The gunfire outside was closer and louder than ever when Fioral got back. It was like the roar of a heavy sea, individual impacts impossible to discern amid the general chaos. Every window not already broken rattled from the vibrations, and the chandeliers jingled musically overhead as he hurried through the halls. All across the grounds, blooms of black smoke were rising into the late afternoon sky. Shell after shell struck the roof directly, their impacts pulsing through the floors and sending rubble thundering down.
He found Graz addressing the Incorruptible sentries guarding the throne room doors. “You men are needed on the western barricades,” the commander was telling them. “I will oversee the First Marshal’s protection personally. I’ve instructed the east-wing guards to gather in the Aquamarine Gallery; join them there and report to Monlarn at the barricades. Let him know I’ll send fresh reinforcements when I can.”
Miklaus would have countermanded Graz, told the Incorruptible to stay put. But Miklaus wasn’t there, and the sentries seemed glad enough to be relieved of the duty of guarding the most hated man on Aede. They saluted Graz, hefted their rifles and began a fast march down the hallway. Their march quickly turned into a panicked run as an explosion shook the floor above, and then they were out of sight.
Graz registered Fioral’s approach. “Did you find Miklaus?”
“Yes, sir. In the Votive Courtyard.”
“Good.” Graz motioned for Fioral to follow him into the throne room.
The First Marshal was limping back and forth beside the map table like a caged animal, muttering ceaselessly under his breath. The electric lamps had died, and now the room’s only illumination came from rips in the blackout curtains, which let in slanting shafts of grey daylight. Dust motes danced and twinkled in those sparse beams. Above, the great vaulted ceiling was entirely lost in shadow.
“First Marshal?” Graz enquired, walking up to the pacing, gibbering old man.
Nilen looked round, frowning. It seemed to take him a while to recognise who was speaking to him. “Guard Commander Graz. Where is Lord-General Miklaus? His report is late. General Monlarn, too. They have sent no messengers to update me. All I hear is this, this racket. I cannot abide such disrespect of my time.”
“Miklaus is waiting for you in the Votive Courtyard, First Marshal.” Graz said. “He has a detachment of Incorruptible with him. They will escort you out of the city.”
“Out of the city? No. No, no, no.” Nilen shook his head feverishly. His obsidian-black eyes gleamed. “We must not leave, not now. The Last Intervention is at hand. The Almighty must be witness to our undying devotion, lest He turn away from us. Our faith must not waver-”
Graz grabbed Nilen’s upper arm, quickly and firmly. The First Marshal broke off, stunned out of his reverie. He stared up at the much taller commander in speechless outrage.
“First Marshal. The city has fallen,” Graz said curtly. “We must escape. The enemy will overrun the palace within the hour.”
“We cannot abandon the Dawn Palace to the subhumans!” Nilen spluttered, trying to wrench his stick-thin arm away from Graz.
“Miklaus plans to rally troops north of the city for a counterattack. The garrison on the Almaste Heights still holds.” Graz said it with an almost casual confidence. The man was a good liar, Fioral had to admit. The Almaste Heights had fallen to the loyalists two nights ago. “The men will be heartened to see their First Marshal.”
“I…” Nilen’s eyes roved around the vast, empty space, at its sagging tapestries and dusty pillars. His face twitched again, grimacing with indecision, then settled into a determined sneer. He nodded stiffly. “North of the city. Very well. We will strike back against the heretics, and crush them at the height of their confidence. We shall prove to the Almighty we are worthy of His intervention. He shall smile on us.”
“That He shall,” Graz agreed.
They led Nilen out of the looming darkness of the throne room, escorting him through the barren halls and half-collapsed archways of the west wing. The battle had come to the Dawn Palace in earnest. Their boots crunched constantly on broken glass and drifts of fallen masonry. Gunfire echoed on every side, machine-guns rattling without cease, shellbursts shaking the walls and dislodging plaster from the ceilings. More than once, they found their path blocked by rubble or licking flames, forcing them to detour through the maze of old servants’ passages.
They encountered almost nobody else alive, aside from a few haggard gunnery details frantically carting ammunition up to the roof. There were plenty of corpses, though. In one bullet-pocked corridor, they passed a handful of wounded men, abandoned on their bloodied stretchers, moaning for help that would never come.
Nilen didn’t stop muttering to himself, a stream-of-consciousness babble of threats and prayers and orders directed at imaginary armies. He flinched at the louder explosions, but otherwise seemed nearly oblivious of his surroundings. His withered leg wasn’t up to moving fast; Graz and Fioral had to almost carry him along by the arms at times.
