Nona ran the Path and all her hurts were left behind her in the very first step. Her wounds, her exhaustion, even the ache of Darla’s death, something small behind her, growing pale and faint. Each step flooded her with an energy so fierce, so exhilarating, that it overwrote her, became her, replaced her centre.
In the end only Darla brought her back. Nona would have run the Path forever. Something so right couldn’t be denied. But for the fact of her friend’s death diminishing behind her. Something like that couldn’t simply be thrown away, discarded, abandoned as if it held no worth or meaning. And with a howl Nona turned in a place where there could be no turning, and fell back into the world.
She hit the ground and only with effort managed to stop falling. The world held too many possibilities and her body wanted to explore them, wanted to flow like the smoke, dance like the flames licking around her, follow gravity’s pull deep into the ground; wanted to run as she had run on the Path, not in one direction but in all of them at once. Aspects of Nona began to separate, some to answer the horses’ distress, some to explore the smoke, others to play with fire.
A faint noise penetrated the vastness of Nona’s wonder and she turned towards it, towards the black carriage, wrapped in smoke. A figure clung to its side. Ara!
Nona drew a breath as if breaking the surface of some bottomless lake. It hurt, as if her lungs were wrapped in broken glass, but she had been schooled in pain of late. Nona drew the breath and drew back into herself the possibilities, the myriad choices, until at last she was focused, one, whole, shuddering with power.
She approached the carriage, suddenly aware of the fragility of everything around her, even the flagstones beneath her feet. In the past she had thrust the Path’s power from her rather than keep it. She had thrown it as heat when she brought fire to the forest outside Verity, and as lightning against the Noi-Guin. Now, though, she turned it inward, running it through muscle and bone, owning it as strength, not just the kind that moves mountains but the kind that preserves the flesh doing the moving. Sister Pan had explained that one at length. The strength to punch through walls is of little use if the arm you punch with shatters before the rock does.
Nona moved behind the carriage. She inched her hands forward with caution. Too much pressure too swiftly and her palms would break through the timber before her and she would be elbow-deep in splintered wood. Hands met lacquered panelling, pressure mounted. And Nona’s bare feet began to slide across the flagstones.
“No!”
Armoured in the Path’s energies, Nona kicked at the stones beneath her feet, pulverizing the rock, excavating small craters to push against. The boards beneath her palms creaked and the huge carriage stole into motion. Nona kept up the pressure, feet scraping the flagstones, shattering several more.
The front of the carriage hit the stable doors at a brisk walking pace and they shuddered aside, billowing smoke out into the courtyard. Sherzal’s carriage emerged, wheels clattering, thick white smoke all around, terrified horses streaming past on both sides.
The archers lining the walls hesitated, uncertain what they were dealing with. Sherzal’s carriage carried on past those of the Sis, lining the walls to either side. With every yard Nona imparted more speed to it. The palace gates, more accurately described as fortress gates, would of course bring its progress to an abrupt and devastating halt.
The first arrows began to hammer into the carriage. Those inside had already made efforts to reinforce the shutters with seating. On the outside Ara was a popular target, but even with only one hand free she managed to deflect those arrows that would otherwise have hit her.
With the carriage moving at a good speed, Nona let it run and sprinted to get ahead of it. Every archer on her side of the courtyard took the opportunity to let fly at a clear target and their arrows hissed around her, breaking on the flagstones, hammering into the carriage’s sides, or finding her flesh. The same energies that allowed Nona’s body to contain and use the Path’s strength also resisted arrowheads. The arrows ricocheted from her as if she were a statue, leaving just pinpricks.
Feeling the Path-energies begin to ebb and fade, and with Sherzal’s carriage rumbling along behind her, Nona threw herself at the palace gates. Her final leap took her six feet off the ground and her shoulder hit the heavy timbers with a bone-jarring impact. The doors stopped her dead and she slid into a heap at their base. Arrows hammered into the timber on both sides, several hitting her in the back.
