* * *
• • •
KETTLE HAD EXTRACTED herself from the vertical passage into which Nona had manoeuvred her body. Escaping Nona’s pain had been a vast relief but a short-lived one as she began to appreciate quite how wedged in she was. There had been several moments of panic and cursing, the conviction that she would never escape pressing down with terrifying weight, but she had at last emerged, filthy and panting, into the tunnel above.
In all, a day had passed and a night and another day since Zole and Kettle had hidden. The vigilance of the Noi-Guin would be fraying. All that time at highest alert, scouring tunnels, guarding key points, extending their perimeter. Nobody, no matter what their training, could stay focused indefinitely. Kettle had eaten and drunk sparingly, counted away the hours, listened to the silence, and now it was time to act. Nona would be recaptured soon.
Kettle knew that to try to reach the cells was likely a suicidal venture. She had no idea of the Tetragode’s layout and just a thread-bond to follow. And if the thread-bond were to guide her through the twists and turns of the cave system she would need to rejoin the tunnels that Nona had been taken through. This meant a return to the area just past the fortress where Zole had killed the Noi-Guin. That fact still sounded unreal. A novice killed a Noi-Guin. But Nona had repeated the feat.
Kettle cleaned off her Lightless robes as best she could, checked her weapons, then hurried back along the long convolutions of tunnel and cavern towards the fort. She wrapped herself in clarity rather than shadows, straining every sense for news of her enemy.
She was perhaps two hundred yards from the place where Zole had vanished into the wall when she heard approaching feet. What surprised her was that they were coming from behind, and fast, half a dozen or more people. Kettle picked up her own pace and kept ahead of them. Approaching the main tunnels of the Tetragode at speed had not been her plan. At last she spotted a fold in the rock wall where she could hide. Moments later seven Lightless came jogging by, the shadows swirling behind them. Kettle guessed they had been recalled to defend or breach the cells. Most of the Lightless seemed unable to use shadow-bonds over longer distances but in the confines of the Tetragode all of them appeared to be linked to some central will.
With the Lightless out of sight but still audible Kettle gave chase. More patrols might be converging on the cells from behind her, and if the one in front stopped for any reason then she might become trapped between them. In any event the forces arrayed against her at the cells would certainly be significantly beyond her ability to overcome. But choices, always slim, had now run out. Soon Nona would be recaptured and not long after that Lord Tacsis would return to exact his revenge. Kettle had suffered the agony of the Harm in what she had to assume was full measure. It was certainly beyond any pain she had experienced before. Dying in an attempt to free Nona seemed by far the better option than sharing her final hours through the thread-bond.
The patrol wound its way along what appeared to be a major highway of the Tetragode, the floor well-trodden, chasms and inclines tamed with bridges and stairs, even the occasional dim lantern burning in a niche. Other Lightless joined the general flow from side passages, mostly in groups but sometimes just singly. Kettle found herself dangerously close to a pair of Lightless up ahead, struggling with what looked to be a door-ram, a heavy timber two yards long, iron-shod at one end. She dropped her pace.
Seated at the back of Kettle’s brain, Nona could feel the nun’s unvoiced thoughts and regrets churning, struggling to break into her conscious mind and being relentlessly shut off. No part of Kettle wanted to die. She wanted to be back at Sweet Mercy, to hold Apple, to see another dawn. She wondered how many Lightless she could take down before they got her. She wept for the novice trapped and facing an awful death. She worried for Zole. But no hint of this maelstrom of fears was allowed to disturb her focus.
The hurrying footsteps behind Kettle drew closer and she considered her choices. She could sprint past the pair ahead of her and hope that burdened by the ram they wouldn’t challenge her . . . but more likely they would demand her aid, then realize that they didn’t know her.
A faint tremor ran through the mountain. Kettle felt it through the soles of her feet and it trembled in her chest. A moment later she felt the pulse along dozens of shadow-bonds. What message was imparted Kettle couldn’t tell, and a shadow-bond usually allowed for only the simplest of communications, but enough of the emotion leaked out for her to get a taste of it. Panic.
The Lightless approaching from behind stopped, reversed their course and started to sprint away. The pair ahead dropped the ram. Kettle heard it hit the ground and pressed herself to the wall as the men who had been carrying it raced past her, robes streaming. They should have seen her but they didn’t. Kettle followed them a short way until she found a side passage where she waited as a full dozen more of their comrades hurried past, swift, silent, determined.
Zole. It had to be. She had seen the Lightless head towards the cells and known that either Kettle or Nona was in trouble. This was Zole’s diversion. Panic! How could even Zole panic the Noi-Guin?
Kettle emerged from her hiding place, listened hard, then carried on, tracking the thread-bond as swiftly as she dared. Twice more she had to backtrack and hide at the hurried approach of groups of Lightless and Noi-Guin. She passed areas where a greater density of caverns, together with hand-hewn connecting tunnels, made the Tetragode almost a subterranean town rather than a series of locations isolated by the twisting distances of an ancient river course. She saw signs of industry, forges whose smoke passed up great shafts to vent above the snowline, and of communal living, dining and sleeping areas, even what looked to be a temple of some kind.
On the temple steps a lone guard stood watch, armoured in what looked to be black glass.
“Stop!” The call arrested Kettle in mid-stride. “Show me your face.”
