Holy Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  Zole grunted and a moment later the Noi-Guin’s shipheart spilled its violet light between them. Nona could see herself now, and Zole, but nothing else. Their surroundings swallowed the glow, returning nothing. Zole led on, her footsteps cautious on the broken ice.

  The passage took them perhaps four hundred yards before joining a natural tunnel carved by the passage of meltwater that had long since found a better course. They tramped down from the breach on a ramp formed from the passage debris, now frozen into an irregular, solid mass. The water-cut tunnel crossed theirs at right angles, making their choice of direction unclear. Zole crouched, considering.

  “Up?” Nona suggested.

  Zole scrutinized the ice for a silent minute, then another. Nona hugged herself. Her toes had grown numb in her ill-fitting boots and the cold had started to seep into her bones.

  “Or down.” Nona just wanted to move. A thousand eyes watched them, the freezing air sharp with their hatred.

  “Up.” Zole stood and started along the barely perceptible incline. She moved more slowly here, the ice slick underfoot.

  Nona paused for a moment. Where Zole had crouched and waited the ice had paled to a translucent grey. In the depths beneath them the ancient flaws glimmered with the shipheart’s violet light.

  “It pushes them away!” Nona caught up with Zole, nearly losing her balance in the process. “The shipheart.”

  “It does.” Zole nodded. “It breaks them free of our minds and then, if we are strong, it drives them from our flesh.”

  Nona kept close to Zole after that. The shipheart’s radiance was hard to tolerate but it shielded her from the devils’ malice and of two unbearable choices it proved the lesser evil.

  The tunnel led them for an untold distance. It might have been miles, snaking through the thickness of the sheet, the vanished stream turning one way and another where pressure hardened the ice into something closer to the consistency of iron. In places where one ancient glacier swallowed another or pushed it from its path, their burden of rock and stone lay bedded through the ice in bands many yards deep.

  Several times the gradient steepened and neither novice could continue without falling to her knees and using knives to find purchase. Nona tried her flaw-blades first but they would hardly scratch the black ice, just as they had proved impotent against Raymel Tacsis’s devil-haunted skin.

  Gaining height, they found the ice riddled with meltwater channels where surface water had drained away after the passage of the focus moon. The sound of running water penetrated the ice, a constant behind which deep-throated gurgling reverberated as chambers filled and emptied around natural airlocks.

  In several places vents in the tunnel walls would erupt without warning, blasting out spray-laden air at tremendous velocity. Nona had been dimly aware of such phenomena from her father’s tales but it was Zole who dived and took her to the floor when she walked unknowingly in front of one fissure just as it started to blast.

  The spray of black mist hurt where it found skin, neither scalding nor freezing nor acid but somehow worse than all three, as if wrongness had been made into liquid.

  “How did you know it was coming?” Nona wiped her hands on the range-coat Kettle had given her.

  “Working air and water is not so different from working rock.” Zole helped Nona to her feet. “There are chambers in the ice that fill with meltwater until they reach a certain level, then empty rapidly. The sudden changes in air pressure can be extreme.”

  Zole called several halts as they went on, waiting for vents to blow. Each time they paused, the ice’s blackness faded to grey around the shipheart. In one long gallery they passed a gauntlet of a dozen vents, each blowing to their own rhythm. Zole explained that the previous night’s surge of meltwater must be passing around them on its way to the hidden seas. The most powerful of the vents was fringed with icicles and blasted with regular ferocity. Nona learned the tempo of it before she crossed and was still almost driven from her feet by the tail end of the previous gust.

  Nona marvelled at the volume of water that must have flowed through the gallery but it opened onto a chamber that dwarfed it. Nona could see no farther than the shipheart’s glow but Zole described the space beyond as if a vast bubble had been trapped beneath the ice.

  “There are several exits we—” Zole fell silent.

  “We what?”

  “Yisht is there.”

