Nona crouched, pinned by indecision. She felt Abbess Glass’s hand upon her shoulder but found no sense of direction in it. Even the old woman’s legendary foresight had its limits. She could not have seen this end. It fell to Nona now and she felt unequal to the challenge. Ruli’s terror and pain began to spike along their thread-bond. Kettle’s despairing exhaustion reached out to Nona through the bond they shared. Five miles away another friend released the awesome power of the Path in her single-handed attempt to destroy an army that had been sent to kill not Sister Thorn but Sister Cage.
Nona couldn’t lose Ara. Not her. With a cry of despair she threw herself across the corridor, scooped up the shipheart, and ran into the darkened room to her left. The shipheart’s glow revealed what Ruli had glimpsed on her way past, what Zole had spoken of back in the black ice. A huge ring, too large to have come into the small room through the single doorway. It leaned against the rear wall, too tall to stand vertical. Its dimensions and markings were identical to those on the ring that Zole had sent Nona through against her will three years earlier. Without pausing to think, Nona leapt into the circle. She held the shipheart out before her, and every fibre of her being tensed for collision with the wall behind the ring.
The cave into which Nona stumbled was too big for the shipheart’s light to find its sides. Behind her a ring of strangely crystalline metal rocked gently on its edge. The glow was already dying from the scores of symbols around its perimeter. On the floor for yards in all directions lay fragments of the flowstone that had once coated the ring. The pieces lay in the same broken chaos in which they had landed when Nona had emerged here three years earlier. That time she had travelled far more than five miles. Zole had flung her a hundred times farther from another of the ring’s counterparts beneath the black ice.
Nona had discovered this ring with Ara and the others in her early exploration of the undercaves. A holothour had guarded it using nothing but terror. Those days seemed long ago and simpler. Part of Nona wished the ancient magic could send her back across the years as easily as across miles.
For a moment, as the light died from the great circle, the shipheart flared. Cavern walls appeared, described in violet and black, a roof above, hung with a downward-questing forest of stalactites. Pools patterned the undulating floor, each surface still trembling with the shock of Nona’s arrival. Nona’s senses flared too. The world of threads, in which humanity’s paper-thin reality hung, lay stripped bare before her eyes. Her rock-sense ran wild, reaching out through the void-riddled vastness of the Rock of Faith, echoing down passages unknown to man, stealing along secret ways, lacing around the sleeping mass of the Glasswater, the weight of its countless gallons held back behind such a thinness of stone . . .
Nona shook away the sensations and wasted no time. She ran, following paths that she and her friends had explored years earlier. It took no more than a couple of minutes to reach the passage where once she had struggled to climb a fissure to reach the scene of Hessa’s murder.
Nona leapt towards the opening overhead and within three heartbeats was pulling herself out of the fissure’s mouth into the space before the shipheart’s old vault, the place from which Yisht had once stolen it.
“Lano wants you.” Nona spoke to the shipheart. “He will not have you.” She pushed the sphere against the smooth wall of the passage and exerted her power over the rock. Moments later she withdrew her hand. The shipheart remained, entombed behind inches of stone with few signs of disturbance to betray its presence.
The voices of her devils called at her in the silence that remained now that the hurricane of the shipheart’s power no longer blew through her. They told her to run. To take the shipheart and escape through the ring to some distant place. They whispered that Ara was false, a child of the Sis, raised on gold; they told her that Ara had always seen her as a peasant, never as a true friend. They told her that golden Ara would laugh at her secret passions and never love her in return. They told her that in her place Ara would run.
And Nona believed them.
“It doesn’t matter.” She stumbled on along the tunnel, away from the shipheart. With her mind splintering, her thoughts drawn one way then the other, Nona clung to the simplest of her truths. Those she first found. “It doesn’t matter what she thinks of me. It doesn’t matter if she hates me. She’s my friend. I won’t leave her.”
