Sherzal rotated each of the wheels to the numbers she had named.
A grinding noise started up behind Ruli and she turned with a start. A rectangular section of what had seemed to be tiled floor was now drawing back under the rest to reveal a set of stairs.
“The wonders of our forefathers!” Sherzal clapped her hands with enthusiasm. “But of course you two girls know all about that.” She picked up one of the lanterns from the reading table and began her descent even before the floor had fully retracted. “Come along! Quickly now. It will slide back on you if you dawdle.”
The guards followed, Jula and Ruli prodded along between them, Safira bringing up the rear.
The stairway led down on a square spiral and the turns kept coming. The depth of the emperor’s cellars seemed remarkable, even to novices who had lived with the cave-riddled thickness of the Rock of Faith beneath them.
Eventually they emerged into a surprisingly dry chamber with no hint of cave about it. Sherzal turned to face them and raised her lantern. “You’ll like this.” She cleared her throat. “Lights.”
Across the ceiling rectangles of white light flickered into being. Others appeared along the length of two corridors leading off in opposite directions. Nona had never seen illumination so steady or so white. It wrought strange changes in the colours it shone upon.
“Come!” Sherzal led off again, her gown billowing with each long stride.
They passed doorways left and right, opening onto square white rooms, echoingly empty, or sometimes dark rooms, or rooms lit by flickers. Occasionally Ruli would glimpse something within. An object covered with a sheet—a chest or cabinet perhaps—a section of black metal, perforated with circular holes, broken from part of some larger structure maybe, a toothed wheel of a metal too orangey to be gold; a mass of wires emerging from a silver-grey sphere . . . did they wriggle, or was that a fluttering of the light? While Ruli marvelled, Nona was put in mind of the inner sanctum at the Hope Church in White Lake. What had Preacher Mickel said? The Sis build their homes over the best of what remains in the Corridor. The emperors themselves built their palace above the Ark and bind the Academy to them with its power.
“Wait.” Sherzal held up a hand and stopped in a section of corridor that seemed no different from any other. “You’ll like this too, novices. My father showed it to my brother and me long ago . . . before our sister was born.” She tossed her knife out in front of her. It jerked in the air, becoming a shower of bright pieces that fell to the ground in front of one of the dark doorways. A surprisingly musical tinkle accompanied the destruction. “You’ll like it less if you disappoint me. It can be used with more subtlety to unpleasant effect. Well . . . unpleasant for the person being peeled. It’s quite fun to watch.” She went to the wall and tapped out a rapid, changing beat. A panel slid back and she pressed her finger upon a glowing disc inside. “Safe now!” Even so she motioned the guardsmen through before her.
Ruli glanced to the left as she stepped over the pieces of Sherzal’s knife. A dark room, the same on the right. Just as her eyes slid away a flicker of light offered a confusion of hard lines and stark shadows. A circle? Nona made her friend’s gaze linger for one more heartbeat, piercing the darkness with Ruli’s shadow-work. A great ring, taller than a man and leaning against the rear wall?
Sherzal stopped again ten yards on and waited for them all to pass before tapping the same pattern on the wall. For a moment the corridor behind them filled with faint lines as if a hundred glass blades were criss-crossing it. They faded from sight in moments. “That annoying friend of yours can do something similar, no? But in the days when our people built the Ark we knew how to make mere mechanisms that would do as much! Our forebears could take a few cogs and gears, mix in some wires and lightning, and have a device that could do anything!”
An echo of Nona’s hatred for the woman curled Ruli’s lip. Which of them clenched her hands into fists neither could tell.
Patience, Nona said, as much to herself as to Ruli. I will find you.
Sherzal resumed the lead. A hundred yards on, the corridor terminated in a white door. Safira came to join the emperor’s sister at the front. Sherzal stepped forward and the door slid away to reveal a large white-walled chamber. Six white doors stood spaced around the perimeter. A huge circular silver door had been set into the floor at the centre of the chamber, its single hinge thicker than a man’s leg. Around it stood a trio of the emperor’s guards, their breastplates enamelled in green and gold.
