Marius rubbed his chin. “The powder will not work alone?” he asked.

Cade shook his head slowly. “It might, but we would need a lot of it, and we would need to pile it against the door itself rather than shoot from far away.”

His words hung in the air, but Marius only stared at him in response. “Where did this powder come from?”

“The place that smelled of death,” Scott interjected. “It was full of—”

Marius stabbed a finger in the boy’s direction. “I did not ask you to speak. I am asking Cade,” he said in a low voice.

Scott held up his hands and fell silent.

“Cade?” Marius asked.

Cade bit his lip. “Scott’s right. The yellow powder there is an ingredient. The other is charcoal, and the third … well, I scraped it from the walls of your cesspit.”

“Nitrum,” Marius murmured. “It is used for…” He searched for the right word, then shook his head. “It helps our plants grow.”

Cade was surprised that the Romans had known of the substance, but he plowed on regardless. “When crushed and combined in the right amounts, together they make a powder that explodes. When you place it inside a cannon behind a cannonball, the explosion shoots the cannonball out like a sling stone.”

Marius nodded slowly, though Cade could tell some of the words he had used were not ones that the new legatus was used to.

“You have enough of this gunpowder?” Marius asked.

“We can make more by morning. But your men have to scrape more of this … nitrum … from the sewers here, if there is any. We’ve already gathered all we could from Fort Caroline.”

Marius furrowed his brows. “Caroline?”

Cade forced a smile. “That’s what the Codex told us your old encampment was called.”

If he had expected a smile from Marius, he was disappointed.

“You hide such power from us,” Marius said, his voice low and angry. “You are here three days, and you already know more than we have discovered in years.”

He lifted his chin. “Tomorrow, we will march to war. We will camp outside their walls. You contenders shall be tasked with opening their gates. You alone. Should you fail, you will transfer the power of the Codex to me. The attack will be called off. And you will begin a new life here, with us.”

CHAPTER

24

The men slept through the morning and into afternoon, and now Cade could feel the urgency as the timer ticked away. But Marius had insisted that tired men could not fight, and would not be swayed on the matter, especially after they wasted several hours digging, only to find that Jomsborg’s sewers contained no saltpeter at all.

Still, Cade had time to sharpen his blade and grease his armor with sauropod fat, rendered over a campfire. More time still to sleep, and hold Amber close in his arms.

They hardly spoke when they did so, only kissing and talking as they lazed in the warmth of day. Somehow, the impending battle was pushed aside in the face of their desire to touch and be touched.