She ran on blind, following her memory of the place, trailing a hand against the wall, falling, rising, crawling, wriggling, reaching Apple’s caves. The gate to the Shade steps surrendered to a slash of her blades and she emerged to run through the convent where she had grown from a small child into the young woman Abbess Glass had burdened with too much trust.
Few lights burned in the windows but torches ringed the courtyard before the dormitories and on the steps sat Sister Scar. The nun looked older than Nona had ever imagined her behind her desk in the scriptorium. She clutched a cleaver from the kitchens in her lap. Above her at the Holy Class windows, where junior novices were forbidden on pain of a beating, dozens of small faces leaned out. They looked ridiculously young for the battlefield.
“Protect the convent!” Nona paused and met Sister Scar’s wide eyes. “No quarter. Let the Ancestor take care of mercy.”
The faint edge of a scream that reached Nona from the forest of pillars was lost in the far louder scream that threatened to shatter her skull from within. Ara! At the same time a white agony speared its way between her shoulders, an echo of Ara’s injury.
Ara! Ara! I’m coming!
Nona sprinted towards the battle, her mind reaching ahead of her for her friend and finding only darkness.
* * *
• • •
THE PELARTHI STOOD between the pillars, a loose halo around the place where Ara lay in a pool of her own blood. To Nona’s amazement Clera stood above the fallen girl. For a bright moment Nona thought that somehow her friend was there to save Ara, but as their eyes met across the intervening yards a cold certainty took hold of her. Clera had been the one who had brought Ara down.
Clera opened her mouth to speak, and said nothing, condemned by the close company of the mercenaries all around her. Of all of them, in that moment only Clera seemed to have seen her.
Nona drew her sword as she ran towards the first of the Pelarthi. Sister Tallow had pressed the weapon’s hilt back into her hand barely an hour before and as Nona spun through a group of six she took her first lives with the blade. The Pelarthi knew all about her arrival then.
Back in the convent compound Bitel rang out. It seemed fitting. The bell had never heralded anything but disaster.
Nona scanned the forces arrayed before her. She felt her devils moving beneath her habit, their voices crying out for blood, and she found herself in agreement. The Book of the Ancestor says that for everything there is a season. This was a time to reap. A time for death. A time to die.
Bows creaked among the Pelarthi ranks, spears were lifted, knuckles whitened on the hilts of sword and axe. A hawk-eyed archer caught Nona’s eye, her cheek torn and bloody. She drew back her string but there was a tremble in her aim.
The Pelarthi would know stories about her. Clera was a teller of tales and they were here for her. They would know her as Nona, as the black-eyed child who slew Raymel Tacsis, the girl who broke Lord Thuran Tacsis’s mind with ancient pain magics. They would have heard that to some she was known as the Argatha, the Chosen One. Given Joeli’s spying they probably even knew her by her new name. Sister Cage.
Kill them all.
Make a red slaughter.
Fill the air with their screams.
Nona listened to the cries of her devils and found a dark smile on her face. The trembling archer let her arrow fall with a clatter. She turned without a word and began to push her way back, past the warriors of her clan. To her left another turned, a man thick with muscle, the names of his forefathers inked in
runes along his arms. Two of those he pushed aside turned and ran with him. Sister Thorn had already shown them what a Red Sister could do.
The trickle became a flood. The Pelarthi left the scores of their dead, still scattered or heaped where Ara had killed them. They ran as if Nona had rolled the shipheart among them. Her devils howled their disappointment and it echoed through her.
* * *
• • •
NONA STRODE TOWARDS Clera and saw where Ara lay at her feet.
“Is she dead?” Her heart hurt, despair overwhelming her rage.
“How are you here?” Clera ignored the question. “You weren’t supposed to be here! How did you know? . . . And even then, how did you get here?”
Nona ignored the questions. Clera was an accomplished liar but seemed incapable of seeing that another Tacsis brother had lied to her. Again. About the same damn thing. Nona had always been the target, never Ara. “Is she dead?” She rushed forward, pushing Clera away from Ara, who was still coiled around a spear. Nona knelt, reaching out to touch the spread gold of her hair. “Ara?”
