She pulled her lantern to her and dropped to the floor of the larger tunnel. The slightest rotation of the lantern’s cowl let enough light bleed out to show the dark entrance to Yisht’s excavation. Nona could feel the shipheart’s power thrumming through the marrow of her bones, singing in her blood, setting every small hair on its end, filling her with possibility. She had but to will it and her feet would leave the floor, she felt sure of it.
Nona advanced, buzzing with energy, but with feet firmly on the stone. Yisht had cut a narrow rising slot into the limestone, tall enough to stand in and swing a pick. The excavation led upward for twenty yards: extraordinary progress that left Nona open-mouthed. In places the walls lay scored with pick-marks, in others they had the peculiar melted quality that Nona had noticed in the vertical shaft she suspected led to Yisht’s sleeping quarters.
At the cutting face the air seemed to throb with the shipheart’s pulse. Nona’s own heart slowed to match the tempo. She closed her eyes and the Path lay before her, broad as a river, too bright to look upon and too bright to look away from.
She turned and hurried down the passage, her feet slipping on loose stone scattered over bedrock. Hessa had said to ambush the woman as close to the entrance as possible. It seemed obvious now, but Nona hadn’t even thought of waiting anywhere save at the cut itself, waiting for Yisht to return to the scene of her crime. She retraced her steps. More climbing, more wriggling, more stealthy advance, and at last she settled herself some yards back from the shaft down which her enemy must come. She turned her lantern low, hooded it, and crouched to wait.
The waiting and the natural darkness put far more fear in Nona than Luta’s efforts with enchanted shadow at the Academy had. Yisht scared Nona in a way that Raymel Tacsis never had, not even with demons writhing beneath his skin or peering at her from his bloody eye. Raymel would murder her with glee, with passion: he would enjoy her death. Yisht would cut her down without reflection, with no more concern than the butcher carries for pigs when their throats are cut. Somehow that idea felt worse.
When something slithered and thumped close at hand Nona almost cried out. She pressed herself to the wall, dry-mouthed, the gourd clutched in a trembling hand. A faint glow lit the circle of the shaft in the ceiling, the black length of the rope dangling beneath, twitching as someone climbed down, still out of sight in the shaft.
Nona forced the fingers around the gourd to unclench even as a pair of black boots, the rope trapped between them, slid into view. Black-clad legs. Narrow hips. Without warning, Yisht released the rope and dropped to the floor.
Nona dug as deep into the moment as ever she had, slowing Yisht’s descent to a crawl. She flung the gourd out of the darkness of the tunnel, her arm so stiff with nerves that Nona doubted her ability to hit Yisht at all, even if she were standing still, let alone strike her face while she was dropping. Even so, when the gourd left her fingers and passed beyond her control Nona knew it to be a true throw—the same way that when she loosed a throwing star she might not always hit her target but she always knew whether she would or not.
Yisht raised her hand as she fell. She caught the gourd a foot before her face, her hand moving to reduce the impact as if she knew the gourd to be fragile and dangerous to break. Her off-hand had already dropped her lantern and now produced a throwing knife, releasing it back along the path the gourd had taken. A cold terror gripped Nona even as she twisted aside. It was as if Yisht knew precisely what would happen and had practised exactly this situation a thousand times.
Nona dropped to her left, her mind running furiously through her options and finding precious few that held even a glimmer of hope.
She sees the future. She knows what I’m going to do.
Nona hit the ground and rolled, twisting out of the path of another thrown dagger. She rose, a rock in her left hand and a collection of smaller stones in her right. She threw the stones at the fastest tempo consistent with accuracy, shaking each up into a throwing grip as its turn came. She loosed them, miss, hit, hit, miss, all in flight, their fate known before the first covered half the distance. Another knife angled through the darkness, just the glimmer of its edge to betray its approach. Nona deflected it with the rock.
Nona’s first stone passed within a finger’s width of the gourd and sailed past to strike Yisht in the chest. The ice-triber already had her hand open, the flask dropping. She’d understood what would happen if a stone broke the gourd while it was in her grasp.
