Rewrite That Witch
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Chapter 506: No One Could Escape

Dust and ash rose from the street in a slow column as the guns fell silent.

In the second before the first shot, the charging soldiers had been men—moving, screaming, believing in their own momentum. Then the heavy machine guns found the range. The crack of each shot blurred into the next until it was not discrete sounds but a continuous note, and the men in its path became plumes of blood and then bodies and then stillness. The bullets did not negotiate with armor. Where they struck plate, sparks flew; where they struck flesh, the matter was decided immediately.

The drugged guards that revolving rifles had only slowed, the heavy guns killed cleanly.

“Yes!” Nail couldn’t help it—his hands came together. The relief that moved through him was physical, like setting down something extremely heavy.

The muzzles trailed white smoke as the sound faded. The surviving guards had retreated, leaving their dead and dying in the street. The dying made noise. Nail looked at the closest one—a man about his own age, armor cracked at the shoulder, one hand pressed against a wound that no longer bled fast enough to matter—and looked away.

“Guns in the air!” The unit leader’s command was flat and habitual.

Nail thought of his teammate, cut in half three minutes ago by a red-eyed man who was now also dead. He raised his rifle without hesitation.

They reached the palace gate when the five commando teams converged and circled shooting positions per training, each unit watching a different approach. The plan called for three wings advancing up three main streets simultaneously, each wing serving as a flank for the others, so that enemies could not concentrate on any single column without exposing themselves to fire from the adjacent streets.

Real combat was more complicated than training.

The south street was on fire—impassable, its wreckage still burning in heaps that pushed heat across the intersection. Nail’s own wing had been scattered by the intensity of the guard counterattack, picking up stragglers from broken units and losing track of which platoon they belonged to. The flag signals from Lightning had gone unheeded; no one had watched the sky when the streets were full of red-eyed men with swords.

A commando unit that should have been part of their wing was missing entirely. Gunfire sounded from half a dozen directions at once inside the Inner City, none of it close enough to tell which side it favored.

But they were the first wing to reach the gathering point.

An hour later, the other wings filtered in, then the field artillery—delayed by fallen masonry and the chaos of the south street fire, detoured through the market district. When the hot air balloon appeared again above the palace, the final assault was already arranged.

The four bombs worked through the garden wall and iron gate in sequence. The wall gave first: a twenty-meter section collapsed outward in a cascade of dressed stone. The gate held through three detonations and fell on the fourth. Through the gap, the soldiers of the First Army went.

“Your Majesty—they’re at the palace gate. Please, Your Majesty, run!”

Osborne stood in the bedroom doorway, his voice thinned by controlled urgency. The imperial bodyguard had been controlling himself for hours. The self-control was visibly costing him.

Timothy did not move from the edge of the bed.

He sat where his father had sat, in this room, on a night much like this one. King Wimbledon III had driven a dagger into his own heart—a fact Timothy knew and had never discussed—and now Timothy sat at the same bedside and listened to the sounds of his guards dying below and felt the parallels as a physical sensation.

I built an empire in a year. He had broken Gerald. He had driven Garcia south. He had unified the East and North and stood poised to take the West—the single remaining piece of a completed board. He had done it all. He had done everything correctly.

And still it had come to this.

Three days. From the message out of Redwater City to this moment: three days. The snow still lay in the Northern passes; the farmers were plowing; the letter to the Eastern duke was probably only now being unfolded. He had fought with what he had—knights, mercenaries, patrol teams, the nobles’ guards and squires—and the city wall that had stood two centuries had held for exactly one morning.

“Son of a bitch!” He picked up the candlestick and threw it against the floor with both hands, the crash of it satisfying in the way that small violences sometimes are when large ones are unavailable. “Damn you—how do you defeat me without the witches? Without surrendering to the demons? The Church promised to destroy every witch and then simply allowed you—”

Two explosions went off below the palace. Glass rattled in the frames.

“—I have more laborers, more alchemists, more wealth by a hundred times over. There is only one explanation—”

He heard his guards’ voices change below, the register shift that meant they were making a last stand.

I won’t die here. Dying here would be too much of a kindness to him.

“The passage.” He tried to stand. His legs did not cooperate; Osborne stepped in and took his arm, steadied him, bore his weight without comment. “We use the passage.”

“Yes, Your Majesty.” Osborne’s relief was genuine and immediate.

The passage ran from behind the bedroom hearth through a tunnel that predated the palace itself—possibly predated the city. Timothy had explored parts of it years ago and not finished: the structure was a maze, every junction lined with God’s Stones of Retaliation to prevent witch access, every corridor fitted with traps whose positions he had only partially mapped. The farthest exit opened outside the Outer City, a mile from the wall.

Six of them entered the hearth passage. They moved through the dark quickly, Osborne carrying a torch, Timothy between guards. They stopped in a large underground chamber to rest and wait. To exit into daylight was to be seen; to exit at night, with the city occupied and the enemy’s forces extended across it, was manageable.

He lay on the damp blanket Osborne unrolled for him and stared at the torchlit ceiling and tried to think past the panic.

North or East? Both regions had nobles loyal to him. Both had new dukes he had appointed personally. But loyalty trained in comfort was a different thing from loyalty tested by a lost capital. Would those dukes stand firm once they heard King’s City had fallen?

Or the Church.

The thought arrived and would not leave. The great nobles were sycophants—whichever way the wind blew, they would bend toward it, the same way the Longsong lords had knelt for Roland the moment he applied sufficient pressure. The Church was different. The Church had stated principles it could not publicly abandon. They would not tolerate Roland’s witches; they could not tolerate them, not if they wanted to remain what they claimed to be. They had power that even Timothy’s father had hesitated to confront—his father’s notes contained things that had given Timothy pause when he’d read them.

If the Church would support him, he would give them almost anything they asked.

Until he could watch Roland Wimbledon go to the guillotine and see those witches broken.

After midnight, the six of them moved.

They found the long passage, navigated its turns, emerged into the cold dark of the outer fields. A half-mile of open ground, then the forest, then the road north.

They covered less than half the distance.

The fields lit up. Not dawn—torches, hundreds of them, rising from the ground in all directions at once. Osborne started to speak and stopped himself. There was nothing to say. The ambush had been laid hours ago, with knowledge that could only have come from inside the palace.

Every exit was covered.

Timothy felt the cold of the field air and something colder than it, and understood that there was no road north or east, no message to the Church, no second act.

No one could escape.

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