“Too light,” Nona muttered. It didn’t matter how strong you were, nobody could knock a man down by throwing a feather at him.
She stood, the carriage only twenty yards behind her now. The gates’ huge locking bar had not been lowered but they were still held by a series of bolts driven into the stonework above and below by some system of cables anchored across the inner surface. Nona lacked both the time and the reach to rip it all clear.
How to open the gates when her own strength would just throw her aside? Even if she had the time to dig footholds Nona thought that they would probably give way before the bolts surrendered.
Academia lessons came to Nona’s aid where her Blade and Path education kept silent. Inertia keeps even the lightest of things stationary in the face of great forces—you just have to act fast enough. Nona punched the left gate a foot from the edge where it met the right one. The speed of the action allowed no time for her to be pushed back. Instead her fist burst through the timbers and she stood with her arm elbow-deep in a splintered hole, her fist just emerging into the wind that scoured the outer surface. Nona slammed herself forward until her shoulder met the timbers and her elbow cleared the far side of the door. She bent her arm and clung on. More arrows studded the woodwork around her. More hit her back and fell away leaving just shallow wounds.
Now, anchored by the thickness of the gates themselves, Nona set her other hand, palm out, to the other gate. And pushed. When she punched the door had no time to move and so she punched through. Now she pushed with slow, inexorable force. Anchored to the left-hand gate, she couldn’t move back. Instead the gate had to take all the pressure. She curled around, setting her shoulder and hip to the other gate, using all the core strength of her body, magnified a thousand times by the fading energies taken from the Path. Behind her the rumbling clatter of the carriage grew ever closer.
With squeals of protest the bolts above and below began to fail, pieces of stone shooting away, shards of wood as long as an arm breaking free as the housings gave way. A shadow loomed. Time had run out. Sherzal’s carriage smashed into the gates, Nona caught between its hammer blow and the gates’ anvil.
A moment of darkness, of light, of whirling motion, screams and broken wood. Nona found herself on the ground with something huge rushing above her.
47
THE ROAD DOWN from the side valley that housed Sherzal’s palace was a long curving sweep of modest gradient. It ended at the highway that threaded the Grand Pass.
Despite the arrow transfixing her left calf Ara had managed to scramble on top of the carriage, climb to the heavily damaged front, and find the braking levers. The slope was too steep for the brakes to fully arrest the carriage’s motion but they helped to tame it.
Steering proved to be a different matter. The carriage steered itself by scraping along the rocky wall where engineers had cut into the valley’s side to make the road. It was a process that removed a new section of the carriage’s side every twenty yards or so and threatened, at every collision with a larger outcropping, to send them all veering across the narrowness of the road to pitch over the drop into whatever heart-stopping fall the darkness hid.
Eventually, with about two-thirds of the mile-long journey to the pass road complete, the ruins of Sherzal’s grand carriage lurched sideways and came to a halt with the front right wheel hanging over an unknown drop. Ara stood panting, braced against the brake lever.
A minute’s work saw most of the carriage’s passengers disembarked, or carried off. Two older men h
ad been killed by arrows that found their way past shutters and seat bases. A matronly woman in a voluminous dress had been shot through the shoulder, the arrow still in place, its steel head emerging from her back. Regol, Kettle, and Ara kept close around the abbess.
* * *
• • •
NONA CRAWLED FROM beneath the wreckage of the carriage, her arms aching, legs scraped and torn. She had lunged for the axle and let it drag her, with only the fading power of the Path to shield her from harm.
“Nona!” Ara hobbled across to help her up. Behind Ara Nona could see the distant flames licking up above Sherzal’s walls. She hoped the conflagration would spread and gut the place from lowest cellar to tallest tower.
“Where’s Clera?” Nona asked looking over the survivors.
“She never got in,” Ara said.
“I called to her.” Kettle pressed her mouth into a speculative pucker. “She backed away into the smoke.”
“But—” It made no sense. The abbess would have taken her back. Nona knew it.