“Miklaus,” he barked, in a sudden moment of lucidity, as they descended the grand staircase to the ground floor. “Where’s Lord-General Miklaus? You said you were taking me to him.”
“Right ahead, First Marshal,” Fioral said. Let’s see if I can lie as well as Graz. “The Votive Courtyard. He’s waiting there now. He has fifty…a hundred and fifty Incorruptible with him.” He glanced aside at Graz, who gave him a minute nod of approval.
“And the heretics? How close are they, now?”
“They’re being held at bay,” Graz said. His words were drowned out by a shell striking a floor or two above them. The staircase shook mightily, nearly knocking Fioral off his feet, and one of the fluted chandeliers fell from the landing above. It crashed down onto the mosaic-tiled floor to their right in a cacophony of shattering crystal and clanging brass. Graz went on as if nothing had happened. “Our men are fighting back as hard as they can.”
“Every man must fight to the death,” Nilen proclaimed to the dusty air, hobbling down the marble steps. “Not one inch of ground yielded to the subhumans. We must paint the earth red with their blood. The Almighty shall scourge them, in the world to come.”
“Yes, yes,” Graz replied impatiently. “Come on, First Marshal. Miklaus is just ahead.”
“Miklaus. Yes,” Nilen muttered. His voice rose and fell weirdly, sometimes a whisper, sometimes almost a shout. “He’s a loyal man, a godly man. A righteous replacement for that coward Stehdal. He can have command of the eastern armies, and the Air Legion. The great weapons on Delan's Rock, once they're ready. Almighty willing, we will drive the heretics before us. Wipe their poison off the face of Aede. The Last Intervention is close now, so close…”
Nilen was still talking feverishly to himself when they brought him through the gateway that opened into the Votive Courtyard. It was a wide flagstoned space with a vaulted arcade running along its walls, its tall pillars decorated with painted statues of the blessed martyrs of the Faith. To the north, the courtyard was overlooked by the towering tiered splendour of the royal chapel. The battle hadn’t yet reached this far, and the chapel’s gilded spire looked undamaged, though soot-stained and coated in the omnipresent ash.
The square of pale sky above was clouded with drifting smoke. Loyalist planes could be glimpsed streaking back and forth across it, jets and turboprops stooping almost lazily into their strafing runs. There was nothing left to stop them now; the flak guns on the roof had long since fallen silent.
“Ah. Here is Miklaus, First Marshal,” Graz announced. He was smiling.
Half a dozen yards from the doorway, Lord-General Miklaus lay facedown on the patterned flagstones. He had one arm stretched out, as if pointing across the courtyard at something unseen. The back of his uniform jacket was dotted with holes, the black cloth soaked through with congealing blood. One bullet had struck him in the nape of his neck, leaving a neat red perforation.
Nilen saw the corpse and stopped in mid-stride. His babbling abruptly ceased, and he let out a strangled groan, turning back towards Graz and Fioral with uncomprehending eyes.
Graz unholstered his pistol. He levelled it at the First Marshal.
“What...what is this?” Nilen croaked. “Commander, what are you-”
“I thought about leaving you for the King's men, Palkas,” Graz said calmly. It was the first time Fioral had ever heard someone address Nilen by his given name. “I imagine they’d have done something fairly creative with you. Maybe nailed you to the palace roof by your shrivelled balls. But I didn’t want to risk Miklaus spiriting you away to Kursalian, or you putting a bullet in your own head. Some things one has to take care of oneself.”
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“Drop that weapon, commander. I order you.” A fresh twitch ran through Nilen’s jaw, his teeth grinding together manically. “I order you! As First Marshal of Holy Kauln, I…I command you!”
“No.” Graz clicked off his pistol’s safety catch.
“This is treason, commander. A betrayal of your sacred oath. Before the Almighty, you swore me an oath!”
“I did, didn’t I? And yet, here we are, Palkas.”
Nilen glanced over at Fioral, his gaze now showing wild terror. “You – guardsman! Shoot him! Shoot this traitor!”
Fioral looked into the old man’s wide dark eyes, saying nothing. Slowly, he lifted his submachine-gun and aligned its muzzle with Nilen’s face.
“Guardsman Fioral is with me,” Graz said in a tone of flat satisfaction. “He executed Miklaus on my orders. I would have loved to have done it myself, let me tell you.”
“Traitors,” Nilen said faintly, his bloodless cheek twitching again. Then, louder, shouting and spraying spittle as if he was back at his pulpit: “Traitors! Godless vermin, apostate filth, heretics!” His voice echoed around the empty courtyard, a reedy cry amid the booming shellfire.
“Do you mind if I shoot him?” Graz asked Fioral. “I let you have Miklaus, after all.”
Fioral lowered his gun. “He’s all yours, sir.”
