“It matters to me. Now.” Nona took Zole’s cool grey hands in her own, filthy with mud and blood. “You’re leaving us. I know that. I don’t know where you’re going. To join the Missing maybe. But you’re going. And it doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re my friend, Zole. I would die for you. The least you can do is give me the moon.”
Nona wasn’t sure if she imagined the brief and tiny curl of Zole’s lips, but if the smile was imagined the order was not.
“Let Nona guide the moon.”
29
HOLY CLASS
THE SOUND OF a battle can be described as a roar, and sometimes it truly is. When a thousand warriors charge, a roar precedes them and swallows up all other noise. But in between charge and counter-charge there is the screaming of those too wounded to hold their peace and not yet close enough to crossing the Path that they fall silent. There is the clash of weapons, most often on shields, for tight-packed conflict is an ugly, graceless thing and there are few parries made. There are the desperate cries for aid and there is the sobbing of the lost.
Kettle heard all these things. She saw a forest of legs and bodies rising around her, and at her back the palace wall. She saw the black sky above. Here and there crimson stars shone through the wind-torn smoke. Of the Hope there was no sign.
She didn’t hurt so much as ache, her pain a dull throb beneath the blanket of exhaustion that smothered her. She wouldn’t think of Apple. Instead she left those raw voids in her mind untouched, her thoughts skittering around them. The Scithrowl sounded very close. She would not have to avoid thinking of Apple for too long.
* * *
• • •
IT DID NOT seem that anything short of the Ancestor in person, stepping out of thin air and clad in glory, could silence a pitched battle. But when, without warning, the focus moon lit around them, all the many thousands locked in combat paused in astonishment.
The focus, not due for hours yet, had not crept upon them, rising smoothly to its blazing climax. One moment it had been dark, the next they were plunged into the fierce heat of the moon. Every flame looked pale now—all the city’s fires, the torches and battle-lanterns amid the throng, the flame-serpents coiling around Adoma’s throne platform, all flickering ghosts of themselves. Those closest to death knew with certainty that they were now looking across the Path.
In that following moment, when one soldier might think to take advantage of his enemy’s distraction, a second wonder happened. In the space of three heartbeats the moon dimmed to a dull crimson disc on which the eye could rest. And every eye rested there. This was a wonder past the skill of any mage.
Kettle raised her head, an action she had thought beyond her. She pushed with her legs, sliding her back against the emperor’s walls, rising from the dead and wounded heaped about her, and struggled up, drawn by a communal intake of breath all around her. Across the face of the moon something was being written as if by a dark finger. Two words in black on red. Written in the Scithrowl tongue.
Go home.
A muttering spread across the length of the King’s Road and out to the fields beyond. The literate among Adoma’s horde sharing the meaning.
Far back among her forces Adoma rose from her throne, a distant figure gleaming crimson. The battle-queen’s words reached Kettle as if she were standing at her side, reverberating across the intervening yards through the art of the wind-workers ringing her seat. Few among the emperor’s forces understood her words but the tone left no doubt that her message was one of defiance.
“The Scithrowl do not run from lights and tricks! This is our home now. Before me lies my palace.” Power lay behind those words. Hers was a voice to stir a heart to violence, to wake pride in any chest. The army around her had claimed hundreds of Corridor miles in the battle-queen’s name. They wouldn’t run. Not beneath her gaze and with victory just a spear’s throw ahead of them. The Scithrowl warriors began to raise their weapons and find their voice.
The rising cheer faltered as the moon went wholly dark, leaving twice a hundred thousand eyes night-blind. Kettle cursed herself for letting her training slip and allowing herself to lose an edge. Apple would scold—
The moon lit again, though not to full focus. A brilliant light fell around Adoma’s throne, filling half the width of the road. The intensity rose from dazzling to blinding so swiftly that there was almost not enough time to look away. A moment later the searing circle of light had gone, replaced by a general illumination bringing the day to Verity’s night.
