Brian McCLELLAN - The Autumn Republic

“I see her,” Taniel said, his eyes focused on something far away, half-lidded from looking into the Else. “She’s in the throne room.”

“If Claremonte is still hiding his true power, he might be impossible to find. I…” Tamas opened his own third eye and swept his gaze from one end of the palace to the other. Opposite the throne room, all the way at the other end of the palace, the Privileged wing where Tamas had slaughtered the royal cabal shone like the sun in the Else. The power felt like it might burn his face, and he knew that it could only be Brude. “Never mind. He’s not hiding.”

A fact that couldn’t mean anything good.

Tamas searched until he spotted some of his soldiers crouching behind one of the immense marble fountains in the garden. “Taniel, do you remember the trapdoor in the gardens behind the throne room? I showed it to you when you were a boy.”

“Vaguely.”

“It’s behind a statue of Manhouch the First – old man, big ears. Go in that way. You’ll come out in a passage right behind the royal throne.”

“All right.”

“Get at it, soldier.”

Taniel nodded and stepped away, only to stop and look back. Tamas met his eye.

“Dad?” Taniel said.

“Yes, son?”

“Be careful.”

“You too.”

Taniel was off at a crouching run as he ran from bush to bush, covering his approach. Tamas went the opposite direction, toward the group of his soldiers he’d spotted earlier. He came up behind them and threw himself down behind the fountain where they hid. “Report!”

One of the soldiers, a woman of about forty with a major’s stripes on her uniform, snapped to attention. “Sir! We’ve encountered heavy resistance, sir. They’ve got marksmen in all the windows and at least three Privileged inside. They had around a thousand men in the gardens, but we were able to sweep through with our superior numbers.”

Tamas had expected Claremonte to have some kind of contingency for if he lost the election. After Adamat’s information that the ships hadn’t been fully loaded, Tamas had had his men follow them up the river to where they disgorged the rest of their troops. Those troops had then circled back around to garrison Skyline Palace.

But Tamas wasn’t making the same mistake he’d made attacking Charlemund’s manor. He now had over twenty thousand men closing in on the palace.

Whether that would mean anything in the face of a god… “Casualties?” he asked.

“No idea, sir, but it has to be at least fifteen hundred men. Those Privileged were unleashed the moment we took the gardens.”

“Where are they?”

“North side of the palace grounds, where the fighting is heaviest.”

Tamas craned his neck to look out from behind his cover and toward the north. At the north wing of the palace was the throne room. Taniel was walking into a full-on battle. “Where’s Colonel Olem?”

“We cracked the main palace door in two volleys from our cannon. Five minutes ago he led two companies into the palace to try to clear it out. Haven’t heard from him since, but the marksmen’s fire on this side of the building has died down.”

“Have your men tighten the perimeter. I’m going in after the colonel.”

“We’ll send a company with you.”

“Excellent.”

Just a few minutes later Tamas approached the front doors of Skyline with two hundred soldiers at his back. The mighty silver-plated doors had been rent asunder by light artillery. The entryway was littered with the bodies of the dead and dying, both Adran and Brudanian alike, and he left ten of his men to move the wounded back out into the relative safety of the royal gardens.

He paused in the mighty foyer and, by the pattern of the dead and wounded, could see the progress of the battle heading off to his left and up the stairs around one corner. Olem had led his men toward the throne room to try to come out behind the Brudanian soldiers who were holding the northern palace doors. The sheer size of the palace could easily swallow up Olem and his two companies. The thought made Tamas wish he’d brought an entire brigade with him.

He felt tired, his strength waning. Every old, sorcery-healed scar ached, and the memories of how he got them all seemed to flow together. He remembered the campaigns in Gurla and the countless charges and battles. He recalled his flight from Kez after his attempted assassination of Ipille, and the years of planning his own monarch’s fall that ended in Manhouch’s head in a basket. The battle against the royalists and his flight across northern Kez toward Alvation all seemed to blend together.

He was so tired, and this needed to end.

“You, Captain,” Tamas said, splitting his force in two, “bring your platoon and come with me. Major, take the rest of the men up to the second story and work your way north. There are a half-dozen galleries between here and the throne room that will give you the high ground. Give Colonel Olem what reinforcement he might need from above.”

“Sir?” the major asked. “Where are you going?”

“I have a score to settle.”

Taniel worked his way through the gardens and hedgerows, past the fountains and statues, over the decorative walls and around the north face of Skyline Palace.

The fighting grew thicker, bullets whizzing over his head, black powder smoke hanging like a fog over the ruined gardens. The smoke gave him strength and clarity of mind as he avoided the clusters of Brudanian troops and sprinted behind the lines of Adran soldiers slowly advancing on the palace.

He moved like a man possessed as he rounded the northeast corner of the palace, sprinting with all his strength. He cut across a polo lawn and heard the crack of muskets and the whiz of bullets cutting through the air behind him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a squad of Brudanian soldiers leave their cover in pursuit, but he left them behind as he cut through a hedge maze, throwing himself through the prickly walls of greenery with an arm over his face.

He came out on the other side of the maze and descended a hill into a grove of birch trees in a hollow behind the palace. The sound of fighting was muffled and distant, and this part of the garden was overgrown but untouched by the conflict. A dry streambed, once fed by the same pumps that kept the fountains going, meandered through the grove.

Taniel approached the back wall of the palace, passing the statue of the old King Manhouch the First. He ran his hands over the thick stone blocks of the foundation, ransacking his memory for an image of the entrance his father had showed him sixteen years ago.

He continued along the wall for twenty paces, feeling every crack and nook to no avail, his heart beating harder with every second that passed without finding the entrance. Back at the statue he gazed for several moments at the wall – all that lay between him and Ka-poel – before taking a step back.

The fall might have broken his neck if he hadn’t dropped his rifle to catch himself. His leg plunged into a hole in the grass below his feet, and he wiggled his foot in the empty space, unsure if his eyes were playing tricks on him. Reaching down, he cleared away the grass to find an opening easily big enough for a man worked into the landscaping in a way that made it impossible to see.

He crawled in on all fours, sliding his rifle along ahead of him. Within ten paces the passage turned and opened up into a narrow corridor. He was able to stand and keep moving forward. The ground was damp beneath his feet, cobwebs tugging at his face and arms.

The corridor ended abruptly, leaving Taniel at a dead end. The only sounds he could hear were his own nervous breaths and the distant, almost inaudible cracks of musket and rifle fire.