She looked at the strange window to check where Nona, Ara, and Clera were, then opened the door. The thick blast door outside had retracted into the floor. Sherzal walked out, arms crossed before her, thumb on the hidden button that would detonate the explosives she’d installed in the Ark.
Nona, under Ara’s control and carrying Ara, moved to one side of the corridor to allow Sherzal to pass by as far from the shipheart as she could get. Clera nodded to the emperor’s sister as she went but said nothing.
As the three of them crossed over the blast door Nona returned to her own body, Ara slid back into hers, and Ruli returned to her own flesh with a series of whimpering gasps.
“Blast doors up!” Nona called, and behind her ten tons of iron slid smoothly into place.
The special window continued to show the corridor as if inserting a two-foot-thick wall of iron made no difference to the view. Nona hobbled in and watched as Sherzal turned their way. She jabbed at the button experimentally, happy to blow them all to the Ancestor now the door had risen between them.
“How frustrating for her.” Nona narrowed her eyes at the woman. Even now her devils screamed for her to chase Sherzal down and hack her apart.
Beside Nona, Clera helped Ara to her feet. Ara, for her part, allowed Clera to aid her and didn’t punch her in the throat, which wouldn’t have been unreasonable given the fact that Clera had thrown a spear at her back less than an hour before.
“This isn’t over,” Ara said, joining Nona at the window.
“No,” said Nona, watching as Sherzal stopped at the blade-trap.
The emperor’s sister tossed a coin out to check that it hadn’t been reactivated. The coin hit the floor in four silver strips. She shot a foul look back at the blast door and pushed the button uselessly.
“You should go out there and kill her.” The guards had cut Jula free and she had crossed to help Ruli who was struggling to roll Safira’s corpse off her.
“If we open the blast doors she can blow the explosives,” Nona said, not looking away.
Sherzal tapped out the sequence to deactivate the blade-trap. Ever cautious, she tossed in a second coin. It hit the ground with a chime and rolled to a halt. Satisfied, she hurried through, picking up speed, anxious to reach her guards and flee before the Scithrowl broke in.
She was clear of the blade-trap when suddenly she jolted, slowed, then carried on at a reduced pace. The jolt would have been the first wire breaking. Invisibly thin, it would have cut to the bone before Sherzal’s momentum broke it. The slowing was the result of the multiple wires behind the first biting into her. By this point the pain would have registered. The blood appeared as thin red lines first, blotting the sliced edges of her gown. As she staggered, large folds of flesh and muscle began to flay away from the bone. The top half of her face did something similar, the detail thankfully hidden behind a rising crimson mist. The emperor’s sister managed five more steps before falling in a gory ruin. The sound of her screaming didn’t reach into the Ark.
Beside Nona, Ara and Clera looked ready to vomit.
Nona nodded slowly. “Now it’s over.”
26
HOLY CLASS
“I’LL BRING IN the wires.” Ara looked as if she would rather do anything else, even if she weren’t battling just to keep standing. But the first and last thing that Sister Apple had taught them about setting wires was that you cleared up afterwards.
Who had actually set the trap for Sherzal was open to debate. Nona had used her thread-bond with Ara to ask her to do it. Ara, too weak to set the wires, had used that same bond to inhabit Nona’s body while Nona in turn inhabited Ruli and spoke with Sherzal behind the blast doors. The bloody lengths of Ark-steel would be returned to the wire kit that Kettle had given Nona along with the poisons and cures carried by every Grey Sister.
Even so, it was Ara’s task to pull the wires from Sherzal’s gory remains.
“Go with her, Clera.” Nona nodded and motioned the two of them back into the corridor. Ara would need support.
When the way was clear Nona would let Sherzal’s guards go. Joeli would stay here. Jula had tied the girl with Safira’s cords. Joeli might be good with threads but Jula tied better knots.
“The book was a lie?” Ruli came closer, cradling her injured arm as if it were made of eggshell. Jula hovered around her, trying to help. “I went through all that for nothing?” Now that Nona had set the Noi-Guin shipheart against the far wall with the Sweet Mercy shipheart, both novices could approach her.
