There’s a paralysis in choice, especially when what’s at stake is more precious to a person than what they own. Nona risked her own life with frightening regularity and without hesitation, but tasked with deciding how to save Kettle, from the inside, she found herself frozen. “Kettle?”
* * *
• • •
KETTLE’S WHOLE WORLD was pain, a white sea of hurt. With enormous effort she uncoiled and forced her eyelids to part. She blinked. The world looked wholly alien, the colours strange, stone alive with fire. Her eyes burned too, as if rubbed with pepper. She lay in a corridor, the floor awash with blood, the Noi-Guin who seemed to have supplied it close enough to touch. The assassin’s flesh looked black, her black-skin mask dark but with glints of gold as if something brilliant swam beneath its surface.
Kettle struggled up and sucked a breath through a throat that felt narrower than a straw. The hands she used weren’t hers. One wrist bore a metal cuff. The tatters of a smock hung around her nakedness. Her ribs screamed at her.
I’m in Nona. Somehow I’m in Nona as she was in me. Kettle raised a hand to her face. I lifted her hand. I did that.
A spasm clenched her stomach into a knot of pain, curling her around it, and her throat sealed completely.
Kettle clutched at her neck—Nona’s neck—frantic. A moment later she felt something like a scalding hand that clenched her throat beneath her own useless fingers and somehow opened it again.
Get up. Do something. You are as useless as she was. A harsh voice, like that of an ancient, neither male nor female.
Nona . . . ? It wasn’t Nona.
You are dying. Move!
Kettle drew a throttled breath and crawled to the Noi-Guin. Her jacket had been cut open, exposing the antidotes and poisons she carried. Pain, weakness, strangulation. What poison? Think. Kettle’s memories surged, carried with her into Nona’s empty mind. She heard Apple’s voice, the lecturing tone she reserved for class. “You have close on a hundred of choices for blade-venom. Unless, of course, you want it to stay potent for more than a day. Then you have only a score. If you also want it to have a chance of disabling your opponent before the fight would have ended naturally then you have only a dozen. If you want it to be something people can’t build up resistance against too, then you have fewer still. If you want to source the ingredients locally rather than bring them halfway around the Corridor . . . there are five.”
Five choices. Pain. Strangulation. It has to be blue scorpion . . . but weakness? Varnish of boneless? You can build resistance . . . maybe that’s why Nona can still move?
Kettle began opening vials in an ecstasy of fumbling, stoppers popping off, contents spilling. A splash of the wrong poison on her skin and her problems could be compounded. The Grey Sisters had ideas about the Noi-Guin scripts, theories, but the Noi-Guin rotated their ciphers and Kettle would rather die because she was failed by her senses than because of an error in translation.
The Greys had training in sniffing unknown compounds. Not just for a day, or two, or a week. Kettle had been drilled with her two fellow would-be Sisters of Discretion for a solid month. A month during which she came as close as she ever had to disliking, even hating, Apple. Two sniffs, one at a distance, one close. Then decide, and if you think it’s safe . . . take it. The distant sniff gave a first and vital impression, and a chance to survive any trap. Noi-Guin in particular were known for packing a tube marked with some or other antidote (in cipher) with grey mustard, which when inhaled would eat away your lungs.
“Blind-eye.” Kettle wheezed a breath and tossed the vial aside. “Cramps.” Another tossed. “Blue scorpion.” A sharp scent and the stuff inside looked viscous. Spread on a blade it would dry to a clear coating like a resin varnish. “White-blood.” The first antidote but no use. Four more, three unpleasant poisons and an antidote to the blind-eye. Her throat tightened again so that each breath was sucked in with a wheezing rattle. Her heartbeat was now so fast it practically vibrated in her chest, and the effort of keeping her arm raised was starting to defeat her. And the pain. It made death seem welcome. If she had the air in her lungs for it, she would be screaming.
Hurry. The stranger’s voice in her head . . . in Nona’s head.
