Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye / And he gave us a riddle instead of reply;
“He who serves me best,” said he, / “Shall earn the rope on the gallows-tree.”
– Maurice Ogden, ‘The Hangman’
The Crown City was on fire. Beyond the darkened gardens of the palace, across the wide triumphal avenues and the curve of the river, the harbour district was a single vast wall of seething flame. The tall dockyard cranes and the shells of gutted buildings were outlined in skeletal black against the inferno. Livid fireballs bloomed up from the greater churn of destruction, reflected as bright shimmers in the river’s dark waters. Mountainous pillars of smoke rose into an overcast summer night crisscrossed by searchlight beams and stuttering bursts of anti-aircraft gunfire. Far above, invisible in the dark, the bombers thrummed in their implacable hundreds.
Fioral watched the leaping flames from his perch on the southeast eave of the palace roof. The wind was blowing the smoke his way. It was choking stuff, heavy and acrid with ignited chemicals from the dockside warehouses, and it made his tired eyes water. The ancient stone parapet was already caked with soot from previous air raids. Below him, the flak guns emplaced on the eastern gatehouse fired upwards sporadically, their muzzle-flashes illuminating the shuttered towers and empty colonnades.
At least the bombers left the palace itself alone. It was the only part of the city they never touched. The King wanted his former home back in one piece.
Coughing into the sleeve of his uniform jacket, Fioral leaned against one of the statues that lined the parapet. It was a statue of a sentry, fittingly enough – a pitted limestone rendition of a man in a scaled cuirass, holding a long pike and staring out eternally towards the river. That expressionless stone face had probably seen the Crown City burn before. Perhaps it would again.
His ration for the evening was a heel of seedbread, a tin of pale sliced meat whose origin he knew better than to ask, and a canteen of water. He also had a little flask of rye whiskey hidden in his jacket pocket. He’d bartered it off one of the flak gunners the night before. A good Salvator wasn’t supposed to drink, but he doubted anyone in the palace kept to that stricture any more, aside from the First Marshal himself.
Fioral had told the gunner he would save the whiskey for a special occasion. “The end of the war, maybe.”
“Reckon that’ll be about a fortnight,” the man had replied.
The seedbread was stale and hard as teak, but Fioral was hungry enough to bite into it anyway. He followed it up with a scrap of that tasteless meat. The rations had been gradually shrinking all year, as the farming provinces fell and the loyalists tightened their blockade of the ports. There were no fat men left in the Crown City, and precious few animals. Fioral couldn’t recall the last time he’d heard a dog barking.
He always liked to take his breaks up on this side of the roof, where the view was unrestricted all the way out to the canal at the edge of the grounds. The gardens were spectacular in the sunshine, and even more so on a moonlit night. He loved the way the tiered lawns led down to the sunken gardens and pathways, the ponds with their splendid fountains, the vine-covered pergolas and the tastefully ruined follies. The grass was long and wild now, the trees and hedges densely overgrown from neglect, which somehow only added to the charm.
Lately, he’d found that the grounds looked just as good by firelight.
More blasts lit the night to the north, in the direction of the factory quarter. Apart from the out-ranged flak guns spitting impotently at the sky, the bombers were flying with impunity. The Air Legion hadn’t been able to offer them any real opposition for months now. Fioral remembered the early days of the war, when it had been the Salvators that ruled the skies and sent the loyalists scattering like rats. How much had changed in eight short years.
In the sweeping gardens below, he noticed a flicker of movement. Three guardsmen were picking their furtive way between the hedgerows, heading west, away from the bombing. The glow of the distant fire made their long shadows dance ahead of them. Sneaking off to see their sweethearts in the tenements, perhaps, or to visit one of the makeshift brothels by the riverside. Those always did a roaring trade under the cover of the blackout.
He wondered if any of them were men he knew. These days, a lot of the guards who slunk away by night didn’t come back.
A new fireball blossomed up over the docks, the biggest one yet – a hideous, grinning death’s-head of roiling flame, scattering black debris in its wake. An ammunition depot, maybe, or a moored oil tanker. Its light cast the gardens in a hellish orange-red, and the gunners on the gatehouse shouted curses in shock. The rolling boom of the explosion reached Fioral’s ears a few seconds later. The stone sentry beside him trembled slightly on its plinth.
Waving away the smoke, he bit off another chunk of bread.
*
As a child, Fioral had read that the Dawn Palace was the single largest building on Aede. It was like a city unto itself. The royal apartments alone were the size of a modest cathedral. After three years patrolling its halls, he still stumbled upon turrets and sub-levels he’d never seen before, unfamiliar passages and chambers, new junctions in its endless corridors.
The enormity of the palace was magnified by its emptiness. It had been built for tens of thousands, back in the glory days of the old kings. Even before the war, when King Charos was in residence with all his servants and courtiers, entire floors had gone unused. Now, there probably weren’t more than five hundred men in the whole building. Guards, gunners, medics, secretaries, a company of the oh-so-elite Incorruptible. The generals: dour old Stehdal and his lackey Oberden, addled Vanteig, dull-witted Monlarn, Miklaus the eternal sycophant. Graz, the guard commander. And Nilen, of course.
