"About twenty," Shannock said. "Besides us."
"And can you get portable equipments?"
"Easy. We can get into the Ministry building, too, by a way we know. But from then on we'll have to fight. Likely some of us won't make it."
"Likely," Birrel admitted, thinking privately that probably none of them would make it all the way. "But since we're all due for the gallows one way or another, this looks like our only chance to make Wolt and Vannevan sweat. Want to try it?"
"Give me half an hour," said Shannock. His eyes blazed with a feral light.
Birrel waited. It was a little less than a half hour and it seemed like no time at all because he spent it talking to Kara, and the things he wanted to say to her would have taken hours. Perhaps years. When finally, armed now and accompanied by twenty-seven determined men of the underground, he and Thile started back through the conduit, Kara went with them. There was no safe place to leave her, and in any case Kara was a soldier, share and share alike. She carried a weapon and walked beside Birrel, and after a while it didn't seem strange to him that she should do so, but rather as it should be.
This time they did not enter the duct system. They came through a drainage pit into an unused cellar, and from there directly into the main hall of the Ministry.
It was past midnight and the building was quiet. The guards stood at their posts, but the eruption of armed men into the hall came so suddenly that they had only time for a few scattered shots before they were dropped. Shouts and sounds of alarm and running feet came from other parts of the building. Leaving one man on the floor of the hall, the attacking party rushed into Wolt's office and barred the door.
"Hold it," Birrel panted, "while I find the right stone."
He pawed frantically at the wall, trying to remember exactly where Wolt had placed his hand. Outside there was a tramping of feet and a growing clamor of voices. "Can't you find it?" Thile said.