“You should never have let me go.” The words sputtered from Clera as if she were hurt, as if it were her wrapped around a spear. “You had me bound. Guilty. You should have let them drown me.”
“I wouldn’t do that to a friend.” Nona had fought Zole, Darla, Ara . . . all of them, and insisted that Clera be allowed to run. What might have changed had she not? Who might still live that now walked with the Ancestor? She shook the thoughts away and set her fingers to Ara’s neck, seeking a pulse. The smallest of groans rewarded her, the smallest tremble of a hand. Nona found she could breathe once more.
A short laugh burst from Clera, sounding as much like pain as mirth. “They all think you’re the big bad. The Church’s hammer. Cage the Shadowless. And you’re still acting like a child, Nona! You run into everything heart-first, expecting . . . what? You didn’t understand how people work when the abbess brought you here as a dirty-footed peasant. You didn’t understand when she sent you away. And you don’t understand now. People lie, Nona: they steal, they cheat, they’re unfaithful. People hurt you, they let you down. They sell you out.”
“It doesn’t mean I have to be like that.” Nona stared up at Clera, who flinched. The devils inside her wanted Clera’s blood, and Nona strove not to make that desire her own. “We have a whole church built on ancestors.” She waved an arm at the Dome. “Family. Dead family.” She took Ara’s hand in hers. “You choose your friends. If you’re going to worship dead people you didn’t choose, then perhaps the bonds of friendship shouldn’t be so easily broken. No?”
Clera shook her head. “You’re a fool, Nona Grey. Are you going to kill me now, or let someone else do it?”
Nona fought to block out the voices of her devils. She had seen enough death for ten lifetimes. She had chosen the Black. Abbess Glass had made her a Holy Sister for a reason. War was not that reason.
“Ara could live. If we get her to Sister Rose. Now!” Nona glanced back towards the convent. They were coming. The old sisters and the young girls.
Clera waved her hand at the distant nuns, exasperated. “Let them take her. I don’t care. I didn’t come for Ara. She was just in the way.”
Nona released Ara’s hand with a squeeze and stood. “I’ve missed you, Clera. It’s been too many years.”
Clera glanced out across the plateau. “We were children, Nona. Children make and break friendships all the time. It’s not important. This, what we’re doing now, this is important. It’s about sides in the great game that’s being played. And you’re on the wrong one. The losing one. You should change sides.”
Nona shook her head. “I’m not playing. And I’ve always been on your side, Clera. You’ve just not properly understood it.”
Clera looked down at Ara. “I wanted her to run.”
“I know.”
“She should have run. There were too many of them for her. Why did she have to be so stupid?”
Nona shrugged, a slow gesture giving the lie to a racing mind. “Where is Lano Tacsis?”
“You know the Tacsis.” Clera nodded towards the plateau stretching out beyond the pillars. “They like to let you spend your power against people they consider expendable, then arrive to finish the job if anything’s left to finish.”
“They do.”
“He’s out there with his soldiers and eight Noi-Guin. His teachers from the Tetragode. Others too.”
Nona looked down at her sword. “My power’s not spent.”
“You think you can kill me without reaching for the Path, little Nona?” Clera drew her sword, a twin to Nona’s, taken from the body of a Red Sister.
Nona turned away, her back to Clera, and looked out across the plateau. If her friend struck her down then, she would be at peace with it. She didn’t want to live in a world where Clera would do a thing like that. “I think I won’t need to kill you. I think you’ll fight them with me. Sister.”
As Nona spoke she saw that some of the convent girls had followed her out among the pillars. They watched now, peering around stone columns. She waved for them to advance and four Grey Class novices came forward. At Nona’s nod they lifted Ara, carrying her rapidly away, back through the pillars. “Take her to Sister Rose! Hurry!” She turned back to Clera. “Well?”
