“There were soldiers there,” he said. “Your father’s men.”

“Theo and Damian? And Spiridon? They have all been in our house,” she told him. “They are not strangers, they are like uncles.” She thought of Damian, who was really quite handsome. “Young uncles, perhaps. But they are not strange to me, and it is no shame to embrace my father in front…”

She did not finish her statement because something outside the antechamber boomed like thunder, making the statue of Perin sway in the wall shrine above the landing. Pelaya squeaked with fear despite herself, then ran to the window.

“What are you doing, child?” The servant almost grabbed her arm to pull her away, but then thought better of taking such a liberty. “Come away. A cannonball will kill you!”

“Don’t be foolish, Eril.” Whatever else she might be, Pelaya was her father’s daughter. “They cannot shoot their cannon this far, all the way to the citadel, not unless they are inside our walls already. But, oh, sweet mother Siveda, look!”

A thick plume of gray black smoke was rising beside the ancient walls—one of the buildings along the quay of the Harbor of Nektarios.

“It must be the powder magazine, hit by some stray shot. Oh, look at it burn!” Had her forward-thinking father not moved much of the powder stored for convenience in the immense harbor magazine, parceling it out to at least a dozen different storage places all over the city, half of the city’s black powder would be gone now, not to mention the harbor itself, which would have almost certainly been destroyed. Instead, it looked as though only one building, the magazine itself, had been ruined, and if the fire could be put out quickly the loss would be bearable.

“I must tell my father,” she said, leaving Eril to catch up as best he could as she scuttled back up the stairs.

“What are you doing?” her father shouted as she came in. He looked angry, truly angry, and for the first time she realized that the city might fall—that they all might die. She was so overwhelmed by this sudden, terrifying understanding that for a moment she could not speak.

“The magazine…” she said at last. “The one in the Harbor of Nektarios. It was hit by…it’s exploded.”

His expression softened a little. “I know. There is a window in the next room, do not forget. Go, and hurry to your mother as I told you. She will be frightened—I’m sure she could hear that crash in Landsman’s Market.”

He is defending the whole city, she thought, staring at him. Her father had already turned back to the table and was examining his charts again, his big hands splayed across the curling parchments like the roots of tall trees. For a moment she found it hard to breathe.

Pinimmon Vash, Paramount Minister to the Golden One Sulepis, Autarch of Xis, did not like traveling on ships. The sea air that had so delighted his ancestors when they came out of the deserts of Xand and settled on the northern shore of the continent smelled to him of putrefaction. The rolling motion of the waves made him feel again as he had in his childhood, when he had caught the bilious fever and lain for days near death, unable to keep anything in his stomach, shivering and sweating. In fact, his survival of that fever had been so unexpected that his father had dedicated the sacrifice of an entire ram to the goddess Sawamat (something that Vash would never have mentioned to the autarch, who barely acknowledged that any other gods beside Nushash existed).