clothes and entertainments and…” He groped for words. “…the usual. But it was all borrowed money. So I turned thirty-five and then…” He threw out his hands. “Then it was all gone.”

Sula was surprised. She had always assumed PJ lost his money in debauchery. Instead he’d lived a perfectly normal life for a member of his class, oblivious to everything around him, until suddenly his life wasn’t there any longer, and he became the object of pity and contempt that his relatives had tried to sell to Clan Martinez, only to have him rejected by the woman he loved and bundled into marriage with someone else.

Perhaps, she thought, her own life had been easier, since she’d never had any money to begin with.

“I’m sorry, PJ,” she said.

The expression on his face was hopeless. “I know the marriage to Sempronia was supposed to be all about money,” he said. “But I was too useless and ridiculous to take seriously, and—” His eyes were starry with tears. He turned away. “Let’s look at the palace, shall we? I have the key right here.”

Sula followed him across the court and through the cavernous, empty house, filled with silence and ghosts, and gathering dust. She wanted to comfort him, but knew she was the wrong woman for the job.

He was another casualty of Martinez’s ambitions. As was she.

Three days of frenzied work followed, and the long-limbed, stumbling, uncoordinated giant that was the secret army began to pull itself free from the muck in which it hid itself and prepare to take its first great strides. Trucks rolled up to the High City, carrying away Ngeni furniture, replacing it with paint, canvas, medical supplies, and mountaineering gear. Sula rode the trucks along the streets of the High City, making notes on a map of which palaces had guards, and therefore held someone worth guarding. She wondered what would happen to the guards during an emergency, whether they’d stick at their posts or rush to the fighting. She supposed she’d find out on the day.

Storage cabinets were opened and Team 491’s formidable arsenal removed and placed in willing hands. Friends on the police opened a warehouse and over four hundred modern automatic rifles, an equal number of sidearms, ammunition, sets of body armor, and grenades and their launchers became the possession of the secret army. The police didn’t even have to be bribed.

A pair of the scouts watching the prisons were captured, and apparently provided to the Naxids the false information with which they’d been primed. Through the friendly contacts the cliques maintained with agents of law enforcement, Sula learned that the prison guards had been quietly reinforced and that police and Fleet personnel were shifted out of the city center to react to any mass breakout attempts.

The Naxids were apparently satisfied that they were about to spring a trap. So was the White Ghost. Time would tell which of them was right.

At last there came a moment when the last message had been sent, the last weapon readied, the last plan made, revised, and remade. Then, as the sun touched the horizon, Sula walked into the safe house she shared with Casimir and found him dressed in his long Chesko coat with the triangular mirrors, the shining boots, the long walking stick with its glittering globe of rock crystal.