With a subdued Aiya beside her, Meresamun followed Marduk as he strode down a colonnaded corridor, cutting a path between shafts of brilliant, white mid-afternoon light and dense bars of pillared shadow. Ever since her consort had brought his ship down onto the massive game board in Ikalur's palace garden, silence had greeted Serde's overlord. No guards tipped their spears to him as they passed. No servants hurried to move out of his path. Not a single courtier graced the corridors. The palace glared back at them, empty, desolate, weighted with the stink of abandonment.

Marduk pressed on, impassive, the obsidian depths of his armor repelling the relentless glare of the sun, his booted tread warning of the approach of one accustomed to domination, obedience, and the right of retribution. Every now and again he slowed to check the screen at his wrist, blinking with the quiet pulse of life—of those still within the citadel. Each pause granted Meresamun and her estranged companion a brief respite before he moved on in a new direction in pursuit of his quarry, leading them at a punishing pace through a maze of empty corridors, suites, and vestibules.

They came to a halt in a deserted chamber deep in the palace, its walls and pillars clad in marble and gold. Opposite the entrance, a massive golden door bore down on them, imperious, its panels engraved with elegant sigils and the emblem of a falcon with its wings spread open.

Marduk tested the door's handle. It remained closed, locked from within. He freed one of the weapons at his hip, pressed a series of lights upon its handle and pointed. A bolt of cerulean light streamed from the weapon's nose. It encased the door in a shimmering web. A heartbeat later, it erupted into a burst of light. Meresamun blinked back the imprint of its glare. A memory of the door hung in the air, as fine as ephemeral blue powder, and then, nothing. The door vanished in total silence, as though it had never been.

Beyond the opening, darkness and the faint tang of the sea. Marduk went through. His footfalls echoed against stone, diminishing with distance.

"That door was crafted during the time of the gods," Aiya whispered. "It leads to the holy sanctuary of Horakhti."

A draft of air stirred the tendrils of Meresamun's hair. She went to the opening. Outlined in the spluttering light of ensconced torches, a narrow stone staircase spiraled upward, its steps curved into deep basins, worn by thousands of footfalls over an immense period of time.

She ascended the treacherous, uneven steps, her arms outstretched between the wall and the stairwell's spine, the going slow, monotonous. From further behind, the quiet slap of Aiya's sandals against the stairs as she followed, unwilling, just as Meresamun followed Marduk—two leaves caught in the wake of his dark torrent.

At last, her legs trembling and her lungs aching, she reached the top of the stairwell. Sunlight poured over her, and heavy gusts of salted, sea air buffeted her hair and gown. Ahead, a colonnaded vestibule crossed a short distance to another set of closed doors. To her right, a wall of solid rock carved from the face of the cliff. Opposite, barricaded by nothing more than a low wall and a series of pillars, a sheer, eye-watering drop plummeted to the faint crash of the sea.

At the other end of the vestibule, Marduk came to a halt. A silvered glint flared as he lifted his weapon before the pair of gold-paneled double doors. No guards stood without. A beam of cerulean light shot into the doors. It spread, rapid, weaving its deadly, crushing web. A heartbeat later, a puff of light and another piece of Elati's history vaporized, its existence obliterated, forever.

Aiya's quiet pants breached the crown of the stairs. Meresamun waited, dread assaulting her, hoping she had gone far enough and could remain where she was. Marduk turned. His eyes found hers, the message clear. She hadn't. He lifted his hand, the one holding his weapon, and beckoned her to him. Domination poured from him. Come to me.

She went, Aiya's fear-soaked presence close behind.

At the gaping maw of the entrance, Marduk held out his hand to Meresamun, regal, his sudden calm unnerving her. She slid her hand into the cold curve of his metallic palm and ascended the short flight of steps up into the chamber.

Within, lit by four braziers, a white marble chamber lined by two rows of golden pillars. Straight ahead, in the center of a marble tier, an opaque panel similar to the mirror Meresamun had emerged from in Anki reared out of the smooth, ageless floor. It stood, as fragile as alabaster and as big as a door, flat, thin, alone and unsupported, a thing of utter improbability. White light churned within its frameless sides.