  Nona heard a tremor in Zole’s voice for the first time and found it mirrored in her own. “Yisht? You said the Noi-Guin wouldn’t come near the black ice!” She strained to see farther into the darkness ahead. “You can’t get much more susceptible to devils than Yisht, right?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. Her mind is far from weak.” Zole lifted the shipheart. “But Yisht no longer has need to fear the klaulathu.”

  “She doesn’t?” Nona drew her sword.

  “No.” Zole sat at the lip of the tunnel, setting her empty hand to the ice, ready to slide into the great chamber. “She is full.”

  * * *

  • • •

  YISHT STOOD WAITING for them close to the great drain at the lowest point of the bubble chamber, a yawning mouth into which thin cataracts of black water cascaded on all sides. Nona knew that nobody who fell down there would be coming out again. The hole seemed to exert a pull all its own, above and beyond that of gravity on a slope of slick, wet ice.

  “Why here?” Nona hissed. She released a dagger, slid a foot down the ice, anchored the dagger, pulled the other clear. “Why wasn’t she waiting at the entrance?”

  “We might have run away,” Zole replied, sliding lower. “Here she believes she has us trapped.”

  Yisht had found or cut a niche where she could stand. Zole and Nona remained on their sides, Nona anchored by her knife hand, Zole somehow finding purchase with her fingers.

  Their enemy stood impassive, watching, her stocky figure statue-still. The shipheart’s violet light picked out edges, coaxing a detail here and there, the dark glimmer of an eye, the angular planes of her face, the razored length of her tular. Nona had already felt the kiss of a tular in Yisht’s hands. Her thigh still bore the scar. Her thighbone too had been notched by the jagged end of the ice-triber’s broken sword. The leg ached now as if the cold had entered her through the old wound.

  It seemed somehow that through all Nona’s dreams of vengeance Yisht might have been waiting for her here within the cathedral vastness of this lightless cavern, black waters rushing past her, the meltwater rain falling endlessly around her.

  Yisht saw the short game with unequalled clarity just as Abbess Glass saw the long game. Nona had difficulty seeing either, but somehow she knew this would end here. One way or the other.

  Nona hung soaked and freezing, enveloped in the wrongness of devil-laden water, strange urges and alien thoughts trying to ease beneath her skin. The voices competed with those from within her skull as the shipheart gripped her mind, trying to squeeze out devils of her own. She shivered uncontrollably, though whether more from terror or the cold she couldn’t tell.

  Above all these multiple sources of distress she felt stupid. She didn’t dare stand up or see how they could possibly make progress other than on hands and knees. Would they have to crawl to Yisht?

  “It would be a sorry place for you to die, child.” Yisht watched Zole with blood-filled eyes. “Give me the shipheart and I will let you pass. The other”—she turned her gaze on Nona—“I mean to hurt. The best that she can hope for is that she can throw herself into the depths before I get to her.”

  Under Yisht’s stare Nona found her old anger rising. She’d almost forgotten it in the freezing night of the under-ice but now, with the ice-triber’s attention upon her, the old images that had haunted so many dreams rose again, filling her mind with Hessa’s death. She sheathed her sword and fumbled a throwing star numb-fingered from the bandolier around h
er chest. “The Ancestor cautions us against becoming a slave to revenge, Yisht. And although I want to hurt you I will be satisfied just to see you die.” She lifted her arm to throw. “How well can you dodge down here?”

  Yisht opened her mouth wide, her expression savage, the snarl of a fever-sick beast. The teeth she bared at Nona were as black as the ice.

  “She’s been drinking the water!” Nona shuddered at the thought, then drew back her arm.

  “Wait.” Zole held out a hand to forestall her, then curled the fingers into a fist. “Hang on.” All around them the ice began to fracture, black plates carving away and sliding towards the gullet. Ice began to explode upwards and outwards as if some creature were burrowing beneath it. The air filled with fragments.

  When the frost cleared from the air a different topology lay revealed in the shipheart’s glow.

  “How?” Nona gasped.

  “Water-work is not so different from rock-work,” Zole said. “Especially when it is ice.”

