“Your majesty, we must go!”

     King Leothan nodded. The Radiants had almost arrived. They had spread out as they approached to form a huge crescent that would envelope the city. Their intention was plain. No-one was to be allowed to escape. The Radiants intended to kill, or curse, the entire population. Anyone who escaped to the west would be hunted down to ensure a clean sweep, and then Leothan's advisors had suggested that they would visit every other Helberian city, one at a time, until the troublesome country had been wiped from the map. Even hiding in Marboll Tower would only delay the inevitable. The Radiants could leave a few of their number behind to starve them out.

     Everyone remaining in the city had been moved into the Tower nonetheless. There was nothing else to do. The remaining ballistae had been positioned in the entrances to try to keep the creatures out, but their supply of bolts was low and, when they had run out, the corridors and passageways were easily wide enough to allow a Radiant to crawl through, slithering along the floor on their tentacles. One by one the inner doors would be broken down and those cowering within would be dragged out and killed. The only doubt was how many of the creatures the defenders could take with them before they were overwhelmed.

     “I wanted to speak to my daughter one more time before we left,” said the King mournfully. “The six hours are almost up. I thought I could tell Nilon that we'd complied with his wishes. Bluff it out somehow...”

     “All their officers are dead,” said Amberley, his voice uncharacteristically soft. “There's no-one left who knows the codes.”

     “I shouldn't have let her go, George. If I'd kept her here, at least we'd be together at the end. Now she's going to die surrounded by enemies. Strangers...” He got a hold of himself with an effort. This self pity was unbecoming of a King. He still had subjects, and they needed a leader, not a grieving father. “What's done is done,” he said. “I always knew there was a risk she wouldn't come back, I agreed to it anyway.”

     He made himself stand up straight, threw his shoulders back. He had to make a good impression. Even now, there were still a few people out and about in the streets who would see him and be either encouraged or disheartened by his demeanour. He was still the King, so long as he still had a single subject looking up to him. “Let's go,” he said.

     Amberley nodded and they walked with stately dignity through the corridors of the ministry building. Balhern and four members of the palace guard went ahead of him while Darnell and two runners followed behind. Most of them were wearing their dress uniforms, as if they were on their way to some great state occasion to be seen by cheering crowds and foreign dignitaries. Leothan had had the idea while discussing the city's last defence with his Generals, and as soon as the meeting had been over he’d returned to his chambers and told his equerry to fetch his coronation robes. If he was going to die today, then he wanted to look his best for it.

     When he’d emerged from his dressing chambers, though, he’d found that his generals and the senior members of his palace staff had all had the same idea. Amberley’s uniform was a riot of gleaming brass and gold braid while Darnell's uniform looked as though it had arrived from the tailors just that morning. Balhern, still wearing his regular duty uniform, looked sour and unhappy, as if it had been prearranged and he’d been deliberately left out of it.

     When they reached the main entrance and went outside, Leothan looked up into the sky. It was clear and blue, fine and warm, but a brisk breeze was blowing from the east. The same breeze that was speeding the Radiants on their way towards them. There was no sign of the creatures yet, but the last news they'd had was that they had just crossed the Tolham hills travelling low to the ground and attacking every human they came across on the way. That would slow them a little, but not much. By all accounts they could cast curses almost continually and they were strung out in a line so that their curses overlapped, blanketing the ground so that there would be no escape even hiding in a basement. The King had no human subjects left in a strip of country five miles wide stretching from Marboll to the easternmost edge of his Kingdom.

     There were carriages waiting for them by the gates. Leothan and Amberley climbed into the leading coach and it set off immediately without waiting for a command from the passengers. Around them the streets were quiet and empty. The only sounds were the cries of birds and the howling of the wind among the rooftops. Here and there the streets were blocked by rubble where Carrow artillery had demolished a building or left a crater in the road itself. Damage that would now never be repaired. Even the Electric Messiah, the machine the scientists had been trying to build, had failed to materialise. The scientists would have been taken to the Tower by now, at his orders. I should have let them stay, he thought. Let them keep working right up until the end. What difference did it make whether they died in the Tower or in their laboratory? If they'd been left to keep on working, there was always the chance that they might have gotten the damned thing to work at the last moment. Now, even that hope was gone.

     So, it’s the end, he thought, but at least we will end with dignity. People will remember us for that, and there will be people to remember. Maybe thrown back to a life of nomadic hunter gatherers, maybe kept in cages like farm animals, but some people would survive because the Radiants need humans to adopt, and those people would remember. If Helberion ends up nothing more than a story told to adopted animals, he thought, then let’s make sure it’s a good one.