Kettle blinked away afterimages and tried to see what had happened. She heard the screaming before she saw the source. All around the fringes of the area where the brilliance had risen, Scithrowl were burning. The screams came from farther back where warriors rolled around the pain of their scalded flesh but were not actually on fire. In the place where Adoma’s platform had been borne on the shoulders of a hundred men there was nothing. Just a black circle twenty yards across. No trace of the platform, of the throne, of the people upon it or beneath it. Even their smoke seemed to have been burned from the air.
The moon dimmed and the words returned.
Go home.
And everywhere the Scithrowl started to run.
* * *
• • •
IN THE ARK chamber silence reigned. Nona had controlled the moon by voicing her desires and using her fingers to place and size the focus on the image before them. She had watched the results through Kettle’s eyes. It seemed wrong to see the death of a queen and so many of her subjects as a flash of light that could be covered by a fist and have the ant-sized survivors run noiselessly from the fringes of the blackened circle left behind.
“You should have killed them all,” Clera said. “While they were in one place. They’ll scatter now. You can’t use the moon to hunt down thousands of small bands roaming the countryside.”
Nona stepped back from the image and looked around at her friends. Ruli still hugging her injured hand. Jula red-eyed, forehead furrowed with concentration. Ara slumped, breath labouring but watching even so. Joeli stood amazed, as if she had forgotten where she was or that she was bound, a traitor to the emperor whose palace they stood beneath. Tarkax watched Nona, his dark eyes unreadable. And Zole . . . Zole stood tall, apart from them all though she was within arms’ reach, her head cocked as if she were listening to music that no one else could hear.
“Why didn’t you kill them all?” Jula asked.
Nona frowned. “I had thought Abbess Glass made me promise to take the Black and become a Holy Sister because she knew it would change Wheel’s mind about me. That was part of it. But the abbess rarely did something with only one goal or said anything with just one meaning.” Nona looked down at her habit, sticky with blood. “At Sweet Mercy they made a weapon of me. They honed every skill into a sharp edge. They put a sword in my hand, because there will always be foes who must be opposed, always violence that must be met with violence.
“But that was never the heart of Sweet Mercy. The shipheart wasn’t the foundation of the convent. It was always the faith. Always the notion that all men and women are our brothers and our sisters. And that faith doesn’t end with borders. It doesn’t care about heresies used to divide us, or whether you speak your prayers to a white star, or to the fields and forests and stones.
“Abbess Glass spoke to me on the day she died. She told me that when she lost her child, at first she took every novice at Sweet Mercy as her own, to fill that hole, the emptiness only a mother can know. But the Ancestor taught her not to be so narrow. She came to understand that the children before her, those she could see, those the Church gave into her hands, were no more or less important than any other. She saw that all of us are children, no matter how many years we might have walked through.
“She taught this to us every day. Even Sister Wheel taught it to us despite herself, if you listened hard enough. It’s wr
itten in the Book of the Ancestor and no matter who speaks the words or how they try to twist them . . . the truth is there.
“Abbess Glass wanted me to take the Black because she wanted the moon to be wielded by a Holy Sister. Not as a weapon but as a tool. As the healer might use the knife, sometimes to cut, but ultimately to heal.”
Clera looked astonished. “But they’ll just come back. The ice is closing. There’s not enough room or food. Someone has to die. Lots of someones. Sister Rule taught us that in our first year at convent. The point is that it not be us who dies!”
Nona looked around the room once more. The others were looking at her as if she were some new creature standing in a friend’s shoes.
“Maybe Sister Rule will have to learn a new lesson to teach.”
* * *
• • •
THEY LEFT THE chamber at Nona’s insistence. Tarkax carried Ara up the steps since she lacked the strength for the climb, and Nona hobbled up behind half-wishing that she had someone to carry her. More than half-wishing it.
