At each point at which their path was blocked and they had to move aside or go around, Kettle ensured that they emerged on a heading more closely aimed towards their goal. Nona noticed that both of the nuns also managed to dump their entire supply of deadwort into two separate communal water barrels. If the slightly acrid taste went unnoticed the first victims wouldn’t start to die for hours yet, giving plenty of time for more to join them on the casualty list.
“This isn’t going to be easy. If there’s anyone of real note in there, then they will have guards every bit as well trained as we are.” Kettle breathed the words as they walked, pitched just for their ears.
“Distraction?” Bhenta muttered.
“Has to be.” Kettle nodded.
* * *
• • •
A LINE OF hard-eyed soldiers in brighter and less ragged uniform than the regulars stood a perimeter around the pavilion. Kettle didn’t approach close enough to be warned off. Another of Apple’s maxims: make one sure move, nothing tentative.
“The catapults?” Kettle spoke directly to Nona across their thread-bond. “Can you do it?”
“Yes.” Nona had never mastered the ability to work fire beyond the snuffing of candles and making figures dance in the hearth flames. But the great clay pots in which the flaming oil was being lobbed . . . those were something she could reach out and touch with her rock-work. Especially this close to the Ark with her bloods singing to its tune.
“Not too close. We don’t want the pavilion catching. It could scatter our targets.”
The pavilion’s exit ran beneath multiple awnings hung between poles carved from a dark wood that Nona didn’t recognise. Anyone emerging from the tent would find themselves looking out over the row of catapults some fifty yards away. Kettle led them on a circuitous route, approaching the pavilion from the side. As they closed the distance she and Bhenta drew shadows to them, a subtle gathering that kept the darkness to a mist barely rising above the trampled grass while it flowed behind them.
Nona paused and stared at the catapults, frowning in concentration. A series of defensive ranks were arrayed before the great camp against the remote possibility that Emperor Crucical’s armies should sally forth. Beyond those ranks lay several hundred yards of churned earth. Then came the sea of armed humanity surging around the base of Verity’s walls, weathering rocks and arrows as they waited their turn at ladder or scaling chain. To the left, annoyingly just out of the catapults’ line of fire, the first of half a dozen vast siege towers had just met the wall.
Nona reached out with her rock sense for the feel of fired clay, hunting the roundness and fullness of the containers. The catapults launched without rhythm, each firing when ready, the faster crews slowly overhauling the slower.
The sensation of finding her goal was like that of suddenly remembering a name that had eluded her. How could she ever not have known it? She selected a pot that had already been hefted into a catapult’s throwing cup by the rope netting sewn around the clay. The top of the pot was shielded from the wind by a perforated copper housing, and the wick within had just been lit. As Nona watched, the man who worked the lever took position. A moment later the throwing arm snapped up, the twisted hides releasing their tension with a throaty twang. The arm slammed into the arresting bar, jerking the whole back end of the wheeled framework from the ground. The pot sailed on, still rising.
Nona slowed the world, ground her teeth together, clenched her fist, and the pot shattered. Flaming oil spread, slowed, and fell upon the heads of a division of Scithrowl archers all busy lofting their own missiles towards the walls of Verity.
The shadows that had been gathered now wound up Nona’s legs, wrapping her with a cold dark thrill. While all eyes turned towards the flames and screams ahead of the catapult line the three nuns sped forward, swift and indistinct. They kept low and passed between two soldiers guarding the tent. Nona pushed at the man facing them with whatever marjal empathy she had: you don’t see us.
Kettle slit the pavilion’s billowing side, low down, and all three of them slid through in a trice on knees and elbows.
Nona understood their mistake the moment she came through. The interior was a single space lit by shifting colours as the sunlight penetrated the walls. The ground was uncovered grass. Five figures in the mottled white tunics of softmen stood around a man seated in a plain wooden chair at the centre. Softmen were dangerous enough on their own, assassins as deadly as the Noi-Guin, versed in their own martial arts and peculiar variants of shadow-work. It was the man at the centre who caught Nona’s attention, though, even before she was off her knees. Sigils sewn in threads of silver and of gold overwrote the black velvet of his robe. Dozens of them. Such expense might be lavished on a king or queen, but here in this empty tent it meant only one thing. The whole thing was a trap designed to draw in the best assassins the enemy had. The man was clearly a mage, waiting here to ensure that none of those lured in would escape again. Either the Scithrowl had learned from their long haul across the Corridor not to signal where their battle commanders slept, or they had been deliberately stupid, sacrificing leaders, or perhaps even simply using actors, in a game of bait-and-switch. They must have known that the best of the empire’s assassins would strike in the last days and hours before they reached the emperor’s walls.
To their credit, Kettle and Bhenta rolled smoothly away on either side, coming to their feet while unleashing a barrage of throwing stars. Sadly the distraction that had allowed them to enter unobserved from the outside had simply let the softmen know that something was coming. Each of them held a pair of pain-sticks, thin iron rods about two feet in length. The sigil at the end, activated by shadow-work, caused such agony that even a light brush against exposed flesh would leave the victim screaming on the floor. The artefact that Thuran Tacsis called the Harm had been fashioned along the same principles.