Fioral’s days had a numbing cadence to them. The routine was practically drilled into his bones. He patrolled the courtyards of the west wing each morning, and the decaying maze of the upper levels in the afternoon. Then he would descend to the cellars, to keep watch over the offices of Monlarn and Vanteig. In the evenings, he joined Graz for a shift guarding the throne room.
A couple of months before, Graz’s adjutant had drowned in the perimeter canal, blind-drunk on some noxious bootleg spirit. Graz had appointed Fioral as an unofficial replacement. “Because you know the place well, and you don’t seem like the deserting type,” was all he’d said in explanation. Lately, the commander had been making Fioral accompany him whenever he attended the First Marshal. Maybe to act as his own bodyguard, as much as Nilen’s.
The throne room was an immense space, designed for throngs of fawning nobles and well-wishers, now echoingly empty. Like so much of the palace, it had fallen deep into disrepair over the past few years. The throne itself had been removed after the King’s overthrow, leaving the grand marble dais it once sat upon to gather dust. The massive tapestries hanging on the walls, centuries-old depictions of the great battles and pilgrimages of Kauln history, were moth-eaten and sagging from their fastenings. The high arched windows were covered by blackout curtains, so the room was lit by buzzing electric lamps that left most of it in shadow.
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Fioral stood guard beside one of the throne room’s soaring pillars, his submachine-gun held at ease across his body. He looked across the marble floor at Graz, who leaned watchfully against the opposite pillar. The commander was a tall, wiry, hard-muscled man, his dark hair streaked with grey. He was in charge of the regular army contingent protecting the First Marshal, independent of Miklaus’ Incorruptible. He could not be called pleasant, but he was a fair enough master, not the shouting or the beating kind. Fioral had served under far worse before he joined the palace guard.
Aside from Graz and Fioral, there were three other guardsmen keeping watch in the corners of the room, and two Incorruptible stationed up on the throne dais with rifles held ready. The generals were arrayed near the foot of the dais. Lord-General Stehdal was a white-haired old soldier, a veteran of the wars with the Ralkovak Kingdoms, and one of the most determinedly gloomy men Fioral had ever met. His chest glittered with medals and weaves of gold braid. Standing beside him, inseparable as a shadow, was his short, stocky protégé, Sub-General Oberden, who carried a stack of bound files and reports. Then there was Vanteig of the Air Legion, skittish as usual, and wall-eyed Monlarn of the Defence Reserve. Miklaus stood smugly apart from the rest, immaculate in his silver-trimmed black uniform blazoned with the sword-and-star emblem of the Incorruptible.
In the middle of them all, Nilen was leaning over a steel table spread with a complex mosaic of topographic maps. He was a small, thin man in his middle sixties, sunken-cheeked and pale as ice. His head was meticulously shaved, and he was dressed, as ever, entirely in austere black. One of his legs had been withered by a childhood illness, so he walked with a pronounced limp, never accepting a walking stick despite the pleas of his physicians. Over the past year, he had developed a persistent facial twitch, which tended to flare up when he talked. And Nilen talked a lot, especially to himself.
It was hard to believe that this was the same Palkas ir-Nilen whose sermons once had millions hanging onto his every word. Who had turned the People’s Salvation from a circle of pious pamphleteers into the greatest political force the kingdom of Kauln had ever seen. Who had forced the King himself to flee in the night like a common thief.
The only thing that still impressed about Nilen was his eyes. They were piercingly dark, almost black, like two chips of obsidian. The one time Fioral had made eye contact with the First Marshal, quite by accident, it had been like looking down the twin barrels of a gun.
“Miklaus. I want your Incorruptible to increase their presence in the tenement districts. We must not allow sin to take root during the air raids. Looters and fornicators are to be shot on sight.” Nilen spoke without looking up from his maps. His voice was dry and scratchy, very much an old man’s. Still, it was unmistakably the voice that Fioral had grown up hearing on the airwaves, calling damnation on heretics and syndicalists and blood-traitors. The voice that had sent Kauln to war.
“Yes, First Marshal. I’ll have the vice patrols doubled,” Miklaus simpered.
Oberden cleared his throat. “First Marshal, the Council of Ministers once again requests permission to relocate to the palace. They say the bombing has rendered the Parliament Hall unusable.”
“Denied. There are bomb shelters beneath the Hall, they can work from those if they must,” Nilen said dismissively. He hadn’t allowed the civilian ministers near him since the previous year’s purges, not even his former favourites. Instead, their duties had gradually been transferred to his dwindling circle of trusted generals. Stehdal now had authority over the War Ministry, rather than the other way around. The Vice and Propaganda Ministries effectively answered to Miklaus; as if he needed any more reason to gloat. “I grow tired of the Council’s endless petitioning. I am less convinced of their faith by the day.”
