The electricity went out entirely around midnight. The interior of the Dawn Palace became a vast black tomb, its swallowing darkness pierced here and there by the feeble pinpricks of battery-powered torches and lanterns. At least visibility remained good out in the grounds. The crimson glow of the blazing city lit them up nicely.

Nilen could be heard shouting well into the night. The dark halls and stairwells echoed with his fury. It wasn’t clear if he was shouting at anyone in particular, or simply yelling at the walls themselves. He raved about the cowardice and faithlessness of the people, the incompetence of the generals, the sheer disgrace of Kauln soldiers surrendering to the lesser races. He recited the most fiery verses of the Sacramental Texts, just like in his old sermons, condemning everyone in the city to eternal damnation. When the Last Intervention came, he promised them, all traitors would be left behind to burn.

In the guard bunkrooms, one of the men started to weep hysterically in the darkness, crying for his mother. He wouldn’t shut up even when another man threatened to slit his throat. Fioral finally grew sick of the noise, and went by torchlight through the winding corridors towards the kitchen annex. He managed to get a few hours of fitful sleep on a threadbare brocade settee in the corner of a cobwebbed parlour. Empty rooms were the one thing the palace still had in abundance. He could have had a whole floor to himself, if he’d wanted.

He woke just before sunrise, feeling the palace vibrate to the endless drumbeat of unseen guns.

A couple of the generators were restored to functionality in the early hours of the morning. The palace radio operators were immediately treated to a deafening wave of panicked traffic from Salvator garrisons across the city. Screams, prayers, curses, desperate calls for help cut brutally short by loyalist gunfire. The few coherent reports that came through spoke of pure catastrophe. The Crown City was being taken apart, district by district.

Passing one of the radio rooms on his dawn rounds, Fioral heard a voice crackling from the speakers. One he hadn’t heard in years, but one that he recognised immediately. It brought back memories of childhood holidays, long before the People’s Salvation – a kindly man on the radio leading the nation in the Year’s Turn prayer. Now that same voice was older and harsher, utterly empty of kindness. It sent a chill of fear down Fioral’s spine.

“Soldiers of the Apostate Nilen. Hear the words of Charos the Second of the House of Raiu, Defender of the Sacramental Faith, King of Greater Kauln.” The cold fury in the King’s voice was clear even through the thick static. “You are surrounded by our armies, and those of our loyal allies. You cannot hope to overcome us, or to escape. We offer you a final chance to atone for your treason. Lay down your arms, renounce the blasphemy of the so-called People’s Salvation, and your lives will be spared. This we promise, in the sight of the Almighty. No other terms of surrender shall be offered or accepted. Those who resist will die along with their false prophet-”

The radio room supervisor shut off the speakers at that point, snapping at his underlings not to listen to enemy propaganda. Fioral walked on, balling his hands into fists to stop them shaking.

He joined Graz for breakfast in the guard commander’s makeshift office, a former reading-room overlooking one of the grand courtyards. They ate the day’s ration together in near-silence, surrounded by high shelves of mouldering books. Even Graz couldn’t get hold of any decent food. Fioral barely had any appetite, but he forced down the stale bread and nameless meat as best he could.

He wondered, with a dim sense of surreality, whether this would be his last breakfast.

As they were finishing their pitiful meal, a guardsman rapped at the reading-room door. Graz bid the man enter. Fioral recognised him as one of the east-wing sentries.

“Lord-General Stehdal shot himself last night, sir,” the man said, without emotion, as if he was reporting on the weather. “Sub-General Oberden, too. I found them in the Greenstone Hall, just now. Looks like they were having a last drink together. I covered them with blackout sheets.”

Graz nodded. He didn’t look surprised. “I’ll detail some men to bury them in the sunken gardens, out of sight. We don’t want a panic.”

“Shall…” The guardsman paused. “Shall I inform the First Marshal?”

“No. I’ll do it,” Graz replied. “Go back and watch over the bodies until the burial detail gets there.”

When the man had gone, Graz looked up at Fioral with a bitter smile, the end of a cigarette dangling from his lips. “Well. That’s quite a vote of confidence from our illustrious high command.”

“Miklaus will be promoted, now, won’t he, sir?”

“Yes. What an honour – the last Lord-General of the People’s Salvation. I’m sure he’ll still be boasting about it when he’s marched to the gallows.”