With hunska speed the softmen deflected the hail of missiles, taking particular care to protect the man in their midst. The mage rose to his feet. He looked to be in his fifties, grey hair cropped short, a hard dark stare. A tattoo dominated his face, blue lines radiating from between his eyes. It had something of a flower about it. Also something of a spider spreading its legs. Nona knew him for a quantal. She couldn’t say how, except perhaps that he lacked any of the deformities common to many marjals who draw too deeply on the elemental arts or those rarer and more strange talents sometimes brought to bear.
“Three! Three is a prize worthy of my efforts.”
Nona felt the man set foot on the Path. The weight of his footfall shuddered through the fabric of everything. He smiled. A Scithrowl Path-mage with decades of experience preparing to snuff out a trio of Grey Sisters who would likely have fallen to his softmen, though not without cost. Even if he knew Nona for a quantal he had nothing to fear, armoured as he was in sigils of the highest order. To her eye the robes were surely capable of draining thirty steps’ worth of Path-energy to the void. More likely they would withstand fifty or even more. Nona had never come close to thirty steps. She had nearly died trying to own what she had taken from fewer than twenty steps outside the cave where Raymel Tacsis had come for her.
The anger that had been waiting its moment ever since she had first realised that she had led her sisters into a trap now burst loose inside Nona, an explosion against which the oil bomb’s flare seemed pale. An instant later, driven by that same fury, Nona hit the Path running.
This close to the Ark, Nona saw the Path with new clarity, finding it wide beneath her feet, though in truth it was no more beneath her than it was above. The Path was a mountain river, an avalanche, a lightning bolt all in one, all that and more, pouring through her. She forced her mind to impose the simplest interpretation on what lay before her and ran the Path as she had run so many times. At each stride boundless energy swelled inside her. She felt the fierceness of its gift start to fray her mind, start to unravel ever
y fibre of her being.
Nona knew she needed to find her enemy before he took his power, shaped it, and blasted her to ash. She had no protection and even if she could take enough steps and own enough energy to overload his robes, which she knew she couldn’t—she hadn’t the time. The mage would leave the Path and destroy her before that could happen.
Sister Pan had taught Nona that when a quantal runs the Path they are in no one place along its length. When something has no end and no beginning it has no middle either, and soon your mind begins to realise that if there is no way in which to specify where you are along its length then in many ways you are everywhere along its length.
That, Sister Pan had said, is the key to finding your enemy. It merely requires the understanding that there is no place they could ever be other than before you.
Nona had never been sure of the logic and she couldn’t claim to understand the Path, but she believed the ancient woman who had taught her with such patience, and somehow, there on the Path itself, she knew every word to be true.
Belief proved sufficient. She saw the Scithrowl mage ahead, walking towards her on a beam of twisting light now grown as narrow as the pipe the novices trod in blade-path. She saw the idea of him rather than the person, etched by streamers of the Path’s energy.
Sister Pan had spoken at length of contesting the Path but never allowed the novices to practise as such contests were almost invariably fatal to the loser. Falling from the Path and owning what you took from it was hard enough, but being pushed from it made the task far more difficult. Most quantal Path-walkers avoided such duels because they were often fatal not only to the loser but to both contestants. Sister Pan likened it to wrestling on a tightrope. It wasn’t so hard to make the opponent fall, but to not fall after them was almost impossible.
Nona’s vision of the approaching Path-mage told her that he stood deep in whatever meditation mages used to find their serenity, advancing in cautious steps. He walked the Path as Sister Pan taught, as all quantals Nona knew walked it. Sister Pan in all her years had never met another who threw herself at the Path and raced its length with such disregard. Now Nona hoped that speed might somehow save her.
Nona charged on with the reckless haste that she always brought to the Path, clutching her growing power around herself like a cloak. The mage saw her only at the last fraction, lifting his gaze from the study of the way before him, shock and horror in his eyes.
There was an impact, at once both as vast as worlds colliding and as slight as the momentary chill of a passing cloud. Nona knew herself to be both on the Path and at the same time scattered from it in all directions, her bones tumbling as they burned. Falling and not falling. A choice. Her flat sprint had thrown the mage from the Path, dumping half her energy into his lap, slowing her but deflecting her only by degrees. Still, her balance escaped her one fraction at a time and just as on the convent blade-path she knew that the error would grow with each step until she fell. She took two more steps and dropped from the Path by choice.
Her race along the Path had taken almost no time. Kettle and Bhenta had closed half the distance to the first of the softmen. Throwing stars hung in the air between them, their rotations lazy. Nona saw that the Path-mage had begun to fall. Bright crackles of blue-white energy had broken from his skin, and his face was starting to twist with horror.
Even as Nona struggled to own the Path energies raging through her, the out-of-kilter resonances that throbbed between her and the mage confirmed that he was failing to do the same. Being thrown from the Path with such violence had left him off-balance, unable to contain what he had taken. And although he wore the value of half a city in the sigils upon his robes, capable of deflecting the strongest blast Nona might throw his way, his protections couldn’t save him from himself.
