The Palace rose like a wound that decided to heal by growing teeth.
From the Colossi Valley, the outer bastions had been distant geometry—golden angles softened by fire. Up close, they were cliffs drilled through with murder. Curtain walls layered upon curtain walls, each parapet a ledger for blood, each gatehouse a lie that promised entry and meant to kill you for believing.
The air tasted of dust ground from monuments and ozone breathed by guns that never got cold.
Kael and the Silent Company reached the Saturnine ramparts at a run that had been going for years. Their boots struck adamant stone whose edges had been worn smooth by the history of retreating while refusing to call it that.
Around them, Imperial Fists moved like ideas perfected by repetition—yellow armor black with soot, faces that had stopped asking questions a week ago because answers wasted time.
"Night's Children?" a vox-man demanded as they cleared the checkpoint.
"Brothers," Kael said, and did not slow.
The interior arteries of the wall swallowed them—gun galleries that stank of machine oil and prayer smoke, spiral stairs polished by generations who'd trained for a war they begged would never arrive, courtyards where mortals ran with crates of shells held like swaddled infants.
Voices collided: "Hold fire—down two mils—next volley on my mark—medicae, here—no, here—"
They found Sigismund at the foot of a breach-tower. The First Captain looked carved from the same stone as the wall and then hammered into motion. His golden helm was off, his hair clotted with ash, his mouth set in a straight line that had learned long ago how not to tremble.
"You took your time," he said.
"I spent it wisely," Kael answered.
Sigismund's eyes slid to the men behind Kael—fewer than before, black armor veined with silver rune-light, helms pitted, lenses scratched, moving with the steady economy of those who have learned to pace their dying. He nodded once. "Good. I need a hinge."
"You have one," Kael said.
"Then come," Sigismund replied, turning.
They ascended to the breach.
It was not a gap so much as a chewed seam: Iron Warriors had brought a battery the size of a cathedral close enough to kiss, and the wall had learned new shapes. The breach deck groaned under the weight of fortification plates dragged into place by chain-whinched Titans that had already gone to die elsewhere. The air tore at the lungs—propellant, dust, the iron tang of ancient rock made new again.
Beyond the breach lay a bowl of ruin where the enemy had chosen to live. Siege towers crawled on ribbed wheels, their maws yawning, spilling infantry that advanced like patience.
Behind them, batteries sat on armored sledges and coughed metal meteors. On the flanks, Emperor's Children darted in flares of violet, their weapons humming obscene harmonies. The Iron Warriors' banner rose from a mound of wrecked machines and mortality: IRON WITHIN, IRON WITHOUT, lettered as if a stonemason had cut it into the sky.
"Two pushes this hour," Sigismund said, voice clipped. "Third is forming. Their guns have found the rhythm of our return fire."
"Then we change the song," Kael said.
Sigismund's mouth tightened, pleased and unwilling to show it. He pointed downrange. "They have choir-guns in there"—a flick of his blade toward the violet flicker on the left—"and siege masters nesting in that ruin."
He indicated a jag of black stone bristling with barrels. "My guns are hot. My men are tired. I can promise you five minutes of perfect shooting, then chaos."
"Five seconds," Kael said. "I'll buy you the five minutes."
Sigismund's brows lifted by the width of a blade. "You always were ambitious."
"Counting is cheaper than prayer," Kael said. He turned to his men. "We're going under."
Malchion grunted something that might have been satisfaction. Joras's grin showed the wolf still living inside a scribe. The Silent Company peeled off the breach deck and vanished into a maintenance gantry that dropped into the wall's innards—a shaft where heat pooled and old ghosts hung their coats.
Below, the world narrowed. Vaulted braces met in stone ribs. Red emergency luminators smeared wet light across cogitator banks hissing arguments.
Servitors sang to themselves in chewing static. Kael led them along a service crawlway that ended in a blast-door as thick as a shame and no more willing to open.
"Joras," Kael said.
The sapper put his ear to the metal, closed his eyes, and listened with his fingers. "It wants the right word," he murmured. "Or a promise."
"Give it both," Kael said.
Joras touched three runes and lied to the door about who had asked. It sighed and slid aside.
