Grey Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  A muttered discontent rose immediately. Many families among the Sis had lost members to the Noi-Guin. The deaths were often commissioned by other families, most of the remaining casualties were ordered “in-house” as a means of advancing personal prospects within a family.

  “If you would see an end to the Noi-Guin,” Sherzal said, “I know of a way that will succeed where hundreds of years and thousands of troops have failed. Bring them into the fold. Let them take their place at the high table as the Noisis and there will be no more Noi-Guin. Let them add their shipheart to our cause.”

  “That’s two.” Old Lord Glosis, hunched within her robes despite the heat.

  Glass found herself sweating with the crackle and roar from the hearth behind her. She began to unwind her chain though she had no hope of escape.

  “Two.” Sherzal held up a pair of fingers. “And Adoma has the last two required.” She raised the remaining fingers on her hand.

  “You plan to invade Scithrowl?” A lord at the back barked a laugh.

  “I plan an alliance.” Sherzal lowered her hand.

  “With the battle-queen!” Carvon Jotsis’s outrage had nowhere left to take him, so he sat down. Others rose to their feet—many of them—cries of “Treachery!” on their lips.

  “You would sell us into Scithrowl chains?” Lord Mensis cried.

  Shouts of “Heresy!” from the judges’ bench.

  “Adoma will provide two shiphearts and her war clans will clear our path to Verity,” Sherzal said, her voice rising above the swell of complaint. “My brother will be faced with two choices, where before he had only one, though he will not admit it.

  “The first choice is to have the Scithrowl take the empire under their control, have their heresy in every church of the Ancestor, have our people enslaved, our nobility overthrown. Surely Crucical would ruin the Ark to deny them such a prize, but it would be a hollow victory, one battle in a lost war. This is currently his only choice. The Scithrowl cannot be held.

  “The second choice is to accept me as the new emperor, maintaining the Lansis dynasty. To take the offer of Adoma’s shiphearts and by adding them to our own to gain dominion over the moon itself.

  “Adoma will, through the sigil-work of her mages, retain the ability to destroy her two shiphearts from her own throne and in doing so destroy the Ark. This is her assurance of our good faith. But we will control the moon, and in exchange for its use in preserving Scithrowl and in furthering Adoma’s interests to the east, she will withdraw her forces.

  “Our borders will be secured, our future ensured for generations to come, our honour restored. We will let the ice crush Durn and the moon will burn their ports to ash. And you, my friends, by joining your forces to my advance, will ensure that the flower of the empire survives this crisis and that your position as prime among the Sis is assured, favoured by my throne.”

  The shouts of protest continued but began to ebb, many lords falling to intense discussion with their neighbours. Glass knew enough of folk to see that the tide had turned and all that remained was for Sherzal’s guests to realize it themselves.

  “The only casualties that are unavoidable stand before us.” Sherzal recaptured the lords’ attention. “The Inquisition will never accept a Scithrowl alliance. I will need to make an end of the abbess and her organization.” She waved a hand at the judges. “Can any among you claim that the Inquisition is a thing of worth, an asset that should not be sacrificed in the cause of greater good?”

  And Abbess Glass, her tongue possessed by a poison that compelled the truth, had to answer. “No.”

  * * *

  • • •

  GLASS FOUND HER voice again as Sherzal’s guards advanced on the judges’ bench.

  “The Inquisition may be a price worth paying, Sherzal, but your assassin killed an innocent child when stealing from the Church of the Ancestor. A child’s life was too high a cost. As are all the lives that will be spent when the Scithrowl hordes sweep along the roads to Verity. The battle-queen may withdraw, she may not, but even if the hordes do return to the east it will be like a storm-tide retreating, leaving devastation.” Glass spoke nothing but the truth and she spoke it with the confidence of her office, exerting a magic all of her own, one that stilled the chatter of the lords and even made Sherzal’s soldiers pause in their advance on Melkir. “All this blood spilled for your ambition, Sherzal! If this myth of shiphearts and wielding the moon were true then Crucical himself could strike such a bargain with Adoma. If you shared your knowledge with him no Scithrowl would have reason to cross the Grampains. If it were true.”

