The spy was clinging like a spider to the roof of the tunnel. Mathas had seen her before at the Palace of Seven Vultures, always standing close to Neferata and whispering to her. It was Raia, and in the moment of Mathas’ attack, he realised that if he did not strike true, then it would not matter when the help from Lestor’s master arrived. The rebellion would end now.

  Fate smiled. He stabbed Raia through the chest before she could react.

  Raia shrieked. She dropped from the ceiling and rode the blade down. It protruded from her back as she grabbed Mathas’ neck with her claws. She sank them into his flesh, and his blood poured down his chest to mix with hers. They were trapped with each other now. Her claws plunged deeper. Tendons tore, and Mathas started to choke before he forced himself to remember he did not need to breathe. The tip of a claw scraped against bone, and in another few moments, she would be able to snap his head off. He twisted his blade and sawed to the right, fighting to reach her heart.

  ‘Traitor,’ Raia hissed, spraying dark gore in his face. ‘You will all burn.’

  ‘The tyrant failed with me,’ Mathas grunted, the words liquid as his mouth filled with his blood. ‘Now she will fall.’

  Raia’s lips pulled back in a feral snarl. Her hands began to curl deep inside and tear at Mathas’ flesh. His physical being teetered on the brink of dissolution. He wrenched the sword desperately, and Raia stiffened. The blaze in her eyes dimmed, went dark. Her arms went slack, and her legs gave way. Mathas lowered her to the ground and released his sword. Carefully, he pulled her talons free from his throat. His blood was still pouring from his wounds and his mouth, and he felt a terrible looseness in his neck. He crouched and fed from her river of blood flowing from her severed heart. The vintage was rich with age and experience, and as he drank, his wounds began to close. This was blood stronger than any he had tasted before. His senses exulted. Savage, intoxicating pleasure roared through his veins.

  A hand touched his shoulder, and he whirled, snarling, teeth bared to tear the throat from the rival who would dare drink from his kill.

  Teyosa staggered back, eyes wide.

  Her terror broke the feral spell. It stabbed into him, soul-deep pain much stronger than any murderous pleasure.

  He rose from Raia’s corpse, swaying and reached out to Teyosa. ‘Do not fear me,’ he pleaded. ‘Don’t ever fear me.’ He stayed where he was, his hand open and waiting.

  Teyosa met his eyes, and she came forward again. She clasped his hand. He pulled her gently to him, embracing her with one arm, protecting her and at the same time leaning on her for the strength of her love.

  He turned to the others as they crowded in the doorway. Still dizzy from the power of Raia’s blood, he pulled his sword free. He had killed a much older, more powerful vampire. It had taken luck to give him this victory. Yet the victory was real.

  ‘You see?’ he rasped. He could barely croak out the words. ‘We can win. And we will.’

  ‘Do you know who that is?’ Jedefor asked, eyes wide.

  ‘I do.’ With Teyosa’s help, Mathas took a step towards Lestor. ‘There is no more time,’ he said. ‘We need your master’s aid. Now.’

  ‘You aren’t returning to the court tonight,’ Teyosa said. ‘You can’t. Not after this. She will know.’

  ‘I must,’ Mathas told her. ‘She may not find out. But if I don’t return, she will.’ He paused, already anxious at the thought of being absent from his family. ‘Be ready to take Kasten into the tunnels,’ he said. ‘The passages can be reached by a door hidden in the wine cellar.’

  ‘We won’t be safe here either.’

  ‘But you will have hope.’

  That night, Mathas took his place among the other vampire nobles. He composed his face into a mask of attentive humility whenever Neferata spoke, a thrall awaiting the pleasure of his mistress. He hoped Neferata would not look too closely at him. He hoped she would not perceive his thoughts of Raia’s dust scattered through the tunnels.