“She made a choice, Nona.” Abbess Glass spoke in a low voice. “She helped you when you needed help, but she fancied her chances better with the emperor’s sister.”
Nona looked around her. Starlight washed the roadway through a wind-torn hole in the clouds. It lit the ruined carriage, one side torn away, the roof sagging, and shone red across a score of Sis in ballgowns and formalwear, ill-suited for walking the mountains. Many bore injuries, including Kettle, Ara, and herself. Her gaze settled on Regol, the only fighter among them fit for combat, save for Melkir.
“My lady.” He executed a half-bow, showing her that same old smile, even now.
She found herself suddenly aware of how tattered and inadequate her smock was, the wind playing it around her, and how filthy everything beneath it lay. “Regol.” She had meant to tell him she was a novice rather than a lady, but she wasn’t sure she was either right at that moment. And with his gaze upon her she was no longer sure which she would rather be.
“Every time I dine somewhere that you are also a guest, Nona, I find myself attacked.” He rubbed his jaw as if remembering a punch. “By the same woman!”
“Safira?” Kettle stepped forward. “Is she . . .”
“I punched her pretty hard,” Regol said. “But she’ll get up again. I can’t claim it as a fair fight, though.”
“Are we safe?” Terra Mensis broke into their circle, cradling her injured wrist. She seemed to have picked up new injuries in the carriage and sported a livid bruise across most of the left side of her face.
“I rather doubt it,” Abbess Glass replied. “Sherzal will send her soldiers after us. How soon depends on how bad a fire we left her with, but I can’t see us outrunning them.”
As if to answer her the sky cleared further and beneath the starlight the whole curve of the road could be seen, leading back to the broken gates of the palace. A troop of perhaps fifty soldiers was advancing along it at speed. They’d covered half the distance already.
* * *
• • •
NONA SET HER back to the rocks beside the road, as spent as she had ever been. Yisht had called friends a weakness. The pain that Hessa’s death, and now Darla’s, had caused her was very different from that of the Harm, but it was deeper and longer-lasting. A weakness, though? It had been friendship that had Kettle follow her half the length of the empire, friendship that had Clera spirit her out of the dungeons of the Noi-Guin, and if she had to die she would rather do it here under the scarlet heavens with her sisters of the Red and the Grey, free and fighting, than any alternative she could imagine.
Kettle stood, throwing aside the halves of the arrow she’d taken from Ara’s calf, and came to stand beside Nona. Ara followed, testing her weight on her tightly bound leg with a grimace. “Ouch.” She leaned back beside Nona, the wind spreading golden hair across the rocks.
“Nice dress,” Nona said.
“Thanks. Terra helped me choose it. It was stupidly expensive.”
Regol came to stand before them. His dark hair swept by the Corridor wind, he glanced across at the approaching troops. All around them the rocks lay red with starlight. He turned his gaze upon Nona and suddenly it felt as if the focus moon were blazing, making her sweat. “Will you hold the road with me, sister?” he asked. “I’ve wanted to see you fight again.”
“I’m not a sister, just a novice.” The moment the words left her she felt stupid. Was that the best she could think of to say? And why did it even matter with fifty swords approaching?
Regol grinned. He always grinned. “You’re my sister of the cage.”
A chill ran the length of Nona’s spine despite the heat of his regard. How did he know she would be Sister Cage, a secret shared only with Ara and Mistress Path?
“We were both born from Giljohn’s cage after all!” He laughed, breaking any tension, and turned towards the palace, swinging his sword in a figure of eight.
Abbess Glass stood revealed as Regol moved aside. She too was smiling, albeit a smile tinged with sadness. “You three have done astonishing things to bring us so close to an impossible success. Astonishing.” She reached out her hands and Nona took them, Kettle and Ara laying theirs over hers. “But the world is not changed by individual acts of violence, no matter how good the cause. Neither can it truly be changed by the power of the Path. The greatest of the Mystic Sisters all knew this. However much strength is concentrated in a single Martial Sister, however far the reach of a Sister of Discretion, it is overreached by the strength and reach of the masses. You may be rocks but humanity is the tide and you only have to stand upon the sand to see how that contest concludes.