“Maybe not a lie,” Nona said. “Perhaps just misguided and unnecessary. What was important was that you believed its value. That’s what got us in here and what kept you both alive. It was always Abbess Glass’s intention that the book would be the key that got us to the door of the Ark. I don’t imagine she knew it would be with the Scithrowl fighting in Verity’s streets.”
“So how do we control the moon, if we could even get in there? Which we can’t,” Jula asked. “Aquinas’s instructions are very complex . . . If they’re wrong, then I don’t know what to do.”
“Well. The first thing to do is to open the door, no?” Nona tried to shut out the voices of her devils as they raged against Jula’s stupidity. If the girl came any closer Nona might just reach out in an unguarded moment and end her. She leaned back against the wall. “Before that, though . . . I need this fucking knife out of my leg!”
Jula flinched as Nona’s voice rose to a shout, or perhaps at the cursing, or both. Even so she came forward, already unbinding her habit cord to use as a torniquet. Nona put her head to the wall and ground her teeth while Jula set to work.
“How can we open the Ark?” Ruli asked. She had a right to ask. She had had envenomed needles driven under her fingernails.
“I—” Nona roared as Jula drew the cross-knife from the back of her thigh and tightened her habit tie above the lacerated muscle.
“Nona!” Clera came back in, trailed by Ara, pale-faced and bloody-handed. “Are you . . .”
Jula stood up, tossing the little knife to the floor. “She’ll live.”
Nona turned her black-eyed stare on Sherzal’s guards. “Out!” She snarled the word through gritted teeth. “Join the defence if you want to survive the night.”
Clera spotted Joeli, sitting bound on the floor. “I know her. One of Sherzal’s creatures.”
Nona bit back the accusation that Clera was nothing more than that herself, and tried to drive the devils from her tongue.
“We should get the truth out of her,” Clera said, ignoring Jula’s and Ruli’s staring. “Sherzal didn’t have all her eggs in one basket. She was only going to share with Adoma as a last resort. She was after more shiphearts of her own. I know that much. She had an agent among the ice-tribes and she’d set her hunting down Old Stones. You really don’t want to know who I heard it was . . . But rich girl here, she knows for sure.”
“Nona!” A call from Ara at the doorway.
Out in the corridor a fierce light had overwhelmed the ambient illumination. It glared from the doorway of the chamber that held the travel ring. The blaze made harsh silhouettes of the guardsmen now frozen a few yards from it. A deep throbbing buzz trembled through the ground.
Nona drew her sword. Ara struggled to draw her own. Clera’s blade cleared her scabbard with a hiss.
A crack rang out, like the world ending, and the light died. At first Nona could see nothing. Afterimages filled the corridor, swimming across each other. As they faded and the dark shapes of Sherzal’s men reasserted themselves Nona saw that a new figure stood there ahead of them, and in her hands burned two balls of light, one a virulent green, the other the red of iron just starting to glow.
“Yisht!” A scream from Joeli behind them.
“Oh hells . . .” Clera’s blade wavered, the point dropping.
Nona blinked away the remaining traces of her
blindness, and there, alone in the corridor now as the guardsmen ran off in terror, stood the ice-triber, so thickly patterned in devils that no patch of unstained skin showed.
I can’t die. Yisht’s last words and Raymel Tacsis’s too. Perhaps if the black ice taught any lesson it was that evil never truly dies . . .
“Nona?” Yisht’s smile twisted. A moment later the rest of her rippled and in her place stood Zole, her face tight with strain.
“Zole?” Ara gasped. “You’re dead!”
“She’s playing games with our minds!” Clera backed a few paces.
“With two shiphearts in my hands I could make you see anyone I wanted to,” the figure said. “But I am Zole.”
“She’s lying,” Ara said. “Zole died.”
“No,” Nona said. “It’s Zole.”
And as she said it Tarkax Ice-Spear stepped out into the corridor, ten yards behind his niece and wincing as if he stood too close to the heat of a fire. Zole continued her advance and others of Tarkax’s tribe emerged, pushing at his shoulders.
