Chapter 149: Scharlott [Power Stones Bonus]

’Well, it is not that dangerous.’

I frowned at myself.

That was not entirely honest. It was not a bottomless pit, and I doubted anyone would die from falling here. The drop looked like ten, maybe twelve feet, with a floor of old stone at the end of it. But the darkness below looked wrong. It looked like the kind of darkness that had been waiting for someone to fall into it, and I didn’t want to find out what it did with them.

So I told myself it wasn’t dangerous. And I did not believe myself.

"We jump," I said, standing. "It’s one stride. Wide, but one stride. Just don’t slip."

"Easy for you to say," Khan muttered.

I took a few steps back and measured the distance with my eyes. Three strides of run-up, one long leap, and the stone on the other side was slick enough to ruin it all. I breathed in once, slowly, then ran and leapt.

For half a second, I hung in the air with nothing under me. The cold breath of the gap rushed up past my legs, and my stomach dropped as if it had decided to stay behind. Then my boot hit the far stair, skidded, and held. I windmilled once, grabbed the wall, and found my balance. ’Idiot.’

My heart was hammering, and I stood there a moment, waiting for it to slow down.

One by one, the others followed. Eva jumped like she was stepping over a puddle. Khan landed heavily and swore. Petra went last, and I caught her hand and pulled her the rest of the way, and she laughed under her breath, a little too sharply.

Her hand stayed in mine a second longer than it needed to. I didn’t mention it.

We looked back at the gap.

Then I noticed something that stayed with me. No one was living here.

Not just the houses. The whole path. The stairs, the pipes, the walls, all of it was clean and well made, and there was not one footprint in the slime but ours. The problem was not the gap. It was that nobody was here to fix it. Someone had built a mountain road with running water and neat stairs, and they had walked away from it, and nobody had come back. A place like that doesn’t empty out quietly. Something makes it happen.

After the gap, we took the short way toward the palace. It was a narrower path that split from the main road and cut straight across a ridge, steep and rough, but it saved us at least an hour. The wind pushed at our backs the whole way, as if it wanted us to hurry.

We didn’t encounter any trouble walking it. Except for one thing.

I was in front, with my sword loose in my hand, when I felt a small, quick thump against my boot, like a pebble thrown at it. I looked down.

An Unorthodox creature. A Feral, though it took me a second to believe it. It was no bigger than my fist, a round mottled body like a beetle crossed with a spider, six thin legs, and a mouth of needle teeth gnawing at the leather of my boot with great determination.

I stared at it. It looked up at me, and I swear it considered whether to keep going.

Feral. The lowest rank. Barely more than an animal with an appetite. The kind of thing that doesn’t kill you, only ruins your boots.

"Is that it?" Khan asked.

"It’s a Feral."

"It’s tiny."

"It’s angry."

I flicked my sword down. The creature made a sound like a snapped twig, and it was in two pieces on the stones. Nothing else happened. I wiped the blade on a tuft of dry grass and wished everything in the Realm were that easy.

We rounded the final curve.

And there it was.

The palace rose out of the mountain like a thorn out of a wound.

It was not golden, not glittering, not the bright, flattering kind of palace that nobles dream about. It was carved from a stone so dark that it seemed to drink the failing light, and it climbed the cliff in layered tiers, each one narrower than the last, until the highest spire pierced the cloud ceiling like a blade through a bandage.

Long, thin windows glowed faintly red along the walls, dozens of them, hundreds of them, staring down at the world with the patient attention of a thousand half-lidded eyes. I felt every one of them settle on us, one by one, like fingers on the back of my neck.

And the quiet tug in my chest woke up. It didn’t pull this time. It leaned, the way a plant leans toward a window, and I had to dig my heels into the ground to stay where I was.

A bridge of black stone spanned the gap between the road and the main gate, with no railing, only a long, narrow back like the spine of some great sleeping beast. Mist drifted beneath it, and somewhere far down, water or something like water was moving.

The gate itself was monstrous. Two enormous doors of blackened iron, each easily five times my height, studded with spikes and sealed together by a single massive bar. Atop the lintel, carved in bold relief, a pair of wings spread wide above a circle, and from the circle, thin lines ran downward in a pattern that I knew, uncomfortably, to be a stylized rain of blood.

We gathered our courage and began walking toward the two doors. We stayed close to each other, and I kept my eyes on the iron, because the moment I looked down at the drop beside the bridge, I knew my legs would stop. Our boots made small, dry sounds on the black stone, and in that silence every one of them felt too loud.

There were no guards there.

Only one man could see us outside the gate.

He was old and crippled, huddled at the foot of the right-hand door in a tattered grey cloak, with one leg bent wrong beneath him. His eyes were milky white. He was blind.

And yet he lifted his head as we approached and turned his face directly toward us.

My left ear tingled, faintly.

He smiled, wide and toothless and friendly, and it was the worst thing I had seen all day.

"Oh, you traveller," he said, in a voice like paper rubbing on paper. "Come and live under the gaze of the mighty Emperor Scharlott."

Behind me, I felt Petra’s fingers close around my sleeve.

’Emperor Scharlott?’ I thought.