The Almighty Dominance novel Chapter 769

Alexander stepped back behind Felicia.

He did it the way the old Alexander would have done it — shoulders up, chin down, one hand bunched in the back of her coat like a child in a crowd.

She felt the tug and spread her arms without thinking, a nineteen-year-old woman in a travelling coat trying to hide a grown man from twenty rifles.

The Second Queen watched them and almost laughed.

Behind Felicia's shoulder, Alexander's lips barely moved.

...

The voice did not come from him.

It came from everywhere at once, and from an inch inside every ear in the front of that hall — the Queen's, and each of the twenty men in armour — low and dry and very old.

"I warned this house not to let anyone enter."

Twenty visors turned at the same moment.

"And since you have come anyway," the voice said, "you can die here."

...

The line of knights broke step.

Not much. Half a pace. But these were palace men, picked and drilled, and half a pace from palace men is the same as a scream from anybody else.

"What was that?" one of them said. He had his rifle up and was turning it at the ceiling, the empty gallery, the tall windows with the afternoon coming through them.

"Where is that coming from?"

"You heard it too?"

"Everyone heard it."

Somebody near the back said it quietly, the way people say things they've been told not to say.

"So the curse is real."

...

"There is no curse."

The Second Queen did not raise her voice. She did not need to. Every man in that line had been hearing that voice give orders since before some of them could shave.

"I do not believe in ghosts. I do not believe in curses, or voices, or dead grandfathers in the walls. There is a young man hiding behind a housemaid, and somebody in this building knows how to throw their voice."

She lifted two fingers toward Alexander. "Go and get him."

...

The front knight went.

He was the biggest of them and the bravest, or the one who had the most to prove, and he came up the middle of the hall at a jog with his rifle across his chest and his free hand already reaching.

Behind Felicia, Alexander turned his right palm up at his hip.

The moisture in the air of that hall was cold and old. It came to his hand the way iron filings come to a magnet, and it closed into something the length of a sewing needle and half as thick, clear as glass.

He flicked it.

...

It went under the edge of the chest plate and into a point two finger-widths below the collarbone, on the left side, where the Xia texts put the gate of the heart.

Nobody saw it. Nobody could have seen it.

The knight took two more steps.

Then his heart stopped beating the way a clock stops when somebody puts a finger on the pendulum. His face went very surprised. His rifle came off his chest on its strap and swung.

He went down onto the stone at a run and did not put his hands out.

...

The ice was already water by the time he stopped sliding.

"Marcus?"

The second one went to him, and the second one was two paces from the body when the needle found him too.

The third was shouting.

The fourth had got his rifle up to his shoulder and was sweeping it across the hall looking for something, anything, to put a bullet into. He never found it.

They went down one at a time, in no particular order, with no sound except the sound of armour hitting stone.

Five. Then six.

Nobody fired a single shot, because there was nothing in that hall to shoot at except a crying housemaid and the idiot hiding behind her.

...

Then the Second Queen put her hand on her own chest.

She did it slowly, almost curiously, as though she had felt something land there and wanted to find out what. Her mouth opened. The breath she drew did not go all the way in.

She tried again, and it went in even less.

"My lady—"

She went to one knee on the stone in a pool of cream silk, and then she went over sideways, and the coat came off her shoulders.

...

The line fell apart.

Everybody left standing turned their back on the prince at once and went to her. Somebody got his visor off and his ear down by her mouth.

"She's breathing. She's breathing, but it's bad — it's barely there—"

"Hospital. Now. Get her up."

"Quick. We need her in the car, her breathing is going—"

Three of them got her off the floor between them, one at the shoulders, two at the legs, and they ran with her. Her heel came off in the doorway and nobody stopped for it.

Car doors banged in the forecourt. An engine came up hard and gravel went against the side of the house.

And in the time it took them to get her through that door, four more of the men who had stayed behind went down onto the stone and did not get up.

...

The ones who were still on their feet looked at the floor.

Ten of their own. Ten men in full palace armour, lying in the middle of a hall at odd angles, some of them with their eyes still open, not one mark on any of them.

No blood. No wound. No smoke. Nothing.

One of the knights let his rifle go on its strap and went down on both knees on the stone. He took his helmet off. His hair was stuck to his forehead with sweat.

"Please."

He said it to the ceiling, to the gallery, to the walls, because he did not know where else to say it.

"We meant no harm to the Tenth Prince. We were ordered. We're leaving. We're going right now, all of us, we will take ourselves out of this house. Please don't kill us."

...

Behind him, men were already turning.

Nobody gave an order. Nobody needed to. They were backing toward the door with their rifles pointed at nothing and their faces grey inside their visors — and then the voice came again, and every single one of them stopped where they stood.

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