  Zole had carved them a stepped path to Yisht two yards wide with a broader ledge immediately in front of her. She reached out and sunk the shipheart into the ice before them, so deep that only the top half remained in view.

  “Why didn’t you just tip her down the hole?” Nona asked.

  Zole glanced her way. “She is a warrior of the ice.” She stood and drew her sword. “Besides, the klaulathu would not let her fall. Violence is sweet to them.”

  Nona got to her feet, still wary of her balance, her borrowed coat hanging wet around her, dripping. She returned the throwing star to its place among the others and drew her sword.

  “Together?” Nona gritted her teeth against their chattering.

  “She would use us against each other,” Zole said. “There is too little room.”

  Nona sighed and stepped forward.

  “No.” Zole put a hand out to stop her. “I will go.”

  “I’m your Shield.” Nona’s anger faltered under a sudden wave of relief. She wanted to end Yisht but no part of her truly believed herself capable of the feat. She saw Hessa’s face again, felt her last moments, and the anger surged back. “She’s mine.”

  “No.” Zole spoke the word with that buzzing resonance that had stopped a Scithrowl rider from seeing what lay right before him. And while Nona struggled with the compulsion the ice-triber advanced on Yisht along the ledge she had fashioned.

  Yisht stepped forward, tular in hand, ready to meet her former pupil. The first clash of steel broke Nona free of Zole’s command and immediately she started to follow her friend.

  The two ice-tribers fought within the level circle that Zole had formed, their footwork precise, hardly slipping despite the black slickness beneath them. Zole attacked with all of the swiftness and precision that Nona found so hard to counter, a relentless assault, free of flamboyance, efficient and focused on the kill. Yisht defended with unnerving skill, countering hunska speed with the ability to anticipate every attack.

  The ringing of blades echoed around the vast, hidden chamber, returning in fractured peals. Once Yisht slipped and fell, but immediately Nona saw that she had allowed it to happen, dropping beneath Zole’s thrust to kick her shin, taking her down too. Both combatants found their feet together and rose with swords swinging.

  Whilst Yisht could mount an impenetrable defence she could find no way to pierce Zole’s guard: her attacks were too slow and she hardly tried, knowing such moves left her open. Instead she relied on her greater strength, knowing that Zole’s speed would fade, leaving her with the advantage. Somehow, even with Zole, Yisht was able to see all action and consequence with several seconds’ warning. Keot had told Nona that Yisht saw only what people would do. She read the future actions of her opponents. She would know if Nona was going to flip a coin, but not whether it would land heads or tails. In such a fight, though, knowing what her opponent would do seemed to be enough.

  The din of sword on sword continued. Razored steel turned away from flesh again and again, sometimes with fractions of an inch to spare.

  “Draw back!” Nona could see Zole beginning to slow. “I can take her!” She felt ashamed, standing there while Zole fought her battle for her, ashamed of the relief she’d experienced when Zole stepped forward. “Retreat!”

  Zole showed no signs of drawing back. She attacked, her swiftness almost that of her initial assault. For a moment Yisht was forced to retreat to the very edge of the platform. At that instant Zole stamped and the ice erupted beneath her opponent, a detonation every bit as violent as those that had created the platform in the first place.

  Somehow Yisht contrived to have the force of it drive her at Zole. She deflected the novice’s sword thrust and grappled her. Zole slid back before the impact and drove her knife into Yisht’s side, but despite the wound the woman kept her feet. A moment later Yisht held Zole’s knife hand at the wrist, placed her other hand behind the girl’s elbow, and spun her straight-armed out over the slope. The force and timing of the move were sufficient to loft Zole above the ice and she fell into the gullet below them without touching the sides. Her scream hung in the air far longer than she did.

  “No!” Nona stared in disbelief, first at the void into which Zole had fallen, then at the space where she had been standing.

  “Yes.” Yisht pulled Zole’s knife from her side, then reached around to remove a shard of black ice embedded in her back. Her blood should have run in rivers but somehow the devils inside her refused to let more than a trickle escape, the air around it steaming.