  There were few revels in the Palace of Seven Vultures any longer. Neferata’s anger pervaded the halls, and Mathas took that fury as a good omen, another sign of her growing weakness. The light from the torches seemed dimmer, as if the fire itself were clotted with resentment and corrupted blood. Dark smoke coiled around the pillars of the hall and gathered, sullen, under the ceiling like a lowering cloud. There were no musicians, and no dances. In their place were terse whispers and the whine of complaints. The Mortarch of Blood still provided the court with fine mortal victims on which to feed, but the events seemed more like executions than celebrations. Over the course of the last several nights, Mathas had found himself looking carefully into the faces of his prey before he fed, increasingly worried that he might see someone familiar.

  He watched the other nobles, too, careful not to hold the eye of fellow conspirators too long. The faces that interested him were the ones who were not part of the rebellion, but looked so unhappy they might well take part when the uprising began.

  ‘Why are you displeased?’ he overheard Lord Vasyth ask Lady Casein. ‘You ascended to control of your house thanks to that slaughter.’

  ‘We are as decimated as you are,’ Casein hissed back. ‘Control means nothing if there is nothing left to control.’

  Neferata presided over harsh sessions where the encounters with her courtiers threatened to draw blood through words alone. The nobility was becoming less obsequious and more demanding. The queen was becoming less willing to grant favours, and more savage in her denials. In the great hall, beneath the smell of incense and spilled blood, the air reeked of conflict and hate. With a spark, the atmosphere would combust into war.

  The stars were aligning. An uprising was inevitable. All Mathas asked was that he be able to choose the moment when the spark was applied.

  He hung back, keeping to the rear of the hall, saying nothing and requesting nothing from Neferata, doing everything he could to avoid her attention.

  Casein reached the front of the line of supplicants. ‘You have weakened us,’ she said, paused, and then added, with bitter pretence of respect, ‘my queen.’ Her hands were clenched in anger. ‘Yet your tithes are unchanged. We cannot sustain them. We seek compensation… my queen. We seek justice.’

  Neferata rose from her divan. She strode to the edge of the dais and glared at Casein, then at the entire court. Weakened she might be, Mathas thought, but she was still terrible in her anger. Majesty wrapped around her like a cape and thundercloud. Her eyes burned with deep, volcanic fire. ‘You tire me with your needs,’ Neferata declared, her words a hissing serpent. ‘You would feed from my very veins if I let you. Your greed and your vanity would devour Nulahmia. I will not let them. Begone from my sight. I will see true fealty, or I will see no one.’

  The courtiers pulled back from the dais as if burned and filed out of the great hall. Mathas moved with them. The ragged ceremony was done.

  Then Neferata called out to him.

  ‘Mathas of House Hellezan, you will remain.’

  He froze where he stood. With an effort, he forced himself to turn around. He stared across the empty space of the hall’s floor to the dark figure of Neferata.

  ‘Stand before me,’ she ordered.

  He obeyed. As he walked towards her slowly, feeling the pressure of her glare, the doubts returned. He wondered how he could think to challenge this being in whom beauty and command and death were fused.

  Mathas reached the edge of the dais and stopped. He looked up into a cold, merciless mask.

  ‘I hear little of your family,’ said Neferata.

  Mathas forced the tremor from his voice before speaking. ‘There is little to hear, my queen,’ he said.

  ‘Isn’t there? That is, I must say, a pleasant change from the chattering vermin that assail me in my palace. And how well do you feed?’

  ‘Very well.’

  ‘Your wife and child, were they succulent?’

  His face turned numb with fear. He grunted, unable to answer. He could not lie. She would know. She must realise they were still alive. The question was a trap, and there was no way out. ‘I…’ he said, and trailed off.

  Neferata smiled, showing her perfect fangs and perfect cruelty. ‘You don’t know? No matter. I’m sure someone else knows the answer now.’

  Mathas stared, trying to pierce through the pounding clouds of horror in his head to make sense of her words, and then trying to deny their meaning.

  Neferata waited, her smile sinking its venom into his veins.

  Then he turned and ran.

  Guards closed in from the sides, but Neferata stopped them. ‘Let him go,’ she said. ‘Run, Mathas! Run to your house of traitors! Did you think you could hide your perfidy from me? Did you think I did not see your pretence? Did you think I would let Raia’s death go unpunished? You are a fool. Go now, and learn. Go, and burn.’