The second stone caught the top of the gourd, shattering it and exploding a modest shower of the liquor within. The third hit Yisht’s palm. The fourth would have missed the gourd if it had still been in Yisht’s hand but hit the dropping gourd dead centre, completing the job of smashing it and splashing the boneless liquor back across the woman’s chest.
The pooled oil from Yisht’s dropped lantern flared up, and beads of liquor sparkled on the oily blackness of her jacket. Nona was far from sure any of it would penetrate to the skin. Of more help would be the rising fumes and the splatters that had reached Yisht’s palm as the flask shattered.
“Nona Grey.” Yisht’s voice carried no emotion. “You chose a lonely place to die.” She pulled the tular from its open-sided scabbard. The blade resembled a long narrow rectangle of flat steel, slightly wider at the end than at the hilt, cut at an angle at the extremity to produce one sharp corner and one more open.
Nona needed to kill time, enough of it to let the boneless drop Yisht, but not enough of it to let Yisht drop her. She could stay in the light and pit her speed against Yisht’s sword and her unnatural ability to know exactly what any opponent would do in the next few seconds . . . or she could run blind into the dark.
She turned and ran. She knew the tunnel well enough for the next fifty yards. She ran with her hands out before her, not at a flat sprint but far faster than she felt comfortable running in total darkness.
The sound of booted feet on stone pursued her into the night. Nona considered diving to the side and letting Yisht pass her . . . but could the woman’s knowledge of the near future tell her what would happen if she slashed left or right? Could her vision of the next few moments be effectively a vision of the next few yards around her in any direction? Nona didn’t want to put that to the test.
She had passed the side tunnel. Passed it or almost reached it. Either way, she had no means of finding the opening inches above arm’s reach without wasting far more time than she had. Yisht had closed the gap: she sounded so close that a swing of her tular might trim Nona’s hair.
Hell. The tunnel might make a sharp turn in the next few yards. Or Nona might sprawl over a rock or break a leg in a fissure. Inevitably, Yisht would find her senseless or injured and kill her without relish or mercy. Nona skidded to a halt, angling to the side. If she had to die she’d do it facing her enemy, blades out.
Yisht came on, swift, not missing a step. Nona ran towards her, one hand reaching to find the wall, the other before her, flaw-blades cutting the darkness.
Nona tripped on the rougher ground where the floor curved up to become wall. She pitched forward as Yisht came upon her. Something jolted her arm, a metallic squeal and an impact against her blades that echoed through her bones all the way to her shoulder. Nona rolled and came up, arms reaching. Behind her Yisht cursed in the ice-tongue and came to a stumbling halt.
“You poisoned me.”
Nona ran back the way she’d come. Yisht’s footsteps followed for a few yards, then came to a halt again. She slurred something.
A moment’s silence. The sound of something slumping to the ground.
Nona released a breath and let the tension inside her unwind. She took a step towards Yisht. Another.
What am I doing?
She needed the others. She turned again and started back, slowly, arms searching the space before her.
With a roar Yisht launched herself into a stumbling run, her ru
se having failed to bring Nona to her.
Nona just ran, screaming, all control lost in the dark. She hit a wall, bounced off it and fell, her head blazing with pain, wet with blood. Yisht tripped over her before she’d stopped rolling and in a moment the woman’s weight had her pinned, elbows holding her forearms to the ground, both hands wrapped about Nona’s throat. And there, far below the ground, with the two of them locked together in the blind darkness, Yisht began to throttle her.
Nona couldn’t lift her arms to use her blades, couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe. She raged, blades flexing, body heaving, seeing lights in that dark place that held no light, and the thunder of her heart filled her ears. She fought. She fought hard. And she lost.
• • •
“—A—”
It was a small sound to express so much pain but it was all that could be squeezed from a throat as narrow as a straw. Nothing had changed. Nona was still pinned. She still could see nothing. Still had hands about her throat. Still had her arms pinned. But she could breathe. Everything had changed!
