The central hall was where the palace stopped being corridors and remembered that it had been built to hold a kingdom's ceremonies.
The ceiling was forty feet above the floor. The hall was sixty paces long and thirty wide, supported by marble columns whose spacing created the natural lanes that any warrior's eye would immediately assess for cover, for approach, for the angles that determined who could see whom and from where and at what distance. The windows along the upper gallery had been shattered by the thundermaker bombardment's pressure waves days earlier, and the morning light came through the empty frames in slanted columns of dust-filled brightness that divided the hall into alternating strips of visibility and shadow.
