Fairfax carried the king through the western passage’s darkness.

The passage was narrow. Four feet wide, seven feet tall, the dimensions that the palace’s original architects had specified for the specific purpose that the passage served: the escape of a monarch whose palace had fallen and whose escape’s concealment required the passage’s dimensions to be the dimensions that construction within existing walls allowed. The passage ran through the palace’s western wall’s interior, the space between the wall’s inner and outer surfaces, the space that the wall’s four-foot thickness provided and that the architects had converted from structural mass into the corridor that the architects’ paranoia about fallen palaces had demanded.

The king was unconscious. The Sixth Realm’s autonomous functions sustained the body’s vital systems at the minimal level that the Realm’s remaining capacity permitted. The breathing was shallow. The heartbeat was present but reduced. The blood from the hip wound and the back wound had soaked the improvised bandages that Fairfax had applied at the passage’s entrance, the bandages’ absorption capacity exceeded by the wounds’ sustained blood loss.

Fairfax carried the king in the specific hold that the Griffon Knight order’s rescue training prescribed for the evacuation of wounded personnel through confined spaces: the wounded person’s body across the rescuer’s shoulders, the rescuer’s arms securing the wounded person’s legs and arm, the carry’s weight distributed across the rescuer’s back and shoulders in the pattern that the Fifth Realm’s enhanced musculature could sustain for the duration that the carry required.

The king weighed approximately two hundred and forty pounds with armor. The Fifth Realm’s enhanced musculature sustained two hundred and forty pounds across the shoulders for the duration that the carry’s distance demanded. The distance was the passage’s length: six hundred paces through the wall’s interior, descending three levels through the stairways that the architects had carved into the wall’s thickness, emerging at the chapel district’s crypt through the door that the crypt’s construction concealed.

Two Royal Guards accompanied Fairfax. The guards had been assigned to the escape’s escort at the moment that Kreese’s defense of the corridor had begun, the two guards’ separation from the eleven who remained being the separation that the mission’s requirements imposed: eleven to hold the corridor, two to protect the king’s passage through the escape route.

The guards moved through the darkness with the specific silence that the passage’s concealment required. The passage’s walls were stone. The passage’s ceiling was stone. The sound of armored warriors moving through a stone corridor was the sound that the passage’s concealment’s failure would produce if the sound reached the palace’s occupied spaces where the barbarian assault force was conducting the room-by-room clearance that the palace’s capture demanded.

"Quiet," Fairfax whispered. The whisper was the whisper that confined stone spaces produced: barely audible at arm’s length, the sound absorbed by the stone’s surfaces before the sound could propagate to the distances that detection required.

The descent through the three levels’ stairways was the descent that the king’s unconscious weight and the stairways’ narrow dimensions combined to make difficult. The stairways’ width was three feet. The stairways’ turns were tight. Fairfax navigated the turns with the king’s body across his shoulders, the body’s weight shifting with each turn’s directional change, the Fifth Realm’s balance compensation sustaining the carry through the turns’ geometry that the carry’s weight and the turns’ tightness would have made impossible for a carrier whose Realm was lower.

The first stairway descended twenty feet. The second descended fifteen. The third descended twelve. The total descent placed the passage’s exit at the depth that the chapel district’s crypt occupied: forty-seven feet below the palace’s ground level, the depth that three centuries of the chapel’s burial practices had established and that the architects had used as the passage’s exit point because the crypt’s depth provided the exit’s concealment from the surface’s observation.

The crypt’s door was iron. The iron was cold. The door’s mechanism, the latch that the architects had designed for the specific purpose of opening from the passage’s side and not from the crypt’s side, operated with the specific resistance that three centuries of disuse produced in iron mechanisms whose maintenance had not been included in the palace’s routine maintenance schedules because the passage’s existence was known only to the monarch and the Lord Chamberlain and the architect’s original drawings that the Lord Chamberlain’s office stored in the archive that the archive’s classification system identified as the classification that only two people in the kingdom had the authority to access.

Fairfax pulled the latch. The mechanism resisted. The Fifth Realm’s enhanced grip strength overcame the resistance. The door opened.

* * * * *

The crypt was dark. The darkness was the darkness that underground spaces produced when the underground spaces’ illumination depended on the torches that the spaces’ visitors brought and the spaces’ current visitors had not brought torches because the visitors’ arrival was the arrival that concealment rather than illumination required.

Fairfax moved through the crypt by touch. His left hand on the wall. His right arm securing the king’s body across his shoulders. The two guards behind him, their hands on each other’s shoulders, the chain of physical contact that movement through total darkness required when the movement’s participants could not see the movement’s destination.

The crypt’s layout was the layout that the chapel’s three centuries of burial practices had produced: rows of stone sarcophagi arranged in the grid that the crypt’s rectangular floor plan permitted, each sarcophagus bearing the name and dates of the kingdom’s notable dead whose families’ status had merited the chapel crypt’s interment rather than the common burial grounds’ disposal. The sarcophagi’s grid created the aisles that Fairfax navigated by touch, the stone edges of the sarcophagi’s lids providing the tactile guides that the darkness’s visual absence demanded.

