All the ordinary business of the city had stopped as the Princess and her army stepped out into the street. How word had spread so quickly they never found out, but more people joined them at every street corner they passed, leaving shops, factories and schools unattended. The men were armed with anything they could find as a weapon whether it was a kitchen knife strapped to a broom handle, a crowbar or a hundred year old antique sword. A very few people had firearms, mainly shotguns normally used by farmers and gamekeepers to control wild animals. The Brigadier suspected that the owners of these weapons had originally brought them into the city for criminal purposes, but this wasn't the time to pursue that train of thought.

     Every house they passed had faces in the windows. Half raised animals or people left infirm by age or injury. There would also be people too timid to take part in the uprising, of course, but who, in years to come, would entertain anyone who would listen with the tale of how they'd been at the very forefront of the army, marching alongside Princess Ardria and the Brigadier themselves. And, of course, if the uprising should fail, they would swear to the King's men how desperately they had tried to talk their fellows out of their traitorous actions out of love and loyalty to the regime.

     The Brigadier didn't let himself think about such people. Every city had them, even in Helberion. He kept his attention on the windows nonetheless, fearing that there might be a King’s man behind one of them armed with a long gun, taking aim at the Princess. What would the crowd do if Ardria were shot down? he wondered. Would they fly into a fury and attack the palace as a disorganised rabble, or would they mill around in confusion for a while and then quietly all go home?

     No shot rang out. They passed through the industrial complex known for some arcane historical reason as The Puddles, then entered ones of the city's residential districts, so similar to the working class districts of Farwell that Malone had described to him that the Brigadier felt a pang of grief for his former batman. Word had reached Edward Blake just the day before that Lord Benjamin Hedley had died when his mansion had burned to the ground, and there was no doubt in the Brigadier's mind that Malone had been responsible. Malone had told Ambassador Mornwell that he was going to kill Benjamin, and Benjamin had died just a few days later. The timing was too perfect for it to have been a coincidence.

     Among the bodies found at the scene, though, not all had died in the fire. One had been viciously torn apart, something that could only be the work of a Radiant, and although the body had been described as fully human, the Brigadier had no doubt that it had been Malone. Why would a Radiant have killed someone in that way, unless it was in retribution for the murder of their human collaborator? No, Malone was dead, the Brigadier was certain of it, but he kept his grief in check for when he had the time to indulge it. Right now, the Princess needed him at the top of his game.

     They continued on through the narrow streets of the city, through the merchant district then past a large hospital and orphanage, possibly the only large buildings still functioning normally as doctors and nurses tended to patients who could not be left unattended even for something as monumental as the regime change of an entire kingdom. Finally, they reached the noble districts that ringed the centre of the city. Here, for the first time, they sensed fear emanating from the buildings they were passing. Shutters were closed, and those windows that lacked shutters were dark as every light inside had been extinguished. The city's elite would be trembling with fear as they imagined the mob turning on them once the King had been dealt with. The Brigadier knew that the Princess would protect them if she could, not wanting them to get caught up in the killing she had warned might be about to begin, but no matter what she did the Brigadier knew that there would still be isolated murders if a nobleman or a wealthy merchant should ever be careless enough to find himself in the wrong kind of company without his small army of bodyguards to protect him. These people had a right to be scared.

     Nowhere during their journey through the city did they see any guards, though. The guard stations they passed stood empty, their doors locked. There was probably a crime wave going on as the city's criminal element took advantage of the situation, the Brigadier mused. Even as the thought passed through his head, the sound of breaking glass came from somewhere nearby, easily audible over the tramping feet and the muttered conversations of the crowd. A moment later it was followed by a man's terrified scream. A toff, as the working classes called them, discovering in the worst possible way that the balance of power in the city was shifting. The Brigadier tensed up as his body instinctively prepared to go to the man's aid, a lifetime of habit that it required an effort to force down. The nobleman was almost certainly a villain, grown rich on the sweat and blood of underpaid, overworked labourers, but to ignore his cries for help still went against the grain and the Brigadier’s jaws clenched with disquiet as be forced himself to remember his most pressing duty. To protect the Princess.

     Only when they reached the Grand Concourse did they finally see guards. Dozens of them manning the gates, with doubtless dozens more at each of the other gates in the tall, cast iron fence that surrounded the palace grounds. Warning shots were fired into the air as the crowd emerged from the streets and entered the wide, open space, but Princess Ardria continued on until she was fifty feet in the open, enough for the bulk of the crowd to arrange itself behind her, visible to the gate guards. She wanted the guards to be able to see the full extent of what faced them, and knew enough about modern weaponry to know how little real danger she was in.