     It was only a five minute carriage ride to the Tower. It occupied the centre of the city and every main road converged on it including Liberty Avenue; the wide boulevard beside which Paisley Palace and the ministry building stood, along with all the other great buildings of government. These buildings were important, but they sat to the side, pushed away from the centre of the city by the Tower, emphasising its overwhelming pre-eminence in the city's history and culture.

     If not for the Tower there would be no Marboll, and there very possibly wouldn’t be a Helberion either, for it had been the presence of the Tower, offering, as it did, a defensible place of refuge during the barbarian invasions, that had allowed civilisation to take root and flourish in this part of the world. If Ihvon Ironhand, the local warlord of the time, had not ordered its construction, much larger and more powerful than it had needed to be at the time as a tribute to his famous vanity, many historians argued that the lands between Carrow and Ultumbria would still be in a state of lawless anarchy today, as the lands further east still were. These days, of course, the Tower was little more than a tourist attraction, but the walls were still just as strong as they'd ever been, even if the deep ditch that had once surrounded it had long since filled with water, forming a wide, tranquil moat.

     The three carriages clattered across the drawbridge into the courtyard, which was bounded by the first of the three concentric walls; the last to be added as the castle had grown in size and importance. The walls were useless against enemies that could float on the wind above them, of course, and so the carriages went on without slowing, following the road halfway around the circumference of the tower grounds to the great gates in the second wall, and then to the gates in the third wall, the highest and strongest wall of all and the first to be built after the Tower itself. Only then did the carriages stop, in front of the original structure. Walls and battlements of dark granite that rose tall and strong, sitting like a monolith at the centre of everything. So perfectly constructed that the gaps between individual stones could only be seen with great difficulty so that it gave the impression of having been carved from a single titanic block of stone.

     There was a large courtyard of crushed granite in front of it, across which the wheels of the carriages crunched as they came to a stop in front of the inner dyke; a deep, grass-covered trench that encircled the Tower itself. The dyke was crossed by another drawbridge that sloped up to the great gates in the first floor, the gates that opened into the tunnel that ran through the fifteen foot thick wall.

     As the King and his retinue walked through he looked up into the trapdoors in the ceiling. The deadfall that would once have dropped all kinds of deadly substances on any invader that somehow managed to get that far. There had been no time to re-arm the castle's ancient defences, unfortunately. Leothan would have liked nothing better than to drop burning coals onto the Radiants’ hydrogen filled flotation sacks.

     The earthquake that had shaken the city had had virtually no impact on the structure, the King had been told. It looked solid enough to survive the end of the world itself. It gave an overwhelming impression of safety and security as the King and his retinue walked in through the north doors. Once those great doors of iron-strapped oak were closed, it was impossible to imagine that there was anything in the world that could threaten those inside. The last of the army and the last remaining folk of the city certainly seemed calm and reassured as they crowded the halls and corridors of cold, perspiring stone, but Leothan had to keep reminding himself of the truth; that the creatures that were almost upon them had shown themselves capable of tearing through the strongest doors with ease. Over the centuries, thick wood had shown itself to be better at resisting the weapons of human attackers than any other material, even solid steel, but it would take steel doors like the doors of a bank vault to keep out the Radiants, and no-one had ever guessed that such a thing would be necessary.

     Inside the doors, up against the walls, stood two ballistae, ready to be moved into place the moment the last people were in. Every other entrance was already covered by the new weapons, with soldiers standing ready to man them and defend them with guns and swords. Even though the doors were not expected to stop the Radiants, they were closed and bolted anyway, just for the little extra time it would buy them. Only the north doors still stood open as they waited for the soldiers who had been guarding the Carrow prisoners. The Carrow prisoners themselves would probably escape from the kickball stadium before long, much good it would do them. If they were expecting the Radiants to spare them, Leothan thought they were going to be disappointed.

      “Look!” said one of Darnell's runners, pointing to the eastern skyline. Everyone followed his finger, and they saw a line of tiny points of light strung out in a line, rising slowly into sight above the inner wall.

     Leothan felt a cold chill shooting down his spine. He’d given many orders during the course of the war, sent many good people to their deaths while sitting safely in his palace, but now he was on the front line, facing personal danger, even the likelihood of death, for the first time. To actually see the enemy approaching... Was it always like this for his soldiers as battle approached? The Brigadier had described many battles during the years of their friendship. He’d described the chaos and confusion of battle, the bloodlust that came over a soldier when the fighting started. The sick horror of the aftermath of battle as they did a head count to see who was still alive, but he’d never described anything like this. The awful anticipation of an unavoidable battle that they couldn't possibly win. A nausea in the pit of his stomach as if he might be about to throw up in front of all his subjects.

