The city was still smouldering the morning after, shrouded in smoke like a thick sea-fog. The smell of its burning was everywhere, even inside the palace. Ash blew in through every open window, swirling around the fine furniture. Fioral’s boots kicked up drifts of the stuff as he made his rounds.

The afternoon found him standing guard with Graz and a squad of junior guardsmen in the palace undercroft. Monlarn and Vanteig, more fearful of air raids than the other generals, had established their quarters down here among the cavernous brick arcades. The cellars were cold, spider-infested and unpleasantly damp, with water seeping from the walls and collecting in great stagnant puddles. In places, the crumbling brickwork was coloured by expansive colonies of fungus. Beyond the areas lit by the palace generators, the ancient vaults and passageways extended off into utter blackness.

Monlarn and his staff were huddled around a cluster of wooden desks in what had once been a wine-cellar. The royal wine collection had all been poured down the drains eight years ago, on Nilen’s order. Fioral had always considered that a great shame.

While Fioral and Graz kept watch for loyalist assassins sneaking through the catacombs, Monlarn’s adjutants brought him their latest reports. None sounded the slightest bit encouraging. The city’s garrisons and civil defence stations fed through a steady stream of bad news via hardened telegraph lines. They warned of critical food shortages and soaring desertion rates, severed bridges and impassable roads, disease running riot in the tenement districts.

Then came the grim accounting of the latest air raid. “Glassmakers’ Street, four hundred dead,” one of the adjutants droned, scribbling new entries into an already-crowded logbook. “Massaine Street, two hundred and seventy dead. The Rachalen Chantry – unknown, they’re still trying to douse the fires. Haelleck Drydocks, six hundred and forty dead…”

“At this rate, King Charos is going to be holding his victory feast in a rubble heap,” Graz muttered aside to Fioral.

Fioral frowned in surprise. The commander seldom spoke so casually to him. “They’re still leaving the palace alone, sir.”

“That won’t last. They know Nilen’s here. They’ll take it apart brick-by-brick to find him.” Graz’s expression was hard, unreadable.

Chewing tobacco at his desk at the other end of the cellar, Monlarn grew impatient with the casualty report. “Enough of that,” he told the adjutant abruptly. “Just give me a number to pass on to the First Marshal.”

“Twenty thousand dead last night, sir. At least.”

“Twenty thousand. Hmm. Miklaus’ propaganda boys won’t like that,” Monlarn mused. He worked the tobacco noisily between his teeth. “Makes our air defence seem pretty feeble. Call it two thousand. Enough to get people angry, not enough to make them panic.”

“The people won’t believe that, sir. They saw the raid with their own eyes,” the adjutant said. “They’re digging out the bodies of their own families.”

“They’ll believe what they are told to believe,” Monlarn replied, as if he was stating a mathematical fact. Graz shot Fioral a look of bleak amusement.

Time was, Fioral thought to himself, I would have believed it too. Every word of it.

He’d joined the army fresh from grammar-school, early in the war when it seemed the Salvators truly were blessed by the Almighty. He’d been part of the all-conquering advance that had driven the King and his loyalists westward across the supercontinent. The banners of the People’s Salvation had fluttered over a thousand cities back then, from icy Okanios in the far north to the sunny shores of the Bay of Ralka. When Nilen spoke in his triumphal sermons of the destiny of the Kauln people, and their natural place above the lower races, Fioral had listened with a thrill in his heart.

Then it had begun to go wrong. The loyalists had escaped to Tletora in the far west, beyond the mountains of the Great Range. The Salvator war effort had turned southward, to crush the King’s allies in Mar-Ilhande and the Ralkovak Kingdoms, only to find the Mar fought like demons and the Ralkovak would not yield. Army after army exhausted themselves trying to break through, grinding away the best of Nilen’s soldiers. Attempts to strike into Tletora by land and sea met with bloody failure. Meanwhile, the King levied what seemed like half the men of Aede, and the factories of his allies churned out new ships and tanks and planes at an unbelievable rate. Slowly, inexorably, the loyalists drowned the People’s Salvation with sheer numbers.

Four years ago, the last great advance on the Bay of Ralka had ended in disaster. After that, the long bitter retreat began, across thousands of miles of hard-won ground. It had been a campaign of total destruction. They’d set cities ablaze rather than surrender them to the King, scorched and poisoned the farmlands, reduced entire provinces to ash and bones. But for every loyalist killed, a dozen more seemed to spring into battle, while the Salvators took losses they could no longer replace. As the war entered its eighth year, Nilen’s broadcasts stopped promising dominion over all of Aede, and began to speak instead of the Last Intervention.

The last glimmer of hope had been two months ago, when the atomics had been set off in the fortress cities of Indeleon and Drax-Taalo. Four loyalist armies had been incinerated in the blink of an eye, along with half a million Salvator defenders. “The Almighty’s fire!” Nilen had crowed when he heard the news, almost cackling with joy. “They’ve tasted the fire of judgement, at last. Our victory is written in stone. The unholy shall wither in His light.” He’d ordered the blackout rules lifted for a night, so that a celebratory march could be held on the Martyrs’ Avenue. Citizens were ordered out of their air-raid shelters, some at gunpoint, to join in.

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Fioral had gone along, too. He’d watched the banners and prayer-flags flutter above the flickering torches as the meagre procession made its way to the palace gates. It was just like the old rallies before the war, if you ignored all the ragged clothes and gaunt faces, and the rubble and ash and unburied dead lining the avenue.

