Chapter 101: Seeing The Palace

I dismissed the dagger the moment it left the Kutur’s skull.

The handle was still warm in my palm, and the warmth was the wrong kind, a slow, patient heat that seemed to pulse in time with my heartbeat.

A faint whisper brushed the back of my mind, sweet and reasonable, suggesting that the corpse at my feet was not nearly enough.

’Not now.’

I let it fade into nothing and felt the whisper curl away like smoke through a keyhole. My hand was left empty, and a little colder.

Theodore was watching me from the pillar.

"Everything fine?"

"Perfectly."

"You looked like you were about to stab the wall."

"The wall was not provoking me."

He snorted, pushed himself upright, and winced. The ring’s recoil had left him pale and a little sullen, as though he had run through a long argument with himself and lost every round. He rolled his shoulders, cracked his neck, and nodded toward the stairs.

"Shall we?"

We climbed.

The slick steps ended in a narrow, winding road that clung to the flank of the mountain like a vine. The ruins thinned out on either side. Fewer houses, fewer walls, more bare grey rock streaked with dark moisture, as though the mountain itself were sweating. The wind sharpened with every turn, carrying a mineral cold that crept under my collar and settled between my shoulder blades.

I should have been alert. Instead, I was tired.

It was a heavy, grinding tiredness, the kind that does not come from a single battle but from a long chain of them. The swamp. The Ferals. The masked charade. The haircuts, strangely enough, felt like they had happened to somebody else in a different century. Each fight was small on its own. Together they had worn a groove into me, and my steps had begun to fall into it without asking permission.

’One step at a time.’

It was a stupid thought, the sort of thing a child tells himself in the dark. But it worked. Nothing else needed to be considered. Not the plan, not Culex, not the hundred and fifty frightened souls somewhere above us. Only the next stone. Then the next.

Behind me, Theodore’s footsteps scuffed along the road, steady but slower than usual.

"You are quiet," he said after a while.

"I am thinking."

"That is dangerous."

"I know."

"Anything worth sharing?"

I considered it. "Whether I regret agreeing to this."

"And?"

"Not yet."

"Reassuring."

"It is only a matter of time."

He laughed under his breath, and the sound dissolved into the wind. For a stretch, neither of us spoke.

The road bent, bent again, climbed through a gap between two black boulders, and descended briefly into a shallow hollow where the air felt thick and still. Pale lichen glowed faintly on the rocks, and a trickle of water ran down a cracked channel carved into the stone, so straight and regular that it could only have been made by hands.

I paused beside it and dipped my fingers in. The water was frigid and carried a faint, coppery taste when I touched it to my tongue.

I spat it out immediately. "Blood?"

"Iron," Theodore said, kneeling to sniff it. "Or something that wants to be mistaken for iron."

"That is not comforting either."

"Nothing about this mountain is."

He was right. Even the silence had a texture here, a listening quality, as though the stones had learned to hold their breath whenever somebody walked by. I tightened my hand around the locket against my chest, felt it sit warm and steady against my skin, and kept going.

The mountain rose.

Then, slowly, the road began to widen.

It happened so gradually that I almost missed it.

The ruined cottages vanished completely, replaced by a long retaining wall of dark stone, carved with shallow reliefs worn nearly smooth by centuries of rain.

Figures knelt in endless rows along it, their faces rubbed away, their hands raised toward a sky that no longer cared. Beneath them, the road turned from rough earth into paving, cracked and sunken in places, but laid with a care that no wandering hunter or squatting brute could ever have managed.

Somebody had built this to be seen. My pulse quickened.

"Edmund," Theodore murmured.

"I see it."

Neither of us said another word.

We rounded the final curve.

And there it was....

The palace of Culex 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.

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.

The gate itself was monstrous. Two enormous doors of blackened iron, each easily five times my height, were 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.

I swallowed.

A sound came from somewhere high above, faint but clear, carried on the wind. A bell. One slow, deep note, ringing out across the valley and fading, as though announcing something I had not yet learned to fear.

Then silence again.

Theodore exhaled softly.

"Well," he said. "That is not a doorman."

"No."

"That is a throne room wearing a mountain as a coat."

I almost smiled.

"Remember what we came for," I said.

"To frighten the frightened."

"To give them a reason to stop being afraid."

"That sounds much nicer."

"It will not feel nicer."

He stared up at the endless rows of red windows, and I watched his throat move as he swallowed.

"Do you think he knows we are here?"

I stood very still, listening to the wind, the bell’s lingering echo, the distant tick of cooling stone. Somewhere inside that mountain, behind those walls, a creature who thrived on dread was waiting for the dread to walk through his front door.

’Not yet.’

But soon. Very soon.

"No," I said quietly. "But he will."

I tightened my grip on the locket and took the first step onto the bridge.