We rapidly covered the ground from the center of the floor to the tier. I cannot tell you what we stepped over to get there. Bastien didn't let go of my arm and didn't explain himself.
The two guards posted over my men had stopped watching their prisoners. They had more important matters to worry about. Bastien didn't spare them a glance. He lifted one hand and the men sprang to work.
Half of them formed a loose wall with me inside it, moving quickly and wordlessly in the commotion. Davan and two others went toward the benches three tiers up. The rest scattered into the tiers behind us and did exactly what Bastien had signaled them to do. They did not intentionally add to the wreck of that hall, but they used the furniture to slow down anything that might come looking for us through it.
Xotok's men and Ruvuk's men wanted each other dead, not us. We were only debris in the path of something bigger, and debris was the safest thing to be.
I'd been eyeing the hall's exits since they'd marched us in. I found the one I wanted: an aisle running straight down through the benches to a door at the base of the colonnade. It was wide enough for four men to go through abreast. For the moment it was not yet being fought over by anyone.
"There." I pointed. I didn't need to say more than that. Every one of them took it.
I hesitated. I had a clear line to the street. I had every reason to use it, and I turned the other way instead. I can't fully explain why. I've tried to. I try to build an account of everything. But my explanation keeps coming apart. What I can tell you is what happened: I looked down at the center of the floor, where Ruvuk's own men had thrown themselves into a wall between their Prefect and Xotok's guards, and my feet went that way before the rest of me had agreed to it.
Bastien pulled.
"No." Just flat refusal. He considered the conversation already finished. "We're leaving, Elyan. That was the whole plan. You don't get to change it standing in the middle of this."
"I'm not asking you to come."
"You don't get to ask that either." He hauled me half around, close enough that I could see exactly how little patience he had left in him. "You were in the room, Elyan. You heard your father tell me what my job was, same as I did. Not to help you succeed. Not even to keep you safe, exactly. He'd have put it more gently than I'm about to. To bring you back alive, whatever became of the rest of it. I am loyal to him before I am loyal to you, and he did not send me across the Red Sand Sea to watch you die reaching for a man who was never your responsibility."
Of course, he wasn't telling me anything I didn't know. He was reminding me I was standing in the middle of a riot. It was a good argument. I walked toward Ruvuk anyway. After a moment where he looked like he might actually plant his feet and end it there, Bastien came with me instead. Apparently an oath sworn to a king could make him argue harder. It could not make him drag me unwillingly through a dangerous crowd, one likely to get us both killed.
The crowd thickened the closer we came to the center. The way it did that told a story. In the first breath after Xotok's men moved on Ruvuk, it had been simple panic. Each man was just grabbing at whoever stood nearest, throwing whatever was in their hands. Now it was already resolving into a shape. Ruvuk had not needed to give an order. The men closest to him were finding each other now by instinct, packing shoulder to shoulder into a wall that grew with every delegate who loved Ruvuk's vision enough to join it. Xotok's own men were the ones being pressed backward, fewer of them by a wide margin. I realized why they were able to hold their ground despite their numbers. Only Xotok's men had come armed and organized for exactly this.
That was when I saw the doors.
The great ones at the head of the hall, the ones the delegates had filed through that morning in their proper order by rank and seniority, had opened again, and what was coming through them was not more delegates. It came in ranks, spears already leveled, and every man carrying one.
That was to be expected with Xotok. What I hadn't expected but should have was that each wore a uniform cut wrong in the same two places: a seam running from the inner elbow to the lower rib, a second down the flank, the kind of tailoring no Helot seamstress would ever produce by accident. I had seen that cut once before, on a single man carrying a black stone across an empty floor.
Nobody on the tiers had noticed them yet. They were still busy winning or losing a fight they believed was still theirs alone to finish.
Through a gap that opened and closed between two men trading blows, I found Ruvuk. Still on his feet. Blood tracked into the crease beside his nose. One hand braced on the shoulder of a man who was dying. He wasn't looking for me. He wasn't looking for anyone who wasn't actively trying to kill him. Twelve years of building toward this single morning. And now he had to spend all of his attention staying alive. I had taken this moment away from him and now he didn't have any attention to spare on a foreign prince.
I have turned that over more times than I can count since. I don't know whether what he would have felt toward me was gratitude for turning the Assembly to his side or fury for betraying the trust he had put in me. I had just made him more valuable than any man in the Hegemony as an act of sabotage. Certainly in the instant it had happened, he recognized it as betrayal, not a gift. Perhaps both things were true at the same time. I knew we had very few seconds left and we weren't going to settle it in that time.
The ranks at the door were spreading along the base of the tiers now, unhurried. I thought of Drakov, and of what the Tribunal had said the day they granted the petition to turn the stone on Ruvuk: that what was kept in reserve did not distinguish between the guilt a state had to confront and the guilt it couldn't afford to expose. What I had done was ignite a fire that consumed uncertainty as fire consumes dry grass, indifferent to whether the field was still needed. Drakov had known the shape of the organization behind the soldiers filing into the Hall, but had been too afraid to learn its purpose.
I did not shout a warning. I want that written down honestly, because I have caught myself, more than once since, quietly trying to insert a version where I tried into my memory of the event. But there was no way to shout a warning over the commotion.
Bastien had my arm again. The argument about which direction we were going was over. I let him pull me back to the exit route the men had opened for us. I never once opened my mouth toward the one man in that hall who might have used the half-second of warning I could have given him.
We hit the aisle at a dead run. We held it clear all the way down to the door at the base of the colonnade, and then we were through it, into a stretch of open street with the whole roar of the Grand Assembly Hall shut behind a wall of whatever material the ancients made it out of.
Behind us, the sound changed. I could tell, even through a wall that thick, the moment that the argument between the two factions became a single force. It did not last as long as I expected it to. It never does when one side came prepared to have a fight and the other came prepared only to have a debate.
I did not yet know whether Ruvuk would live to see another day. I knew only that I had gone looking for something in that crowd. But I had come away feeling indebted. I did not think, then, either of us would ever get the chance to settle it. I knew I was going to have to carry that the rest of the way home, if we made it.
We didn't stop running until we caught up to the others.