Chapter 152: A Spark of Hope

We went back toward the palace gates, and the old man was still sitting there.

He had not moved, and the same patient smile sat on his face. It was the smile of someone who had been told the answer long ago and was only waiting for us to come around to it.

I felt Khan stiffen beside me. Nobody mentioned the collar. Nobody had to.

"We would like to live here." I said it myself. I kept my voice calm and a little tired, the way a traveler would who had walked far and wanted a bed. It was strange how easily the lie came out. I had told worse ones.

He smiled wider.

"Very well. then you shall go inside."

We nodded.

There was no key and no guard to open the gate for us, and the old man did not stir. So we put our hands on the black iron and pushed.

The doors were taller than five men, studded with spikes, and the bar that sealed them was as thick as my waist. It should have taken ten people to move it.

It took the four of us a little force and a lot of stubbornness, and it opened quite easily. I did not like how easily.

Gates that size are made to keep people out, and this one did not seem to care whether anyone got in.

The doors swung apart with a long groan, and the smell came out first.

Old sweat. Smoke. Piss.

Then I saw the hall, and my heart twisted and turned inside my chest.

Hundreds of people sat on the floor.

They filled the great entrance hall from wall to wall, old and young, shoulder to shoulder, with no beds and no blankets.

They were malnourished, their cheeks hollow and their wrists thin as rope.

Soot filled their faces and the creases of their hands, as if they had been rubbing it in on purpose.

Their hair was matted and messy. Nobody talked.

A child was sitting in the lap of a woman who might have been his mother, or might not, and he was not crying. That was the worst part.

That alone did not make my heart twist.

I had seen hunger. What made my stomach turn over was the place above them.

A great spiral staircase climbed the far wall, wide and curved, rising in two arms toward a landing high up. And along every step stood guards in golden armor.

They were clean. That was what I noticed first.

Not a smudge on their plates, not a speck of dust on their boots, while the people below them were gray with soot.

Their faces were beautiful in a way that did not look natural, smooth and calm and perfectly even.

Their hair fell around their helmets like a sweet dream, soft and bright and loose. They looked like paintings of soldiers.

They stood above the sitting people and watched them the way a farmer watches a pen of livestock.

I do not know if the ones on the floor could even be called living. They were breathing.

But they had the look of people who had been waiting for so long that they no longer remembered what for.

Something moved at the edge of my vision.

Near the foot of the stairs, behind the curve of the spiral, a guard in golden armor was holding a woman by the arm, abusing her. She was thin and gray like the rest.

She was not fighting him. He was doing something to her that I will not describe, and he was laughing about it, low and lazy, and nobody on the whole floor looked at him.

My hands went cold.

The guard noticed us before I could look away.

He let go of the woman and walked out from behind the staircase, his golden boots ringing on the stone. He came toward me from the side, easy and unbothered, and stopped a pace away, looking me up and down.

"What do we have here?"

His hand went for the hilt of my sword.

He was fast. For a man who looked like a painting, he was very fast. But I had been trained to read a hand before it moved, and I tilted backward at the waist, and his fingers closed on air.

Then the anger came. I did not choose it. It rose up through my chest, hot and white, and by the time I understood what I was feeling, my arm was already moving.

I slapped him.

It was not a fighter’s strike. It was a flat open palm, and I put everything I had behind it.

The crack was louder than any clap I had ever heard. His whole head snapped sideways, past where a head should go, and his neck twisted with a wet crunch that rolled all the way across the silent hall.

He stood there for a moment, head hanging on his shoulder at an angle, eyes wide and surprised.

He did not fall. He did not die on the spot.

So I made sure he did.

I drew my sword and drove it through the top of his skull. It went in with a quiet sound, like a spoon into soft bread. His knees buckled. The golden armor clanged against the floor, and the beautiful face went slack.

I pulled the blade free and looked up.

The guards on the stairs had seen it.

For a heartbeat, there was only silence.

Then the sound of metal, a dozen swords leaving a dozen sheaths at once, the ring of it bouncing through the whole hall.

Golden helmets turned toward us. Some of the guards began to run upward, boots pounding on the steps, going for help.

I did not wait for them.

I reached inside myself, to the place where the weight of my summons sat and called.

Ferebrute came out of nowhere.

One moment the floor in front of me was bare stone. The next, it was filled by a twenty-foot dog with two heads, grey and thick and heavy, its paws shaking the ground as it landed. The people nearest to it flinched back. A child screamed, once, and was hushed.

I did not speak. I gave the order through my consciousness.

Ferebrute ran.

It crossed the hall in four strides. The guards on the lowest steps raised their swords, and for half a second they looked like they might hold. Then both heads opened their mouths, and the soldiers saw what was behind the teeth.

They got scared. All at once, as if someone had cut a string. They dropped their swords. The blades clattered on the marble, and the guards turned and ran up the staircase, away from the thing that was coming for them.

But Ferebrute did not leave them.

It lunged. One head caught a man at the waist and lifted him clean off the step, and I watched him disappear into its jaws, armor and all.

The other head snapped a second one out of the air. Others were kicked aside, flung into the walls, or smashed flat beneath its enormous paws.

The staircase rang with screams and breaking metal. Golden plates rolled down the steps like coins.

Not all of them died. Some scrambled past it, up and out of sight, and I heard their boots fading above us. I let them go.

Then the hall went quiet again, except for the heavy breathing of the dog and the slow drip of something from a golden gauntlet.

I turned around.

The people on the floor were standing.

I do not know when it started. One by one, then all together, they had risen from the stone, gray and thin and trembling, with their hands hanging at their sides.

Nobody spoke. Nobody cheered.

They only stood and looked at us, at the dead guard on the floor and the giant dog on the stairs.

And in their eyes, I saw it.

A spark. A spark of hope.