Zole shrugged. “Any god who answers.”
They walked for a moment in silence, aiming for the novice cloister. Nona pursed her lips, then decided to see just how talkative Zole was today.
“It looks as if the abbess is going to let you on the ice-ranging.”
Zole shrugged again.
“Are you going to run if she does?”
“Run?” Zole shot Nona a dark, unreadable look.
“Back to your tribe.”
“Would you run with me, Nona Grey?” Zole asked. “I am told that the ‘Chosen One’ should not abandon her Shield.”
“To your tribe?” Nona couldn’t help smiling at the thought.
“Or to yours?” Zole said. “But I thought you had murder in mind. Revenge. A shipheart to recover.”
The smile left Nona as quickly and as involuntarily as it had come. Of all the things that lay beyond the Rock, whether it be in the Corridor or on the ice, Yisht was the one that called to her. Yisht’s blood, waiting to be spilled.
“We will visit the ice together, Nona,” Zole said. “I will show you another world and how to live in it.”
Nona met the ice-triber’s gaze, surprised. “I’d like that.” And for the briefest moment she could swear she saw a smile tug at Zole’s lips.
* * *
• • •
IN THE NOVICE cloister Nona sat with her friends from Grey Class. Darla came over too but wandered off when talk turned to the caves.
“What’s up with her?” Ara frowned at Darla’s broad and departing back.
“The creature in the caves did the same to all of you. It’s thread-work. The fear it put in us knotted something up in your heads. It was supposed to stop any of us coming back. It was something deeper than fear—you couldn’t even hear me talk about the caves.”
“That’s not . . . true . . .” Ruli trailed off, echoing Ara’s frown. “Is it?”
“It is. I saw the damage it did.” Nona bit off any further explanation, not wanting to explain how she avoided the same fate.
“Why hasn’t it worn off with Darla?” Jula asked.
Nona shrugged. Explaining what she’d done would just invite more questions. “Maybe it takes longer when you’re that big.”
The wind swirled hard for a moment, whipping up dead oak leaves and making the girls shield their faces. Seconds later the squall passed, the ice-wind returning to its steady north-south roaring.
“Ketti won’t talk about it either,” Ruli said.
“Maybe she’s got boy-fever again.” Nona shrugged. “So tomorrow then?”
“Yes.” Ara nodded.
“I’m not going without a spear,” Ruli said. “A knife at the least.”
“I’ll bring you a knife,” Nona said.
At last she wants to kill something! And what she chooses to cut cannot bleed . . .
Give me a better plan then! Nona demanded, but Keot fell back into his silence.
“Is this sensible? Is it worth it?” Jula asked. “What if it’s got teeth as big as my arm? Weren’t there bodies in that cave?”
“Dozens of them,” Ara said.
Nona’s gaze found Joeli across the cloister amid a circle of her friends, almost hidden behind the trunk of the centre oak. “This is the Rock of Faith. The cave that thing was in is practically beneath this convent. In four years we could be Red Sisters. If we don’t even dare explore the holes under where we live . . . what use are we going to be out in the world?” She bit her lip, remembering their escape. “Besides. If it were some monstrous creature, what does it eat? Flooding your prey with fear so that it runs away and never returns isn’t a very good strategy for filling your belly. This thing seems more like a stink-fox to me, spraying its foulness to scare intruders off.”
“But the bodies!” Jula said.
“I saw skeletons,” Nona said, trying to see them again. “Covered in flow-stone like the ones in the niche. They had to be centuries old . . .”
“I saw all kinds of horrible things.” Ara pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. “They couldn’t all be true. So maybe none of them were?”
Nona nodded. Even if the thing was as big as a bear and had teeth like swords she needed to see where Hessa died. With the shipheart so close Hessa might have worked miracles. There could be a clue. Missed by the nuns but waiting for one who was thread-bound to her. And with thread-work you start at the beginning. “We’re going then?”
Ara and Ruli nodded. Jula frowned then nodded too.