He had imagined it more than once, this final moment. He’d pictured Nilen kneeling and begging for his life, sobbing like a child, clutching his hands in mortal entreaty. Turning to run, dragging his withered leg, screeching incoherently for help. Crawling on the ground like a worm, trying to burrow away from the bullets.
Miklaus had tried to run.
Nilen did not. He straightened up, though his hands shook uncontrollably. His face twisted into a mask of impotent rage. “Your kind are damned to perdition, heretic. Hellbound from birth, no better than the subhumans. You will be scourged in darkness forever.”
“Yes, I’ve heard your sermons,” Graz said boredly. “They always dragged on too long. Goodbye, First Marshal.”
“I will ascend to glory, traitor,” Nilen spat. “I will stand by the side of the Almighty. I will live forev-”
Graz shot the First Marshal in the mouth. Nilen’s left cheek, his tongue and half his lower jaw were ripped away in a thick spray of blood and splintered teeth. There was just enough time for him to give a terrible, gurgling moan of agony before Graz fired again, and again, and again, pumping bullets into face and chest and throat. Nilen collapsed backwards bonelessly, tumbling onto the ash-streaked stones. Graz continued to fire, each shot kicking out a fan of blood and bone fragments, until his pistol clicked on a spent magazine.
The ringing echoes of the gunshots faded away into the general rumble of the battle. Graz took a deep, shaking breath, staring neither at Nilen nor at Fioral, but seemingly off into the distance, at the statues of the martyrs in their faded colours. Then he tossed his empty gun aside. It skittered over the flagstones and came to rest near Miklaus’ bullet-riddled body.
Finally, Graz turned back to Fioral. “Let’s go. We don’t have long before the King's men get here.”
“Go…where?” Fioral said. He realised, with a jolt of dismay, that he had taken it entirely on faith that Graz had an actual escape plan. The commander hadn’t trusted him with any details, only promising that he knew a way out.
“The canal, at the north edge of the grounds. There’s a couple of working motorboats still tied up there, I checked this morning. I stashed some plain clothes in one of the boathouses the other day. Labourer’s overalls. We won’t have any chance getting out of the city in these uniforms.” Graz broke into a quick stride across the courtyard, stepping over Nilen’s corpse without so much as looking down.
For a moment, Fioral’s legs wouldn’t obey him. He stood frozen in the shadow of the looming chapel spire. Despite everything, he couldn’t quite believe that the time had come at last. That it was over.
The heavy boom of a nearby explosion reverberated over the rooftops, followed by a chaotic clatter of falling masonry. It snapped him out of his trance. A simple, almost reassuring certainty came to him – if he stayed here, he would die. He hurried after Graz, watched by the stone eyes of the painted martyrs.
On the way, he took one last glance at the sprawled form of the First Marshal. Blood was trickling through the cracks between the flagstones, making a fine geometric pattern around the pulped wreckage of Nilen’s head. Fioral wrinkled his nose at the rising stench, which was unmistakable even through all the smoke.
In dying, it appeared that Palkas ir-Nilen, Herald of the People’s Salvation, First Marshal of Holy Kauln, had shat himself.
*
Graz and Fioral stole their way northwards across the shell-scarred palace grounds, at times on their hands and knees. They dashed from crater to crater, in and out of dried-up ornamental ponds and sunken gardens, taking cover behind the overgrown remains of the grand pre-war topiary. There were corpses, and pieces of corpses, scattered everywhere. Fioral saw men and vehicles appear and disappear like ghosts in the shifting murk, racing across the wide lawns, but mercifully none came too close to them. The fighting still seemed concentrated on the western side, where the constant flashes of guns and bomb-blasts pierced the smoke like a localised thunderstorm. Tanks rattled and roared in the distance as the loyalist armour punched through the remaining Salvator barricades.
Further beyond, the horizon was on fire in every direction, as the greater battle for the Crown City raged on. Every scrap of clear sky seemed to be filled with the black cruciforms of bombers, too many to count, too many to comprehend. Fioral forced himself to look straight ahead, at the path before him, and nothing else.
The canal stairway was hidden behind a row of tall, jagged evergreens, close to the wrought-iron fence at the very edge of the palace grounds. There had been an anti-aircraft unit posted here, but they were gone now, their abandoned flak gun pointing its twin muzzles at the sky. Graz led the way down the steep, mossy stairs, and then through a short unlit tunnel whose guards had likewise long since fled.
The tunnel opened out into a narrow slot-canyon of a canal, sunk forty feet or more below the level of the gardens. A long stone docking platform ran along it, with tin-roofed wooden boathouses jutting out over the murky black water. There was nobody in sight, but two small grey motorboats were tied up near the end of the platform. Patrol craft, normally used by the perimeter guards; paltry, cramped, rusty old things. The way Graz smiled at the sight of them, they might have been the chariots of heaven itself.