Sherzal’s guards ran towards the stairs and the battle above. As Zole drew closer Ara and the novices backed into the chamber. Even Nona couldn’t endure the combined pressure of both shiphearts.
“How is she here?”
“You knew? You lied to us?”
Nona shook her head. “I promised Abbess Glass. Zole did too.”
When Nona had returned alone with the shipheart she had reported to Abbess Glass immediately. On the abbess’s instructions she had let them all believe Zole to be dead and had made no mention of Yisht. Somehow the absence of any mourning among the novices had deepened Nona’s affection for Zole. The girl walked a lonely path and she walked it without complaint or compromise.
Nona hadn’t heard from Zole again for nearly two years and when she did it was to discover that they were thread-bound. Somehow during their long escape from the black ice, when Zole carried her half-senseless from that freezing hell, the ice-triber had forged the bond between them.
At Abbess Glass’s suggestion Zole had set herself the task of bringing to the empire both of the shiphearts controlled by her tribe. At the same time, and seemingly at her own behest, Zole had set to convincing the emperor’s sister that Yisht still lived and was attempting exactly the same thing—to bring Sherzal the two shiphearts she needed. All those years ago Abbess Glass had seen the pieces before her and set them in motion. Tarkax Ice-Spear’s ambition to protect the tribes by keeping the Corridor open was just one more factor to wrap into the long game. Quite how she knew where the cascade of cause and event would lead, Nona had no idea, but the abbess had always made it her business to know things. Nona had seen the results; the application of knowledge could unlock doors that her flaw-blades couldn’t so much as scratch, and it could bring down those so mighty that no feat of arms would stay their hand.
Zole had waited on the ice, ready with the Old Stones. Nona had told her that it was safe to come, and here she was, with the other half of the key to the Ark.
* * *
• • •
ZOLE STOOD WITHIN the chamber where Sherzal had tortured Ruli. She held the two shiphearts from her tribe, one like iron red from the forge, the other a poison green. The Noi-Guin shipheart and the Sweet Mercy shipheart lay against the far wall, one a black-violet that seared the eye, the other golden. She had grown from the girl who sent Nona back from the heart of the black ice. She stood before them a woman of the ice, hard, uncompromising, perfect. Zole watched Nona and the others as if from some distant place, no hint of recognition in them, no warmth, just a focused efficiency.
“Can you do it?” Nona asked. Of all of them only Nona could stand within spear’s reach of Zole and meet the awful light in her eyes. “Can you take all four and open the Ark?”
“It will be hard.”
Nona wondered if she stood alone in seeing the hints that remained of that younger Zole. She had been hard and seemingly without emotion even then, but Nona remembered that Zole had named her friend and come to the Tetragode to save her. She remembered the shy edge of Zole’s tiny smile when she made one of her rare jokes, so dry that it might pass by entirely unnoticed.
“Hard?” As always when Zole called a thing hard it meant that it was essentially impossible . . . a suicidal act.
“Very hard.” Zole’s eyes held something as close to fear as Nona had ever seen.
“Try.” Nona reached out for the wall and sagged against it. “The Scithrowl are coming. I need to help . . .”
Nona didn’t feel herself fall but she hammered into Kettle as if she had dropped from a great height.
27
HOLY CLASS
KETTLE LAY SPRAWLED, stunned by a blow from one of the small shields that many of the Scithrowl in this wave seemed to favour. The man who had stuck her down now leapt over her into the space created. Another Scithrowl followed, this one a squat woman, her skin a peculiar purple-red that Kettle had never seen before. She carried a short spear with a long serrated blade that looked to have been used to finish off a fair number of wounded enemies. Without pause she thrust it down at Kettle’s chest. Kettle lacked the strength to do anything but throw up an empty, helpless hand.
“No.” Nona’s word on Kettle’s lips.
Lying in the same chamber as four shiphearts made Nona feel like a candle burning not just at both ends but along the whole of its length. Their power filled her even as it tore her apart. Quick as thought, she drove a sheet of flaw-blade from Kettle’s palm, cutting the Scithrowl woman in half.
Get up.
