All gone now.

The Hall was a burnt-out ruin. Someone had taken it apart with gunfire and explosives and set fire to what remained. Walls were broken and shattered, blackened and charred from smoke and flames. The upper floors had collapsed in on themselves into one great compressed mass of broken stone and rubble and what fragments remained of the roof. The ground floor looked to be more or less intact, but the windows were all blown out, and the great front doors had been blasted right off their heavy hinges. God alone knew what was left inside.

For all its many bad memories, the Hall had always been home to me. I d always thought it would always be there to go back to when I needed it. To see it like this, brought down by rage and violence and reduced to wreck and ruin, stopped the breath in my throat and the heart in my chest, and put a chill in my soul that I knew would never leave.

I made myself walk slowly forward. Molly was right there at my side, trying to say something comforting, but I couldn t hear her. There was no room left in me for anything except what had been done to my home. The massive front doors that should have been enough to hold off an army had been thrown back onto the floor in the gloom of the hallway. And a single golden-armoured figure lay curled in the doorway, quite still and quite dead, the gleaming metal half-melted and distorted, the arms fused to the torso and the legs fused together, by some unimaginable heat. I hadn t thought there was anything in the world that could do that to Drood armour.

There was no smoke in the air, no heat radiating from the fire-blasted hallway. Whatever had happened here, it had clearly happened sometime before. Days before. So I hadn t missed it by much. The attackers had come here, slaughtered my family, blown up and set fire to my home and then left. All while I was off enjoying myself in the south of France. I stood before the open doorway and I didn t know what to do. What to say. My stomach ached, and even breathing hurt my tightened chest. Molly Metcalf moved in close beside me and slipped an arm tentatively through mine, pressing herself against me. Standing as close to me as she could, to give me what comfort she could.