“You think it’s over,” Fioral said, after a moment. It wasn’t a question.

“It was over years ago. It’s not just the King's men knocking at our door now, guardsman. It’s all of Aede, the whole fucking planet. Tletora, Mar-Ilhande, the Ralkovak Kingdoms, even the bloody Foresters. We’re the only thing they hate more than each other, and they won’t stop until they’ve stuck Nilen’s head on a spike. And ours with him.”

“Then…you don’t believe in the Last Intervention?”

“Do you?” Graz asked flatly. “Does anyone in this corpse-pile of a city still believe, apart from Nilen? They say five thousand people died in the shelters under the Rachalen Chantry. Loyal Salvators, every one, burned alive as they prayed. The Almighty didn’t turn aside a single bomb.” He drew a fresh cigarette from the packet and lit it. His lighter was short on fuel; it gave a weak flame. “Or maybe He has intervened already – just for the other side.”

Fioral felt the floor shudder, a distant tremor from some especially heavy bombardment. The empty plates and drinking glasses rattled on the table. “The First Marshal will expect us to keep fighting,” he said.

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“Yes. To the last man, woman and child.” Graz took a long, contemplative drag on his cigarette. “Listen to me, guardsman. I’m not going to put a gun in my mouth like Stehdal. Nor am I keen to be hanged from a lamppost by King Charos’ men. I mean to get out of here alive. I’m willing to take you along, if you’re prepared to follow.”

Fioral met the commander’s level gaze. No matter how closely they’d worked together, he had no illusions that they were friends. He was quite sure Graz would shoot him if he got in his way. “I swore an oath to the People’s Salvation, sir.”

“So did I,” Graz sneered, blowing smoke. “So did Stehdal. So did millions of dead men. Which do you value more, that oath or your life?”

*

It turned out that a lot of men in the Dawn Palace valued their lives more. Later that morning, with the din of battle creeping closer and closer, Vanteig drove off through the main gates with about a third of the remaining guards. He took along Nilen’s personal physicians, a truckful of gold stripped from the royal apartments, and a male secretary he’d apparently been fucking.

Nilen, already incensed almost to madness by Stehdal’s suicide, shrieked with renewed fury at this latest betrayal. The newly-minted Lord-General Miklaus promised to behead Vanteig with his own two hands. He sent out several units of Incorruptible to pursue the wayward general, none of whom returned. Meanwhile, Monlarn went in person to the city’s northern garrisons, now practically on the front line, to gather fresh troops to defend the palace. Nilen had demanded ten thousand soldiers, and a full tank regiment. Monlarn came back with about a thousand men, many of them already wounded, and precisely one tank.

Fioral and Graz made a point of staying busy, and visible. They sent teams of guardsmen to establish firing positions in the cellars – last-ditch redoubts from which there could be no escape. There was talk of rigging the whole foundation to explode, but there wasn’t enough gelignite, nor engineers to wire it. Returning to the surface, they oversaw the reinforcing of the barricades on the west side of the palace, and the distribution of Monlarn’s new troops across the grounds.

“We couldn’t cover all these lines of approach with fifty thousand men,” Graz remarked, as they watched field guns and heavy mortars being wheeled into position behind piles of sandbags. Behind them, the countless shuttered windows of the western façade glinted dully in the sun. The rumble of artillery and the buzz of loyalist aircraft was so relentless that one hardly noticed it any more. “What are we supposed to do with one thousand?”

“Slow the enemy down,” Fioral said dutifully. “Until the Almighty steps in. The Last Intervention.”

Graz shook his head with a mirthless smile. “He Above. Nilen really wants us all to burn with him, doesn’t he?”

Fioral looked at the commander, thinking back on their discussion that morning, the furtive agreement they’d made. “How long do you think we have, sir?”

“A few hours,” Graz replied. “It’ll be over by sundown.”

With a dry mouth, hardly believing he was speaking the words, Fioral said: “And…when are we going to leave?”

Graz shot him a stony glare. “When I say we are, guardsman. Until then, kindly shut the fuck up. Miklaus’ pet rats are still scurrying around the place.” He nodded towards a squad of Incorruptible assembling an anti-tank gun a short distance away. “All we need is for one of them to overhear you.”

