The marble quay was thirty paces wide, slick with the spray of the flooded reservoir, and ringed by the sixty elite Solar Praetorians whose mirrored shields reflected the blinding, crimson pulse of the ruby-glass sphere above.
Lord Malic didn't wait for Gideon to close the distance.
The imperial champion moved with a speed that defied the weight of mortal bone.
One second he stood thirty paces away on the black basalt steps; the next, he was a streak of blinding white samite and crystalline fire, his twin solar scimitars descending in a scissor-strike aimed to shear Gideon’s head clean from his shoulders.
The white flame burning along the crystal blades didn't just radiate heat—it hummed at an ultrasonic frequency that turned the freezing air of the cistern to scalding steam.
Gideon met the strike with the instincts of an apex predator born in a frozen butcher-yard.
He didn't try to block the crystal with the flats of his blades; twelve winters in the Iron Wastes had taught him that foreign sorcery devoured steel.
Gideon ducked his head two inches, twisting his massive torso so the descending white blades hissed through the air a hair's breadth above his left shoulder, slicing through the heavy leather strap of his traveling pack like hot wire through tallow.
As the blades passed, Gideon drove the pommel of his right star-iron claymore straight into Malic’s golden breastplate with two hundred and sixty pounds of forward momentum.
CLANG!
The impact dented the beaten gold, knocking the breath from Malic’s lungs and sending the slender champion skidding ten paces across the wet marble.
Malic didn't stumble. He caught his balance on the balls of his boots, his lips peeling back over perfect, pearl-white teeth in a hiss of aristocratic fury. A thin line of crimson leaked from the corner of his mouth where his cheek had split from the concussive force of the pommel.
"Crude barbarian," Malic spat, the white flame along his scimitars flaring hotter, turning the edge of the crystal translucent. "You swing that cold iron like a woodcutter clearing scrub. I was trained in the Nine Solar Katas before your mother learned to crawl through the mud!"
"Then you should have learned how to take a punch," Gideon rumbled, his voice low, scraping gravel against the roar of the water behind him.
He didn't rush in.
Gideon circled slowly to the left, his twin claymores angled low, his boots finding traction on the slick stone with deliberate, heavy steps. His amber-gold eyes were dead, unblinking slits, reading the shifting weight in Malic’s hips, the tension in his wrists, the exact angle of his crystal blades.
Beside the quay, the battle for the cistern had detonated.
Varis and the sixteen Void-dancers swept through the Solar Praetorians like black scythes through wheat. Their curved executioner's blades darted under the heavy mirrored shields, opening unarmored knee-joints and severing throat-seals with silent, lethal precision.
Talia and Korina Drake had already vaulted onto the central basalt island, their machetes and rapiers hacking through the brass hydraulic lines that fed the eight golden conduits rising into the ceiling.
"Lyra! The secondary valves are pressurized!" Korina shouted over the clash of steel, kicking a Praetorian captain into the flooded reservoir where a young wyrmling dragged him under with a flash of golden fins. "If we don't bleed the cistern pressure, the whole ceiling collapses on us!"
Lyra was already moving.
She didn't engage the guards.
She sprinted across the basalt island, her boots splashing through pools of leaking sun-marrow, heading straight for the colossal, pulsing ruby sphere.
Up close, the Heart of the Pyramid was monstrous.
It sat in a cradle of petrified leviathan ribs, pulsing with the trapped life-force of fifty thousand barrels of refined sun-marrow. The heat radiating off the glass was an open furnace, blistering her cheeks and crisping her eyelashes, but beneath the physical heat, her Weave-sense caught the siphon's heartbeat.
Connecting the ruby sphere to the city two thousand feet above was a massive, incandescent cord of pure imperial blood-sorcery: the Cord of the Noon.
It was through this single, pulsing artery that the Emperor drew the energy to power the rotating gold sphere atop the pyramid.
Cut the cord, Lyra thought, her small fingers closing around the hilt of her antler knife. And the Eye goes blind.
She leaped onto the leviathan-rib cradle, balancing five paces above the basalt floor, her blade raised to strike.
"NO!" Malic’s shriek tore through the cavern.
Seeing the Ash Queen about to touch the sacred sphere, the imperial champion abandoned his duel with Gideon.
He broke his defensive stance, spinning on his heel, his white-samite cloak billowing as he leaped fifteen feet into the air, his twin crystal scimitars aimed straight for Lyra’s unprotected back.
He never reached her.
Gideon moved like a falling mountain.
The warlord didn't swing his blades.
He threw his entire massive body through the air in a brutal, mid-air tackle, intercepting Malic at the apex of his leap.
The two warriors crashed together eight feet above the stone, slamming down onto the basalt quay in a bone-shattering collision that cracked the paving slabs beneath them.
Malic’s left crystal scimitar tore through Gideon’s leather jerkin, the white flame searing a four-inch trench across the warlord's ribs, burning through muscle and flesh down to the white bone.
The smell of his own scorched meat hit Gideon’s nostrils, but he didn't even flinch.
With a feral, blood-freezing roar that shook the marble pillars of the cavern, Gideon trapped Malic’s left wrist beneath his knee, pinned the champion’s throat to the stone with his left gauntlet, and raised his right star-iron claymore two feet above Malic’s face.
"Wait... barbarian, wait!" Malic choked out, his arrogance shredding into blind, suffocating panic as he looked up into the amber eyes of a predator that had never known mercy. "I hold the title of the Sun-Blade! The Emperor will pay fifty thousand—"
"I don't take coin from dead men," Gideon growled.
He drove the star-iron claymore straight down through Malic’s throat, pinning the imperial champion to the basalt stone.
The white flame along the crystal scimitars flickered and died.
Malic’s body gave one violent, final shudder before going limp, his blood pooling out over the black flagstones to hiss against the water.
Gideon rose slowly, his chest heaving, his left side soaked in black blood and scorched leather, his amber eyes burning with fierce, savage satisfaction.
He looked up at the leviathan-rib cradle.
Lyra stood five paces above him, her antler knife resting against the pulsing Cord of the Noon, her star-iron circlet blazing with the full, incandescent majesty of the Ash Court.
Their eyes met across the smoking cavern.
The silver-red cord between their hearts thrummed with a deep, resonant wave of pure, fated devotion that chased away the agony in his ribs and the exhaustion in her limbs.
"Do it, little bird," Gideon rumbled, his voice thick with raw, aching pride.
Lyra bared her fangs in a feral, lethal smile.
She drove her antler knife into the cord.
SEVER!
A concussive shockwave of violet and crimson starlight blasted outward through the grand cistern.
Two thousand feet above, on the summit of the Sun-Pyramid, the colossal, fifty-pace gold sphere of the Eye of the Noon shuddered.
The blinding light within its lens sputtered, dimmed, and turned into a dull, lifeless ball of cold bronze.
The weapon that had held the southern continent in terror for three centuries was dead.
And from the ceiling of the cistern, a massive bronze gate groaned open, revealing the grand spiral staircase that led directly into the Throne Room of the Sun-King.
Six chapters left.
The Emperor’s door was unlocked.