Nona drew and released a few more breaths, each one agony but delicious even so. The hands at her throat just lay there. She struggled and got her arms out from beneath Yisht’s pinning elbows. Reaching up, she pulled the woman’s unresisting fingers from her throat. “Got. You.” Small words. Painful. Triumphant.
Nona started to wriggle out from beneath the warrior. For a small woman she seemed to weigh an enormous amount—as if her bones were made of lead. Nona struggled with one limp arm, finding it almost impossible to move. With sudden horror she realized that the boneless solution soaking Yisht’s chest had started to work on her. Panic lent her strength. Even so it took several minutes to wriggle out from beneath the warrior and by then Nona felt as weak as a baby and had lost all sense of direction.
“Think, Nona. Think.” Hessa’s words, penetrating Nona’s fog of terror.
Nona drew a deeper breath and stretched out her hands, hunting for Yisht. She took her cue from the orientation of the warrior’s body and staggered away, trailing a hand against the wall.
She moved on through the ancient subterranean night, hoping with each passing yard that she would spot Yisht’s abandoned lantern. As she covered more and more ground and still failed to see Yisht’s light her desperation began to grow again. Surely she hadn’t escaped throttling to die lost in the wormholes of the Rock!
Nona called on her clarity mantra, seeking the calm and open mind that Sister Pan had shown her. She advanced more slowly, every sense extended.
Smoke. She sniffed. Sniffed again.
A minute of hunting on her hands and knees and she found the oily residue around Yisht’s burned-out lantern. From there it took another minute to recover her own, standing where she had left it, hooded and with the ghost of a flame hovering over a short wick. Picking it up felt like lifting another novice and her limbs trembled with weakness but the comfort of a light in a dark place cannot be overstated.
• • •
“ANCESTOR! YOU LOOK terrible.” Ruli grabbed Nona’s arms and, pulling her forward, wiped her forehead with a handkerchief. “Oh hells! Your neck!”
“Is she following you?” Clera, eyes wide, peering over the barrel.
“She’s down.” Nona whispered the words.
“We’d better hurry.” Ara stepped forward, giving Nona a quick hug. “Lead the way.”
• • •
THEY FOUND YISHT face down on the tunnel floor, her sword in two pieces against the wall, two deep grooves sliced into the piece of blade still attached to the hilt.
“How in the . . .” Clera picked it up, holding it towards the lantern in Nona’s hand.
Nona pulled the lantern away. “We have . . . to move her.” A pained whisper. “No time.”
Clera knelt at the warrior’s side. “I need to give her the rest first.” She took out another of Ara’s old perfume vials and held Yisht’s mouth open while she tipped the contents in. Given orally it was the maximum safe dose. Safe-ish. According to the tables the Poisoner had made them memorize it should keep a small adult incapable for several days. The main danger apart from suffocation was dehydration.
While Clera made sure Yisht swallowed the dose Nona made a quick search of the warrior, removing two daggers and five cross-knives for throwing. She didn’t want to leave the ice-triber anything that would help her escape or encourage her to return. Reaching into the front of Yisht’s tunic, Nona’s fingers brushed against something cold. She pulled it out. An amulet, a sigil cast in black metal, small enough that she could just curl her thumb and forefinger about its circumference. Like the sigils Yisht had drawn in the air outside the dormitory it drew the eye, twisting Nona’s vision about it. Yisht’s fingers twitched and some deep sound escaped her throat, a threat perhaps.
“Is that stuff working?” Nona yanked the sigil and it came free, trailing a broken thong. She slipped it into an inner pocket.
“Give it a few more seconds.” Clera frowned. “She’s tougher than she looks. And she looks pretty damn tough!”
It took forever to drag Yisht all the way back. The scariest part was when her dead, shark-like eyes happened to point Nona’s way.
They met their only real problem where the fissure ran between their tunnel and the tunnel from Shade cavern to the recluse. Ara and Clera had had a hard time squeezing through, even with Nona’s constant assurance that it widened out any moment. Clera lost her nerve and would have started to scream but for Ara’s hefty shove popping her out of the tightest neck and into the wider section.
“How are we getting her through there?” Ruli asked.
“Well we can’t get her up there!” Ara pointed at the tunnel in the ceiling.