On the southwest steps, they found Monlarn in a heated argument with a nameless general who’d come in with the new contingent. The general had an empty sleeve pinned up where his right arm should have been. An old injury, unlike the fresh, crudely-bandaged shrapnel wounds that marked his face.

“You don’t speak for the First Marshal, Monlarn!” the wounded general yelled hoarsely. “These men are under my command. Half of them are in no condition to fight. I’m not handing them over for you to throw into the meat-grinder!”

“The First Marshal is no longer giving orders!” Monlarn shouted back. He was beetroot-red in the face and sounded more than a little drunk. “He hardly knows where he is any more. Go fucking ask him, if you like!”

A strange look crossed Graz’s face. A sort of savage, opportunistic hope. He turned to Fioral.

A shell whistled overhead and slammed into the third floor of the western façade. The grand windows blew out in cascades of glass, and flaming debris tumbled down onto the troops manning the barricades. Graz and Fioral threw themselves flat on the muddy flagstones as another shell blasted away a tiled cupola on the palace roof. Yet another struck the huge gilded doors of the western gatehouse, battering them inwards and turning the men guarding them into a gory splatter.

More shells began to fall in the gardens. They excavated craters on the lawns and smashed statues to gravel. Dirt and shrapnel rained down, rattling off the idled guns and half-finished fortifications. Fioral scrambled to his feet. He looked out in a panic to the edge of the grounds, but all he could see was the merrily burning city beyond.

“He Above,” Graz spat. He swept the dirt off the front of his uniform as he rose up. “I didn’t think they’d get here so soon. The fucking Sixth Army must have folded as well. Always knew they were milksops. They were useless in Mar-Ilhande, too.” He looked towards the palace’s western side, which now had flames crawling hungrily across its face in a dozen places. “This…accelerates things a little, guardsman. We need to get back inside, to the throne room.”

They sprinted along the burning façade, past the defenders running to their guns, past the smashed corpses outside the gatehouse. On the steps, Monlarn and the one-armed general had dusted themselves off and were already resuming what was likely the last argument of their lives. Graz shouted terse orders to groups of guardsmen as he ran, yelling at them to man their stations, to return fire to the southwest.

“Is the enemy…coming from the southwest, sir?” Fioral asked him, panting and straining to keep up. He couldn’t tell where the shells were coming from. Everywhere, it felt like.

“Almighty knows. I just want the fuckers to stay busy, and out of our way.”

They had just made it to the northwest corner, to the mouth of an old servants’ passageway, when an aircraft engine blared above them. It rose in pitch and volume until it was a relentless scream that blotted out every other sound. Fioral looked up, seized by a paralysing terror, and saw a propeller aircraft diving steeply out of the sun. Bombs and clustered rockets hung from its upswept wings. The pilot didn’t even seem to notice the volleys of flak directed his way from the palace roof. Straight at me, Almighty, he’s coming straight at me.

“Move, you idiot!” Graz roared. He grabbed Fioral by the forearm and pulled him through the passageway.

There was a loud, tearing burst of autocannon fire, and then the thunderous boom-smash of bombs blasting a hole in the palace wall. A surge of fire and shattered stone erupted into the space Fioral had occupied seconds before. Billowing dust chased him and Graz through the crumbling passageway. The noise of the plane’s engine faded away, only to be replaced by what sounded like twenty more closing in.

Graz yanked open the wooden doors at the far end of the passageway, which led through into the long tiled hallways of the west wing. “Dive-bombers. Fucking great,” he snarled, glancing back at the settling rubble. “That means the tanks will be here any minute. Monlarn’s army of cripples is in for a world of pain now. Best-case, they’ll hold out for an hour. Our lot will do a better job defending from inside, but not for long, even down in the cellars. The King will have the whole fucking palace burned to the ground to smoke them out.”

He slowed his run suddenly, looking up and down the deserted corridors. There was something cold, a flicker of calculation, in his grey eyes. “Guardsman Fioral, I need you to do something for me. Now, while there’s still time.”

Fioral caught up with the commander, his heart racing with fear and exertion. The submachine-gun in his hands was slippery with his sweat. He was oddly proud of himself for not dropping it. “Sir?”

Graz placed his hand on Fioral’s shoulder. “I need you to find Lord-General Miklaus, and pass on a message.”