The next one had that sharp, almost lemon, smell that made Kettle’s gut roil. Proper lemons, grown at vast expense in the orangery of some lord, had a smell that made her mouth water, but somewhere between “proper” and “almost” something went very wrong. It was the red cure. Kettle would bet her life on it. The mixture had to be prepared much like the black cure, but lacked some of the more dangerous ingredients, and included a couple of others specific to counteracting the scorpionoid venoms.
Kettle bet her life on it. With the last of Nona’s strength she lifted the vial to her mouth and tipped in the contents, trying not to choke as they leaked down the constricted passage to her stomach.
* * *
• • •
NONA LAY DEEP below the tunnel she had first found herself running through. The narrow sinkhole had swallowed her. Gravity had pulled her over yard upon yard of slippery rock, a sinuous near-vertical descent, weaving around harder intrusions of igneous stone, the passage growing narrower, starting to grip Kettle’s body on all sides. Nona raised her arms and, just as she thought she might become wedged, her heels found a ridge. She’d slid down so far that the sounds of her pursuers no longer reached her. Nona held her breath and listened. She couldn’t imagine any Lightless so dedicated to the hunt or so scared of failure that they would voluntarily lower themselves feet first into the stony throat and allow themselves to be swallowed too.
Nona stood, clutched by the cold rock, damp, shivering, alone in the deep blind dark, yet seeing. The darkness pressed on her and into her. Nona understood the power she held over it, here in this body. But more than that, she was vulnerable to it too, in new ways. The dark was neither empty nor kind. She felt the shadows flowing through Kettle’s flesh in a way that she hadn’t on the previous occasions she had shared her body. This time was different. Kettle had gone.
Given a moment to think, Nona remembered where she had fled from. Somewhere not so far away her own body lay poisoned. Dead by now, surely? She would go back if she could but there seemed no way to do it. She sensed no connection.
An awful suspicion rose through her. Somehow Kettle had taken her place along the thread-bond. Somehow Nona had allowed it when she had weakened the sigils that walled off her power. Nona reached for the echoes of Kettle’s memories, hoping for some clue. She ground Kettle’s teeth with concentration and forced the most recent recollections to the surface, sifting through them with the fingers of her mind.
Kettle had been hiding, waiting where she came to rest after her long flight from the fortified tunnel. Judging the passage of time can be hard when you’re alone in a dark place, far from the sun and moon, but the Sisters of Discretion have their ways, and Kettle had sat her first day and night in silence. At some point she had slept, dipping into that feather-light and dreamless sleep in which those of the Grey are trained. Kettle had spent time remembering, without pleasure, the long, arduous weeks of her instruction on remaining alert. She had endured those weeks in the undercaves, as had a trio of other candidates for the Grey. It had been her first trial on reaching Holy Class. Safira was one of her three companions.
Sister Apple and Kettle’s classmates had made scores of attempts to take her unawares, day and night, creeping to the cavern where she waited, coming at her from any of five entrances. She had to last six days. If anyone managed to touch her without challenge then the count was reset, the six days started anew. If she hadn’t managed the six days before the month was up, she would never have worn the grey. Sometimes they came at her every hour, or twice in five minutes, sometimes they left two days. The longer gaps were the worst . . .
Nona shook herself out of Kettle’s older memories, searching for something fresher and almost immediately found a memory of Kettle lifting from he
r shallow sleep. Eyes opening to the darkness. Clarity descending as she strained to hear again whatever had woken her. Some faint sound reached her. A pebble sent tumbling by an insufficiently cautious foot. Distant but not distant enough. Kettle had risen silently and started off down the tunnel she had scouted. She sped up. Started to run. And suddenly her head had split with incredible pain, a hot rush of fear flooded her, she saw visions of a burning world and knew Nona was in mortal danger. Forgetting her own plight, she had reached for the novice. And somehow . . . somehow this.
36
ABBESS GLASS
BROTHER PELTER’S RAPID success in acquiring the services of senior inquisitors Seldom and Agika had been followed by frustration. Pelter chased one report of Inquisition activity after another, only to find the operations completed, the inquisitors departed, or the report exaggerated and the investigation lacking sufficient importance to have a senior inquisitor in attendance.