They came out in the underface of the breach—beneath firing positions, in the gloom that collects in the world's lungs. The enemy's forward saps had dug through foundations, but the Palace had grown a thousand throats to breathe their poison back. Between them ran an oubliette of shadow, ridges and pits and collapsed service corridors that twisted like intestines.
"Two teams," Kael said. "Malchion with first to that ruin—kill their masters. Joras with me to the choirs."
"And you?" Malchion asked, which was ritual more than question.
"I change the song," Kael said.
They split into the dark.
Kael felt the five seconds open like a page turned in a book he'd already read, margins scrawled with notes from a version of him who had made different mistakes.
Trajectories drew themselves. Steps fit the plan like teeth. He added one more: the shadow.
At his feet it thickened, peeled from the deck, smoothed into a low, wide wave that crept forward, hugging cover, lapping around piles of ruin, ignoring the places where light fought to exist.
The wave cooled the air. It damped sound. When a splinter team of Emperor's Children hunted down the corridor with their weapons purring, it ran over their boots and made them forget how to enjoy anything for two seconds. Two was enough. The Silent Company took their throats in silence.
They found the choir dug in behind a knuckled mass of fractured stone—a half-dozen Noise Marines and their mortal handlers, cables run into wall-studs, racks of instrument-weapons tuned to the Palace's resonant frequencies.
The air trembled in slow, obscene throbs. The men on the firing step above flinched at each pulse like dogs asking why a master had raised his hand.
Kael signaled. The Silent Company fanned to either flank, blades sheathed, pistols ready. He stepped into the open.
The nearest Noise Marine turned with the careless grace of a dancer asked to admire himself in a mirror. His vox purred. "Night's Child. Come to be softened?"
Kael lifted his left hand. The shadow rose with it.
It spilled up the abused stone like oil poured slow, found the cables, slipped inside, and lay down in the copper like a beast in a den. The next pulse hit it and didn't come out. The third did the same.
The fourth returned, but wrong, out of phase, weakening its brothers. The Noise Marines cocked their heads in the same motion—confusion, then offended delight.
"Interesting," said the talkative one, throat beginning to vibrate around the word.
Kael shot him in the note.
The fight was short and surgical. The Silent Company took kneecaps, wrists, throats; the shadow choked muzzles and drank stray shrieks.
When it was done, Kael set charges in the racks and the floor supports and walked the team back a dozen paces before he thumbed the trigger. The detonation went down as much as out; the choir pit swallowed itself, taking cables, instruments, and the idea with it.
"Song changed," Kael voxed, and heard Malchion's reply ride in on a background of screaming metal.
"Battlesmiths dead. Guns blind. They're angry about it."
"Good," Kael said. "Let them look at me."
They returned the way they'd come, the shadow withdrawing into his boots like a tide going shy. At the upper breach the world had bent a little—pressure easing, the air less a fist. Sigismund's guns had found their five minutes and used each second like a miser using a coin.
Kael stepped onto the breach deck.
"Better," Sigismund said without turning.
"Different," Kael corrected.
"Which is the same thing, if you are the one they were aiming at," Sigismund said. "Dorn will see you now."
The words came like a door opening onto another weather.
They crossed the head of the breach and down into the command gallery set into the wall's shoulder—a room of brass-veneered cogitators built to look like a chapel for men who worship planning. Data-loom tapes crawled across altars; auto-quills scratched and bled sepia onto vellum maps.
Holo-emitters hung in chains like censers and threw up a dim cathedral of blue lines—fire lanes, fallback points, enemy density mapped as blooms of cold light.
Rogal Dorn stood at the center of it all and made the room feel small.
His armor was gilded rock. His face was a wedge of serenity driven through fury. He held a comp-rod in one hand and with it traced angled adjustments in air that men turned into artillery predictions and orders to die.
Around him, captains orbited like moons. Malcador's sigil burned cold on one wall; the Aquila glowed on another with the weary intensity of an old scar.
Sigismund stopped three paces off and bowed his head the width of duty. Kael matched the distance and dispensed with the bow. You put your chin down for kings. For architects, you offered straight lines.
"Kael Varan," Dorn said without looking. The name was a tool in his mouth. "Curze's castoff who refused to rust. The Sigillite's hound."