“I hear you’re up for the Shade Trial,” Ara said, breaking the mood with a grin.
“Yes.” Nona glanced back towards Joeli’s clique with narrowed eyes.
“No chance.” Ruli shook her head.
“What?” Nona turned her stare on Ruli.
The girl held her hands up. “I’m just the messenger.”
“She’s right, Nona. There’s no way Joeli will let you get to that tree.” Jula shook her head. “Even if they liked you they wouldn’t go hungry just to let you pass. And you’re not hard to spot.”
“I can put on a headscarf or something!” Nona found her voice raised and struggled to push her outrage back. “I’m not useless.”
“Can you put a shadow on too?” Ara offered an apologetic smile. “And it’ll take more than a headscarf. Suleri went in with a long white beard, warts, and a cast in one eye. They challenged her before she got halfway to the tree.”
“She overdid it.” Nona sniffed. “Less is more.”
“Well.” Ruli grinned. “You’ve certainly got a lot of that!” She rolled back under the swinging slap Nona aimed her way and ran off shrieking with laughter.
Nona stood to give chase, then stopped, reminded by a dozen bruises that perhaps sitting back down would be better. She tried to imagine crossing Thaybur Square with all of Mystic Class on the watch for her. She let her gaze rest on the skeletal forest of the centre oak’s branches, leaves tight-wrapped against the ice. “I’m lost, aren’t I?”
Ara nodded. “It’s not like you wanted the Grey. Just punch your way to the pine and claim it as a spoil of war.”
13
NONA BUTTONED HER range-coat tight and hurried from the refectory, still chewing on a heel of bread. Ara, Ruli, and Jula were waiting for her to join them on the Seren Way, ready to dare the holothour’s cave once more. And she was already late!
“Novice!” A nun, black against the sun where it rose between Blade and Heart Halls, called to her. “Walk with me.” Sister Apple’s voice.
Shielding her eyes, Nona hurried over. “Mistress Shade?”
Sister Apple motioned with her head and led off across the square. Nona followed, bowed against the ice-wind and hoping she wouldn’t be kept too long.
On reaching the shelter of the steps down to the Shade classroom, Sister Apple turned and beckoned Nona closer so she too would be out of the wind. “Your Shade Trial will be next week, Nona.”
“Next week? I’m not ready!” Nona’s mind started to race. She could get a Mensis house-guard uniform from Terra . . .
“And it has been decided that it will be held here in the convent.”
“But . . . Thaybur Square is . . .”
“Too dangerous. We will use the novice cloister and put the puzzle-box up the centre oak. I’m sorry, Nona.”
“The cloister?” Nona tried to picture it. “That’s madness. Everyone there is in a habit. We all know each other! The defenders would just challenge any stranger . . . not that I can make myself look like a stranger in a habit!”
“Even so—”
“I’ve no chance! This was Wheel wasn’t it? She’s always hated me.” Nona hardly felt Keot burn across her tongue, rising with her rage. “Wheel and that bitch Rail. Revenge for Joeli! Namsis money bought and paid for this—”
Sister Apple’s slap rocked Nona on her heels, setting the side of her face aflame. She had been too deep in her outrage to see the blow coming. Which, even as she raised her hand to her cheek, Nona realiz
ed was a good thing. If she had seen the blow and blocked it some unwritten rule would have been shattered, and Nona’s exit from the convent would have been a likely consequence.
“I made the decision.” Sister Apple fixed Nona with a hard stare. “Safira told you the Noi-Guin still want their revenge. Do you want Kettle and the other sisters out in Verity risking themselves so you can take the trial?” Her voice turned from angry to bitter. “It’s not as if you stand a chance. You cut off your shadow, Nona. You cut yourself off from the shade. The Grey isn’t for you.”
Sister Apple turned and unlocked the gate. She locked it behind her and a moment later descended into the caves, leaving Nona standing before the steps, too full of conflicting thoughts and emotion to do anything but stand some more.
* * *
• • •
“THOUGHT YOU WEREN’T coming!” Ruli stepped out into the track from where she had been sheltering with Ara and Jula.
