Cyprian braced himself against the wall, making his back into a step. Violet ran three steps, then sprang up from Cyprian’s back to grab a jutting corbel, where she hung briefly before pulling herself up further. She leaped from the corbel to the window. Gripping its slim edges, Violet swung herself inside, then dropped. They heard the sound of her feet hitting the stone on the other side.
And then a stretch of silence so long that Will’s stomach turned over.
‘Violet?’ he called quietly, right into the seam of the doors.
Nothing.
‘Violet?’
Are you all right? Are you there? She couldn’t be gone. She was strong. But the Stewards had been strong too.
Heart pounding, he opened his mouth to call again, when he heard her subdued answering voice. ‘I’m here! I’m opening the doors.’
The doors didn’t open right away. Instead, Will heard the heavy scraping sounds of wood pulled across stone. This went on for long minutes. Finally, the immense metal latch beams of the doors were lifted, and there was Violet, pulling the doors open from the inside.
He saw at once what had taken her so long.
The Stewards had pushed every piece of furniture in the great hall up against the doors to barricade them shut. The chairs, the candle stands, the tapestries, the statues cut from their pedestals, even the long table that had always looked immovable. Only the four empty thrones were intact, too immense to be hacked out of the stone.
One by one, Violet had dragged the pieces of furniture away, so that they lay in a circle of useless detritus around her. She was panting with effort, her hair wet with sweat, her eyes hollow. And she was shaking, not with exertion, but from the pressing horror of the room. Will saw the spot where she had vomited, by an overturned chair.
Beside him, Cyprian pressed his forearm to his mouth and nose. The room smelled of fresh meat, like a butcher’s shop, a thick smell of blood and exposed fat.
Will walked forward into it. He could feel the stickiness of the stone under his feet. He looked and his breath clogged in his throat.
The last of the Stewards had made their stand here, in the long dark of the great hall, with its ghostly white columns.
And behind them, the novitiates and janissaries whom they had tried to protect. Carver lying two steps in front of Emery, who would have seen him fall seconds before he fell himself. Beatrix near the front, having pushed her way forward to fight alongside Stewards ten years her senior. He had seen them all this morning, preparing for the attack on Ruthern.
‘Simon,’ Will heard himself say, and then: ‘Katherine said he was in London on business.’
‘These are the greatest fighters of the Stewards,’ said Violet. ‘Not even an army of Simon’s could defeat them in their own Hall.’
‘It wasn’t an army,’ said Will. ‘It was something that could pass through the doors.’
He had known it the moment he had seen Leda, the understanding breaking into their naive, jubilant return to the Hall.
‘No,’ said Cyprian.
‘The doors were barred,’ said Will. ‘There are no enemy dead. It’s only Stewards. It’s only Stewards here and in the halls.’
‘No,’ said Cyprian, as if Will hadn’t spoken. ‘It was an attack. We keep going. If there are survivors, we find them. That’s what you said.’
They stared at each other, Cyprian’s handsome face set in stubborn lines, Will feeling full of awful knowledge.
‘There might be rooms that were overlooked,’ Violet volunteered quickly. ‘Or places in the citadel to hide.’
Places in the vast, empty citadel, full of crumbled stairs and unvisited chambers built by people who had lived and died and fallen to dust. Will knew where they had to go, into the heart of the gloom.
‘The Tree Chamber,’ he said. ‘The Elder Steward once told me that it was the final retreat in ancient times, when the forces of the Dark attacked the Hall.’
‘Then we go,’ Violet said.
Will took up a guttering torch from one of the wall sconces. He knew it was dangerous to draw attention, but it was that or grope blindly in the dark. Once they left the great hall, there were fewer bodies, but the feeling that they were approaching something terrible was stronger. The flames from the torch were too loud, a sound like flapping linen.
He had come this way every day, to train with the Elder Steward. But the macabre, flickering dark turned the corridors unfamiliar. He moved forward slowly, staying as quiet as he knew how. He looked at the few bodies they passed for the gruesome purpose of seeing how fresh they were. The closer they got, the fresher the kills.