  Mathas burst from the main doors of the Palace of Seven Vultures. He pounded down the Path of Punishment, and the martyrs to Neferata’s will were a blur in the corner of his eyes. The wind of his flight blew his hair back. He barely saw where he was going. A howl rose from his chest. It caught in his throat, then squeezed out of his jaws, so huge it emerged as a long, constricted whine.

  As he ran, he sought hope, and found none. The fact that she had not succeeded in making him her thrall now seemed nothing more than an extra layer of cruelty. Part of him wondered how much Neferata knew, but that part was drowned in the incoherent grief and terror of the rest. He could not think. He could not plan. He could only run, and run, and run, and try to free the scream that grew larger and larger as he drew closer to the Hellezan Palace.

  He smelled the smoke before he saw it. It billowed up over the roofs of Nulahmia, rising to greet the dark of the night, spreading its annunciation of doom, the crimson glow of flame pulsing from beneath. Mathas drew his sword as he flew down the final streets before his home. He was ready to fight and kill and die for his family. Jedefor, he thought. I curse your name, you coward. He had no doubt the captain had led the attack on the Hellezans without hesitation, unwilling to take any risk until the battle was already met and decided.

  Mathas rounded the last corner. House Hellezan was before him, a black shell of walls containing a maelstrom of fire. If it had been Jedefor’s guards who had turned the palace into a torch, they were gone now. The streets were empty even of onlookers. No one wished to draw the Mortarch’s attention their way. Mathas stumbled forward, his sword raised in desperate anger, but he was alone.

  Fire billowed out of the shattered doors. It spun in furious cyclones from the windows. The dull, suffocating roar of the conflagration filled Mathas’ ears. It was the cracking, rumbling thunder of the death of his family. Centuries of honour burned. Nulahmia might belong to Neferata. It was her creation. But the Hellezans had been part of it too. They had built a history and a tradition. They had placed their mark upon the city. They had helped shape it and its story, and surely what they had done was theirs to own and take pride in. Neferata was not a god. Some aspects of what made Nulahmia must be the work of its citizens.

  Something must belong to them. Something must belong to a family that had stood proud and unbowed in this land of death, holding the line for an ideal of decency when decadence and cruelty flowed through the very air and ran in blood through the drains.

  All gone now. History annihilated, symbols and flesh turned to fire and black smoke.

  The walls trembled with the force of the firestorm. Mortar crumbled, and a portion of the upper wall collapsed inwards. No mortal could still be alive in the palace. Mathas knew that. Any who would not have been put to the sword would have burned alive. Yet he ran through the doorway, into the holocaust. He had no choice. It was the only action left to him.

  ‘Teyosa!’ he cried out in the great hall. He could not hear himself over the fury of the blaze, but he kept calling for his wife. The tapestries were curtains of flame, waving in the wind of destruction. Fire writhed and coiled along the ceiling, twisting into spectral shapes that mimicked the pain of dying souls.

  Mathas staggered towards the stairs. ‘Teyosa!’ His cape caught fire and he tore it from his shoulders. His skin curled and cracked in the heat. He would already be dead if he were still mortal, and the violence of the firestorm could still destroy him.

  A wall of smoking rubble crashed onto the stairway before he could reach it. The barrier stopped Mathas and jolted him back to rational thought. He had been racing on the wings of instinct, about to run upstairs to his and Teyosa’s chamber. She would not be there. If there was any chance she and their son had survived, it would be down below, in the deep tunnels, far from the palace.

  He turned to the cellar doors. They too were smashed. Fire and smoke roared out to meet him. He hurled himself into the choking, flickering darkness. ‘Teyosa!’ He took the steps three at a time. He did not fall. He cut through the howl of the fire with preternatural grace. He dropped through the cellars and vaults of the Hellezan Palace. Flaming timbers fell before him, and he battered them from his path. On all sides, the wreckage of his family’s history blazed. Corpses lay under smashed shelves and overturned chests, and sprawled in his path. Their throats were cut. Their limbs were dismembered. They were eviscerated, decapitated. Every outrage of mutilation had been visited on their bodies by the command of the Mortarch of Blood. They were burned black, and beyond recognition to mortal sight.

