Chapter One
The walls around Disaris shuddered and creaked as she pushed the heavy storage jar away from the hole she’d made for her escape route. A shower of dust rained down on her head as another barrage of stones slung from a Daesin catapult slammed into what remained of Baelok citadel. The walls groaned from the impact and the tall jar tilted to one side, teetering on its edge until its balance gave up the fight. It crashed to the floor in an explosion of ceramic shards and dust. Disaris shielded her face with her forearm, gasping when a sudden, hot pain lanced her arm.
She glanced down to see her sleeve split and her flesh laid open from wrist to elbow. It was a deep cut, made by a piece of pottery whose edge was as sharp as any blade. For a moment her ring finger and little finger went numb, and blood sluiced down her arm to coat her hand and drip off her fingertips. Clenching her teeth from the pain, she wiped the gore on her shirt hem before unwinding her head scarf to use as a makeshift bandage. A frantic check of her skirt assured her the destroyed jar hadn’t torn the fabric. The fate of a kingdom—maybe a world—layhidden within the folds of that worn piece of clothing. It had to stay together a little longer.
Outside the door of the room where she hid, desperate cries rose above the juggernaut heartbeat of pummeling rock. She tried not to listen, even though sobs climbed up her throat and tears poured down her cheeks, splashing muddy drops onto her hands as she crouched to dig stones and straw out of the opening she’d made in the back wall.
A narrow tunnel, hardly big enough to squeeze a child through, lay behind the mudbrick masonry, leading to an abrupt drop-off to a cavern below. One made by Nature but then altered by the hand of man into a storage room, now abandoned and empty. It offered only the shadow of a promise of escape, if she was lucky enough not to break a limb or her skull when she leapt off the edge. It wasn’t a far distance, but stone was unforgiving. If she lamed herself, she’d die in the dark, alone with only the thumping heart of Daesin catapults to serenade her to her end. Better there than the charnel house the citadel had become.
Her stomach plummeted to her feet, and she abandoned her bid to flee when the flimsy chair she’d wedged against the door to keep it shut abruptly flew sideways to careen end over end across the room. The door banged against the opposite wall and bounced back, its return stayed by a hand gripping its edge.
She was weaponless, but with a quick sleight of hand she hid a shard of pottery behind her back as she slowly stood and retreated against the wall. The time to run was over.
Death stood at the threshold, painted crimson with blood and gilded in the rays of afternoon sunlight that streamed through the pair of broken clerestory windows. Disaris bit back the whine of terror threatening to erupt past her lips. She’d likely die today, if not by the efforts of the Daesin army then by the knife her husband Ceybold gripped in one hand and wavedslowly back and forth as if it were a metallic serpent anticipating a last, lethal strike.
He advanced slowly into the chamber, stalking her as she retreated to a corner, still hiding the pottery shard behind her while she held her pitiful bag of belongings in front of her with her injured arm. The smile he gave her had once charmed her, offered comfort and hope. Time had revealed it as nothing more than a beguilement, part of a mask worn by a fanatic. His expression sent ice-water splinters down her back, even in the tremoring room’s sweltering heat.
Ceybold’s smile widened, his delight in her terror obvious, his eagerness to kill a glitter in his eye as bright and bloody as the blade he wielded. “You really didn’t think you could hide from me, did you, Disa?”
Fear coursed through her blood like river rapids, their dull roar in her ears half deafening her to his words. She eased out of the corner, scraping her back along the side wall as she sidled by degrees toward the open door. Her chances of escaping him were next to none, and his smile widened to a toothy grin as he anticipated the moment she’d bolt. A firm inner voice settled her nerves, repeating what it had uttered earlier: the time to run was done.
“There’s no place to hide for any of us,” she said. “The Daesin army is flattening Baelok around us.” She returned his smile, hoping it conveyed every bit of the hatred she had for him as his did for her. If she died today, she’d do her best to take him with her. “And they brought in the Moon Raven.” She softened her voice, pouring into it every wistful memory of childhood and affection she carried inside her so the words would cut to the bone. “That’s Bron out there.”
They had even greater effect than she anticipated. The smirk slid off Ceybold’s face, replaced by a rabid snarl, and a darkening of his gaze that stripped his features of any humanity. “Youbitch,” he said softly. “If your talent weren’t key to freeing the Dark and Holy Vikari I’d have cut your head off months ago.”
Disaris believed him. The Daggermen of Cruor stopped at nothing in their bid to bring their base goddess back into the world. Blood sacrifices were common, decapitations a matter of course in the singular effort to destroy and remake the world with the help of a twisted deity. She’d only survived until now because of her usefulness, and that had come to an end thanks to the army outside. She was once an asset. With the fall of Baelok, she’d become a threat.
Ceybold all but frothed at the mouth with the anticipation of killing her. Staring at him now, it was hard to believe he’d once been a friend to her and the Daesin battle mage destroying the fortress in which they stood. “To think I once called you friend. To think that Bron once did.” She shook her head. “Whoever you’ve become, you’re no longer the Ceybold we knew.”
His bark of laughter carried nothing of humor and everything of loathing. “Fate will laugh at you. If I don’t kill you, Bron will. I saw him from one of the last standing ramparts, directing the catapult teams. He doesn’t know his precious Disa is here.” He pointed his knife at her. “If he manages to bring these walls down on top of us, I’ll die with a smile because you’ll be killed by the man whose name you whisper in your sleep.”
