Chapter 29: The King's Last Sight
The breaching charge went off with a concussive thump that felt more like a punch to the chest than a sound. The intricate carvings on the gates—the suffering faces, the twisting serpents—bulged inward for a split second before the iron-bound seam split with a shriek of tortured metal and fracturing ice.
Dust and frozen shrapnel billowed out in a grey-white cloud. Before it could settle, we were moving.
“Go, go, go!”
We flowed through the breach, rifles up, scanning the high, vaulted entry hall.No resistance. The silence was heavier here, a thick velvet pressure that swallowed the sounds of our boots on the obsidian floor. The air was different. Cold, but not the biting cold of the city. This was a preserved cold, a tomb-cold. And underneath it, that warm, sweet scent of milk. It was stronger here, clinging to the back of the throat, a biological wrongness in the sterile grandeur.
The hall was enormous, lined with statues of past rulers, their features eroded by time into grim, featureless smudges. Great tapestries, brittle with frost, depicted battles and coronations. Our steps echoed, too loud.
Mary moved beside me, her profile sharp in the gloom. Her free hand went absently to the swell of her belly, a brief press against the ache of a kick or a cramp. I felt it too—a deep, liquid shifting, a reminder of the life under the body armor. My own breasts, tight and heavy, ached with a dull throb that syncopated with my heartbeat. We’d long since learned to ignore the leak of milk under the stress, the damp, personal warmth against the cold plates of our gear. It was just another piece of data, a physiological condition to be managed.Like thirst.
“No contacts,” Finn whispered, his voice swallowed by the hall.
“It’s a funnel,” Mary said, her eyes on the far end where a massive archway led deeper in. “One way in. They’ll bottleneck us there.”
“Or they’re banking on the psychological effect,” I murmured. “Let the quiet get to us.”
We advanced in a staggered line, covering angles. The silence was a weapon. Every flicker of shadow from the icy sconces, every distant crack of settling stone, tightened the nerves. I focused on the mechanics: breath in, breath out. Scan left, scan right. The weight of the rifle, familiar. The weight in my uterus, unfamiliar but constant.
We passed through the arch into a long gallery. Here, the walls were sheer ice, clear as glass, and behind them, frozen in eternal poses of terror or reverence, were people. Courtiers, soldiers, servants. A frozen museum of the final moment of some past cataclysm. Their faces were perfectly preserved, mouths open in silent screams.
“Cheery decor,” someone muttered behind me.
A flicker of movement in the ice.Not behind it. Within it.
“Contact!”
The ice wall to our left shimmered, and a figure stepped out of it as if passing through a curtain. It was a knight, but not of flesh. It was made of the clear, blue-hard ice, its armor and sword a seamless extension of its body. It moved with a grinding, crystalline sound.
Rifles barked. The first rounds struck it, punching holes that immediately began to steam and seal over with fresh ice. It didn’t stagger.
“Switch to sustained! Don’t let it reform!”
Mary dropped to a knee, firing controlled pairs. Crack-crack. Crack-crack. Chunks of its torso blew out. Finn unloaded half a magazine, walking his fire up its leg. The leg shattered at the knee and the construct stumbled, but began to regrow the limb, drawing moisture from the air.
More shapes were stirring in the other walls, beginning to detach.
“They’re using the environment,” I yelled.“Break the gallery! Grenades!”
We pulled pins and rolled fragmentation grenades along the floor toward the base of the ice walls. The blasts were deafening in the enclosed space. A wall of ice ten feet wide and twenty high crazed, then collapsed inward in a roaring cascade of shards and frozen mist. The forming constructs within were pulverised.“Move! Don’t let them regroup!”
We ran, crunching over the field of broken ice. The gallery opened into a series of antechambers, each more opulent and unsettling than the last. We encountered more defenders—living, breathing ones now. Palace guards in ornate black plate armor, their faces pale and fierce. They fought with a desperate, silent fury, but their swords and pikes were no match for aimed fire at close range. The battles were short, brutal, and clinical. We lost no one.
The adrenaline was a current, a live wire in the blood. It muted the deeper aches, turned them into distant signals. My uniform front was damp, a cool patch spreading.Not now. Ignore it.
Mary caught my eye after clearing a chamber where two guards lay slumped by a golden fountain that wept black water. She was breathing hard, a sheen of sweat on her forehead. She gave me a tight, almost imperceptible nod.I know.Me too.
We pushed on, a relentless machine. The scent of milk grew stronger, becoming a cloying, pervasive presence. It led us like a trail. Up a grand staircase of spiraling bone-ivory, through a throne room of glittering quartz that stood empty, and finally into a narrower, darker hallway lined with doors of dark, heavy wood.
At the end of the hall stood double doors of beaten gold, inscribed with a single, huge rune that seemed to drink the light. The smell was overpowering here. Not just milk, but the hot, metallic scent of blood, and the floral, decadent reek of some exotic perfume.
This was it.
We stacked up on the final doors. No sounds came from within. Just that thick, biological silence.
I looked at Mary beside me, her cheek resting against her rifle’s stock, her blonde hair dark with sweat at the temples. Her other hand was splayed protectively over her stomach. We were a thousand miles from home, weighed down by the future, standing at the source of all this frozen hate.
I reached out, my gloved hand finding the ornate, cold handle. I didn’t know what was on the other side. A monster.A mother. A queen.A god.
I glanced at the team, saw the same steady resolve in every set of eyes.Zero casualties. We’d crossed a city of magic and ice without a scratch.
The doors ahead were the last thing between us and the reason for it all.
I took a breath, the air sweet and sickly in my lungs.
“On three.”