“Rope?” Nona reached out to tug the rope that Yisht had let down. Ara had already been up to the room above to ensure the excavation would be noticed.
“We’d never heave her up,” Clera said. “And if we could, how do we get her out unseen?”
“So,” Ruli returned to her theme. “How do we get her through this crack? She weighs as much as Darla!”
“Cut bits off?” Clera suggested.
“She’s not that big,” Ara said. “And if we scrape her a bit . . . well, does it matter? We can leave some clues that lead the Poisoner to the digging. After that she won’t be coming back, will you, Yisht?”
In the end they dragged her. Clera and Ara at her feet—Clera too scared to take the head end in case Yisht got stuck and blocked the way. Nona and Ruli pushed the ice-triber’s shoulders. Though really it was Ruli pushing the shoulders and Nona pushing Ruli’s as there was only room for one to fit and Nona had no strength. Inevitably Yisht got stuck.
“Turn her! Turn her shoulders!” Clera, close to hysteria.
“We’ve turned them,” Ruli called back. “It’s her head.”
“Well cut her ears off! Anything! I don’t know. I can’t stay down here.”
Nona pushed but Yisht’s head had wedged between the two faces of the rock.
“Let me have a go again,” Ruli said.
Nona backed out, seeing that Ruli had a small open earthenware tub in her hand. “Grease?” The whisper hurt.
“Yes.”
“Why,” Nona whispered. “Do you. Have grease?”
“I have lots of things in my pockets, Nona Grey,” Ruli replied primly and recommenced her wriggling.
In the end the grease worked and Yisht came free with a sudden lurch.
Getting her up the stairs was a nightmare. So was getting her into the barrel, and wedging the padding around her. Getting the lid on was a nightmare too and Ruli managed to crush her thumb with the coopering hammer.
“You’re sure she’ll be able to breathe in there?” Ara asked as they heaved the barrel onto its side, preparing to roll it to stand with the others in the winery yard.
??
?No,” said Clera.
“No she won’t be able to? Or no you’re not sure?”
“No I don’t care.”
“She was trying to steal the shipheart, Ara,” Ruli said. “And you hate her.” Ruli looked as though she were trying to convince herself as much as Ara.
“She’s probably going to murder us all if she sees us again, and I doubt we could stop her, so I really don’t care if she dies in there.” Clera set the barrel rolling and ducked after it out into the ice-wind. “Come on!”
39
“SHE’S GONE!” RULI came bustling up to the Grey table, the refectory loud with the usual lunchtime chatter. “Rattling her way down Vinery Stair as we speak!”
“Thank the Ancestor for that!” Ara glanced towards Zole at the far end of the table. The girl had her head down, attacking her food.
“Thank the Ancestor,” Hessa said, uncharacteristically pious. She reached up to rub her neck. “I never want to see that woman again.”
Nona nodded, finding her own hand at her neck, touching the bruises there. Hessa had said that the thread-link between them should fade away given time, and Nona had thought it was doing so, but Hessa had suffered through every bit of Nona’s choking. It was pure luck that nobody in the dormitory had woken and rushed to fetch Sister Rose: the dose of boneless Hessa had tested helped there, stopping her thrashing and making a noise. But for that, the novices’ absence would have been noticed and the whole plan discovered. “We’ve just got to make sure the abbess finds out what she was up to now.” Nona scooped more scrambled egg into her mouth, began to say more and thought better of it.
“Let them notice she’s gone first,” Ara said. “They’ll check her room. They’ll discover the shaft then. When they do it should be easy enough to tell.”
• • •
NONA HAD BEEN expecting the abbess or at least Sister Pan to come and talk to her about her revelations. She’d been hiding her blades since the day of her arrival. Now, to have them discovered one day and ignored the next and the next left her puzzled. Ara had gone on about how rare a thing any three-blood was, and the Academics had certainly seemed impressed with the discovery. But the abbess had just sat in her house ignoring Nona, doing whatever it was she did in there, and then left for the palace. Was anyone even going to train her to use her marjal talent for anything other than shadow-work?