A rustle of silks came from behind the nearest pillar. A man and a woman stepped out, clad in elegant finery. Both wore purple gilt in gold, and on their brows, golden diadems. Marduk eyed them, dispassionate, then turned his attention to the monolith of light, his profile stark against its soft pulsing. Silence, dense and cold mantled him, so thick it suffocated the distant susurration of the sea. It stretched, taut as a hide on a tanning rack.

He powered down his weapon, lowered it back into his belt, and walked to the pair. They faced his dark presence with quiet defiance. Neither knelt.

He paced a slow circuit around them, the light of the monolith sliding along the contours of his armour, seeking escape. His precise, metallic footfalls ceased before the king. "You sent my people to Anki." He tilted his head toward the sliver-thin sentinel. "To my enemies." He lifted his wrist and scanned the screen on the back of his glove. "One hundred and twelve of my subjects were in this citadel when I arrived. And now—" he lifted his brow at the pair, "—there is only Serde's king and queen, treacherous to the end."

The king said nothing, he looked past Marduk as though her consort did not exist. The queen's eyes met Meresamun's, then flicked past her to Aiya. A blink of recognition, smoothed in a heartbeat.

Marduk stepped back. Without taking his eyes from the king, he pulled a device from a slot in his belt. It was a small thing, innocuous. It gleamed in the light, shimmering in jeweled colors, reminding Meresamun of the beetles in the Temple of Sekhmet. A memory stirred. No. Her heart juddered to a halt. Horror clawed up her spine, sharp, urgent.

Before she could blink, Marduk's gloved hand shot out and captured the queen of Serde. He hauled her over to him and forced her to her knees, facing away from him.

"Please," Meresamun whispered as her consort gathered up the queen's hair from the nape of her neck, gentle, seductive, as a lover would. "My love. Not this."

Marduk set the device against the hollow at the base of the queen's skull, the cut of his mouth cruel, sadistic. "Yes," he answered. "This."

The queen's eyes remained on her king, brilliant with unshed tears. "I love you," she breathed. Marduk pressed against the side of the device. It awakened, a living thing, and burrowed into her flesh, sheared through bone, buried itself into her brain.

Her screams filled the chamber, brutal, endless, ragged with anguish, her cries mirrored by her husband's grief, his despair. Marduk left and ascended the tier, ignoring their distress. He inspected the monolith, his eyes raking over it, his pupils fully dilated despite its fierce glow.

By degrees, the queen's suffering slowed, then ended. Blood soaked her gown, drenched her hair, pooled on the pristine marble. The acrid, dense heat of it polluted the air. She quieted and pulled herself from the floor.

"Giver of Life," she whispered, prostrating herself before Marduk. "I am your servant. What would you have me do?"

Marduk turned. In his hand, another of the hateful devices. He held out it to her at arms' length, disdainful. She pulled herself up the wide steps of the tier, her legs trembling, weak, and took the device from him.

"For the traitor?"

"For the traitor," Marduk answered, cold. He turned back to the panel of light, a bleak shadow against its purity. The queen backed away from him, unsteady, descended the steps, and approached her husband, her silken slippers smearing a path through her own blood.

"Whatever it takes to be with you," he whispered as she placed the device against the base of his skull, her eyes empty, her existence no longer her own. A tear slid down his cheek. "Anything for you."

Meresamun fled. She hadn't even reached the yawning gap where the doors had once stood before the king's torment slammed into her. She bolted down the steps and tore across the length of the vestibule, her gown whipping against her legs, and her tears blinding her as Serde's regent paid the vicious price for having stood against the dark—for having chosen to send everyone else through first, a true king. She sank to her knees, and clung to the ledge of the low wall, drinking in the fresh sea air, seeking to cleanse her lungs of the acrid taint of the queen's blood, of the memory of the gaping, ragged hole in the back of her skull, the device worming its way in, a metallic nightmare.

In the distance, the hollow cries of the king persisted, relentless with his suffering, with the erasure of his memories and of his soul, until he quieted, enslaved to Marduk's will, doomed to exist beside the woman he once loved, while his heart beat on, neither dead, nor alive.