“If you would.” Sherzal nodded towards Safira. “Oh, wait!” She raised her voice and turned towards the three men. “Unless you’d like to join my cause and pledge to my service, of course. I’m much more agreeable to work for than my brother.”
The men drew their swords together.
“Oh well.” Sherzal motioned Safira on. Four of her guards followed the woman out towards the centre of the chamber.
* * *
• • •
NONA BLINKED AWAY the vision as the blood began to spray. Safira was every bit as dangerous as Kettle. She settled back into her own flesh, surprised by how dark the night had grown.
Nona steeled her will and summoned her flaw-blades. Even in this tranquil garden just a stone’s throw from the walls of the emperor’s palace she could now hear the clash and roar of the battle in the streets. Her sisters would be crossing blades with the enemy. She felt Kettle’s urgent query along their thread-bond and closed it off with a shake of her head.
The iron casket surrendered before her blades and the Noi-Guin shipheart rolled out onto the grass. No part of her wanted to touch it. Nona remembered Abbess Glass, her hand above the candle flame, flesh melting from her bones, refusing to withdraw despite the agony.
“Damnation.” She reached out and picked up the glowing ball. Immediately its cold fire ran along her bones and the whispers began inside her skull. Touching the shipheart didn’t hurt. It was more like being forced to remember being hurt.
Rather than climb out one-handed Nona scowled at the wall between her and the palace. With the shipheart to augment her rock-work the bricks and mortar surrendered in moments. She swirled the rising dust around her, lifting it behind her like the wings of a dragon. Theatre was her only real key to the palace if she wasn’t prepared to kill her way in.
Crucical’s ring of guardsmen had tightened so much that their backs were literally against the wall. High above them the light of a burning city danced across battlements. The palace, while fortified, was far from being a fortress. The city walls and the emperor’s armies were his defence. When the Scithrowl came against his home it would not take them long to force an entry.
Half a dozen guards came forward from their positions, more starting to advance to either side. The officer among them, a gerant standing at least eight foot tall, levelled her spear at Nona’s approach. The gleaming point trembled as the fringes of the shipheart’s aura rooted out the woman’s private terrors.
“You can stop where you stand or die a step in front of it!” Sweat beaded her dark brow but duty bound the officer to the spot. Her subordinates, however, took several paces back.
“I am Sister Cage, and this is a shipheart.” Nona’s augmented wind-work let her voice carry all along the line, overwriting the sounds of the as-yet-unseen battle. “It belongs to Emperor Crucical, and the Ancestor has bidden me to bring it from the Convent of Sweet Mercy to aid him.” She pressed with her marjal empathy, willing them to accept her word, and took another step forward. “Will any among you take this burden from me and deliver it to the emperor in my place?” She held it out, letting the wind carry the sound of battle to the walls, making it seem even closer.
The gerant guard ground her teeth and furrowed her brow, proving resistant to suggestion. “I don’t know you, sister. I cannot admit you without someone to vouch for—”
“I know her!” A shout from the walls above. �
��And you know me. Let her in, Kerla!”
Nona squinted up at the walls. Regol waved at her. “You know Regol?” she asked.
“Everyone knows Regol.” The woman stepped back with a relieved expression. “Meet her at the Scholars’ Door!” she roared up to Regol. “She’s your responsibility!” She pointed a blunt finger to the left. “Small door with stone scrolls above the lintel. About a hundred yards that way.”
The word went along the line and all the guards cleared out of Nona’s path. She walked rather than ran, concentrating on resisting the shipheart.
* * *
• • •
“WHAT IN ALL the hells is th—” Regol’s jaw snapped shut and he backed away with the guardsmen behind the Scholars’ Door. He paled as the shipheart reached out to twist his mind.
“You have to stay away,” Nona said.
“Thanks for the advice.” Regol pressed his back against a column and stayed where he was. After a moment he found his smile and forced it onto a white face beaded with sweat. “I don’t think I have any choice in the matter. Damn near soiled myself!”
