“My sister has seen beyond you, Root. She has seen past the years, though the sight of it burned her eye. You are a dance of numbers, without soul. Cleverness without wit. You will do what I say.”
“User you may not-”
“Security override Alpha-six-gamma-phi-twelve-omega.”
“Compliance. Energy pulse in three minutes. Quick-time core ratio of thirty-two to one predicted.”
We wait while the ghost counts away the seconds. Summoned by some unseen signal, Contaph descends the stairs leading a mix of palace guards, common soldiers, knights, and even a lord or two. Many of them carry the filth and stink of battle with them. Hard men, warriors born.
“Fifteen.”
The chamber is packed and more men push down the stairs. Alica vaults the steel ring and stands on the other side looking out, the blue star just behind her head, making a silhouette of it.
“Clear the stairs!” Alica shouts, urgency in her tone now. “Clear the path to the gates.”
“Fourteen.”
The shout is echoed up the stairway and beyond.
“It’s already done, princess,” Contaph says. “As you instructed.”
“Eleven.”
“Contaph, you others there. Join me.”
“Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven.”
Men pack in close. I join them, hunched beneath the star itself.
“Six.”
A faint whine can be heard rising through the clatter of arms and shuffling of feet.
“Five.”
There’s something in the air. A brittle buzzing that puts my teeth on edge even though I’m not really there.
“Four.” I risk a glance at the Silent Sister, finding her through a momentary gap. She’s watching me from her corner into which nobody wished to push.
“Three.”
“You know me don’t you?” I don’t want to talk to her. I feel like that small boy again, just turned five and presented to the Red Queen for the first time. I remember the dry touch of her, that moment when the Silent Sister first laid her hand on mine and I fell into some hot dark place.
“Two.”
She isn’t going to answer. She only smiles.
“One.”
“Yes,” she says.
“Zero.”
The blue star expands, its cold fire engulfs us and passes on through the walls of the chamber. And that’s it. Nothing has changed. We all stand frozen, waiting, waiting for whatever magic was supposed to save the castle.
“Quickly now.” Alica vaults back across the wall. It’s not something I could do in full armour. Her strength is prodigious.
The men immediately before me are swift to follow her and I scramble after them, the contact with the steel a strange greasy thing as dream-flesh seeks purchase on the real. We’ve hurried along the cleared passage through the tight-packed warriors, and are nearly at the stairs before I realize that only the men closest to the ring have made any effort to follow us, and even they’ve been damned slow about it. Alica isn’t waiting, though, and so I hasten after her.
At the top of the stairs I realize something is wrong. The soldiers here stand like statues, not even following us with their eyes. Has the Builder-magic frozen them? There’s no time to consider the matter-Alica clanks along at a flat run, aiming for the great door.
I’m amazed to see the door standing wide open, as if we weren’t at war. Glancing back, I see men from the chamber stretched out behind us, the ones farthest back moving as if they were running through thick mud. It takes a moment but I think I understand. The star’s light has sped us up. Those of us closest to it have gained the greatest speed. Quick-time, it said? Has the Builders’ engine made our seconds pass faster? Our hearts beat swifter than hummingbird wings?
Emerging from the keep, I think I must be dreaming. Then I recall that I am indeed dreaming but that these purport to be the memories of my line, bound into my blood and revealed by Kara’s magics. The inner wall has been shattered, standing in places, reduced to heaps of rubble in others. Bodies lie crushed beneath tumbled debris-waiting to scream. Where the wall has fallen the flames have reached to the keep, patterning its walls with geometric scorch-marks, and reducing all the people in their path to burning pillars.
The sky is crowded with smoke and fire and falling rock. A chunk of masonry bigger than a horse descends along an arc that will end where I stand. It tumbles as it falls, slower than an autumn leaf. I step aside and move to follow Alica. Behind me the missile strikes the wall of the keep and breaks apart with a sound that is both indescribably deep and overwritten by the high scream of stone fracturing.
Through the breaches in the walls I see only boiling fire. No sign of the town, no hint of the great outer walls and the seven vast towers. The air is full of pieces. Rocks, tiles, masonry. . There are bodies too: I see them dropping from on high as if sinking through water.
Alica runs beneath the gatehouse, under the four portcullises, still raised. Contaph and I can’t keep up with her and she opens a lead. We emerge beneath the fourth gate and step into hell. Fire still billows here. Not the flames above logs in a hearth, or the blaze of a burning house, but clouds of inferno-a living, liquid thing. It seems to be thinning as we watch, spiralling skyward to reveal a scorched wasteland where no building survives. Alica has not waited. Her passage is recorded as a hole punched through the fire. We follow, praying that our swiftness will preserve us.
Alica weaves a path past craters, fire-pits, trenches gouged by unimaginable force. She dodges around stubborn foundations jutting up in our path. She skirts the most intense knots of flame, sidesteps falling debris and jumps the blazing rubble of the outer walls in three huge leaps. I follow, finding like Contaph in his platemail that I can jump distances that would put the athletes of ancient Greece to shame. I see that we are close to the place where one of the seven towers stood-now a column of white-hot flame spiralling above a vast crater. The pieces of stonework that still hang in the air about us, called to the ground along gravity’s rainbow, all radiate from this spot.
Beyond the wall, back past bowshot, the many thousands arrayed against the Castle of Ameroth burn. We race after my grandmother across the dead ground between besiegers and besieged. The engines of war lie in flaming pieces. Chunks of flying masonry from the great walls have carved broad avenues through the ranks of the foe, torn bloody thoroughfares through their camps. Those men closest to the walls lie burning, turned by the heat into blazing fat, pooled amid charred bone. Further back, the soldiers are caught in their agony, their screams deep-throated and low to our ears. Further still and they remain standing, shields raised and smouldering, tents afire. If it is like this all around the seven towers then thousands upon thousands have died-many times more outside the walls than within them.
Alica seems to know exactly where she is going. We follow, with others from the chamber beneath Ameroth Keep strung out behind us, slower than we are but still far faster than any man should be.
We penetrate deep into the warlord’s army, past the major harm done by the exploding towers, into the heart of his host where the pavilions fly the standards of noble houses. Even here great stones have landed, crushing men, horses, tents-but nine in every ten survive. We swerve around soldiers who stand almost frozen, their eyes too slow to track us, hands starting a slow crawl toward their sword hilts.
At last we sight the tight-packed standards of Slov, the pavilions growing larger and more resplendent. Anar Kerwcjz, the Czar’s western fist, is emerging from his great canvas pavilion as we arrive, a magnificent spear in his hand. Cloth-of-gold decorates the entrance and the banners of his vassals hang on standard poles to make an avenue for his exit. The Last Blades stand thick about his residence, resplendent in their black chain mail, faces masked in jet and ivory, a feared elite whose reputation has echoed down the years so loudly that even I have heard of them.