  “Well, take her!” Sherzal urged her guards on.

  Melkir levelled his sword but Safira moved faster than the eye, stepping around the blade and locking her right leg behind his left to send him clattering to the floor.

  Glass spoke on, even as the guards closed around her. “And all the peoples of the Corridor are children of the Ancestor, whether they know it or not, whatever borders enclose them. Crucical would not use the moon as a weapon of aggression. It is our gift from those far deeper in the Ancestor’s great tree than we. The emperor could seek ways to better employ the moon’s blessing, and to deter others from attack. The empire could become the jewel on Abeth’s belt, not a dark and murderous master, condemning whole nations to icy ruin.”

  Two guards took Glass’s arms, seeming unsure what to do next while she kept on addressing their mistress.

  “Your plan has much in it that is good, Sherzal. What it does not require is you. No part of the greater good requires you to sit as emperor!”

  “Silence the woman!” Sherzal shouted. “Or must I do it my—”

  The sound that overwhelmed all others was an enormous and physical thing, as if a giant’s hammer had struck the palace—not against the outer walls but here within the chamber. Chairs and their occupants flew in all directions, centred on the area where the Sis families had been seated. Cracks, wide enough to receive fingers, even whole hands, ran out across the marbled floor, a cloud of powdered stone rising from the impact site.

  Motion behind and above the scene caught Glass’s eye, a large figure driving smaller ones from behind a screen in the musicians’ gallery. Darla! Her opponents were archers, crossbows useless at such range. Their weapons must have been trained on the one guest that Sherzal knew had the potential to be her greatest physical threat. Slipping away during the trial to deal with Ara’s watchers would have been an impressive feat for someone closer to seven foot tall than to six, but Darla had managed to get herself escorted out, saving the need for subterfuge.

  The dust began to settle. In its midst a figure on one knee, one hand to the floor. A woman in the tatters of a dress. The fabric, indeed the whole of her form, shuddering, shifting . . . warping . . . as she struggled to contain her power.

  Arabella Jotsis! The archers must have been instructed to shoot her at any sign that she had begun to walk the Path. The last of their number fell, wailing, from the gallery.

  And Ara stood, the glow around her limbs and torso almost too bright to look upon.

  42

  THE DETONATION UP in the main levels of the palace drew all the guards from their subterranean barracks, leaving just three of the four who had been on duty in the corridor.

  “If they get to the sigil-work on the walls we’re done for,” Clera said. “I don’t know what it does, but Sherzal puts enough faith in it not to have a gate between her and the Noi-Guin.”

  “And we can be pretty sure there are sigils there that will strip away shadow-work,” Nona said.

  “So, you go up there and incapacitate them, Clera.” Kettle waved her on. “They’ll let you get close, then . . .”

  “I’m not sure I could stop them all in time.” Clera frowned.

  “Jab a pin varnished with lock-up into them,” Nona said, remembering a certain cave and unable to keep a trace of bitterness from her voice.

  “They’re dosed with standard venoms every month to
keep their tolerance high. Sherzal knows the Noi-Guin’s tricks. Besides, I don’t want them to know it was me.”

  Nona unwrapped the chain around her waist. She’d fixed it there as a belt for the remains of her prison smock, and to provide a place to thrust the spare blades picked up after the battle at the cell-block. She set down her weapons and gave the chain to Kettle. Next she crossed her arms, back to back, the knuckles of one hand resting against the inside of the elbow of the other. “Bind me.”

  Kettle started to wrap both limbs together, turn after turn of the chain. “I used this ploy with Zole at the entrance to the Tetragode. I don’t think it will work here though . . . I look like a Lightless.”

  “That’s why I’m going alone,” Nona said.

  Kettle finished binding Nona’s arms and tucked the end of the chain away. “If Clera doesn’t think she can disable the three of them quickly enough what makes you think you can?”