     No firearm invented since the days of the Hetin folk was accurate over much more than about sixty yards, much less than her current distance from the gate guards. Even if they tried, they wouldn’t hit her except by accident. Military weapons were deliberately inaccurate, something that had astonished her when her self defence tutor had first told her. The black powder they used left soot that coated the inside of the barrel and it would eventually render the weapon incapable of firing until it was cleaned. They used bullets that were smaller than the barrel, therefore, to increase the number of times they could be fired in battle, and that inevitably reduced their accuracy. She remembered the Brigadier telling her once that he used a ‘fowler' whenever possible; a weapon used by gamekeepers that used a bullet that fitted the barrel more tightly and that was therefore far more accurate.

     The guards weren't the most immediate problem, therefore. The most immediate problem was the Radiants. There were six of them, floating above the palace like festival balloons, somehow radiating a sense of menace even though there was nothing visibly different about them. There had been Radiants floating above human cities for hundreds of years and they had always seemed benign and harmless. Even beautiful. Seeing those six sent a cold shiver up the Brigadier's spine, though, and he saw the fear on the Princess's face as well.

     She beckoned the Brigadier over. “If they attack us, what can we do?” she asked.

     “Scatter,” he replied. “A large crowd like this, they could curse us by the hundreds. We drove one away with a fusillade of gunfire, but we don't have anything like the weaponry to drive away six. Our only chance would be to scatter and hope they're not willing to kill non participants while searching for us.”

     “But our uprising would suffer a disastrous loss of momentum. Would all these people be willing to rally again after our first assault ended so ignominiously?”

     “If those Radiants attack, we’ll be lucky to lose less than half our number to the creatures. This is what I was afraid of. To just run off half cocked like this, it was always doomed to end badly. An undertaking like this takes weeks of planning. We should have built ballistae to hurl flaming bolts at the creatures. That might have been enough to make them hold off, leaving us and the human defenders to fight it out.”

     “These people were coming here whether we wanted them to or not,” the Princess reminded him. “There was no way to stop them. We came with them to keep them under some kind of control, to stop a massacre. What do you advise we do?”

     “Leave. With dignity, of our own free will, before those creatures drive us away. We can say that we came to see the palace for ourselves, to see if it was true that the guards had withdrawn and barricaded themselves inside it. Now that we’ve seen with our own eyes that it is true, we can withdraw and lay our plans at our leisure. It's a retreat dressed up as a victory. These people will still feel good about themselves and will, hopefully, come again when we're ready to take the palace in earnest.”

     The Princess nodded. “Sounds good,” she said. “Okay.”

     She turned to face the crowd behind her, but before she could say anything a murmuring broke out and fingers started pointing at something behind her. She turned back to face the palace again. A seventh Radiant had appeared, far to the east. Just a tiny point of light shining like a daytime star. It was moving fast, though. Faster than they'd ever seen a Radiant moving as if it was being driven by hurricane force winds, and indeed there were some small clouds nearby in the sky that were being torn apart, as if the air on one side of them was moving much faster than the air on the other causing turbulence and wild eddies that spun wisps of cloud into coils and spirals. The sense of wild, desperate haste was unmistakable and this new arrival to the ranks of the enemy, which should have thrown the rebels into a new despair, instead had the opposite effect.

     “I get the impression it’s bringing bad news,” said Briggs. The gate guards who'd fled with them were arranged around the Princess as if they’d taken upon themselves the role of bodyguards. Ardria suddenly realised, to her shame and dismay, that she'd never managed to learn the names of the others. “Bad to them, I mean. Perhaps it’s bringing news of the destruction of Carrow’s army.”

     “Perhaps,” replied the Princess, "but I doubt that the fate of a human army would have the effect we're seeing now."

     The Brigadier nodded to himself. Although it should have been impossible to read emotions in such an inhuman body form, it was impossible to avoid the impression that the newly arriving Radiant was panicked, and that was bad. Very bad. A calm, collected enemy, no matter how evil, could usually be relied upon to act in a restrained manner, even when committing atrocities, but a panicked enemy was capable of anything. Anything at all.

     “We need to know what’s going on,” he said. “I suggest we go talk to them. With your permission, Your Highness, I'll go over to those gentlemen and suggest a parley.”

     “They'll shoot you the moment you’re within range!” said Briggs, sounding genuinely anxious for him. “Let me go instead.”

     “They very well might shoot you,” said the Brigadier, “but they won't shoot me. With all due modesty, I'm too famous. Too much a celebrity. They'll want to know what I have to say.”

     The Princess nodded. “I'll go with you...”

     “No!”

     Ardria smiled. “I'm even more famous than you, even more of a celebrity. They're not going to shoot the one person who can send this whole crowd home with a single word.”

     “They might, Your Highness. You're also the one holding this army together. That gives them a good reason to take you out. It would be madness for you to expose yourself to them.” She stared at him, but the Brigadier stood his ground. “You know I'm right, Highness. I have to go alone.”

     She continued to stare at him for a moment longer, but then she nodded reluctantly. “Very well,“ she said. “We'll need something to use as a white flag. Does anyone have a white handkerchief?”