Nona sucked into her flesh all that the Path had given her. Her skin wanted to blister and bubble away, her bones wanted to ignite. She screamed her denial and launched herself at Kettle’s back. She brought the nun to the floor a yard before the first of the softmen. The legendary impassivity of the softmen cracked at the sight of one enemy tackling another. Shaved brows rose in momentary surprise. Nona shook with barely contained power, pale violet flame licked across her skin, and versions of herself kept trying to escape along their own courses. She hauled them all back in. The pain made her want to faint but it was too cruel to allow any such relief.
With a sob Nona used her Path-born strength to throw Kettle one-armed, aiming her like a skittle to take out Bhenta even as she slashed at the first softman to intercept her. Both Grey sisters went tumbling towards the pavilion wall. Already the Path-mage shone brighter than the day, shuddering with power he couldn’t contain. Nona followed her friends, her feet tearing deep gouges in the ground as she hunted for acceleration. A pain-stick lashed out at her but the Path’s invisible armour turned it away.
The detonation behind Nona came at the same moment she landed on top of her sisters, still tangled together on the grass. She spread her arms as the shock wave rippled overhead. A light, whiter and more intense than that of the sun, lit the material of the tent walls as the shock wave shredded them in strange geometric patterns. They hung there for an instant and in the next they were gone. The explosion that scattered the Path-mage reduced the perimeter of guards outside the tent to a red mist and then shot that mist at the surrounding army, who fell like corn before the scythe for fifty yards on all sides. A moment later the oil stores went up with a woof and a firestorm swirled skywards around the catapults.
All about them the ground lay scorched and smoking, the only green where Nona, armoured in her own Path-energies, had lain. She mourned the loss of the Path-mage’s robe. If he had worn it inside out the garment might have survived. With a groan she rolled off Kettle, who in turn rolled off Bhenta. The Path’s energy still burned in her, demanding release.
They lay near the centre of a circle of destruction. Nona had never seen someone walk the Path and fail to own what they took. She never wanted to see it again.
She found her voice. “Get back to the others.” The confusion would hide their escape.
Without giving either woman a chance to respond Nona jumped to her feet and took off at flat sprint towards the Scithrowl assault massed at the base of Verity’s great wall. In the past three years of intensive training under Sister Pan’s direction Nona had grown into her heritage and learned all manner of ways to shape and master the power with which the Path filled her. She still couldn’t walk the Path twice in two days without enormous risk, though, and so she aimed to put what she had now to good use.
The speed the Path gave her was like the swiftness a steep slope lends running legs. At first it was just that the running was effortless and far faster than anything you were capable of. And then it would almost be like flying and your feet would beat as rapid a tempo against the ground as your fingers could drum on a table. And almost immediately after that you would know that you had no control and that very soon you would fall and it was going to hurt. A lot.
Nona broke free of the waiting horde before any of them could tear their attention away from the carnage centred on the pavilion. She crossed half the open ground ahead of the walls before the first arrow zipped past her ear.
She crashed into the backs of the soldiers massed at the base of the closest siege tower and broke several of them before their bodies arrested her fearsome momentum. A dozen arrows hammered around her, taking down several more soldiers. She began to weave then, still clinging to the Path’s power, refusing its demands to be spent in one glorious act of ruination.
The troops before her had no idea an enemy was among them. Without exception their sole focus was to get into the siege tower before being found by an arrow or a rock from the great wall looming above them. Nona shouldered armoured men and women aside as if they were small children. The siege tower stank of the pine sap bleeding from its raw timbers, of the un
cured hides nailed across its walls, and of the fear of those climbing it. The great wheels lay to either side now that the structure stood tight-pressed to Verity’s wall.
Nona barged inside and began to run up the ridged wooden ramp that formed a square spiral within the tower. Everywhere she stepped a glowing footprint remained to record her passage, scorched into the timber. Rather than fading, each footprint grew brighter and then more bright until on her sixth stride from the print it detonated, a blast powerful enough to blow out the sides of the tower in a cloud of splintered planking and torn hides. The chain of explosions chased Nona up the tower, tearing apart the soldiers she left tumbled behind her, and setting fire to the main beams.
The tower had begun to collapse by the time Nona burst through the curtain of chains screening the doorway just below its roof. She ran across the platform that bridged to the battlements and, with hunska speed, threw herself between the legs of the defending line. At the far edge she snagged the stonework and slid down the interior wall in a shower of sparks as she tamed her descent with her flaw-blades.
She found herself amid a crowd of startled defenders who a moment before had been racing around on various errands to fight fires, reinforce weak spots, or bring supplies like arrows or rocks to the wall.
“I’m a Bride of the Ancestor!” Two men levelled spears at Nona and she raised her arms. “I’m here to help.”
21
THE ESCAPE
Three Years Earlier
“YOU’VE BEEN SPYING on me?”
“I have been spying on all of you. On the sister of the emperor, on the Red Sisters and the Grey, on the Church of the Ancestor.” Zole looked as unapologetic as it was possible for a person to be.
“Why?” Nona could think of no other question.
Tarkax stepped forward. “The Corridor holds millions of people. What will happen when the moon falls?”
Holy Sister Page 23