Camilla said, “You use machetes yourself.”
“Wanted to get inside your heads,” said Pash.
Camilla considered her, her clear grey eyes narrowing to slits in the sand and the sunshine.
“Did you?”
“Occasionally literally,” said Pash.
Both of them fell silent. Nona twiddled her thumbs. Pash seemed to be the one pent-up with something she couldn’t quite say, standing there with her arms folded, until she ground out— “Die quick, die cold, bring ’em with you.”
There was a movement on Cam’s mouth a little like her old smile. “That one yours?”
“No. Came down from someone much bigger than me,” said Pash shortly. “Don’t get me wrong, wizard slave. You die quick—stay dead—and don’t get up again. But if you kill a guy who would’ve killed me, I have to give you that, right? I pulled a trigger next to you, that doesn’t mean nothing. But it doesn’t change who you are.”
Camilla held out her hand. Pash shook her head.
“I’ll touch you at the end of the world, but not before.”
“Might be your last chance,” said Cam.
Pash barked a laugh. “In my final minutes, Hect, I won’t regret not shaking your hand.”
“Nonagesimus,” said Camilla, “let’s go.”
It was hard to see, but Cam had said not to reach for her or to try to hold her hand. Nona held herself and thought of Hot Sauce, so still and real and royal, so sure-footed, who walked like she never needed anyone. By the time they reached the broken-down, bombed-out, bullet-littered road that led to the barracks, Camilla murmured—“Keep going.”
The gates to the barracks swung wide for them. They did not need to yell at anyone to open them up. Nona perceived a scurry of movement to the side, and then they were let into the wide-open courtyard where Crown’s car still sat—its back doors wide open, its windows pockmarked with bullet holes from disappointed snipers. Nona had never seen the barracks before, not up close. It was a huge concrete building, square and tall, with long slits cut next to a second-storey porch for people to fire out of, and bars over the grand lead-lined windows. It was a building unlike any others in the city. It was big and dark and magnificent, but chipped and dirty and dented, like a lady in a burnt-up ballgown. Its ornate crenellations were so crumbled that it was hard to tell what their original pattern had been, and once brightly coloured flags had been unrolled down the sides of the windows in all kinds of colours, but they had mostly been torn off by the roots with only dull coloured floss left behind.
Nobody shot at Nona as she crossed the courtyard, and nobody shot at Camilla. Great double doors waited at the top of a short flight of stairs. Nona mounted those stairs, and the doors creaked slowly open, revealing cool wide blackness within—a floor of checkerboard black-and-white tiles, peeling white walls, old brown stains that someone had tried to clean but not very successfully, and a terrible foul smell.
She wanted to let her nose wrinkle, but Harrowhark Nonagesimus did not seem the type to wrinkle her nose. Camilla said, “Fall back,” and Nona fell behind her, sight softening into near-blindness as she followed Camilla down into that cool, foetid darkness.
They did not walk far. The first door on the left was open, and a strong white square of electric light fell on the tiles. The door was bracketed at either side with old broken piles of rubbish and chair and desk and wood. Camilla hesitated on the threshold, and Nona walked into the light first.
They had walked into a broad hall, floored with the same black-and-white checkerboard tiles. The walls and ceiling were carved with grand white friezes, and both sides of the room had more rubbish and detritus pushed up against them, as though a great wave had swept through the centre of the room and deposited the contents of a tip on either side. Paler squares lined each side of the windowless room where posters or paintings had probably been hung but were nowhere to be seen now. The room smelled strongly of the type of thing they used to clean the school toilets with. At the end of the room was a raised dais, the same raised dais that had been in the broadcast; and there on a plain and simple chair sat the Prince from the broadcast, and behind the Prince on the left, Pyrrha. On a chair to the right sat Crown.
Crown looked so beautiful that for a moment Nona focused on her to the exclusion of everything else. She had her big beautiful golden hair down around her shoulders in a profusion of smoothed, rippling curls, and she was wearing a lovely pale yellow slip that left her golden shoulders and throat bare. The dress was slit all the way up to the thigh and she wore soft black leather trousers beneath it, and sandals on her big shapely feet, and the usual rapier girdled her waist. She was so stunning that Nona was devoutly grateful she was in clean clothes and not her fish-market tee. Then her attention wandered past Crown, where Nona thought they had lined up lots and lots of statues; but they weren’t statues at all. They were dozens and dozens and dozens of people in uniform, standing in two ranks pressed up very close to the wall. They were not breathing. Their eyes were wide open. They were dead. When the Prince stood from his chair, their shoulders—every single shoulder—twitched minutely.