Chapter 23: The Hollow Citadel

They put the Crown on him at the gate.

It was an iron circlet, plain and dull and much heavier than it looked, and when Isharv settled it on Fel’s brow it made a small, cold click, like a lock turning. A thread of silver light welled from its rim and ran down his temples like tears. He reached up to touch it, and it did not come off.

“Do not try,” said Isharv, with real pleasure. “It will break your fingers.”

Across the gate, on a small stone platform, Saladin Silverine stood perfectly still while a page set an identical circlet on his silver-pale hair. His mirrored eyes never left Fel. When the click came, he smiled, the way a man smiles when a door he has been leaning on finally opens.

“Three days,” said Kirn. “Do not die before the Third Bell, King Felanor. It is not permitted.”

“That’s comforting.”

“It was not meant to be.”

The gate opened, and Team D went down.

The Hollow Citadel took them in like a mouth.

For a moment Fel stood in the entrance of the Shallow Gallows, and every muscle in his body forgot how to move. It was perfect. It was wrong. The same slick cobblestones. The same crooked lanes, the same smog-stained walls, the sewage smell that no memory could improve. He could hear the gutter water dripping. He could hear, very far away, the sound of a bell.

Then he looked down the third lane, at the low, crooked corner where a tiny sign hung above a sagging door, and he saw the Willow’s Drip.

It was whole. The roof was straight. The door was unburned. There was no purple flame, no wreckage, no smoke. It was only a hollow shell built by strangers, and somebody had hung the sign correctly.

Fel looked at it for exactly as long as he could stand to.

“Fel,” said Vili quietly.

“I’m fine.”

“You are not fine. You are hiding it very well, which is nearly the same.”

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“Then let me keep hiding it.” He turned his back on the tavern. “Plan A. Loria on the high ground. Vili on the field. I take the front. We climb the tiers. Saladin will be waiting at the Keep. We don’t go to the Keep. We make him come to us.”

“And if he does not?”

“Then we make Knoxia and the wax boy regret it.”

“Do not call him the wax boy,” murmured Loria. “It is unkind.”

“You’re the one who threatened to shoot him.”

“I said yet.”

They went up.

The First Bell caught them halfway through the Lower City.

It tolled from the Keep, deep and slow and horribly loud, and the whole Citadel moved. Fel felt it through his boots: a long, grinding shudder, a rearranging of stone, as streets folded and gates swung shut and staircases turned themselves around in the dark like waking snakes. The lane in front of them vanished. Another opened at their side.

“Dusk already?” said Vili.

“It’s the Sanctum. Nothing’s on time unless it’s cruel.”

They ran. Fel led, because he still knew the bones of the place, and the bones had not changed even if the skin had. Loria ran on the rooftops, her boots skimming tile, the Three-Eyed Cerberus in her healed hand. Vili ran at his shoulder with Chimera whispering in a dozen shapes.

The warning came from above.

“Left!” Loria’s voice, cold and sharp.

Fel threw himself right. Something the size of a cart came down where he had been, and the paving stones cracked into a spider’s web.

It was Pegoris of Flatin.

He landed in a crouch, seven and a half feet of pale wax in a patched grey coat, and for a moment he looked absolutely miserable. His huge soft hands hung open. Beads of wax dripped from every fingertip, and where they hit the stone they hissed. Above his brow, in the mop of pale hair, a single small, unlit wick stood up like a candle stub.

“I’m sorry,” he said, in his small, slow voice. “I’m so sorry. Saladin asked.”

“He asks a great deal,” said Loria, from the rooftop.

She fired.

The black flame roared down the lane and struck Pegoris square in the chest, and he screamed. It was a high, awful, bleating sound. His coat went up in a puff of flame. His waxen skin blistered and ran, slumping down his ribs in thick yellow rivulets, and he staggered back, swatting at himself, his eyes wide with plain animal terror.

“Please,” he said. “Please, no, not the fire…”

Loria dropped from the roof like a falling blade. She landed lightly, gun raised, and fired again. This time the shot took his left shoulder clean off. Wax splattered against the wall and set into a rough ridge.

He turned and ran.

It was not a tactical retreat. It was pure flight, a seven-foot boy bolting through the alleys of a false city with his arm dripping and his coat on fire, weeping as he went. Loria stared after him for a heartbeat.

“He does not get to run,” she said.

“Loria,” said Fel. “Plan A. Don’t…”

“He will bring the others.” She was already moving. “I will not be led around by a candle.”

“Loria!”

But she had vaulted onto the nearest roof and was gone, a black streak against the dark sky, chasing the smoke of a burning coat.

Vili grabbed Fel’s sleeve. “Come. She is right. If he goes to Silverine, we lose the Gallows. She will catch him.”

“And if she doesn’t?”

“Then she will do something more interesting instead.” He was already tugging him along. “Run, King.”