On their infrequent returns to the swift toll-roads, the paved thoroughfares that constituted the empire’s spine, Glass had seen an unusual number of grand carriages hastening east. Great wheeled confections of ebony and silver thundered by, the devices of many of the greatest Sis families blazoned on their sides. On several occasions the abbess had managed to catch a good look at the coat of arms flying past her window slats. Black axes crossed before a red sun: the ancient house Rolsis, the tower and quill of House Jotsis, and the hangman’s noose of the Galamsis, swift climbers and relative newcomers to the highest circle.
They had travelled on, ever east. From her carriage window Abbess Glass had seen more of the empire in that space of days than she had seen in the last fifteen years. She had always maintained good lines of information, from the Grey Sisters and the Red, but also from a dozen and more old contacts, people who had been her eyes and ears when she sat in the highest chair at the Tower of Inquiry. The tower overtopped all of Verity’s spires and the view was a commanding one, but its mistress had needed to see further still. Even so, the carriage journey had reminded Glass that nothing beats seeing and hearing it for yourself. The gossip of trader and merchant, farmer and soldier, even subdued by the sight of Inquisition robes, offered up the pulse of the empire.
“We’ll soon be there, abbess.” Brother Pelter had taken to repeating the reassurance with greater frequency as the delays mounted. The white peaks of the Grampains dominated the skyline, lending weight to Pelter’s claim. He sat between the senior inquisitors Agika and Seldom on the bench opposite Glass, no kindness in his smile. “Soon be there.”
Pelter thought he was threatening her but Glass now hoped with all her heart that their hunt would end soon. The world held many kinds of magic but the greatest of them, it seemed to Glass, was timing.
“Do you think that Sherzal coming to power would be a good thing, brother?” Glass asked.
“She has already come into power,” Pelter said. “And it is good for those who support her.”
“Sherzal is hunting more than a seat at her brother’s table. She’s collecting shiphearts. The harm she could do—”
“To others!” Pelter snapped. “The harm she could do to others! Wisdom in such times lies in knowing who to follow when things fall apart. You, abbess, have been unwise.”
“Wisdom lies in not allowing things to fall apart, brother.” Glass’s gaze flitted from Seldom to Agika. “We are all part of the Ancestor’s tree. A twig that breaks free will, however advantageous the wind, fall and wither in time.”
* * *
• • •
PELTER CALLED A stop in the village of Bru, at a ramshackle tavern named the Elusive Pig. He commanded that lunch be served for his party and placed another brick of penitent’s bread before Glass. She sat, chewing the coarse slice that Sera, applying her guards’ sword to the purpose, had cut for her. And while Pelter asked after Senior Inquisitor Hames, who supposedly was investigating the heretical reinvention of some would-be lordling’s family tree, Glass listened to the chat at neighbouring tables.
Individuals, families, and whole clans had arrived in Bru, and in-lying villages all along the Corridor, in past months. All of them displaced from the margins by the advancing ice.
“More came in last night.” The speaker two tables away had a rumbling voice that slid under the general chatter. Each word like a boulder rolled out for inspection.
“They says as how these beggars are coming in from the margins.” A narrow-faced merchant opposite Rumbler, dark complexioned and sour. “They says it wrong though. We’re the margins now!”
“We’d better toughen up then and protect what’s ours,” Rumbler said. “Harder than nails these frost-farmers are, poorer than Hope Church mice. What they going to do when they get hungry?”
“They’re hungry now!”
“Well they won’t starve quietly in the road. I’ll tell you that for nothing.”
At the table behind Glass the patrons were, with voices amplified by ale, discussing both the Scithrowl threat and the Durns.
“Piss drown the Durns. What do we care about empire ports three hundred miles west of us? They’re closer to Durnland than they are to us! Let them fight it out on the beaches. Durns and their little boats!” The speaker spat mightily, giving her companion a chance to break in and air his opinions.
“Jace Leaner hunts white lion up on the east slopes. You want to listen to that man. See clear across the border from those slopes, you can. He says you can’t hardly spot the ground in Scithrowl, there’s that many battle-tribes gathered. Adoma’ll have them over the passes before the year’s out, mark me. Like a tide. A red tide. Beggars off the margins won’t matter then. Durns won’t matter then.”
