The Reformer

* * *

'Sir, if you go, I'll follow you. I can't say how many of the men will, though.'

Esmond looked at Jusha. His second-in-command was a grizzled middle-aged man, shorter than his commander but thicker through the shoulders, with a seaman's rolling gate and a scar that drew his upper lip off one yellowed dogtooth.

Esmond nodded silently, then looked back at the Redvers townhouse across the road. There were City Companies men outside the front entrance, blocking the street both ways, and the scouts said there were another hundred around the rear walls and wagon entrance. Magistrate's guards, too; not real soldiers-even the City Companies weren't real soldiers, though there were plenty of paid-off veterans in their ranks-but still armed men. Say two hundred, two hundred and fifty in all, he thought. More than half of them inside, and the place was designed to be held against attack. It was all blank exterior wall, three stories high here and ten feet even where it surrounded nothing but interior courtyard-garden. The narrow windows on the third floor here would serve the purpose of a fort's arrow slits quite well.

Esmond swallowed salt sweat. 'Here's what we'll do,' he said. 'It'd be suicide just trying to storm the place- too many of them, they've got the position. So we'll tie them down with a diversionary attack; grenades first. Then I'll go in with a satchel of grenades, and toss them against the door.'

That was set back into the wall facing the street, making a little alcove.

'One will be lit. You've seen what the stuff can do. Then when the door's blown in, we throw more grenades through and go in on their heels-by the ashy banks of hell, man, it'll be like spearing stunned fish.'

Jusha looked at him. 'Hope you can get something from her that you can't buy for half an arnket any day,' he sighed. 'All right, sir; we ate your salt and took your weapons. Let's get ready.'

* * *

'Didn't work, did it, brother?' Adrian said.

'No. What's wrong with the bloody things?' Esmond said, glaring across the street.

They were crouching behind the stone counter of a soup shop across from the Redvers mansion. Adrian could smell the bean stew still bubbling in the big vats, and the heat of the charcoal fire was almost painful on his knees and belly. Absently he tore a small loaf of bread in half and reached over the greasy marble to dip it in the soup.

'There's nothing wrong with the grenades,' Adrian said. 'You just weren't using them properly. The force of an explosion propagates along the line of least resistance.'

Esmond was staring at him with tightly-held anger. 'I recognize every one of those words,' he said. 'But they don't make any sense.'

'The power of the grenades goes where it's easiest. Out into the open air, not into the solid door. You've got to put the explosion in a confined space for it to do much against doors or walls.'

'Oh,' Esmond said.

There were bodies lying in the street in front of the soot-stained walls of the great house; mostly magistrates' guards and men of the City Companies, but a few of Esmond's Emerald mercenaries, too. They'd been killed by darts hurled from the narrow third-story windows. Adrian's jaws worked mechanically as he examined the scene; Center drew diagrams over it in green lines, with notes on distances and trajectories.

'The street's a long javelin cast, even from a height,' he said thoughtfully. 'But it's possible for good slingmen. That bronze grill over the main door, that gives into the hallway, doesn't it?'

'Yes.'

'All right, here's what we do.'

Esmond looked at him again; not angry, but with a sort of wondering curiosity. Uh- oh, Adrian thought. By the Maiden's Spear, I've started sounding like Raj.

It was comforting to know he had an experienced general living in his head, when it came to things like this. Adrian had read a good deal of history during his time in the Academy of the Grove, but it was Esmond who'd been interested in things military.

'Jeffa,' he went on. 'The four best men. Target is the third-story windows; on my command, not before. The next two sections are to lob grenades right over the roof-see if they can land them on the other side of the ridge tree, and let them roll down into the courtyard. Brother, you get your men ready-we won't have much time.'

He waited while the messages were passed down to the clumps of men concealed behind shop windows and planters; this side of the street was a mansion much like the Redvers', but like many wealthy men the owner had let out cubicles along the streetfront for stores. A minute later a hissed word came back.

'They poured boiling water on my men,' Esmond said in a cold tone, his eyes fixed on the enemy. 'They're going to regret that.' There was an angry red weal down his left arm.

Good man, your brother, Raj said. He's got a lot to think about, but he isn't forgetting his command.

'That they are, brother,' Adrian said. 'They're going to regret it extremely.' His voice rose higher. 'On the three. . one. . two. . three.'

The slingers dashed out into the street. Javelins and darts arched down from the windows, but they skittered sparking across the paving stones. One or two stuck in the cracks between blocks, humming like malignant wasps. Adrian lit the fuse to his first grenade from a helper's torch, swung. .

now.

Hours of practice had connected Center's machine voice to his own fingers. The cast was sideways, up at a slant. The clay jar spun through one of the gaps in the bronze grillwork over the main door of the Redvers mansion, and exploded just before it reached the wooden shutter inside.

Crack. Then crack. . crack. . crack. . as three more arched into windows on the third story of the facade. The bleeding trunk of a man collapsed out of one slit opening, trailing tattered arms and a runnel of blood down the smoke-dimmed whitewash. The second gave only screams, but the third added a gout of flame.

'Must have had a pot of boiling oil over a fire,' Adrian muttered. Louder: 'Again!'

More grenades arched out, for the windows, and a dozen or more over the rooftree. His own snapped into the bulged framework of the bronze grill, and blasted a corner of it out in a shower of wood splinters and metal fragments that pinged and whined off the wall and the street. His next went through the gap, and a hollow roar told him it had exploded in the hallway within.

'Again. . all right, let's go for it!'

Esmond and scores of his men joined him. They flattened against the wall, but no darts or boiling water or oil cascaded down from the windows above. Adrian lit another grenade and tossed it overhand through the shattered grill; it was one of the red-banded kind, the ones with lead balls packed into the double shell outside the powder. He could feel them slamming into the teak of the door's interior.

Crossed spears tossed Esmond up. He gripped the stonework edges that had held the grill, looked within.

'All clear,' he said, and swung himself through feetfirst with an athlete's impossible grace. They heard him swear mildly on the other side, as he wrenched at the warped bar, and then the doors were open.

Adrian looked through and swallowed. Men must have been packed in here pretty densely, when the first grenade came through. More had been trying to drag away the wounded, when that last one he'd thrown had landed among them.

Esmond stood with blood splashed up to his knees, like a statue of Wodep the War God poised with shield and sword. His face held a stony unconcern.

'This way,' he said, pointing.

The main staircase to the second floor ran up from the other side of the vestibule courtyard. In ancient times there would have been an open light well over the pool, letting in water for domestic use. Here it was a skylight, and the pool was ornamental. . less so now, since a grenade had evidently landed in it, and the colorful swimmers were pasted across the columns and mosaics. A wounded man had crawled as far as the staircase, and was making a messy time of dying. Black smoke poured down the landing.