In the circular chamber above, bathed equally in the auras of the four shiphearts spaced around the walls, Zole employed her marjal healing. It had always been one of her least developed skills, but with the power of four Old Stones buzzing through her she worked swiftly and well. Ara’s lung repaired itself and her flesh knitted together. Nona’s thigh and shoulder wounds sealed, the muscles rejoining beneath. Ruli’s wrist grew straight, the toxins beneath her nails neutralized.
“What are we going to do with Joeli?” Ruli grabbed the bound girl with her newly healed hand.
“She killed Darla,” Clera said. “Doesn’t she deserve to die?”
“I didn’t!” Joeli protested, her pretty face ugly with fear. “I wanted her to run!”
“That’s a lie!” Ara roared, suddenly furious.
“But . . . I took Sister Apple’s truth pill!”
Ara shook her head violently. “Your father paid to have your memories altered.” She grabbed Joeli’s shoulders. “I don’t know how many of our friends died out there tonight but it will be too many. I don’t think I can let this . . . stain . . . walk out of here.”
“I swear! I swear it on the Ancestor! I wasn’t trying to kill Darla! I sw—”
“Ara!” Nona shouted. This wasn’t how Ara behaved. If anything it should be Nona wanting Joeli’s blood for her friend’s death and a hundred smaller crimes.
With a snarl and clear effort Ara unlocked her hands from Joeli’s habit and strode away. “You’re the senior nun here, Sister Cage. You pass judgment.”
“Senior?”
“The abbess raised you before me.”
“By one minute!”
“Even so.”
Nona looked Joeli in the eye and the girl tried to back away. Ruli held her tight. Jula looked on, her lips a bitter line. The desire to just reach out and press a flaw-blade through Joeli’s heart rose through Nona in a hot wave. But she’d heard the voice of each devil in that mix before, separate and unbound. Somehow, even though she had accepted those parts of herself back into the whole, back into the mess of contradictions that was her, it felt easier to discount them now, as if knowing them “raw” as she had had helped her to moderate their demands.
“She killed Darla!” Clera reiterated. “She can’t walk away from that.”
“You never even liked Darla,” Nona said. “You poisoned her and left her helpless for Raymel Tacsis and his soldiers. So perhaps you should hold your tongue, Clera.” She looked at Joeli, trying to see what calculation might lie behind the terror on her face. “Abbess Glass allowed Joeli back into the convent. And that woman only made the compromises she wanted to make. It’s not my judgment to pass . . . Zole? Have her memories been changed?”
Zole stepped in until she stood face to face with Joeli, who looked away, struggling to escape.
“I see no signs of it. Is it so hard to believe that in battle she made poor decisions?”
Nona slid a flaw-blade through Joeli’s bonds. “I don’t like you. If you cross me I will give worse than I get. I will speak the truth of your service to Sherzal and hope to see justice brought to bear. But your crimes are not mine to judge, and your punishment not mine to give.”
It was Tarkax who spoke into the astonished silence that followed. “Are we done here?”
“We need to get out of the palace,” Nona agreed. “The emperor is probably on his way already.”
“And?” Clera asked. “He should heap gold on us until only the tops of our heads show!”
“His sister is lying in the passage, and she’s not pretty,” Ara said.
“She was betraying him!” Ruli sounded outraged.
“So you say,” Ara replied. “Will Crucical choose to believe you, novice? The killing of a royal never goes unpunished. It sets a bad precedent.”
“Are we leaving the shiphearts?” Jula asked.
“I’m returning Sweet Mercy’s shipheart to the convent,” Nona said. “It has something of mine that I want back. Besides, the other one was never so good at heating the water.”
“Will you take the others, Zole?” Ara asked. “Or leave the Noi-Guin’s shipheart for the emperor? It might allow him to overlook his recent loss . . .”
* * *
• • •
ZOLE LEFT THE Noi-Guin shipheart bedded in the centre of the silver-steel door. She left the door closed. “Let Crucical take it if he can.”