“Fight them with you?” Clera threw up her hands. “Even if Lano only had a second better army out there you wouldn’t stand a chance. But he has eight Noi-Guin, Nona! Eight!”
As Clera protested Nona pulsed an urgent plea to Ara, begging her to wake up. Nothing. She gritted her teeth against the backwash of her friend’s pain and tried again.
“Eight of them! And one of them is the Singular.” Clera shook her head. “And he is flat-out the scariest bastard I have ever known. He’s the spider at the middle of their web of shadow-bonds. If it was just him on his own, no army, no other Noi-Guin, you still wouldn’t stand a chance—” She broke off, seeing Nona’s distracted look. “I’m sorry, am I boring you?”
“I’m not going to fight them today! Not out here on their terms! That would be insane! There are eight of them!” Nona steeled herself against the desperation and pain now pulsing at her down three thread-bonds. Ara had found her senses and joined her distress to that of Ruli and Kettle. Nona spoke a message into Ara’s mind, then raised her eyes to meet Clera’s outrage. “I’m going to run, of course! I’m in a hurry. Other things to do. I need you to get out there and appear as if you’re still loyal.”
“That won’t be hard. I like to be on the winning side.”
“Tell them I’m scared. About to run. Tell them they’ll lose their chance at me unless they act right now. I’m going to make for the undercaves. For the shipheart vault where Hessa died. Make sure you’re in the lead. In the lead, Clera. It’s important.”
“In the lead. You want us to hunt you down . . .” Clera frowned. “I can do that. But when they find you, Nona, they’ll kill you. I can’t stop them.”
“Just bring them. Bring them all. And we’ll see who sinks and who swims.”
Clera met her eyes for one last time, then turned and fled, out across the rock to where the lights and banners of Lano’s first rank were just starting to come into view.
* * *
• • •
“WHEN THEY COME you must be Grey Sisters, not Red.” Nona addressed the young novices and old sisters, no more than two dozen of them, all watching her in the heart of pillar forest. “Nobody touches the Tacsis lord or the Noi-Guin, don’t go anywhere near them. Draw the house troops out among the pillars. Use the convent buildings. Don’t take risks, just take opportunities. Wound rather than kill. You want to slow them down, make them rethink, give them a reason to retreat. In the end you’re to run rather than make a stand. You carry the convent with you.” She waved her hand towards the convent buildings. “These are just
stones piled up to keep the wind off.”
Nona dispersed her sisters to hide while she took her place among the Pelarthi dead, heaped in dozens, scattered in scores. She bit down on the urgency from her thread-bonds, closed her ears to the whispering of her own devils, and called her clarity to her. The hidden world of detail opened itself to her, from the star-speckled, smoke-streaked vault of heaven above to the complaints of the Rock of Faith below. The Rock’s voice came too deep for ears but rumbled faintly through her bones as the stone cooled beneath the night’s wind.
The Tacsis torches and pole-lanterns would be hard to miss but if the Noi-Guin came ahead of them, insinuating themselves into the darkness between the pillars, they could murder her before she knew they were there. Nona defocused her sight to see the thread-scape. Sister Pan had said that ultimately a true quantal mage would see only the world’s threads for they were the deepest truth and revealed not only every single thing as it was but also the past, the future, and the relationship of each thing to every other. Indeed, when watching the thread-scape you learned how artificial ideas of individual objects, or even people were, since each was infinitely connected and interwoven with the world around them.
Nona focused on the now. She saw the pillars and saw through them. In that moment of her clarity she saw that they might be a map, perhaps a pillar to mark each Ark. She pushed that insight aside and looked beyond. She saw the rock, the caves beneath, the motion of the wind. The soldiers of Lano’s army appeared as complex multidimensional knots sliding along a multitude of threads. And ahead of them slid a handful of knots bound more tightly than that of any soldier. Each of these was shot through with black threads and also joined by them in a web of their own making. Noi-Guin, coming for her.
To their rear all the dark threads converged on a black central node. The Singular, advancing behind his minions.
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