"I bite for the Emperor," Kael said. "Malcador teaches me which throats."
Dorn's head turned. His eyes were winter at noon. "And if he misnames one?"
"I count," Kael said. "The wrong ones don't add up."
A quiet passed, brittle as sugar. Then Dorn inclined his head a blade's breadth. "You bought minutes at Saturnine. You bought us five more now."
"I change songs," Kael said.
"Good," Dorn answered. "Ours grows monotonous."
He gestured. The holo-map collapsed from cathedral to corridor: a narrow slice of wall called the Helios Causeway, a kill-channel that ran like a bright vein toward the Eternity Gate.
Red pins marched along its length, slow, inexorable. "Iron Warriors have tunneled beneath the second bastion and are attempting to come up into the Helios galleries. Word Bearers have infiltrated the sub-strata through the aqueduct conduit. The Helios must hold. If it fails, they can ladder men into the inner defenses faster than I can cut them down."
"Assignments?" Sigismund asked, already choosing which part to bleed on.
"You take the Helios head-on," Dorn said. "Break their ladders. Make their bodies into rungs that slow the men behind them."
"And the aqueduct?" Sigismund asked.
Dorn looked at Kael. "Night's Child."
Kael studied the map. The aqueduct plotted as a blue artery with black spurs—a cathedral's plumbing designed when men had believed they had time to be careful. "Do you want the water clean," he asked, "or full of the wrong men's blood?"
"I want it sealed," Dorn said. "I want the men in it to learn the Palace is a mouth."
Kael's black eyes reflected the blue. "Then I'll teach them the word swallow."
Dorn stroked a control. The map zoomed again—down where stone learned to be pipe. "The Word Bearers have sent scripture ahead of them," he said. "My auspex returns prayers where rivets should be. Their words are eating the air."
"Good," Kael murmured. "Words burn."
Dorn's lips might have moved. It could have been approval. It could have been a tic from a wound he had never allowed to scar. "You have my authority," he said. "Do not ask for more."
"I don't need more," Kael said. "I need five seconds."
"An extravagance," Dorn replied, and turned away, already building his next wall from men he loved enough to spend.
Sigismund caught Kael's shoulder as they moved. "Try not to drown in a pipe," he said, dry as old bone.
"I'll teach it manners," Kael said.
They went.
The aqueduct access lay in the wall's undercroft—arches and pillars too vast for men, space shaped for Titans that would never fit. The duct's mouth was a yawning vault choked with screens and ancient valves the size of reentry capsules. The air was cool and damp, and it carried a whisper that did not belong to water.
Word Bearers had been here.
Symbols crawled across stone, inked in something that had clotted in streaks. Candles guttered in niches, their smoke unwilling to climb. Vox-amps had been nailed to a bulkhead; they hummed syllables that made the tongue want to forget itself.
A company of mortal auxilia lay sprawled where they'd stood, faces turned away from each other as if embarrassed.
"Joras," Kael said softly. "Purge the air."
The sapper moved with the reverence of a man entering a library. He shut down the pumps that had been coaxed into heresy, bled pressure off whispering valves, vented the duct for sixty heartbeats while Malchion and two sharps picked off the robed shapes moving on the far grate like carrion birds shocked to discover they were mortal.
Kael pressed a palm to the floor and let the shadow slide under the first gate like water becoming thinner water.
The Silent Company entered the aqueduct.
It swallowed noise. The world became constriction and condensation. Their lights cut cones through mist. Between drops, writing crawled on the air and sought a page. The first Word Bearer came at them in silence, blade out, lips moving. Kael shot him in the prayer. The man fell trying to finish syllables through a severed jaw.
They moved like a knife in a sheath. Word Bearers tried to flank in branches that once had served minor settling tanks and found the shadow thick there, like an old hymn that had forgotten its words and was offended when someone tried to hum. The Silent Company killed with the courtesy of professionals doing simple work well.
Midway down, the duct changed.
The stone grew soft underfoot—not water-soft, wrong-soft. An odor like old books set on fire in a damp room crawled inside their helms. Ahead, a red light pulsed like a heartbeat.
Chanting rose—low, many-throated, vox-augmented, words as scaffolding for something that had never deserved a shape.
"Now," Kael whispered, because sometimes a command is a superstition.