Kettle struggled to her feet. Her speed had left her. Exhaustion dragged her down more than the minor wounds that stuck her habit to her in bloody patches. Several blows fell on the flaw-armour Nona moved around Kettle as she rose.
Let me in.
“They’re all dead, Nona.” Kettle waved her arm and Nona filled the air with a moving storm of flaw-fragments. The Scithrowl in front of her fell in pieces. Behind them the length of King’s Road lay tight-packed with their kin, stretching all the way back to the breach in the walls and the ocean of Adoma’s horde pressing in.
Over a hundred yards back but now within the circle of the city walls scores of Scithrowl bore a stepped platform on their shoulders, rising yards above the sea of heads. On the lowest step a dozen archers in black chain mail loosed arrow after arrow from their eagle-bows, sending them soaring over the spear tips of their army towards the palace walls or up at bowmen on Verity’s rooftops. On the next step four wind-workers plied their arts to shield the archers from incoming missiles, but Nona imagined they focused their efforts primarily on the third and highest step where a figure sat in crimson armour upon a throne of gold. Adoma, the battle-queen herself, entering the city and driving her followers into a frenzy. The woman commanded the eye, her skin like a hole in the night. It was said she had melted the black ice and drank the waters to gain her powers. Even at this distance Nona could feel the malice bleeding from her.
Let me help, Kettle! Where’s Apple?
“I don’t know.” Kettle stepped back and with an elbow to the back of the neck felled the man who had so recently struck her down. “I don’t know!” Her voice broke as she retreated among the emperor’s guards fighting in front of the palace walls. Images flashed before Nona’s eyes. She saw Leeni fall with a spear driven through her chest. Alata had died fighting above her corpse. She saw Sister Tallow and Sister Iron fighting back to back, with the Scithrowl clambering over the circular wall of dead ringing the pair. She saw Sister Tallow with her sword deep in the body of the biggest gerant Nona had ever seen. Somehow the old woman had pierced the man’s armour but where the Ark-steel blade she had given to Nona might have sliced free, her Barrons-steel remained caught. When the Scithrowl cut her down Tallow looked surprised. Not scared or proud or at peace or defeated . . . just surprised.
K
ettle’s memories assaulted Nona. She saw Ketti, broken by an axe. Tall, quick Ketti. Always talking about boys. Now she would never find one to hold. Nona blinked the vision away, blinked away the deaths of other novices, of nuns she had known most of her life.
“No.” So much marjal empathy rang in Nona’s voice that even those in the front line paused to listen, weapons stuttering midswing.
Abbess Wheel stood nearby, her right arm in a makeshift sling, bandages across her forehead. A pitifully small band of convent survivors stood tight around her.
“No!” Nona stepped back towards the battle-line. Men and women of the palace guard jerked out of her path as if seized by invisible hands. The Scithrowl howling for blood just yards ahead of her fell silent although she was only Kettle, wounded, unarmoured, unremarkable.
As Nona raised Kettle’s arms, an arrow hammered out of the fire-broken night. It shattered inches from her shoulder. Another glanced away. She brought her hands together over her head, struggling against some opposing force. Stone blocks and roof slates tore free from the buildings to either side of the King’s Road, flinging themselves into the army packed across its width. Walls groaned and collapsed in rolling clouds of dust.
“The moon is falling.” Nona’s voice shuddered through men’s bodies as if Abeth itself had spoken, and terror followed. “The. Moon. Is. Falling.”
She swung an arm at the backs of Scithrowl trying to retreat over those still advancing on the palace. Spinning fragments of flaw-blade sliced through armour, flesh, bone. Even the paving slabs beneath the enemy’s feet were cut into pieces.
Nona led the charge, slipping and sliding in a street that had become a charnel house. The gerant captain who had sought to block her passage into the palace as night fell now joined her counterattack.
They couldn’t win. Perhaps a dozen Nonas might turn the tide, but even as the Scithrowl died in heaps their dead were trampled by fresh warriors eager to bleed for their queen. And all along the road the Scithrowl were starting to spread out, clambering over rubble, seeking ways to encircle the palace, ways to come at it from all angles while Nona could defend only one.
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