  “That’s right.” Clera scowled. “I’m as fast as you are! These men aren’t pushovers. It just takes a moment for them to touch the right sigil and then—”

  “Because I want to kill them.” Nona let Keot take her tongue, her voice becoming a snarl, something alien. “I hunger for their deaths. I want their blood to spill. I’ve been trapped, boxed, poisoned, abused, and now it’s my turn. I don’t fear destruction. It’s the desire to survive that slows you, girl. I—” Nona wrested control back from Keot, coughed and added in her normal voice, “If that’s all right with you?”

  Clera, pale now, backed against the tunnel wall, her eyebrows raised, and offered her palms in the “be my guest” gesture.

  Nona walked on alone, the ribbons of her smock loose around her, body filthy with grime and gore, her chained arms held up before her. Days of starvation had taken flesh from her bones and she hadn’t any to spare before she was captured. She put a limp into her step and hung her head as she came into the circle of the first lantern’s light.

  “Ice!” An oath from the trio in the corridor ahead of her.

  “Help me.” Croaked out, too soft for them to hear perhaps.

  “It’s a girl.” The sound of swords clearing scabbards.

  “One of their prisoners?” A deep voice.

  “A child.” The one with a hint of sympathy. “Chained.”

  “Get away!” Barked at her, harsh.

  Nona kept up her advance all the while, slow, steady. “Help me.”

  “We can’t help you, girl.”

  “Get yourself back. There’s ways out. You might find one before they catch you.” This one took a certain pleasure in her predicament. The Noi-Guin would not be kind to any escaped prisoner.

  “Help me.”

  “I’m warning you! Come any closer . . .”

  Nona set her fingertips to the chain and rippled her flaw-blades into being.

  “Help.” She lifted her head. “Me.”

  In the moment while the three men registered the alien blackness of her eyes Nona tore one arm across the other, shredding iron links beneath her blades. She scattered chain segments at the guards and sprinted the remaining five yards, hurling herself sideways into the air. Deep in the moment, Nona twisted to ride both above and below the sword blades reaching towards her. She hit all three men with her back to them, one arm extended to drive blades into the neck of the leftmost man, the other arm crooked to skewer the groin of the middle man, her legs tangling with the legs of the man on the right.

  All of them fell. Before they hit the ground Nona had ripped her blades from the leftmost man’s neck and doubled up to stab the rightmost in the head. She cut short the cries of the groin-stabbed man with a slash across his throat.

  Kettle and Clera ran from the shadows where corridor gave way to natural tunnel, and found Nona sitting across the three bodies, panting, blood arcs spattering the sigil-scribed walls.

  “I thought we were going to . . . knock them out,” Clera said in a small voice.

  Nona levered herself up, her exhaustion returning with a vengeance. “Let’s go.”

  * * *

  • • •

  NONA WATCHED THE corridor while Clera and Kettle searched the dead for keys or anything else of use. The symbols etched into the walls pulled at the corners of her vision. Which of the sigils would collapse the tunnel Nona had no idea, but had there been even a single additional guard it would have been hard to stop them activating one and bringing the roof down. Had there been a whole barracks full of them, it would have been impossible.

  Kettle distributed the throwing stars she had recovered from the bodies of her earlier targets. Nona found a length of rope in the barracks room to replace her chain belt. She thrust her Noi-Guin sword through it and accepted two stars from the nun.

  Clera led them on, nerves showing. “I’ve no idea how you talked me into this, Nona.” She flattened herself against the wall and peered around the corner before moving on towards a flight of stone stairs. “I mean, I missed you . . . but I had a good thing going here. Sherzal and Lord Tacsis are—”

  “Vicious maniacs who would fill the Corridor with blood just to float themselves a little higher than their already lofty stations,” Kettle finished for her.

  “Well.” Clera advanced soft-footed up the stairs. “Yes.” She paused and advanced again. “But very rich.”

  Nona brought up the rear, a throwing star in each hand.

  I like your friend. Keot seemed louder in her skull than he had for some time.