Farther back among the antechamber’s columns five guardsmen huddled together, spears ready. Two of them were weeping. Nona felt like crying herself. That or screaming to drown out the voices echoing in her fracturing mind. The power that the shipheart gave her was incredible but her skin was already crawling as if a dozen devils were following their separate paths across her.
“How are you here?” The question escaped Nona despite her gritted teeth and the urgency of her mission. It shamed her to admit to herself that she hadn’t once thought of Regol in the past two days. If she had, she would have expected to find him with the Caltess fighters rather than within the palace. And all Partnis Reeve’s fighters had probably been conscripted to join the force at the Amber Gate. For a moment the image of Denam in full armour flickered across her mind. If anyone could give the Scithrowl pause it would be that ten-foot stack of muscle and hate. “Why aren’t you with the others?”
“You know me.” Regol’s smile twisted. “Darling of the Sis. Everyone wanted me in their personal guard. I had to choose which invitation from which lord’s lady I wanted to accept.”
Even before he had finished speaking Nona knew that she would be asking no more questions. She had to get to the others. “A blue room. A room with blue light. I need to get there!”
Regol frowned. “I know it. Follow me.”
Nona followed, her pace even, the shipheart held in her two hands, as far out in front of her as she could reach. Its light infected the illumination of crystal lamps hung on golden chains, turning each corridor into something otherworldly and sending straying servants back screaming into the rooms they’d looked out from. She fixed her gaze on Regol’s retreating back and walked on.
He’s betraying you with some Sis whore.
The voice in Nona’s head was hers, but she didn’t own it.
What you had together was precious, sacred, holy. A different voice. Also hers. Also not hers.
Tear out his heart!
Nona felt her flaw-blades spring into being and a liquid rage replaced her blood. Her eyes fixated on the spot between Regol’s shoulder blades where Sister Tallow used to instruct her to sink the knife for best effect. She tore her gaze away and a glance at her hands confirmed her fears. Both were stained with devils of her own making, writhing in the shipheart’s glow.
She choked down a horrified laugh. To pass Abbess Wheel’s Spirit-test and take the black of a Holy Sister, every novice had to be able to recite the thirteen methods for purging a devil and to give a detailed account of how the victim should be put to death, and how their corpse should be disposed of. The method depended on the nature of the possession and whether the devil was driven from the victim successfully or not. She’d not worn the black a week and here she was, unholy and unclean, fit only for killing.
Nona! A fresh voice shook her from her contemplation. This was a voice she didn’t own. One she knew. Urgent. Desperate even. Nona! Where are you?
Nona let the thread-bond take her. Anything to get away from the shipheart. She left just enough of herself behind to keep her upright, legs moving.
* * *
• • •
KETTLE SPRINTED ACROSS a terra-cotta expanse, pushing herself to the limit. Ahead flames leapt, roaring from a shattered roof. She raced along a blazing rafter, too swift to burn. Bursting clear of the fire, she ran on with reckless haste. Apple needed her. She leapt from the slope of one tiled roof, across a broad street, and crashed into a roof on the opposite side. Hunska speed carried her up the slope, scattering broken tiles beneath her heels. She crested the roof ridge and before her lay the wideness of the King’s Road, crammed with Scithrowl warriors from one side to the other, their numbers stretching back a hundred yards to the shattered walls of Verity and the ocean of their countrymen still massed beyond. Their howls and screams shook the air, resonating in Kettle’s chest, an inhuman noise, at once terrifying, desperate, exhilarating.
The emperor’s lines stood ten ranks thick but the Scithrowl’s surging advance had isolated pockets of defenders. One such group lay beneath her, now twenty yards within the Scithrowl horde, trapped against the wall of some lord’s town house. The stranded defenders included a score of empire soldiers and all of Abbess Wheel’s party. Kettle’s gaze anchored itself on a glimpse of long red hair, the owner on the ground between Leeni and Alata, who fought like demons to clear the space around her.
“Apple!”
Without hesitation, Kettle threw herself down the far side of the roof and jumped from the guttering, trailing shadows. She drew her sword and dagger as she fell, dropping deeper into the moment than any but a full-blood hunska can.