“It’s hard to slip away with inquisitors all over the convent.” Nona had crept out quite easily, but that had been quick feet and luck. Mainly luck.
Ruli nodded. “I walked the shadows with Ara.” The other two emerged behind her. Ruli only had a touch of marjal, half-blood at most, but she showed a talent for shadow-work. “Jula just strolled out. The Inquisition know how holy she is and don’t bother with her.”
Jula snorted at that. “Did you bring a weapon?”
Nona pulled out the knife they’d discovered on their last exploration.
Ara frowned at it. “That’s the same as before . . . you know, the one they tried to assassinate you with. It’s Noi-Guin!”
“It’s the same as the shadow-poisoned one that got stuck in Kettle,” Nona said. “One very persistent assassin, three knives. I must have hurt their pride by surviving.”
“Do you think the . . . monster . . . scared the Noi-Guin away too?” Ruli shivered, then hugged herself as if to show it was just the wind.
“I’m guessing so.” Nona put the knife back inside her habit. “What did you bring?”
“Half a quarterstaff!” Ara reached back into the crevice they’d been waiting in. “I guess that’s an eighth-staff?”
Nona grinned: she recognized it as one she’d broken when Joeli’s friends caught her.
“I got a hammer from the cooper’s stores.” Ruli let it slip from her sleeve into her hand.
“This.” Jula sheepishly produced a frying pan. “It’s all I could get.”
“And Sister Coal won’t beat you as hard if she catches you stealing from the kitchen as Sister Tallow would if she caught you stealing from Blade stores!” Nona nodded.
“Are we being stupid here?” Ara frowned at her broken staff. “There’s a monster down there we know nothing about, and Jula has a frying pan.”
“Maybe.” Nona put her knife in Jula’s other hand and folded her fingers around the hilt. “But they’re going to send us out into the world soon enough and we’ll be expected to deal with whatever we find. If we can’t even face up to something on our own doorstep . . . under our own doorstep . . . what use are we?” She flexed her hands and brought the flaw-blades into existence shimmering briefly. “And I brought my own weapons.”
* * *
• • •
THE FISSURE WAITED for them as it had always waited, hidden before there were people to hide from. Ara led the way into the corridor, lantern held high. The entrance held that faint rankness of old bones, damp stone, and rotting vegetation. A few dozen yards took them past the point where even the most shade-loving plant could cling to survival using whatever light bled through the entrance and soon the only smell was that of wetness on rock. They retraced their steps, a familiar route now, none of them speaking. Nona felt the weight of stone above her, the walls pressing in, the heavy silence. In places their footsteps echoed, elsewhere an emptiness, like that of the Ancestor’s dome, swallowed the sound.
“I’ve worked out why I like this place so much,” Jula said.
Nona looked back from her inspection of the long scramble up towards the chamber with the three exits. “Yes?”
“It’s the wind.”
“There isn’t any.”
“Yes. And it’s not just that. There’s no wind inside at the convent, but you can always hear it. Here, there’s nothing.”
“Serenity now.” Nona let the lines of the children’s song run through her head. “It will work. That girl at the Academy tried to make me run with her shadows. Serenity kept them from me.
“She’s falling down, she’s falling down . . .” Nona muttered the words beneath her breath and her serenity rose around her like the sides of a deep well.
Beside her Ara, Ruli, and Jula each walked their own path into the serenity trance.
“Let’s go.” Ara began to climb.
Ten minutes later the tunnel that led to the holothour and its cave of horror yawned before them. Ara walked on without a word. Nona and Jula followed, Ruli at the rear.
“I can feel it.” Nona’s skin prickled as if a thousand eyes watched her from the dark.
It can feel you. Keot rose across the back of her neck like a scald and her anger rose with him, darker emotions too, palpable through the thick velvet wrapping of her serenity.
“Me too.” Ruli sounded calm, almost sleepy.