“Still here. Almighty be praised,” the commander panted. His lean face shone with sweat. “I was worried someone else would make off with them before we could get here. I was ready to swim.”
“I…I can’t swim, sir,” Fioral said lamely. “Not well, anyway.”
“Then you’re having a very blessed day today, guardsman.” Graz gave a breathless laugh, and gestured at the nearest of the two boats. “Let’s take that one, it’s less rusty. Check that it’s fuelled, will you? I’ll go fetch our change of clothes.”
While Fioral inexpertly checked the boat’s engine, Graz ducked into one of the boathouses, returning with the work overalls which he’d stashed away. They were rough tan cotton, with belts and hobnailed boots to match. They were odd-smelling and a poor fit – too small for Graz, too big for Fioral – but they put them on all the same, hurriedly wriggling out of their sweat-soaked uniforms. Fioral nearly forgot to retrieve the little steel flask from his jacket pocket.
“What’s that? Bathtub gin?” Graz asked, lacing up his new boots.
“Whiskey, sir.”
“Whiskey? He Above, I can’t remember when I last had real whiskey,” Graz grinned tiredly. “Who’d you get it from?”
“A dead man,” Fioral replied.
They bundled up their uniforms and tossed them into the dark water. Fioral thought about keeping his gun, but Graz made him throw it in as well. “Unless you plan to fight your way through the King's whole army, our shooting days are over,” the commander said.
The boat was in better condition than it looked, though it rocked alarmingly when they first stepped into it. The motor took a few tries of the pullcord to finally cough to life. It burbled placidly as they pushed away from the dock. Jets roared high overhead, spitting rockets and autocannon fire at unseen Salvators. Somebody was still fighting back, then. Fioral was glad it wasn’t him.
“Where now?” he asked, settling himself awkwardly on the boat’s hard wooden bench. His heart was still pounding in his chest. He truly hadn’t expected to get this far.
Graz took the tiller, steering the boat one-handed. “I’m going to try and make it out west, to Ryvalan. My wife said she was going to take our girls there, in her last telegram,” he said, with a hopefulness that sounded as brittle as glass. “I heard the fighting wasn’t so bad in the valleys. Our lot surrendered pretty quick there, so the King's men went easy on them. Trucked in food for the civilians, even had their medics treat the sick.”
Fioral had heard the same, though he’d also heard the opposite. The propaganda ministry had been shrieking for months about loyalists raping and butchering Salvator women and children, desecrating chantries, burning towns to ashes. For every rumour of kindness, there was another of brutality. And he remembered the barely-contained fury in King Charos’ voice on the radio. He said nothing.
Graz steered them out of the dock and into the main trunk of the canal. He went easy on the throttle, so the boat hardly stirred the ash-flecked water. The sounds of battle from above echoed off the steep brick walls. “What about you?” he asked. “Have you got somewhere to go? Wife, family?”
Fioral shook his head. “Nobody living, sir.”
Graz seemed about to ask more, then appeared to think better of the idea. “Alright. Well. You can come with me, I suppose.”
“Thankyou, sir.”
“I’m not a sir any more. And you’re not a guardsman. If the loyalists catch us…we’re labourers, dockhands on the riverfront. We’re out looking for food. We’ve never held a gun, and we’ve never been within a mile of the Dawn Palace. Understand?”
If the loyalists catch us, they might just shoot us on the spot, Fioral thought. But he nodded, all the same.
“Good.” Graz squinted at the brickwork gorge of the canal ahead. “Another half a mile, and this opens out onto the river. My thinking is, we find somewhere out of sight on the south bank. Pull up there, wait till it’s dark, then get as far downriver as we can. This boat can get us past the ring-roads, at least. After that…” He shrugged. “We find something with wheels. Or we walk.”
“All the way to Ryvalan? That’s five hundred miles.”
“Tell you what. Give me some of that whiskey of yours, Dockhand Fioral, and I’ll carry you halfway there.”
Fioral managed a grin. He fished the battered flask out of the pocket of his overalls.
Graz grabbed the flask with obvious enthusiasm. “Here’s to the Last Intervention,” he said, and swigged heartily. “Oh, that’s good stuff. A Cosserey rye, I used to drink it before the war. Your dead man had some taste.”
Fioral took back the flask and had a long drink of his own. As the whiskey burned its way sweetly down his throat, a faint brightness caught his eye. He looked up.
In the pale evening sky, through a break in the swirling smoke, the moons were rising.