“Right.” He grinned and threw his weight against the bar. The latch gave way with a splintery crunch, and the door swung open.

They slipped inside and into darkness. Marcus kept his lantern shuttered until they’d closed the door behind them, then opened it enough to allow two of the soldiers to light glass-enclosed hurricane lamps. As the flames caught, shadows danced and wavered throughout the warehouse, and tiny points of fire gleamed on polished metal. Raesinia’s breath caught in her throat.

“That,” Andy said, “is a lot of cannon.”

They were lined up, hub to hub, rank after rank of them, at least three dozen in various sizes. Beside them stood stacks of chests that Raesinia assumed contained the ammunition. An equal number of caissons, small carts that would be dragged behind the cannon into battle, stood in neat rows. Beyond that was a shadowy mountain of small kegs; Raesinia made a quick estimate of her size and did some rapid calculations in her head.

“That’s got to be most of what’s missing from the powder mill’s output,” she said. “I don’t think I realized how much that actually was. It looks like enough powder for an—”

“For an army,” Marcus said grimly. He gestured past the gunpowder, where Raesinia could see more stacked crates the size and shape of coffins. “Those are muskets. There’s got to be enough here for ten regiments.”

“I thought Maurisk was making bombs,” Andy said. “What’s he going to do with all this?”

“It has to be for the Patriot Guard,” Marcus said. “Halberds are all well and good for standing in front of buildings, but with this . . .”

“He must have friends in the armament factories as well as the powder mills.” Raesinia raised her lantern. “Come on, spread out.”

“What are we looking for?” Hayver said.

“Paperwork.” Raesinia looked at the neat rows of weapons. “Nobody puts something like this together without paperwork.”

*   *   *

They found a clerk’s desk near the center of the warehouse, overflowing with stray paper. Raesinia hurried over, and Marcus and Andy stood beside her while Hayver and the three Mierantai kept looking, picking their way carefully closer to the front door of the warehouse.

“Well?” Marcus said as Raesinia rummaged through the sheets. “We could just take it all.”

“I don’t know if there’s anything useful here,” Raesinia said. “A lot of this is in code.”

She set aside a stack of gibberish pages, then caught a scrap of readable text out of the corner of her eye and pounced. They were messages, written on flimsy foolscap with the message ENCODE AND DESTROY printed at the top.

“Keeping your plaintext around after encoding?” Raesinia murmured, flipping through. “Naughty, naughty. Sothe would show you a thing or two.”