Kiel nodded, but Triste didn’t move. She was staring, bloody eyes fixed on something in the corridor, a shape moving in the darkness. Kaden squinted. It looked like another soldier, a lone man arriving from the barracks or halls above. Then he stepped forward into the light.

“My father,” she snarled, hands balled into fists.

As usual, Adiv’s blindfold did nothing to hinder the sense that he was looking at you, looking straight through you. The councillor studied them, then waved a hand at the soldiers under his command. “Advance,” he said, voice hard. “Kill them.”

The palace guards managed three or four steps before the first of the Ishien charged through the kenta. Unlike Kaden, they hadn’t seen the ground, and they paused for a second just inside the gate. The guards, too, hesitated, then plunged ahead with a roar. The next moments were madness. Without the kenta shielding them from the worst of the violence, Kaden, Kiel, and Triste would have been cut to pieces almost immediately. Most of the Ishien met the palace attack, although two or three turned, searching for their quarry. Kiel stabbed one through the neck, and another through the hamstring, dropping him to the floor. Kaden thrust his torch into the fallen man’s face, blocking out his scream, ignoring the stench of burning flesh.

“Fall back,” Adiv was shouting, his voice somehow carrying above the chaos. “Drop back!”

Some of the guards retreated, while others, turning at the command, fell to the Ishien. There was a rumbling, Kaden realized, a low, implacable grinding of stone on stone, a sound he’d heard hundreds of times in the high mountains as the granite shifted against itself with the spring thaw, as great blocks sheared off from the cliffs, sliding down the crags, the terrible, thundering weight shattering trees and smashing boulders, crushing everything beneath. He glanced up to see the stone ceiling shifting, the carefully mortared blocks grinding against one another, fine powder sifting down into his eyes, filling his lungs.

“Back!” Adiv called again. Kaden could hear the voice clearly enough, but he could no longer make out the leach, hidden as he was by the rising dust and the darkness of the corridor. As he strained to see what was happening on the far side of the gate, an enormous stone, ten times the size of a man, tore free from the ceiling, smashing down into the Ishien, crushing two and trapping a third, blocking off the kenta.

Kaden turned to Kiel. “What’s happening?”

The Csestriim’s eyes were hard, intent. “The leach,” he said. “He’s trying to crush us.”

Kaden stared. Several of the torches had guttered out, and the tops of the walls were trembling. There was no telling how much weight hung suspended above them, but the stone of the vaulted arch was dropping away seemingly everywhere, everywhere but right above them.