The gates of the inner palace did not creak when they opened. They sighed—a long, slow exhalation of air that had been trapped inside for centuries, air that smelled of dust and old incense and something else, something that might have been despair. The sound was soft, almost gentle, but it carried the weight of a thousand years of silence. It was the sound of a tomb being unsealed.
Gu Yao stood at the threshold, his hammer in his hand, his broken leg dragging behind him. The palace stretched before him, a vast complex of white stone and golden roofs that seemed to glow in the fading afternoon light. It was beautiful, in the way that Jinxiu was beautiful—polished, perfect, and utterly devoid of life. The gardens were immaculate. The fountains were crystal clear. The corridors were lined with silk banners that bore the symbols of the Sects.
But there was no one there.
No guards. No servants. No courtiers. No people. The palace was empty—not the empty of a place that had been abandoned, but the empty of a place that had been emptied. The people who had once lived here were gone. The people who had once served here were gone. The people who had once filled these halls with laughter and conversation and the small, human noises of daily life were gone.
“Where is everyone?” Xiao Liu asked. His voice was low, barely a whisper. He had been walking beside Gu Yao for weeks now, had seen things that would have broken most men, but there was something about the emptiness of this place that unsettled him more than any battle ever had.
Gu Yao did not answer immediately. He was staring at the floor, at the marble tiles that gleamed in the pale light, at the faint, dark stains that had been scrubbed into the stone. He knelt down—slowly, painfully, his stone leg scraping against the floor—and touched the stains with his fingers.
“Blood,” he said. “Old blood. Scrubbed away so many times that it’s become part of the stone.”
He stood up and walked through the corridor, his hammer scraping against the floor, the sound harsh and jarring in the silence. The banners on the walls stirred in the faint breeze that followed him, their silken folds whispering secrets that no one was left to hear. The fountains in the courtyards were still running, their water crystal clear, their basins filled with lotus flowers that bloomed in perfect symmetry. But there was no one to admire them. There was no one to tend them. There was no one.
“Brother Gu,” Chen Tie said from behind him. The one-eyed man had been quiet since they entered the palace, his single eye moving constantly, scanning the shadows for threats. He was not a man who trusted easily, and he did not trust this place. “This is a tomb.”
“Yes,” Gu Yao said. “It is.”
They walked through the palace, past empty throne rooms and abandoned banquet halls, past libraries where the books had crumbled to dust and gardens where the flowers had been replaced by weeds. The deeper they went, the colder the air became, until their breath began to fog in front of their faces and the marble floor grew slick with frost.
And then they reached the inner sanctum.
It was a vast chamber, larger than any of the halls they had passed, its ceiling lost in shadow, its walls lined with pillars of black stone. At the far end of the chamber, on a throne of gold and iron, a man was sitting.
He was not a man, not really. He was something that had once been a man, something that had been worn down by years of suffering until only the shell remained. His skin was pale and translucent, stretched so tight over his bones that he looked like a skeleton wrapped in parchment. His hands were curled in his lap, thin and twisted, more like claws than fingers. His face was a mask of hollow angles, his cheeks sunken, his eyes closed.
But the worst thing was his neck.
Three crystal tubes had been driven into the base of his skull, their surfaces gleaming with a faint, milky light. They pulsed with the rhythm of a heartbeat—his heartbeat—drawing something out of him, something that flowed through the tubes and into the golden abacus that hung around his neck. The abacus clicked softly, its beads moving on their own, recording the seconds, the minutes, the hours of a life that was being drained drop by drop.
“Emperor Liang Zhao,” Gu Yao said. The name was not a question. He had heard it before, in whispers, in rumors, in the stories that the refugees told around their fires. The Emperor of the Kingdom of Liang. The ruler of the Splendor. The man who had been kept alive by the Sects for three hundred years.
The man on the throne opened his eyes.
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They were pale, milky, clouded with age and suffering. They were the eyes of a man who had not seen the sun in centuries, who had not felt the wind on his face, who had not heard the sound of his own voice in so long that he had forgotten what it sounded like.
“Gu Yao,” Liang Zhao said. His voice was a dry whisper, barely audible, like the rustling of dead leaves. “I have been waiting for you.”
Gu Yao walked toward the throne, his hammer scraping against the floor, his broken leg dragging behind him. The tubes in the emperor’s neck pulsed with a sickly light, and the abacus around his throat clicked with a frantic rhythm, as if it could sense that something was wrong.
“You know who I am,” Gu Yao said.
“I know who you are,” Liang Zhao said. “I know who you were. I know who you are going to become.” He smiled, and it was not a kind smile. It was the smile of a man who had been broken so many times that he had forgotten what it felt like to be whole. “You are the one who is going to kill me.”