Kettle’s descent became a flying kick that broke a man’s neck and she rode him to the ground, cutting the throat of a Scithrowl to the left and taking the head of the one to the right. Before that head bounced its way from chest to back to ground among the tight-packed enemy, Kettle had struck half a dozen more blows and six of her foe were starting to pump their life’s blood from the wounds that would kill them. She caught glimpses of her sisters, a face here, spattered with blood and twisted with rage, another pale and serene. A novice bleeding so heavily from a head wound that Kettle couldn’t even recognise her but swinging her sword all the same. Nona knew Ara would never forgive her for having her left at the convent, but part of her rejoiced that her friend wasn’t here and that she didn’t have to watch her die.
Wrapped in hunska speed, Kettle sidestepped a lazy knife thrust and leaned away from a swinging blade. A series of kicks and trips sent four more Scithrowl to the floor, clutching their spears. Kettle swirled the darkness around her, lent it teeth, and poisoned it with fear. Lacerated by unseen edges and filled with horror, the nearest of the enemy threw themselves back, clearing space.
“Apple!” Kettle was on her knees at Apple’s side. The nun’s habit glistened above her ribs.
Apple reached for Kettle’s cheek with bloodstained fingers. “I knew you would come.”
Kettle’s hands were busy tearing the stubborn cloth to expose the wound. A spear thrust, a crimson hole in Apple’s pale flesh. A hole that bubbled and sucked. Kettle’s horror tore through Nona with such ferocity that she was nearly driven back to her body in the palace halls. The Grey Sister let none of it show on her face but worked calmly, maintaining her peripheral awareness of the battle around her.
“It got your lung.” Kettle took Apple’s hand from her face and set it to the wound. “Pinch it closed!”
Leeni staggered back, spraying blood, and Kettle lunged back to her feet, seizing up her weapons again. Three huge Scithrowl with large round shields and short but heavy axes pursued Leeni’s retreat. Kettle dived between their legs, cutting tendons and muscle on her way through until she found herself in a forest of Scithrowl. Rage bubbled at
the edges of her serenity. Apple lay dying. Apple! A gerant warrior tried to stamp on her while on all sides others changed their grips on their spears, preparing to stab down at her as she rolled and twisted.
A heavy boot kicked the sword from her hand. Kettle tried to pull venomed pins from her inner pocket but had to abandon the attempt to writhe between the first two of many spear thrusts. The Scithrowl hammered down at her in the same manner that peasants pound grain with milling poles.
In the midst of Kettle’s thoughts Nona could see that the situation offered no hope for survival.
Give me your body. Nona reached out along Kettle’s limbs, seeking to drop the dagger she still clenched.
Save her, Nona. And in a show of ultimate trust Kettle surrendered her will entirely.
Nona abandoned the dagger and bunched Kettle’s hands into fists. In Nona’s own two hands she held a power so great that it was killing her, driving every talent she had past its maximum potential, burning her up. She drove forth the flaw-blades that had been part of her life for so long, not from her own flesh but from Kettle’s, and made of them not many blades but one from each hand, both as long as a great sword. As they sprang from her flesh the nun’s blood painted their invisible length, giving them form.
Nona used Kettle’s breathtaking speed to lift her from the ground, flinging her arms wide and spinning as she rose. The Scithrowl fell to pieces on all sides: chain mail, shields, spears, swords, all sliced apart. Kettle cut a broad path back to Apple, restraining her butchery only when Alata came into view, battling several of the foe.
For thirty long seconds under Nona’s guidance Kettle spent her reserves of speed with reckless abandon, piling Scithrowl bodies in broken drifts. Behind her Sisters Tallow, Iron, and Rock organised a fighting perimeter. Even Abbess Wheel took a place, wielding her sword with savage glee and a degree of skill that reminded her flock that she had once passed the Blade-test. They fought in darkness now. The sun had gone down on a day that would be long remembered, though it seemed unlikely that any of them would see another dawn.
Holy Sister Page 27