“In the end it is not whether we live or die here, but how the message echoes through the empire and beyond. We are not leaders, merely servants. Even the emperor’s power is illusion. Ultimately the will of the people drives us, as inevitably as the advance of the ice. And the people are, each and every one of them, the children of the Ancestor, holy, chosen. We have shown them Sherzal’s true heart and they will judge her actions. Those who cannot slow the pursuit must flee. They must scatter across the slopes and we must trust that some will find their way to safety and speak of what happened here.”
Abbess Glass stepped closer, staring into each of their faces in turn, her eyes kind. “I’ve always prided myself on being able to look ahead, on being able to see the consequences of actions. It’s a meagre skill perhaps, compared to the talents that the Ancestor has placed in you girls, but it has served me well until this night. But you should know, the greatest joy to those who see the future is that life remains full of surprises. And you have all surprised me.”
“Holy Mother . . .” Kettle’s voice grew too thick with emotion to continue.
“I had a son once.” The abbess smiled, remembering. “I couldn’t have loved him more. But I never had a daughter. I would have been proud to call any of you my own.” She lifted her hands, forestalling any embrace. “You are my children, children of the Ancestor, daughters of the Rock of Faith, daughters of Sweet Mercy. I expect you to meet your enemy with ferocity and make a good account of yourselves.”
Nona turned towards the road where Regol stood ready, behind him a thin line of the Sis with Lord Carvon Jotsis at the centre. Sherzal’s soldiers were close, close enough for her to hear the tramp of their boots as they jogged forward, eight abreast. Each man was chain-armoured, each bearing shield and spear. The stars still watched, their light gleaming on steel.
Beside the carriage Agika and Seldom led the elderly and infirm in prayer. Terra Mensis stood, having cut away the singed length of her skirts. Clutching the knife awkwardly in her left hand, she went to stand beside her father, tears in her eyes, ready to follow the others who were already making for the main road. Soon the story of Sherzal’s treason would be spreading along the Grand Pass in both directions.
“Something’s coming . . .” Nona said as Kettle led the way to stand by Regol.
“
Well . . . yes,” Ara said, hefting her sword.
“No. Something else.” Nona glanced out into the night, down across the slopes, dark and beyond her seeing, edged with the faint crimson starlight. On high the wind tore the clouds still further and the Hope blazed forth, adding its light to the world. Nona strained her senses. She heard . . . footsteps? A beat at least. Something that had been growing for a while but that hadn’t registered above all the loud emotion. Suddenly it came to her.
“It’s a sh—”
The cracking of rock drowned her out. With no warning a great wedge of the mountainside slid down across the road ahead. In just seconds it was over save for a few dozen loose boulders that continued to roll away down the slopes, crashing and bouncing into the distance. Nona watched in confusion as cascades of loose stones died to trickles. An untold weight of bedrock had slumped a score of yards, obliterating the road and the soldiers upon it.
Everyone from the carriage just stood and stared, unsure of what they had seen. Even as they watched the failing starlight stole away the details. Only Nona turned from the scene. Only Nona looked behind them to see a grime-covered hand clasp the edge of the road. A moment later the rest of the person followed, hauling itself up one-handed to stand and return Nona’s stare. The figure clasped something glowing to its chest. Something spherical, the size of a human head, lit from within by a deep violet light. The glow from it was so deep that it seemed as if it might be the edge of some blaze to challenge the focus moon if only the eye could follow it off the far end of the rainbow’s spectrum.
“Zole.”
It was the ice-triber, her habit as stained and tattered as Nona’s smock, her face as impassive and unreadable as ever.
Beside Nona, Ara turned, then Kettle and the abbess.
“You did that,” Nona said.
“How?” The abbess seemed too stunned for more than one word.
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