His foretelling, meant to crush her with its irony, stiffened her spine and her resolve. The memory of Bron when she’d last seen him—handsome, imposing, painfully distant—passed before her mind’s eye as she gripped her makeshift weapon in one hand and bent her knees in readiness for what would come. “Better by the hand of such a man than by the teeth of a dog like you.”
The surge of terror coursing through her equaled the explosive speed with which Ceybold attacked, lunging at her with an animalistic growl as he cut the air in front of her with hisknife. She was not a warrior, but neither was he, and she refused to stand docile as he attempted to disembowel her.
She raised the satchel she held with her injured arm, its flimsy cloth and meager contents a poor shield against the arcing blade as it sliced a path toward her midriff. Even so, it bought her time. A second, maybe two, but enough for her to pivot out of the way. The satchel split open, spilling most of its contents on the floor.
Distracted, Ceybold glanced down, and Disaris struck with the pottery shard. Ceramic never compared to steel in strength, but the fragment accomplished its purpose. Ceybold lurched backward, but not fast enough. Disaris’s slash struck true, the shard’s trenchant edge carving a bloody furrow from his jaw, across his eye, to his forehead.
He screamed, clutching his face with one hand as blood poured between his fingers. He still held onto the knife with the other hand, swinging it wildly as Disaris dropped into a crouch and scuttled toward the door. She held onto her primitive weapon, prepared to wield it a second time.
“Bitch! You’re dead!” Ceybold lurched toward her, his uninjured eye glittering with the shine of a cursed slauga hunting a dying soul. “DEAD! Do you hear me, you fucking slut?!”
Whatever else he might have shouted died before the thunder of disintegrating masonry as two of the room’s walls collapsed, and the ceiling fell under the onslaught of the Daesin catapults and their ladings of pulverizing stones. The packed earth floor galloped beneath Disaris’s feet and she fell to her knees, covering her head with her arms as dust, rock, and splintered wood showered down on her in a bludgeoning deluge. Something hard struck her back, knocking her flat to her belly. Choking and blinded, she gasped out a wheeze of pain andcurled in on herself, the smell of her own blood thick in her nostrils and coppery in her mouth from biting her tongue.
The roar of falling debris silenced as quickly as it started, leaving behind only the occasional soft rumble of shattered pieces of wall as they toppled in a slow slide to the floor. Disaris coughed, expelling a thin vapor of dust from her constricted lungs. She slowly unfolded from her huddled position, stunned by the destruction surrounding around her and the fact she hadn’t been crushed under a mountain of rubble. Her arm still bled, and her back felt like a horse had trampled her. Miraculously, she suffered no broken bones.
Late afternoon sun bathed her in a wash of light and heat, and she squinted at the faded blue of the summer sky above her, exposed by the fallen roof. A quick survey of where Ceybold had stood before the room’s collapse revealed only a pile of rocks and broken timbers. Somewhere under all the detritus her husband’s body lay buried—hopefully as dead as his long-withered soul. He wouldn’t get his wish. He’d died by Bron’s hand; she hadn’t. At least not yet.
She clambered to her feet, swaying for a moment as the world tilted one way, then the other. Her vision blurred. The satchel she held, split open by Ceybold’s knife, still held a few of her things—a comb that had once been her mother’s, a firestick, and a hairpin gifted to her by Bron during his last visit to the village they’d called home before it was destroyed. The clothes, shoes and bare-bones rations she’d stuffed in the bag were buried, an inconvenient loss, but nothing more. The satchel had served to save her from Ceybold’s attack. What it still held mattered most to her, and she hugged the damaged, blood-stained bag to her chest before retying it with clumsy fingers into a smaller bundle and slinging it over her shoulder.
The doorway and surrounding wall still stood, a strange and desolate artifact among the chamber’s remains. Beyond itsthreshold, the labyrinthine corridors of the Spring Palace still untouched by Daesin bombardment beckoned, promising either safe concealment or death. She remembered the screams for mercy she’d overheard before Ceybold broke down the door.
Whatever lay beyond, she couldn’t stay here, exposed and vulnerable to whatever new storm of ruin the Daesin army chose to unleash on Baelok. She climbed over rock piles, falling twice as she navigated a treacherous path to a part of the palace still standing and in possession of its roof. Broken joists and crumbling mud brick littered the path, but she scaled those piles of detritus without mishap, leaving a thin trail of blood in her wake.
Shadows swarmed her when she reached the cloisters, and she squinted into the dark until her eyesight adjusted from bright sunlight to the gloom of the chambers and hallways. What met her eyes made a dry sob scale her throat and close it tight.
The dead lay around her like castoff clothes, their bodies crumpled heaps amid dark pools that glistened blackly in the semi-darkness. She’d not been the only threat to the Daggermen of Cruor; she’d simply been the last marked to die. Some she wouldn’t mourn. They had been as cruel and vicious as those who’d turned on them. Others, though, had been like her, deceived then imprisoned, executed for the sins of trust, hope, and love. If she managed to live past the next sunrise, she’d grieve them even if she couldn’t bury them.