“My informants at the Parliament Hall have overhead some instances of flagrant defeatism among the ministerial staff,” Miklaus put in. There was a look of deep satisfaction on his angular, ratlike face. He’d obviously been looking forward to passing on that news. “I can provide you with a list of names, if you wish, First Marshal.”
“Yes, do. I’ll review it later. Keep the Council under close scrutiny. Their families, as well.” Nilen rapped his thin fingers on the annotated map of the Crown City before him. “Stehdal, what is the condition of our defences?”
“The Fourth and Sixth Righteous Armies are now emplaced west of the city. Sub-General Rondte is overseeing the preparations for battle,” Stehdal replied. He was of old aristocratic stock, and it showed in his clipped vowels. “We’ve completed the primary trench lines and laid mines across an eighty-mile arc. We have pre-sighted artillery covering the main highways out to the ring-roads. Our ammunition reserves are fully stocked, as far as Rondte’s quartermasters could manage.”
“Good. Ensure that the men are aware there shall be no retreat. Not one subhuman must be allowed to pass.” Nilen’s black eyes glinted in the dim light. “We must hold, unflinching, until the hour of the Last Intervention.”
“Our soldiers know what is required of them, First Marshal. They are dependable.” Stehdal fidgeted with his braided uniform cuff. “However, there have been…a number of desertions among the reconstituted divisions in the south. I’ve ordered the line officers to increase their vigilance.”
A number of desertions, Fioral thought with amusement. That number was surely in the thousands now. Reports had started coming in from the southern front of whole units abandoning their posts, killing their officers, driving off with trucks and staff-cars and even tanks. Barrier detachments were shooting as many as they could, but there were always more. The mutinies of the year before had been nothing in comparison.
“Make some examples,” Nilen rasped, his cheek twitching. “Send the next hundred deserters you catch to the Incorruptible. I want them beheaded in the Apostolic Square. The old way – by sword, not guillotine.”
“Of course, First Marshal,” Miklaus interjected, eager as a swotty schoolboy. “I’ll have new scaffolds raised immediately. I will hand-pick the executioners myself. We shall tolerate no disloyalty to the People’s Salvation.”
Fioral saw a look of purest hatred flicker across Graz’s face. It was there one second, gone the next. He was sure he was the only one who’d noticed it. He tried his hardest not to make eye contact with the guard commander.
Nilen didn’t raise his eyes from the map table. “What word from the Holy Fleet? Have they been able to bring the heretic ships to battle?”
Stehdal spoke, after a decidedly uncomfortable pause. “First Marshal…as I’ve said before, the Holy Fleet is restricted to port at present. We do not have enough fuel or trained manpower to operate the larger ships.”
“Then find fuel,” Nilen snapped. “You know better than to waste my time with excuses, Lord-General.”
Fuel wasn’t the main problem, Fioral knew. The main problem was that the illustrious Holy Fleet now largely rested on the sea floor. Nobody had dared tell Nilen of the catastrophic breakout attempt in the eastern ocean, the sinking of their last aircraft carrier and the senior admirals with it. It had been the final deathblow for a fleet already gutted by years of spiralling losses. The remaining capital ships were now being sunk at their anchorages by loyalist air strikes, or captured as the port cities surrendered.
Stehdal opened his mouth. He shut it again. Then he drew in a weary breath and said, “Yes, First Marshal.”
“Now. The heretic bombers need to be swept from the skies. Vanteig,” Nilen turned to the acting chief of the Air Legion. “How many fighters can you muster?”
Vanteig was a scrawny, chinless man with thinning black hair. He had a permanent jitter to his limbs, probably from the medical amphetamine with which he dosed himself on an hourly basis. “I’m…not sure, at this moment, First Marshal,” he mumbled, glancing around the room with watery, unfocused eyes. “I’ll consult with the divisional commanders. I’m sure they’re marshalling their pilots as we speak.”
Yes, Fioral thought, their pilots who are barely old enough to shave, who get a week’s training if they’re lucky, who fly obsolete propeller fighters against the King’s latest jets. And that was if they even got into the air. Fuel shortages had grounded most of the squadrons, and the loyalists were steadily bombing the aerodromes into cratered uselessness.
“Be quick about it. This is no time for timidity,” Nilen declared, leaning his arms on the table. The lamps behind him cast his hunched shadow across the topographic maps with their scattered marker-flags and counters. “We must strike back in full force, as proof of our strength and our devotion. Make no mistake, the Last Intervention is nigh. The eyes of the Almighty are upon us. He shall turn aside the artifice of the enemy. We are His warriors, His children. We cannot be defeated, so long as we keep faith in His eternal word.”
Later that night, listening to the bombers drone overhead while fresh fires blazed on the far bank of the river, Fioral wondered when the Almighty was going to start doing His job.