  But Mathas knew who they were. He smelled the nature of their blood through the smoke. His witchsight caught the residual agonies of their spirits still convulsing over them. Every corpse he passed, no matter how quickly, was a new stab of grief.

  But none of the dead were Teyosa. None of them were Kasten.

  There was too much horror for hope, and too much urgency for despair. Mathas ran faster yet. The fire was consuming even the deepest foundations of the palace, and it was here that he found Verrick and Glanath. His parents had died together, their mutilations fusing their corpses, and there was no telling one severed finger or fleshless skull from another.

  And still he knew who they were. Their rings had not melted. His father’s blackened seal of office hung from his charred neck.

  Mathas stood over the bodies, his lungs raw from smoke, his throat tight with grief, his limbs trembling with rage. He tried to give voice to his horror. If he screamed loud enough, perhaps he would banish the reality before him. ‘Nnnnnnn,’ he groaned. His teeth clenched tight, and his denial became an animal keening. ‘Nnnnnnnnnnnn…’

  His parents had fallen in the centre of a corridor in the foundations. The hall led to the tunnels running under the palace, but not the important ones. Mathas entered the wine cellar, and gave a sob of relief when he found the entrance to the rebels’ network untouched. The cellar burned, but the mechanism that opened the stone door was not damaged. Perhaps, in a final act of defiance, his parents had misled their killers. Perhaps they had saved Teyosa and Kasten.

  Don’t hope. Don’t you dare hope. Look for them. Find them. But don’t succumb to hope. It seeks to destroy us on this day.

  Mathas closed the door, and he shut the fire away behind him. There was smoke in the tunnels, but much less. He ran through the maze, into a darkness that was ever cleaner, shouting his wife’s name. He made for the meeting chamber, the floor outside its threshold dark with Raia’s blood. Just before he reached it, he foolishly let himself think that perhaps, perhaps, Teyosa had found refuge there.

  There was no one in the chamber.

  Now there were no further destinations. Mathas had nowhere to reach, no sanctuary he could think of. There was nothing left to do except run, and run, fleeing the despair that at last closed in, its black pinions sweeping to embrace him.

  ‘Teyosa!’ he screamed. ‘Teyosa!’

  Saaah-saaah-saaah! the echoes mocked.

  He ran and shrieked until he no longer knew where he was, and his voice was hoarse. He sank to his knees. ‘Teyosa,’ he whispered, and the only answer was the susurrus of his pain rasping against stone walls.

  Mathas hung his head, limp with despair. It was over. Some of the other families might still be committed to the uprising,­ but the battle would happen without him. Neferata had destroyed the Hellezans before they had begun to fight. He was spent. He thought that maybe, just maybe, he could will himself into nothingness right here.

  Distantly, he heard the sound of marching feet. The palace guard, he thought. The coward Jedefor leading a sweep to finish his bloody work. Very well, then. He would accept his execution and be thankful for it.

  As the boot steps drew closer, he realised he was mistaken. The marchers were approaching from the west, away from the palace. And there were many of them. Many more, he thought, than would have been necessary for the raid on his house.

  He blinked, and rose slowly. He stood in the centre of the wide tunnel, waiting to face the arrivals.

  Closer yet, he could hear the clanking of heavy armour and the grinding drag of heavy masses being pulled along the floor. Barely aware that he was doing so, Mathas tightened his grip on his sword. Deep in his soul, an ember glowed, and he was ready to fight one last time.

  Lestor emerged from the gloom ahead. Behind him marched a seemingly endless column of vampires and skeletons. Their armour was dark, and shorn of all insignia. They were an anonymous army. There was no way to tell what master they served.

  Lestor had drawn his sword, but put it away when he recognised Mathas. His smile of greeting faded when he met Mathas’ eyes. ‘Is all well?’ he asked.

  ‘It is not,’ said Mathas. ‘Neferata has destroyed us.’

  Lestor bowed, acknowledging Mathas’ grief. ‘Am I too late, then? Have the other houses fallen as well?’