The light from Ara’s lantern reached out across stone walls smoothed by ancient waters. Thick, glistening deposits of limescale coated every surface, like treacle frozen in mid flow, somehow organic, as if they were advancing down the gullet of some vast beast.
Nona wore her serenity as if it were a protective bubble, extending yards past the reach of her arms, beyond even the limits of their illumination, with the fear pushing at its borders a distant thing. Ahead, shapes loomed among the shifting shadows, the rock-bound skeletons of the holothour’s victims.
The four girls pressed tight together, calm but seeking the comfort of one another’s warmth and a side from which attack would not come. The ancient night of the cave began to roll back before the lantern’s advance, leaving calcified skeletons behind like rocks revealed by retreating waves. Shadows swung.
“It’s coming.” A whisper.
Nona felt it, like a squall racing across the flatness of open fields, something big, something vast that would carry her off. The walls seemed to pull away, the touch of her friends fade to nothing. Every fear she owned hurtled towards her out of the night at terrifying speed.
Then it struck.
The bubble of her serenity collapsed in less than a heartbeat, from something wide and confident to the thinnest skin moulded to her body with the holothour’s unclean touch scratching dry-fingered across every inch. In a moment Nona hung high above herself, seeing her body in the small patch of illumination, a tight circle around her, and beyond that an endless void both wholly empty and full of implacable hate.
Run!
It wasn’t Keot’s command that set Nona turning to flee, it was the sound of running feet. The sound of being abandoned. She glimpsed Ruli’s white face, stretched into a scream, horror in every line. Jula shrieking, dropping her knife as she started to run. Ara crashing into the nearest wall as she ran blind. The terror breached Nona’s barriers and flooded through her. She tore off after Ruli, Keot demanding she run faster.
Ruli leapt Ara’s sprawled body. Nona followed. Ara’s collision with the wall had left her on the ground, blonde hair fanned around her head, one arm stretched out as if pointing the way.
Run! Keot fled into her eyes and suddenly the passage ahead revealed itself to her as if the stone itself were glowing with a reddish light.
Nona got five more steps, each slower than the last, before Jula overtook her, habit flapping.
Run! The voice that filled her brain rang with terror as the holothour’s fear infected even the devil. It’s an old one. Too powerful!
“She’s my friend.” The words brought Nona to a halt as effectively as a rope about her neck. She turned. Ara moved her
head, groaning, the lantern lying on its side close to her hip. Keot retreated from her eyes, unwilling to see what followed them.
Take the lantern and run!
Nona took one step back towards Ara, then another, bowed as if braving a headwind. It wasn’t that her fear had gone, simply that a greater one drove her, the thought of Ara’s bones lying with the rest, slowly devoured by stone, a constant silent accusation that the foundation of her own existence lay as hollow as the Rock of Faith.
“No . . .” A whisper. Trembling in each limb, Nona stepped over Ara for a second time and faced the darkness. “No!” A shout.
She stood in an invisible wind. At the back of her head Keot hung, bleeding out into the air, trying to free himself from her skin and flee back to the Path. The intensity built: the cave’s empty night reverberated with it, skins of stone shattered from the walls, warm blood ran from Nona’s eyes and nose. She sank to her knees beneath the weight of it, every nerve screaming to run.
The rocks around her began to bleed. An awful rasping breath shuddered through the blackness. And out there a howling hate, condensing. A darker clot of night. The stench of decay surrounded her. Screams of pain worse than the abbess had made when they’d burned her. A novice emerged into the trembling illumination, thin limbs, rotting skin, dragging a withered leg, lifting up her face. Hessa!
RUN!
“No.” A whisper.
And suddenly the fear blew out. From one moment to the next it had gone. The darkness was again just darkness. Nona fell forward onto all fours and vomited everything she had in her.
* * *
• • •
JULA AND RULI came back, patting their way along the walls. They emerged pale-faced into the light to find Ara kneeling by Nona, holding Nona’s hair back as she wiped drool from her mouth.
“Where is it?” Ruli bent to pick up the hammer she’d dropped. It shook in her hand.
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