At the threshold of the grand spiral stairs, Ren Vale paused and looked back across the courtyard.
The black fiery flat stone slabs were churning like boiling porridge, weeping grey steam into the freezing mountain air. High above the castle walls, the twelve iron pendulums swung in clashing, violent arcs, their cables groaning against the dark rock stone wall-brackets. But below, in the killing yard between the outer gate and the keep, reality was tearing itself into ribbons.
Eight hundred un-burned soldiers—men who had died hundreds of years apart in forgotten sieges and butchered campaigns—clashed in blinding bursts of time friction.
Near the western stables, forty surviving castle guards and freed militia conscripts were huddled behind overturned grain wagons, pinned down by twenty Ducal pikemen whose thrusts tore through wood as though it were wet paper. The militia men were screaming, their spears shaking in white-knuckled hands. They were mortal men from the borderlands, simple cobblers and ditch-diggers who had taken up arms against the Cult. Now they faced soldiers whose flesh couldn’t hold a wound.
“They’re going to break,” Mira whispered, her cool quartz hand brushing against Ren’s lambskin sleeve. Her smoky crystal-clear collar bone thrummed with a low, dissonant chord. She felt the panic in forty human hearts thirty paces away. “If the stable wall falls, the pikemen will flank the cellar entrance. The under-road drain grate won’t hold against thirty pikes.”
