CHAPTER

22

“What are you still doing awake?”

Cade looked up from his work, and Amber almost recoiled from him as she caught his bloodshot eyes and haggard face.

“You look like hell,” she said.

Cade laughed. “I feel great though.”

It was a half truth. He was swaying on his feet, and it took concentrated effort to keep his eyes open. If Quintus hadn’t been there to help him, he’d have collapsed long ago.

But he’d done it. It had taken all night, and hours of scraping away at the crusted, disgusting walls of the cesspit, dangling on a threadbare rope above a pool of vile waste.

By the time the sun had risen, he had gathered almost all of it, leaving him with an entire sackful of brown-white crystal.

At the same time, Quintus had made charcoal, setting a fire and baking wood within a sealed ceramic pot, leaving it blackened. They were lucky the Romans had been forced to abandon so much.

In the early hours of the morning, the pair had toiled with a blunt stub of palisade each, pounding sulfur, saltpeter, and charcoal into a fine powder.

Now, the finishing touch. There were no scales here, but Cade used the end of an old clay pipe to measure out seven and a half dashes of saltpeter, one and a half of charcoal dust, and another of sulfur crystal. This used up a good tenth of their saltpeter supplies, but it was a necessary sample to see if it had worked.

The black powder mixture that remained was now being poured gently into a scrap of Roman parchment, taken from the dusty interior of the log cabin. He made the final twist, grinning as the others emerged from the cabin.

“What is that?” Grace asked, staring at Cade’s sooty hands and Quintus’s worried expression.

“This…,” Cade said, seeing double as he held up the package to the light, “is going to get us into the Grays’ fort.”

Cade woke to the sound of Latin shouts, and the scrape of the sled moving onto pebbled sand. He jerked upright, only to find himself in the shadow of the gates, Scott and Yoshi grunting as they hauled him over the rough surface.

He had resisted riding the sled for the first half of the journey, near delirious as he shambled behind the others, but Amber forced him to lie down on the sled and rest when he began to slow them down.

“I’m up, I’m up,” Cade groaned, rolling off the moving sled and sprawling on the ground. They were in the harbor basin of Jomsborg, where the campfires of the Romans were already lit, and curious glances were tossed in their direction.

He saw Marius at the head of a half-dozen men and checked surreptitiously to see if the Codex was still visible. Lucky for him, it had a knack for knowing when to hide itself from others. How thoughtful of Abaddon to program it that way.