Chapter 132: Seven Bullets

Captain Saud raised his right hand into the air.

Dhrum!

The whole floor shook.

It was not a rumble. It was a single, brutal heave, as if the palace itself had been punched from below. The iron gates rattled in their frames. Dust rained from the ceiling. Every Fighter in the corridor, and there were dozens of them, lost their footing and crashed to the stone like dropped dolls.

I stayed upright, and my teeth clicked together.

Behind me, someone began to scream. The sound ricocheted off the ceiling and came back twice as loud. Torches swayed on their brackets, and the shadows leapt along the walls like startled animals. The air tasted of dust and iron, and my heart hammered.

Saud lowered his hand. He was calm, and he was young, not much older than Charolette, with the same white skin as Culex and a faint, unpleasant red in the depths of his eyes.

In his other hand he held something I had never seen in the Realm of Evil: a silver revolver, long-barreled and engraved, with a cylinder that carried seven chambers instead of six.

Seven holes. It looked less like a pistol and more like a machine gun waiting to be unleashed.

He aimed it at my face.

I understood, a heartbeat too late, why he had shaken the floor.

The quake was small and local, only a few paces wide, but it had done exactly what he wanted.

It had scattered our footing and shrunk the space we could dodge into.

He was not in a hurry. He was watching me the way a cat watches a mouse hole, patient and thoughtful, waiting for the right opening.

"You are the boy," Saud said.

His voice was smooth and young.

"I wondered what you would look like. I have been watching your future for a month."

My stomach dropped.

"My affinity is Decree, and my Core is Silver." He said it without pride, as if reading from a list. "It gives me two abilities. I can see pieces of what is coming, and I can bend the rules of the world a little, to make them agree with me. Three weeks ago, I saw that something would happen today that could threaten my father."

’My father.’

The words rang in my skull like a dropped bell.

"I could not see your face," Saud went on. "Only the shape of the danger. So I told Captain Rashford, quietly, that a boy would be waiting in the dark beyond the palace, and that he should bring him in. He listened. It was not a perfect prophecy."

Arthur’s ruined eye. The ambush that looked like it already knew.

It had not been a leak at all. It had been a man with a crystal ball and a gun.

"And when your plan was ready to start," Saud said, smiling, "I let the other captains ride out. I let the whole palace watch me go. They saw me, and they will swear they saw me, because I asked the world to agree. But I never left the stairs." He tilted his head. "A son does not abandon his father’s door."

I forced my face to stay still. Inside, my mind was screaming.

’He knew...’

"Now," Saud said softly. "Let us see how brave you are."

Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang!

All seven chambers fired in a single roaring breath.

The bullets were wrapped in raw spiritual power, white and silver and screaming. My intuition had been shrieking for half a second, and I threw myself sideways and down.

The first bullet kissed the air where my head had been.

Then it turned.

It bent in the middle of its flight, a hard, impossible curve, and drove into the shoulder of a soldier behind me.

The second followed it. The third.

I watched each of them swerve and punch through a body, and out, and into another, like a needle threading through cloth.

Seven bullets. Nineteen people.

They fell in a heap along the corridor, groaning and clutching at wounds.

None of them were dead. They would live, if they were carried out soon.

But I knew, with a cold certainty, why they were hurt. That volley had been meant for me. I had ducked.

’They paid for my dodge.’

I swallowed the thought. There was no time for it.

Arrows hissed through the air behind me, a ragged volley from the guests on the stairs. They flew at Saud in a dark flock.

He did not even lift his gun. He only glanced at them, and the arrows twisted, as though the air had suddenly become thick, and half of them sank harmlessly into the floor while the rest rebounded off the iron gates and clattered away.

He raised his free hand.

The five soldiers at his side stepped forward. Each of them carried the same blank, loyal look as the men who had died on the stairs.

Saud reached into his coat and handed every one of them a small glass vial. Inside, a silvery-gold liquid swirled like melted starlight.

"Drink," he said in a straight tone. "For the King."

They did not hesitate. They tilted back their heads and swallowed.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then their eyes went strange. They turned glassy and pale, ghostly white, and a horrible cracking sound rolled through the corridor.

Bone pushed out of the sockets from the inside, a spike of ivory tearing through each eye.

The men did not scream. They only shuddered, and their muscles swelled like loaves in an oven, thickening, tripling, stretching their uniforms to rags.

Their heights shot upward. Eight feet at the least.

Their skin stretched and turned shiny gold, polished and smooth as a coin.

They turned their eyeless faces toward us, and I felt something I had not felt since the first night in the swamp.

Not fear of dying. Fear of being unable to stop what came next.

They were no longer human.