She activated the travel ring with greater mastery than Nona could manage and left it open while she stepped away to allow her fellow ice-tribers to return.
“How will you get out of the black ice?” Nona asked as Tarkax, the last of them, approached the ring.
“We’re going to a different ring,” he said. “A thousand miles from the Corridor.” Then a sigh. “But we still have to climb three miles! So think of us, little Nona, when you’re warming your toes by the light of your own private moon!”
“Little?” Nona grinned. She was a hand taller than the man.
Tarkax returned the grin. “Never call the Ice-Spear short!” He stepped into the light and was gone.
Zole made to follow him, the shiphearts burning in her hands.
“What will you do?” Nona called after her. She had been to the ice and yet she couldn’t imagine how people endured up there, let alone lived. “What will you do, now you’re so . . . perfect?”
“What will you do with your imperfection, Nona Grey?” Zole asked. “We will both seek our purpose just as we have always done.”
“And what’s that?” Nona genuinely hoped for an answer. The Book of the Ancestor held answers aplenty but they had never seemed to fit her questions. “What are our purposes?”
“Do you assume they are not the same?” Zole asked, curious. She turned towards the ring. “I am changed. The Ark called me ‘purified.’ I hear a whisper and it seems important. Perhaps the Missing are calling to me. Perhaps their voice will be clearer up on the ice where the wind blows. I think that is my purpose for now, and maybe it is yours too. To listen.” She made to leave.
“Thank you, Zole.” Nona felt a sudden hollowness, a pain in her throat. She wanted to say more, but the words seemed too clumsy to speak. “I’ll miss you.”
“I will miss you too, my friend.”
And Zole was gone.
30
HOLY CLASS
IN A TIME of crisis the sisters of Sweet Mercy were expected to minister to the injured, say the rites over the dead, and pray that the Ancestor would receive all who had crossed the Path.
It turned out that the survivors of Abbess Wheel’s flock were so few in number and their dead so numerous that it was all they could do to tend their own.
Nona and Ara found themselves the only two of the convent’s nuns uninjured, though their wounds were newly healed and the flesh benea
th was still sore. As such it fell to them to gather the survivors and to set those still able to walk to helping drag or carry from the battlefield those unable to fend for themselves.
The emperor and the Academy both opened their doors to the wounded, but Nona had the injured nuns and novices taken to St. Helliot’s. The new cathedral stood a quarter of a mile from the palace and the eastern wing was still smoking from an earlier impact by a particularly far-flung incendiary. Torches lit the main steps, where High Priest Nevis himself stood organising the treatment of injured nuns, monks, and novices by overworked church healers and volunteers from among the faithful.
“Place the dead in the mausoleum. With honour! We will hold services for them on this day for a hundred years. I will have them carve it upon the walls.” Nevis looked overwhelmed but he kept working with the grim efficiency of a merchant squeezing the margins, directing his resources to maximize survival.
Nona helped carry Abbess Wheel into the mausoleum. High Priest Jacob had commissioned the building for himself as soon as he took office. Under Nevis the work had continued, though quite who would now be interred within had become less clear.
“Lay her here.”
Nona hadn’t needed any help. Wheel seemed to weigh nothing in her arms. Without her fierce will to animate her she seemed small, an old woman, mostly skin and bones. Ara, Sister Oak, and Ghena had insisted on lending their strength to the effort, though, despite the latter two being barely able to stand. Ghena bore a host of minor cuts and perhaps had broken ribs. Sister Oak sported a livid bruise across her forehead and the left side of her face. Being knocked senseless early on had saved her life. She seemed dizzy, unsure of herself.
The four of them laid the abbess out, straightening her limbs, arranging her habit. They stood around her corpse, careful not to step upon the dozens all around them, and said the prayers of farewell. Nona had last heard them from Wheel’s own mouth when old Sister Bone had failed to rise from her bed on a cold morning three weeks before.
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