The crypt’s exit was the stairway that ascended from the crypt’s western end to the chapel’s nave, the stairway that the chapel’s worship services used for the specific ceremonies that required the clergy’s descent to the crypt and the clergy’s return. The stairway’s ascent was twenty feet. The stairway’s width was four feet. The stairway’s dimensions permitted the carry that Fairfax sustained.

Fairfax ascended. The king’s unconscious body rose from the crypt’s depth to the chapel’s interior. The chapel was empty. The chapel’s congregation had fled through the southern gate with the civilian population whose exodus the sixth day’s breach had initiated. The chapel’s silence was the silence that evacuated sacred spaces produced: the silence that was not merely the absence of sound but the absence of the specific quality of sound that occupied sacred spaces produced, the quality of murmured prayer and chanted liturgy and the particular resonance that stone interiors provided to the human voice when the human voice was speaking to something that the speaker believed was listening.

The chapel’s western door opened onto the street that connected the chapel district to the western wall’s postern gate. The street was empty. The barbarian advance had not reached the chapel district because the barbarian advance was proceeding from the breach’s northwestern position through the palace district’s approaches and the chapel district was south of the palace district and the advance’s trajectory had not yet curved south.

Fairfax set the king down on the chapel’s floor. The king’s breathing was the breathing that the Sixth Realm’s autonomous functions maintained: shallow, regular, the specific rhythm that the Realm’s minimal life-support produced when the Realm’s conscious functions were offline and the Realm’s unconscious functions were operating at the single-digit percentage that critical injury sustained. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

"He needs a healer," one of the guards said.

"He needs a healer who is not inside a city that is being occupied by barbarians," Fairfax said. "The postern gate. The western wall’s postern gate is two hundred paces from this chapel. The gate’s mechanism is operable from the interior without the exterior’s awareness. We exit through the postern gate. We move south. We reach Duke Remmington’s reception point. The duke’s healers provide the medical attention that the king’s injuries require."

"The postern gate may be watched."

"The postern gate may be watched. The alternative to the postern gate is remaining inside a city whose occupation is proceeding from the northwest and whose occupation’s completion will reach this district within hours. The watched gate is the risk. The remaining is the certainty."

The guards lifted the king. Fairfax led. The two hundred paces between the chapel’s western door and the postern gate were the two hundred paces that the king’s escape required and that the escape’s success depended on.

The street was empty. The western wall’s section above the postern gate showed no barbarian presence on the wall-walk. The barbarian advance’s focus on the palace district had drawn the assault force’s attention northward, away from the western wall’s southern sections, the sections that included the postern gate that the escape required.

Fairfax opened the postern gate. The gate’s mechanism, maintained by the wall garrison’s routine maintenance schedule, operated with the smooth function that maintained mechanisms produced. The gate opened. The exterior was empty. The barbarian army’s encirclement of the capital had been the encirclement that the northern and western approaches’ battery positions provided, and the southern and western walls’ exterior positions had been unoccupied because the barbarian force’s seventeen-thousand-warrior strength had been insufficient to encircle the capital’s full perimeter while simultaneously conducting the breach assault and the urban advance.

The king passed through the postern gate. The two guards followed. Fairfax closed the gate behind them.

The capital was behind them. The capital’s sounds, the boomstick fire and the distant thundermaker impacts and the specific acoustic signature of a city being fought through street by street, carried over the wall’s top and faded with each step that the escape party took away from the wall’s base.

Fairfax carried the king south. The Fifth Realm’s enhanced endurance sustained the carry across the distance that the carry’s destination demanded: thirty miles south to Duke Remmington’s provincial boundary. Thirty miles of open countryside between a fallen capital and a southern province that had been preparing for the capital’s fall since the preparation’s prudence had demanded the preparation.

The king was alive. The king was unconscious. The king was escaping from the capital that had fallen while the king defended it, the capital whose defense had cost the king his sword and his shield and his consciousness and the specific percentage of his Sixth Realm’s capacity that the defense’s intensity had consumed.

The eleven guards in the corridor had purchased the time that the escape required. The eleven guards’ sacrifice was the sacrifice that the escape’s success made meaningful, the specific meaning that sacrifice acquired when the sacrifice’s purpose was fulfilled and the purpose’s fulfillment was the thing that the sacrifice’s participants had died to produce.

The king lived. The guards died. The sacrifice was complete. And the capital behind the escape party’s retreating figures was the capital that the barbarians now occupied and that the kingdom’s fate depended on the forces whose positioning around the capital would determine whether the occupation was permanent or temporary.

The Snarling Wolf banner, sixty miles southeast at the Horde’s observation position, held its direction northeast. The wolf had observed the week’s events with the specific attention that the observation’s purpose demanded. The week was complete. The capital had fallen. The agreement’s week had expired.

The wolf’s next action was the action that the expiration demanded.

The wolf was done observing.