The celebration proved to be premature. The atomics, it turned out, hadn’t been enough. The bombers kept coming, more every night, and the news from the front kept getting worse. More cities fell, more ships were sunk, more divisions were routed. Provinces that had been the very heartlands of the People’s Salvation broke into open rebellion. Nilen demanded more atomics, thousands of them, enough to drown half of Aede in fire. But the reactor complex at Ocharam Forest had already been overrun. If any more atomics existed, they were in the hands of the loyalists now.

A few days after the march, Fioral had overheard Stehdal muttering grimly to Oberden in the east wing’s Greenstone Hall. “They’ve found the labour camps in the west, and the liquidation centres in Esuloa. They know what happened to the darkskins and the Hannevara. Make no mistake, if they get hold of us, we will hang.”

“The liquidation programs were under Incorruptible control. Miklaus’ remit. They can’t blame the army for it,” Oberden had protested.

“Sub-General,” Stehdal had said, with a chuckle utterly devoid of humour. “Do you really think the loyalists will make that distinction? There’s thousands of Esuloans in the King’s army. Redskin Foresters too, and Mar, and Hannevara. All of Nilen’s subhumans. They’ll be champing at the bit for revenge. When they get into the city, they’ll kill anything wearing a Salvator uniform.”

“Surely the King wouldn’t let those…savages loose against his fellow Kauln?”

“He Above, Oberden, don’t delude yourself. There will be no clemency for us. Every man in this building is already dead.”

*

The lights in the throne room flickered constantly now. The palace generators had started to fail one by one, starved of fuel and maintenance. Fioral watched the shadows dance oddly on the faces of Nilen and the generals. On the throne dais above, the Incorruptible sentries seemed markedly on edge, gripping their rifles white-knuckled.

A low constant rumbling could be heard outside, like summer thunder. The timbre was different to the now-familiar sound of bombs. It was artillery; the faint but growing roar of ten thousand loyalist guns. It had grown louder and louder over the past few days. It never stopped, even for a moment.

“The southern command posts are no longer responding to communications,” Stehdal was saying. Sweat beaded visibly on his high forehead. “The Fourth and Sixth Righteous Armies are still holding the line in the west, but they are enormously outnumbered. The situation is…very difficult, First Marshal. Sub-General Rondte reported this morning that ammunition supplies are running critically low. The battleships in the harbour are being readied for use as artillery platforms, but I understand that they are likewise down to their last shells. We do not have either the men or the munitions to mount a sustained defence-”

“My Incorruptible are mustering citizen defence brigades as we speak,” Miklaus interrupted shrilly. “Brave civilians are lining up to volunteer by the thousand. Men, women, even the children of the city. They stand ready to drive the subhumans back, in the name of the People’s Salvation.”

Volunteers, Fioral thought numbly. Marched into battle at gunpoint, most likely. Probable death ahead, certain death behind.

A lopsided smile came to Nilen’s face. “See what wonders can be wrought by the true in faith? Our children have more courage than any of the False King’s lapdogs. How can the enemy hope to prevail?”

Stehdal’s voice rose in protest. It was the most outraged Fioral had ever heard the old general. “First Marshal, we do not have enough ammunition to supply our regular troops, let alone these civilian auxiliaries. They will be forced to fight unarmed!”

“Then let them. A fist guided by the Almighty shall prevail over a heretic’s bullet.”

“Thousands will die, First Marshal, tens of thousands!”

Nilen snapped his head around to glare at Stehdal. His face twitched again, making a snarl of his lips. “Is your faith wavering, Lord-General? I have heard a great deal of whining from you, of late, and precious little else. I would advise you spend some time at prayer tonight. The Last Intervention is imminent, and the Almighty has no use for men of lukewarm devotion. Neither do I.”

Stehdal went silent, his jaw tightening. Vanteig shifted uneasily from foot to foot. Miklaus sneered.

Oberden was the next to speak, after a long pause, looking nervously aside at his old mentor. “There is also the issue of food, First Marshal. The citizens are starving. The granaries are empty, and resupply ships can no longer get through the loyalist blockade. With your permission, I will have the northern garrisons distribute some of their surplus rations-”

“Food?” Nilen cut Oberden off with a contemptuous laugh. “A petty thing to bother me with. Keep the rations for the fighting men. The citizens know that sacrifices must be made, in the name of victory. Those who give their lives now shall be rewarded by the Almighty. They shall sit beside His throne in the world to come.”

Fioral’s trigger finger curled, almost reflexively. It would have been the easiest thing in the world to bring up his gun and riddle the First Marshal with bullets. Miklaus, too, if I have the time before the sentries on the dais gun me down. He caught Graz’s eye across the room, and knew immediately that the commander was thinking the same thing.

The throne room’s great doors creaked open. An exhausted-looking young Incorruptible hurried in, clutching a folded telegram. His boots squeaked on the dirty marble. “News from the western command, First Marshal,” he called out. There was real fear in his thin, boyish face.

“Report,” Nilen snapped, waving a hand irritably in the man’s direction without looking at him.

The courier swallowed visibly, then unfolded the telegram and began to read it out in the flickering lamplight. “The western trench lines have been breached. Sub-General Rondte was killed in action near the Hunting Fields.”

Stehdal, Oberden and Vanteig all swore out loud, almost simultaneously. Fioral nearly did the same. Even Nilen turned in surprise. The Hunting Fields were the Crown City’s grandest public parks, but more pertinently, they were well within the city proper. Less than ten miles from the palace.

The courier read on, his voice quavering more and more. “The Fourth Righteous Army has…has surrendered to the False King. Enemy armour is advancing unopposed from the south and north. Enemy battleships are firing directly on the harbour. Elements of the Sixth Righteous Army are attempting to fall back to prepared positions near the Parliament Hall. They are coming under relentless air attack. Casualties are…extremely severe.” He swallowed again, harder. The paper shook in his hands. “The enemy is converging on the Dawn Palace.”