Chapter 131: Saud

He stepped, low and slow, his sword held at his hip with the edge turned inward, his weight settled in his back foot.

His eyes did not move from his opponent’s shoulders. It was a stance I had only seen in old books, a quiet, patient stance, like a drawn bow.

The tallest of the loyal soldiers lunged.

Raisen’s blade came out of its sheath of stillness like a snake.

Clang!

He turned the thrust aside with the flat of his sword, slid inside the man’s guard on a half step and cut upward in a rising arc. The loyal soldier twisted away, and the edge opened his sleeve and left a thin red line across his forearm.

He hissed and stabbed back. Raisen dropped under it, pivoted on one heel and swept his legs.

The man hit the stairs on his back.

"Now!" Raisen roared.

Two of the ex-soldiers rushed in on the right, and the loyal pair above them met them with a crash of steel.

Blades rang. Boots scraped.

A woman screamed somewhere behind us as a spray of blood painted the wall in a bright, wet arc.

One of the loyal soldiers drove his shoulder into an attacker and sent him tumbling down the steps, and another caught a sword across his ribs and bellowed and kept fighting.

I could not look away.

It was not magic. Not one of them had a good Gift or an affinity ability or a trick.

They were Fighters, plain and simple, and all they had was the weight of a blade and the memory of ten thousand drills.

And yet there was a terrible beauty in it. Every parry was a sentence. Every step was a decision. The two sides moved around each other like dancers who knew the final bow would be death.

Mary’s voice came quietly in my ear. "The one on the left. He is favoring his right knee."

I looked. She was right. The fifth of the loyal soldiers, an older man with a gray stubble beard, had been giving ground on his right side for the last six exchanges. His eyes met mine for a moment through the chaos. He saw that I had noticed.

He smiled, a thin, tired, honest smile.

Then he screamed, and charged, and the whole stair seemed to hold its breath.

He hit the nearest ex-soldier like a falling tree. His sword went through the man’s guard and out the other side, and the ex-soldier folded without a sound.

The old man yanked his blade free and spun, and a second ex-soldier raised a sword to block, and the old man’s edge came down and shattered the guard and kept going.

Two of the rebels fell, one after the other. One was already dead before he hit the floor. The other lay on the steps clutching his stomach and staring up at the ceiling, and the torchlight danced in his open eyes.

"For the king!" the old soldier roared.

It was the last thing he said.

Raisen’s blade came across in a horizontal arc, fast as a falling star, and opened him from shoulder to hip.

The old man stood for one heartbeat, looking at Raisen with an expression I will never forget, an expression of pure, quiet satisfaction...

Then he fell forward onto the stair, and did not rise.

The others went down within a minute.

Arthur’s spear took one through the chest. Theodore’s knuckle spikes found another. Sera did not even draw her sword. She only lifted her hand, and Puppeteer launched itself off her shoulder in a blur of black feathers, and a soldier screamed and clutched his head and dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

Then the staircase was silent.

Five loyal soldiers lay dead on the stone. Two ex-soldiers lay beside them. A pool of red crept slowly down the steps, one stair at a time, and the torches wavered over it.

Nobody spoke.

I looked at the old man’s face. His eyes were still open. He had died for a king who would not remember his name.

’Collateral,’ a quiet voice said in my head. It was very calm. It sounded a little like me.

I pushed it away. I did not have time.

"Come on," I said, and my voice was rougher than I wanted it to be. "The other five are already at the throne room."

I ran.

The stairs blurred under my boots.

Four floors. Five.

Torchlight flashed past. The air grew colder. The stone walls were carved with long, thin windows, and through each one I glimpsed a slice of red sky.

The staircase ended in a wide, high corridor, and at the end of it stood the gates.

They were enormous.

Black iron, twice the height of a man, banded with silver and carved with a dragon coiled around a fang. They were shut.

I had passed them only once before, in a line of soldiers on the day the new captain was named, and I had never realized how huge they were. They loomed over me like the mouth of something that had been waiting.

I skidded to a halt in front of them, chest heaving.

"...Damn it!"

The word tore out of me before I could stop it.

I had expected the five soldiers who had run ahead. I had expected a barred door and a frightened king.

I had expected, at worst, an ambush on the stairs.

I had not expected this...

Standing in front of the throne room gates, calm as a statue and tall as a doorway, was a captain.

His uniform was black and gold. The coiled-dragon tattoo glowed faintly beside his left eye, and a long straight sword rested in the crook of his arm like a sleeping child.

Captain Saud.

He was supposed to be on the road. All eight of them were. I had counted them out of the gates myself.

And beside him, in a neat, disciplined line, stood the five soldiers who had run ahead to warn the King.

Saud’s eyes met mine, and his lips curved into a smile.