“She wants the Ark, they say.” A third voice. An old man, Glass thought. “That’s what the battle-queen wants.”
“That’s what they say. It’s always about the Ark. Me, I think it’s about land. They want acres. They want our acres, and they’re happy to water them with our blood. Once they’ve got the land they won’t give three whistles for Crucical peering out of the Ark at them.”
Glass sat back, her gaze on the table, immune to the malice in Pelter’s glances, listening. Perhaps five minutes later the sea of voices, from which she fished her gossip, fell to near-silence. Glass lifted her gaze and turned, like almost everyone else, to see three large men in furs and iron come through the inn’s main door. Juregs. Like the Pelarthi in the north, in the south the Juregs reigned largely unchallenged as the fiercest and most feared of the tribes that stalked the ice margins. Unlike the ice-tribes, they did not want to live out on the sheets nor could they survive there long. But they could certainly retreat ten or twenty miles onto the ice when empire troops threatened, then march east or west to reappear unannounced, weaving down between the crevasses on a glacier’s back and abseiling from the heights where the moon’s focus sheared off the ice’s snout.
The Juregs scanned the crowded taproom, wolves eyeing the flock.
To either side of Glass, Pelter’s guards, Melkir and Sera, quietly slipped hands to sword hilts. Agika and Seldom exchanged glances. Juregs were known for taking clergy for ransom. Even if a packed inn discouraged them from immediate action the chances were that they would follow the carriage when it left.
The Juregs ignored both bar and fire-pit, plotting a straight line for the inquisitors. The crowd of villagers, farmhands, and travellers standing in the main room melted out of the men’s path. Melkir made to stand but found his chair wedged beneath his legs by that of a portly cloth merchant behind him.
The largest and eldest of the trio, a solid six and a half foot tall, broad in the chest and sporting a wild beard shot with grey, offered them a discoloured grin. “You’re claimed. Come.” He gestured to his companions, possibly twin sons. “Leave your guard and we won’t hurt him.”
Glass met Sera’s eyes. The Juregs adhered to a bizarre patriarchal version of the Ancestor faith that relegated women to a menial status barely higher than that of slaves. They
kept the trappings of those beliefs in the language they used with outsiders but sadly were not so committed to their principles that they would ignore armed females such as Sera. They would underestimate her, though. Even so, the life of an Inquisition guard was a soft one compared to one spent raiding on the ice margins. Glass would be tempted to bet on any single one of the three Juregs against both of Pelter’s guards. Despite that, she would urge both guards to fight. She had a timetable in mind and the delays thus far had been welcome. But being ransomed by the Juregs would take weeks and ruin everything.
“Up!” The older man clapped callused hands together. As adherents of a heretical strain both Juregs and Pelarthi would set high ransoms for inquisitors, and harsh deadlines. Putting an inquisitor to a gruesome end was said to please a Jureg almost as much as being handsomely paid to let them go.
“I don’t think the nun wants to go with you.” A man’s voice from behind the Juregs. He sounded gently amused.
The tribesmen turned together, the two sons reaching for their swords, the father with his hand resting on the haft of his axe. Glass saw that the speaker was a surprisingly young man, not as tall as the Juregs and of considerably lighter build. He wore a traveling cloak of good quality, held an ale tankard in one hand, and the strap of his travel bag in the other. The dark eyes beneath the scroll of his black hair mirrored the amusement in his voice, as did a crooked smile on his narrow lips.
“Not your business, lad. Dying will be your business if you don’t step back.” The senior Jureg spoke with rasping malice.
“Make me.” The smile broadened, showing white teeth.
One of the sons stepped forward, drawing his sword. The man released his ale and bag, dropping as fast as they did and sweeping out a leg that took the son’s feet from under him. The speed of it was breathtaking. The man surged up faster than the son came down, stepped inside the other son’s sword blow and punched him in the throat. Somehow he had the father’s knife out of his belt and pressed into the thicket of his beard before Glass properly formed the thought “hunska full-blood.”