     The Brigadier had lost battles, he knew. All military commanders did from time to time, no matter how brilliant they were. There were battles he’d known he was going to lose before they'd even begun, but he’d never described feeling the way the King did now. Perhaps he just lacked the imagination, he thought. The Brigadier was a practical man who dealt with the problems facing him and didn't waste time with introspection. If he’d been there now, he would be running options and strategies through his head, not quivering with fear. I have to be the same, the King told himself. He looked around and saw the others looking at him, waiting for his orders.

     “We've got time yet,” he said. “We'll wait.”

     Amberley nodded, and they all stared at the gate in the inner wall, thirty yards away on the other side of the central courtyard, willing the soldiers who'd been guarding the Carrow prisoners to come running through, sprinting for the safety of the Tower.

     “We should at least get the ballistae into position,” said Captain Machett, the man in charge of the Tower garrison. “Save some time later.”

     Amberley nodded and gave the order. The ballista crews began pushing the great wooden crossbows into the middle of the hall, facing the doors, ten yards in front of them. They were scratching the tiled floor, the King noted, feeling a slightly hysterical laughter trying to rise up inside him. The tiles that had been laid on the original stone surface a century earlier, when advances in military technology had already made the Tower redundant as a defensive structure and Bengoll Strake, following the secession of eastern Helberion from Carrow under his leadership, had had the building redecorated to serve as his palace.

     The Chamberlain will be furious, thought the King. Who was the Tower's Chamberlain these days? It had used to be old Ben Herrick, but that had been in his father's day. He remembered him from when King Goswen, his father, had brought him here during a ceremonial visit, but he’d been old then. Chances were that someone else had the job now. He should really know, he knew. Darnell would know, of course. He briefly thought about asking him...

      Pay attention to the matter at hand, he chided himself. His mind was shying away from the horror and awfulness of the situation, looking for an escape in mundanities, but the people around him deserved his full attention. He looked back up at the Radiants. They were closer now, visibly growing larger as they approached. They would be over the outer districts of the city by now, casting curse after curse at the buildings even though there should be nobody left in them. Nobody except the occasional stubborn family either refusing to accept the reality of the situation or so afraid of change that they would rather die in their own homes than live the rest of their lives as penniless refugees. The King had sent his men from door to door finding whoever they could and sending them out of the city by force, but they were bound to have missed a few. Would they be running ahead of the Radiants, now that they could actually see them coming? Would they suddenly appear through the door in the inner wall? Terrified and desperate, holding half raised animals in their arms along with whatever prized possessions they could carry?

     Nobody appeared. Neither civilians nor soldiers, and the Radiants drew closer still. “How close do you have to be before they can curse you?” asked Machett. “Are the ballistae too close to the door?”

     “Pull them back five yards,” said Amberley.

     The Captain nodded gratefully, and soon there were more scratches on the floor as the great machines were pulled back, their steel rimmed wheels totally unsuitable for the finely crafted floor of one of the city’s greatest tourist attractions.

     “We should close the doors, Sire,” said Field Marshall Amberley.

     “Not yet.”

     “Sire...”

     “I said not yet. There's still time.”

     “The stadium’s not that far away. They've had plenty of time to get here if they were coming. Something must have happened. Maybe the Carrowmen overpowered them. Sire, if it’s armed Carrowmen who come pouring through that gate...”

     At that moment, though, they heard the unmistakable sound of running men approaching. The Field Marshall's suggestion made everyone tense up and the soldiers raised their weapons, but it was their own men, arriving at last. Running as though all the demons of hell were after them. Leothan looked up. The Radiants were almost upon them, pushed forward by a howling gale that came in through the open gate, tugging at their clothes and making the tapestries flap against the walls. “Come on!” he muttered under his breath as the soldiers ran, their arms pumping and their faces contorted into masks of desperation. “Pick your bloody feet up!”

     The leading soldier, an officer, paused and ushered for his men to go ahead of him. “Don’t stop, you idiot!” cried someone, Leothan didn't know who. “They're already going as fast as they can!”

     The officer remained where he was, though, waving his men past one at a time, visibly counting them, and only when the last man had passed him did he finally start running again, going flat out in an effort to reach the temporary safety of the Tower. The Radiants were close now, though. They were above the outer wall, crossing the outer courtyard. Close enough that their piping could be heard. The utterings of so many creatures mingling together to form a single pure note like a bow drawn slowly across the strings of a violin. A sound that heralded the end of human freedom and independence.