They rounded the bend.
A Word Bearer coterie had built a chapel from valves and blasphemy. The central dais was a spread of grating on which a Dark Apostle stood, vox-throat turned up to trembling.
Around him, acolytes bled into bowls and fed the blood into ports that were not designed for sacraments. The water sang. It had been taught a hymn.
Kael's vision tore wide. Futures cascaded—the Apostle's head snapping back, Malchion falling with his chest open, the aqueduct filling with tongues instead of water. He closed his hand and the shadow clenched with it. The futures scraped across bars and broke their teeth.
"Cut his choir," he said.
Joras's charges leapt—fat-bellied little things that found wiring and loved it too hard. Sparks gouted. The hum pitch-shifted and then died like a thought interrupted. The Dark Apostle swung toward them, mouth making a W sound that would have wanted to be war if it had grown up.
Kael stepped into him.
Veilrender took the wrist raised to bless a curse. The Apostle screamed and the scream fattened, trying to be a sermon, until the shadow reached his throat and made it remember it was a passage for air.
Malchion put two bolter rounds into the vox-amp at the man's neck. It exploded with an ungentle pop. The next words came out as blood.
The acolytes tried to finish the litany—pious to the last, and stupid—but the Silent Company ended piety with professionalism. The last Word Bearer dropped to his knees and lifted a hand as if to plead jurisprudence. Kael shot him in the palm and then the eye, because mercy has a shape and so does expediency.
"Seal it," Kael said.
Joras vented the branch-lines. Gates slammed with old thunder. The aqueduct groaned like a barge caught in ice. Water rushed in—in actual water, clean as a lie told for a good reason. It washed blood from grating, hissed where runes had been chalked in poor faith. The candles died ugly.
Kael stood in the breath afterward and listened. The wrongness bled out. The air remembered it had a job. His shadow lay down and panted like a beast after a fight that delighted it.
"Helios?" he voxed.
"Held," Sigismund returned, voice raw silk. "Bodies for rungs. As ordered."
"Good," Kael said. He looked up toward stone and gold and the idea the Palace tried to be. "We're coming back up."
They emerged at the base of the command gallery to a change he felt in his teeth before he knew what it meant. Not the enemy's push—he'd learned that weight. Not the Palace's breath—he owned that rhythm. Something new, old, both.
The vox cracked—one frequency only, a thread Malcador wove when he wanted a whisper to carry through storms.
"Kael."
The Sigillite's voice sounded thinner, stretched over a frame too large. The air around the syllables shook like heat over a road.
"Report," Kael said.
"Later," Malcador replied, and the word was almost gentle. "Listen. The hour turns."
Kael stood very still.
"You will see movement in the heavens soon," the Sigillite continued. "Not ships. Not storms. A… door. When it opens, everything ends incorrectly. Before that, there is work we will pretend is our choice."
"Your orders," Kael said.
"You know them," Malcador said. "You have always known them. Buy minutes. Hurt the ones who think time is theirs to sell. When the light fails, be where it would have been if it were brave."
Silence stretched. It held like a rope that had decided not to snap.
"Malcador," Kael said, and did not recognize the softness in his own voice.
The old man exhaled. It might have been a laugh. It might have been a death rattle stealing a rehearsal. "It was good to know there were still honest monsters," he said. "Keep your darkness close. It will try to earn a name."
The channel died.
Kael looked up. Through the slit of the breach he could see a slice of sky the color of iron cooled too quickly. Something far beyond it shifted, as if an eye had opened in a face too large to imagine.
Sigismund's hand closed on his pauldron. "What did he say?"
Kael's black eyes reflected nothing.
"He said the endgame has begun," he answered. "And we are still on the board."
"Then we keep making better moves," Sigismund said, and his mouth bared teeth that had learned to love duty in a place where it could not love anything else.
Kael nodded once. The shadow at his feet agreed.
Outside, the Iron Warriors reconvened their mathematics. The Emperor's Children tuned weapons with fingers that bled because they liked the color. The Word Bearers sent a prayer into a pipe and heard only water answer. Above, the Watcher Above turned on her high arc like a patient knife.
The Walls of Gold held another hour.
Inside them, men kept counting. And the night counted with them.