Gu Yao stopped in front of the throne. He looked at the emperor—at his pale skin, his hollow cheeks, his clouded eyes. He looked at the tubes in his neck, at the abacus around his throat, at the chains that bound his wrists and ankles to the golden throne. He looked at the man who had been kept alive by the Sects for three hundred years, not out of mercy, but because he was useful.
“I'm not going to kill you,” Gu Yao said. “I'm going to free you.”
Liang Zhao laughed. It was a dry, rattling sound, like stones grinding together in a dry well. “Free me? You cannot free me. No one can free me. I have been bound to this throne for three hundred years. I have been drained for three hundred years. I have been used for three hundred years. I am not a man anymore. I am a battery. A tool. A thing.”
“You are a man,” Gu Yao said. “You are a man who has been kept alive against his will, drained against his will, used against his will. And you are going to help us bring the Sects down.”
Liang Zhao stared at him, his clouded eyes searching Gu Yao's face for something—reassurance, perhaps, or a sign that everything would be all right. He found neither. He found only the cold, hard determination of a man who had been fighting for fifty years and was not about to stop now.
“You don't understand,” Liang Zhao said. “You don't understand what you are fighting against. The Sects are not the enemy. The Sects are not the problem. The Sects are just the middlemen. The real enemy is something else. Something older. Something darker.”
Gu Yao felt a chill run down his spine—a chill that had nothing to do with the cold air of the palace. “What are you talking about?”
Liang Zhao leaned forward, his chains rattling, his voice dropping to a whisper. “The Sects are not the masters of this world. They are not the ones who hold the power. They are not the ones who control the flow of Rhyme. They are just the collectors. The managers. The landlords.”
“Then who is?”
Liang Zhao smiled. It was the smile of a man who had been waiting three hundred years to tell this story. “The Immortal Court,” he said. “The ones who live in the sky. The ones who created the system. The ones who take the Rhyme that the Sects collect and use it to fuel their eternal lives.”
Gu Yao stared at him, his mind racing. He had known, on some level, that the Sects were not the ultimate power. He had known that there was something else, something higher, something that the Sects answered to. But he had never known what it was. He had never known that it had a name.
“The Immortal Court,” he repeated. “The ones who live in the sky.”
“They are the ones who created the golden abaci,” Liang Zhao said. “They are the ones who built the machine. They are the ones who turned the world into a farm. They have been harvesting the Great Desolation for three thousand years, and they will continue to harvest it until there is nothing left to take.”
Gu Yao felt the weight of the emperor's words pressing down on him, the weight of the truth that he had been trying to ignore. The Sects were not the enemy. The Sects were just the middlemen. The real enemy was something else—something older, something darker, something that had been living in the sky for three thousand years, feeding on the lives of the people below.
“How do I fight them?” Gu Yao asked. “How do I fight a power that lives in the sky?”
Liang Zhao leaned back on his throne, his chains rattling, his clouded eyes fixed on Gu Yao's face. “You don't fight them,” he said. “You cut them off. You break the machine. You destroy the system. You cut the strings that connect the sky to the earth.”
“The supply pipes,” Gu Yao said. “The tubes that carry the Rhyme to the Immortal Court.”
“Yes,” Liang Zhao said. “The supply pipes. They are the only thing that keeps the Immortal Court alive. They are the only thing that keeps the system running. If you destroy the supply pipes, you destroy the Court. You destroy the Sects. You destroy everything.”
Gu Yao was silent for a long moment. He was thinking about the Sword Forge, about the chimneys that had risen above the city, about the black smoke that had stained the sky for three thousand years. He was thinking about the supply pipes that ran beneath the earth, the tubes that carried the Rhyme to the Immortal Court.
“Where are they?” he asked. “Where are the supply pipes?”
Liang Zhao smiled. It was a thin, tired smile, the smile of a man who had been waiting three hundred years to tell this story. “They are beneath us,” he said. “They are beneath everything. They run through the heart of the world, carrying the Rhyme to the sky. And the main junction—the place where all the pipes converge—is beneath the palace.”
Gu Yao turned to look at Chen Tie. The one-eyed man was standing at the edge of the chamber, his saw in his hands, his face pale. He had heard every word. He had understood every word. And he was ready.
“Then we're going to cut them,” Gu Yao said. “We're going to cut the supply pipes. We're going to break the machine. We're going to cut the strings that connect the sky to the earth.”
Liang Zhao leaned back on his throne, his eyes closed, his body still. “Finally,” he whispered. “Finally, someone is going to finish what I could not.”