The air tasted of burnt sugar and melting gold.
Leonard spat onto the marble cobblestones of the Grand Plaza. The taste remained. It always did.
He was a creature of the North built for pine needles and the silence of falling snow. Every scar on his body had been given to him by cold. He wore each one the way the mountain wore its ice: not as a wound, but as decoration.
The Southern heat was something else. It pressed against his chest plate and turned his steel armor into a kiln, seeping through the gaps at his joints and cooking the skin underneath. The humidity was a wet cloth held over the face.
He stood at the head of three thousand Iron Guard in the Grand Plaza of Diathma. Behind him, his men waited in absolute silence. Before him stood the Gates of the Sun.
Fifty feet of solid celestial bronze, reinforced with spell-forged lattice. Three generations of Southern architects. The kind of engineering that took three hundred years to replicate. They were barred, sealed, and shimmering with golden defensive wards that pulsed like a dying heartbeat. Dim. Faltering.
Not gone.
Kael appeared at his shoulder.
"My Lord." The High Commander's voice was flat in the way that a blade is flat as it had edges, but they were hidden until you needed to bleed something. "The gates remain sealed. The Southern commanders inside appear to have executed the men responsible for opening them. They would rather die in order than live in surrender."
"I know," Leonard said.
"Shall I bring the battering engines?"
"No."
A pause. "My Lord, the men have been standing in this heat for four hours—"
"They will stand for four more if I ask them to," Leonard said, without turning around. "That is what it means to be Iron Guard."
Kael went quiet.
Leonard looked at the gates. He looked at the wards. He let his eyes unfocus not at the surface of the thing, at the thing beneath the surface.
The wards were old. Sun-script, drawn in the First Age when the Southern royal line still carried Scribe blood in meaningful concentrations. Designed to withstand siege engines. Iron. Fire. Force.
Not designed for this.
He pressed his right fist against the center of his chest. The Rune of Will, branded into his sternum at age fourteen by his own father. It had spread at the edges over the years, the way a scar spreads when you keep putting pressure on it.
He breathed in.
The heat retreated.
Ten degrees in one second. The Iron Guard near him felt it and said nothing, the ones who had seen this before had taught the ones who hadn't: you do not react. You stand still and you thank whatever god you worship that the thing doing this is standing in front of you.
Leonard pressed his palm flat against the air.
The gates shuddered.
The wards didn't break. They didn't crack. They simply unraveled, the gold light peeling away from the bronze in long, slow strips, like bark from a tree in autumn, each strip dissolving into nothing before it hit the ground. The old Sun-script came apart at its seams. Not with violence. With the resignation of something that had been holding on too long and finally received permission to stop.
The gates opened inward. The groan of the hinges echoed off the surrounding buildings and bounced back, smaller than the original sound, like an echo afraid of its own source.
Leonard took his hand down. He breathed out.
The heat returned.
"Forward," he said.
Three thousand soldiers moved through the Gates of the Sun.
Diathma was dying the way beautiful things die: loudly, and in pieces.
The street was full of bodies.
The Grand Avenue had been the pride of the Southern continent two hundred yards of white limestone, flanked by date palms and marble fountains in the shape of solar rays. Today the fountains ran red and then brown and then dry. The date palms were burning. The limestone was cracked down the center where one of the Earth-Shakers, a Western engine the South had leased at extraordinary price, as a final act of desperation, had been turned on the street by its own frightened operators and fired at the wrong target.
Leonard walked through it and noted the details with the part of his brain he kept for logistics. The granary district: still standing. The harbor: accessible, chains lowered by someone sensible when the outcome became clear. The temple complex: burning. The slave quarters in the eastern district: quiet.
Too quiet.
"Kael."
"My Lord."
"Why are the slave quarters quiet?"
A beat. "General Ferrus believed it prudent to contain the situation, My Lord. Given that freed slaves in a conquered city present a complication—"
"Are they locked in?"
"...Yes, My Lord."
"Unlock them."
"My Lord, the risk of—"
Leonard stopped walking. He turned to look at Kael directly, which was something he rarely did in public, and Kael — who had served the Iron Throne for twenty-two years and survived three campaigns and one assassination attempt felt the specific chill of a man who has suddenly realized he is very small.
"Every slave in this city is now a free laborer," Leonard said. "Every free laborer is a potential taxpayer. Every taxpayer is revenue. Every locked door between me and my revenue is making me angry. Unlock them."
"Yes, My Lord."
Leonard turned back and walked.
A child was sitting on the steps of a ransacked merchant's house. Small. Five years old, perhaps. Dark curling hair, Southern. Her expression was not quite crying and not quite shock, something in between, something the human face invents specifically for moments when the world has changed too fast for the body to keep up. She was holding half a pomegranate. She had been eating it when everything had gone wrong. She had not put it down.
Leonard slowed.
He looked at her for a moment. Then at a young soldier beside him, he was barely twenty, his first campaign.
"Find her family," Leonard said. "If her family is dead, find someone to take her in. Feed her."
The young soldier blinked. "My — yes, My Lord."
Leonard walked on.
Kael fell into step beside him. "That was kind," Kael said. Not a compliment. An observation.
"That was expensive," Leonard said. "A child with no one in a ruined city becomes a problem. Problems cost money. I have already spent an extraordinary amount on this campaign."
He thought, briefly, about his son. Lorenzo. Fifteen years old in the Ironhold, already beginning to look like the man he would become. An open face. The exhausting warmth of a boy raised in safety.
He filed the thought and continued toward the palace.