  An understanding struck Nona as moments of clarity sometimes do when all the parts of a problem come momentarily into some chance alignment. When I kill and rage . . . your grip on me grows stronger.

  Only a silence where Keot should be.

  And when I show mercy or kindness you’re driven to the surface.

  “Nona!” Kettle beckoned her to the corner ahead. “Servants.” The nun reached a hand around Nona’s shoulder, the other arm around Clera, sharing her weight on the pair of them rather than her injured leg. “I’ll hide us.” Shadows rose to wrap them and although Nona still felt visible, albeit darkly shadowed, she knew that Kettle had worked the trick of hers that would deceive any casual and untrained eye into seeing nothing but perhaps a thickening and a flicker of the shade. She concealed them from the worry-faced servants who came and went. Of Sherzal’s guards there were few signs.

  Stealth is best achieved in the patience trance. Nona had conquered the clarity trance first, and finally serenity, but she had never truly mastered patience. She tried though, focusing on her mantra, an image of a green shoot just broken through the soil and waiting to grow. She found that being exhausted helped. With Kettle’s weight on her shoulder and the shadows flowing cold around her, she found a kind of patience and schooled both her breathing and her footfalls to match the palace ambience, fitting them into the spaces provided by the moan of the wind, the distant clatter of feet or shutting of doors, the sounds that underwrote each day beneath that roof, unmarked and unheard.

  They paused at a second flight of stairs.

  “We’ve been incredibly lucky so far,” Kettle whispered. “So lucky it almost feels like a trap. We can’t count on things staying this way. Whatever problem is drawing the guards off is unlikely to keep them away for long.”

  “Once I’ve got my hands on the shipheart it won’t matter,” Nona said. “Let them come.” She could feel its power even now, and Hessa’s memory promised so much more as they got closer.

  The arm with which Kettle held Nona to her stiffened a little and, after a pause, the nun spoke. “A shipheart is a dangerous thing. As dangerous to the person who holds it as to anyone they aim that power at. If we’re going to do this I think I should be the one to carry it . . .”

  “You can hardly walk!” Nona said.

  “I don’t know what it would do to you, Nona.” Kettle’s voice was tight with conflicting concerns. “There are books at Sweet Mercy that say the shipheart is too strong for mortals to get close to. It twists them.” She was
talking about Keot. Nona felt sure Kettle knew she carried a devil beneath her skin, and the nun didn’t believe her pure enough to touch a shipheart. It hurt to hear Kettle’s doubt in her. But it was probably well founded.

  “Well we’re not going to find out standing here.” Clera bumped them both back into motion.

  With Clera’s direction and Kettle’s shadows the three of them wound their way deeper into the palace, through galleries and halls so numerous that Nona wondered who used them, and whether Sherzal saw any of these grand spaces more than once a year. They crossed a small internal courtyard, like a deep sky-roofed pit in the palace, at the heart of it a lonely fountain, and came at last to a corridor where an iron gate blocked their progress.

  “Locked.” Clera ran her hands up the scroll-worked bars. “Solid.”

  Kettle sat, leg held stiffly to the side, fresh blood glistening amid the dried. Taking three heavy picks from her sleeve, she addressed the lock. Within seconds the mechanism yielded, clunking as she rotated the picks together. “Done.”

  They helped Kettle up and went on, advancing down a long lamp-lit corridor, passing many closed doors.

  “We’re getting close,” Nona said. The shipheart’s presence pushed on her, filled her, set her nerves tingling, the feeling both exciting and a little terrifying.

  “We are.” Clera shot her a look. “There’s a barracks room ahead and to the left. They say Yisht’s quarters are around here too, but I’ve not seen her since that day with the barrel.” Clera bit her lip, frowning. “And you know what? I really don’t want to see her again. Especially not when all I’ve got for protection is you two walking wounded.” She shrugged off Kettle’s arm. “We really should go back.”

  “We’re going to get our shipheart!” Nona helped Kettle on alone.

  “Sherzal’s guards are scared of Yisht.” Clera’s voice came from behind them now. She wasn’t moving. “They say she came back changed.”