  Terror and fury waged their old war through Nona. Yisht had killed another of her friends and now she would come for her.

  Nona tried to see the Path but it was a distant thread even with the shipheart just a couple of yards away. She had walked the Path twice in Sherzal’s palace. The second time had nearly killed her. A third surely would, even if she could manage it. Half of her demanded that she run, half that she launch herself at Yisht and attack with every ounce of her passion.

  Yisht picked up her tular and began to advance on her. The shipheart lay between them, the cleared ice all around it violet-lit. “I will enjoy killing you, little girl.”

  Yisht barely seemed to notice her wounds. She walked with a hunter’s confidence. Nona sheathed her sword and drew a second knife from her belt. Clutching only the corner of a plan and a faint hope, she followed her fear and ran. Pursued by Yisht’s laughter she began to retreat towards the mouth of the tunnel she had entered by. She climbed the slope using the strength of her arms, stabbing her knives into the ice to advance, her goal lost in the darkness above her.

  As the curve of the chamber steepened to near vertical, Nona paused to look back. She could see nothing of her surroundings, only Yisht below her approaching the island of greying, violet-lit ice around the shipheart. And just behind Yisht, defying all illumination, the black throat that had consumed Zole. The air still echoed with the memory of her despairing scream.

  Yisht reached the shipheart and broke it from the ice, snarling as if it burned her hands. She stood, clutching the orb, then came after Nona, apparently unconcerned by the slickness of the chamber floor that curved steeply up to become the chamber wall. To Nona, hanging by her knives, the ice-triber’s advance seemed impossible. Maybe the shipheart was enhancing Yisht’s marjal talent, or the devils inside her were powering her on in their eagerness to see violence unfold.

  Nona redoubled her efforts, reaching up to anchor a dagger, heaving herself up behind it, repeating the action with the other hand. She hauled herself over the tunnel’s lip, sobbing with exhaustion. All around her the shipheart’s light grew stronger as Yisht steadily narrowed the gap between them.

  Nona got to her feet, slipping back to her knees immediately. No feeling remained in her extremities and she shuddered with the cold, her teeth chattering uncontrollably. She stood again, almost falling again, and staggered on, tearing
off the bandolier of throwing stars. She could lie in wait for Yisht, try to behead her as she crested the tunnel mouth. But Yisht could see Nona’s actions in the near future. She could examine how each of her own actions and each of Nona’s actions would unfold and could choose the one that suited her. Whatever Nona chose to do, she would end up dead, or worse . . . captured. With only the thinnest sliver of hope, and pursued by fear, Nona fled into the dark.

  Moving with reckless speed, Nona opened up a gap while Yisht was still climbing. She could hear blasts from the air vents in the gallery ahead, the irregular tattoo of their eruptions reverberating down the icy tunnel. Soon she could feel the edge of the explosions, the pulses of freezing mist and the wrongness as the black frost settled and melted on her skin.

  Nona came blind into the gallery, relying on memory, reaching for her clarity to separate and time the blasts. Numb-fingered and trembling, she pulled her throwing stars from the bandolier. If she cut herself she didn’t feel it. A blast roared out close at hand and as it died away Nona found the vent. She lifted her double handful of spiked steel to the icy maw and hurriedly jabbed as many of the stars as she could into the interior. Most of them spilled from her grasp and rattled away. In the distance the tunnel along which she had retreated lit with a violet light.

  Nona drew her sword and stood her ground. She thought of Hessa and of Zole and let her anger warm her as the black figure approached.

  “Come on, then.” Nona spoke into the lull between a series of blasts farther back along the gallery. Her sword hand trembled but her voice held steady.

  Yisht dropped the shipheart at the entrance, her hands white to the wrists. By the time she had pulled her tular clear of its scabbard the stains of competing devils were already advancing from beneath the sleeves of her tunic. A scald spread across the back of her sword hand and Nona wondered if it might be Keot, eager to play his part in her demise.