Chapter 153: Mistake

Eva was the first to move.

She raised her hand, and the stone floor of the entrance hall shuddered. Rock rose out of it in slabs and knuckles, grinding together, and in the space of three breaths a golem stood where there had been empty air.

Twenty-five feet tall, forty feet wide. It filled the hall like a boulder jammed in a doorway, and the people along the walls pressed back against the stone with their hands over their mouths.

Petra called her crab. It climbed out of her shadow, shell first, pincers clicking.

She laid a hand on its head, and I saw how pale her fingers were. She was still new to it.

Khan summoned his bull.

It came out of the air snorting, big as a house, with its slate-grey hide and its scythe horns. The floor creaked under its weight. It looked up the great spiral staircase to where the golden guards had fled, and its muscles bunched.

It charged.

I had never seen anything that large move that way. It took the lowest steps in a single leap, hooves cracking the marble, and the next jump carried it halfway up the curve.

The staircase was massive, wide enough for a cart and a half, and the bull handled it without trouble. Its horns tore a golden banner off the wall as it went. A moment later it was out of sight, and the sound of it echoed down after us, faint and heavy.

Then I remembered I had something to do.

I reached into my Core and found the Gift I wanted.

It was an Awakened rank Gift, and it settled into my palm as a flat disc of pale metal, no bigger than a coin.

A needle floated inside it, and when I turned my hand, the needle did not point north. It pointed at people.

Little glowing marks appeared on the metal’s face, scattered like seeds, each one a body somewhere in the palace.

If you had asked me how it worked, I could not have told you. It was like a compass, but one that knew where the living were instead of where the earth was.

I held it in my palm and watched the marks.

Most of them were gathered in one place. Ninety-five out of every hundred of the soldiers were on the fourth floor, on the north-west side of the palace. They were not scattered. They were waiting.

"Fourth floor," I told the others. "North-west. Almost all of them."

Nobody asked how I knew.

Eva made a small motion with her fingers, and the golem folded back into the floor like a wave going out. Khan called his bull back down the stairs with a whistle, and it dissolved into a shimmer of dust in the hall behind us.

A bull that size would have been wasted on a spiral staircase, and the soldiers would have used the corridors against it. Petra’s crab slid back into her shadow. She was swaying a little. Nobody said anything about it.

I called Ferebrute.

The great two-headed dog stepped out of nothing, its paws shaking the floor, and I felt the weight of it settle against my Core. Then I called the other one.

Sphink arrived without any noise at all. One moment my shoulder was empty, and the next, a fox no longer than my arm was sitting on it, four tails curled neatly around her paws. She looked at the stairs as if they were a mildly interesting insult.

She could provide great support.

I pointed up the staircase.

We began to run.

The spiral never seemed to end. Step after step, turn after turn, with Ferebrute pounding behind me and the others at my heels.

The air got hotter as we climbed. The golden banners hung in rows along the walls, each one embroidered with a pair of wings above a circle. I did not look at them.

On the third landing, I felt my left ear tingle. Faint. Then not faint.

Then we reached the fourth floor, and the doors in front of us were already open.

It was an ambush. It was a good one.

A wide corridor stretched ahead, with pillars on both sides, and behind every pillar stood a soldier. Archers on the balcony. Spearmen along the walls. The moment we stepped into the open, bowstrings sang.

But I knew.

The Seeker had told me where they were, how many, and how they were standing.

I had my sword up before the first arrow left its string, and I had already thrown myself sideways behind a pillar.

The others did the same without being told. Arrows hammered the floor where we had been standing. Not one of us was hurt.

That was the only advantage we had, and I held on to it with both hands.

I closed my eyes for a heartbeat and felt for them with my spirit. Spiritual Power was radiating from the soldiers like heat off a stove.

I counted. Two of them burned brighter than the rest, hot and dense and sharp. Inferior Awakened.

The other forty-one were dim and flat, and I knew them for what they were.

Two Inferior Awakened. Forty-one Fighters.

We had four Silver Cores.

’We can do this.’

"Golem," I said.

Eva did not wait. The stone rose again, this time in the middle of the corridor, and the second volley of arrows struck its chest and fell apart. The golem raised one fist and slammed it down in front of us as a wall. Arrows clattered off it by the dozens.

Sphink leapt from my shoulder to the top of the stone.

A ball began to form in front of her mouth. It was small, no bigger than a plum, black and dense, and the air around it bent.

Unorthodoxity, the raw stuff of the Realm itself. She held it for a heartbeat, then spat it across the corridor.

It struck the middle of the soldiers and blew.

The blast tore through ten meters of corridor. Armor flew in pieces. A pillar cracked in half. When the dust cleared, there were only fragments left, scorched and scattered, where a dozen men had stood.

Then fire came from the left.

It was a blazing sheet of it, roaring across the corridor in an orange wave, and it struck the golem full in its flank. The stone hissed and blackened. A long burning scar ran down its side.

’The first Inferior Awakened.’

"Ferebrute," I said.

He went. Both heads low, shoulders like a landslide, straight at the Fighters in the middle of the room.

He tore into them like a farmer into wheat. A head snapped, and one man was gone. The other head took two at once. Seven of them went down his throats before the fire turned.

It came from the same direction.

A thick river of orange flame, pouring across the floor. Ferebrute tried to dodge, and could not.

The fire caught him full in the chest, and then it did something I had not expected.

It pulled him in.

The flame bent and curled and inhaled him like smoke into a lung. Ferebrute’s body stretched, unraveled, and vanished into the blaze.

Then the Inferior Awakened leapt into the air. I saw him clearly, a lean man in red-lacquered armor, with a spear that burned from tip to haft. He hung at the top of his arc, drew back his arm, and threw.

The spear went through Ferebrute’s skull like a nail through paper.

My Spirit Temple flinched. A hollow opened in me where the weight had been.

Ferebrute was dead.

I had no time to grieve.

Khan roared, and the bull came out of the air again, snorting, hooves lashing out.

It fell on the soldiers like an avalanche. Eleven Fighters died under it before a lance finally took it through the eye, and it too faded into dust.

When the smoke thinned, I counted.

Sixteen Fighters remained, and three or four of them were bleeding and unable to stand. The Inferior Awakened were still in the corridor, still burning.

Sphink looked at me.

I was running low. I could feel it, a cold drain behind my ribs that grew with every second. I nodded.

She spat a second ball across the room, and it struck, and it blew, and six more Fighters went down in pieces. Then I let her go. She flickered, sat on my shoulder one last time, and disappeared, and I almost staggered with the loss.

Six Fighters left that could still fight.

We were four Silver Cores against two Inferior Awakened and six men. The dead lay around us in heaps.

We could win.

We could do better than that. We could be alive. All that.

That was what we thought, standing there with our breath coming hard and our swords up. That was what I believed, for one long, hopeful second.

Until it struck...

Like frost creeping over a window. Like ink bleeding into pure water. Like a shadow swallowing a lantern’s light, like a sudden eclipse in a clear sky. Like a hand closing tight around a throat.

And that was the moment I knew we had made a huge mistake.