Kettle turned and spun a throwing star at his head. He almost avoided it. The star caught him just below the left cheekbone rather than in the eye. He proved less fast after that and the second star took him in the throat just above the line of his breastplate.
Kettle ran on, wrapped in clarity. She entered a large chamber, her exit on the far side. The faint echoes of a door being battered reached her from the distance. And something closer, just the ghost of a sound, high up. Kettle swerved and a cross-knife sliced past her ear, rotating as it flew. Kettle kept running. She knew her attacker lay above and behind her, probably in some gallery over the tunnel through which she entered the cavern, probably a Noi-Guin. She jerked left, then right, running an erratic zigzag path, relying on her speed and the distance between them to not be where she was expected to be when the knives arrived. And arrive they did, a storm of them, hissing out of the dark, clattering against the rocks to both sides of her, striking sparks from the stones at her heels. A sharp line of pain scored her shoulder and another knife flew past. Without breaking stride, Kettle found the most likely antidote, kilm oat, and smeared it over the cut. If she was right and fast enough the venom on the blades wouldn’t touch her. If she had to take an oral cure then the effects might overwhelm her before the antidote kicked in. She muttered a prayer to the Ancestor.
Two-thirds of the way across Kettle stopped dead and spun around, drawing her sword, and struck a cross-knife from the air. She was near the limits of the Noi-Guin’s range now and wanted to exhaust their supply of the deadly little knives. Two more came and she avoided them disdainfully. Her shoulder burned where the small cut still trickled blood. She kept her vital signs in mind, alert for any signs the kilm oat hadn’t solved her problems.
Back across the cavern the Noi-Guin on the balcony turned and ran through a tunnel, either to give chase or gather more of his kind. Kettle sprinted back. She knew the doorway they would most likely exit from and didn’t want a Noi-Guin following her to the cells.
As she returned through the tunnel she had entered by she heard the soft impact of the Noi-Gui
n landing behind her. The assassin had also doubled back and vaulted from the gallery.
“Damn.” Kettle turned back around.
* * *
• • •
“NONA! WAKE UP, Nona!” A hand slapped Nona’s face. She opened her eyes and found herself being dragged across a rough floor. Flickering lantern-light painted the rock ceiling just inches above her face. One of the hands under her armpits pulled loose for another slap. “Bleed on it! Wake up.”
“Kettle!”
“You’re stuck with boring old Clera.” Another grunt, another heave. Nona felt herself inch across the rock. “Little help?”
Nona began to wriggle her shoulders and push with her feet. Their progress accelerated markedly. “Kettle’s in trouble!”
“We’re all in trouble,” Clera said.
Nona shook her head, trying to clear it of pain and confusion. “What are you doing here, Clera?”
“Besides saving you?” Another heave. “The Tacsis are my patrons. Lord Tacsis sent me to the Noi-Guin to get the same training his son got here. Lano, the younger one.”
“And . . . they showed you a secret tunnel into their cells that they’ve . . . now forgotten about?” Nona jammed her arms against the walls to stop being dragged further. She felt stronger. Not good, but stronger.
“These caverns belong to Sherzal. She’s hosting the Noi-Guin, but she hasn’t shared all her secrets with them.” Clera tugged. Nona stayed where she was.
“But she shares them with you?”
“Lord Tacsis is her main ally. I’ve spent time training at the palace too. And you know me. I dig out secrets.” She tugged again.
“At the palace?” Nona struggled to turn to her front. She managed with difficulty, gasping at the pain from her ribs. “Training with who?”
Clera frowned, coughing on the lantern smoke building around them. “Safira.”
“And Yisht?” Nona reached out, closing her hand around Clera’s wrist. “A woman who stabbed Kettle and a woman who killed Hessa?”
Clera’s face hardened. “I’m saving you here. Remember the torture? I’ll be getting some too if they catch us.”
“Get my collar off.” Nona rotated the lock towards Clera and turned her neck.
“How?”
“They’ve been training you haven’t they?” Nona tugged at it angrily.
Clera moved in closer, the lantern in Nona’s face, her breath on Nona’s neck. “I could try to pick it. Might take a while. It’s more heavy duty than complicated. Applying the torque—”
“You have acid, don’t you?”
“We’d both end up with holes in our lungs if I used it in here. We need space.”
“I’m going back.” Nona started to push herself back along the tunnel, feet first.
“Saving you is much harder work than betraying you!” Clera frowned, advancing after Nona’s retreat. “Turn your head to the side.”
“What?” Nona did as she was asked though.
A fuzzy sort of pain blossomed as Clera struck the nerve cluster at the bottom of Nona’s neck. Nona fought to hold on to consciousness but lost her grip and pitched forward into a darkness the lantern could not illuminate.
* * *
• • •
NONA SAW, THOUGH whether her own eyes were open or not no longer mattered. Kettle’s urgency had hauled Nona into her mind once more.
The nun crept along a tunnel, part natural, hewn out in sections. The stink of smoke hung in the air, stinging her eyes; her arm ached and the taste of blood filled her mouth. She used a tiny mirror on a thin metal rod to look around the next corner. Twenty yards away five Lightless and another guard waited before the ruins of a door. Beyond it figures moved in a smoke-filled corridor.
Noi-Guin. Kettle’s heart sunk so far that even Nona felt it drop. However the previous encounter had ended, it clearly had not gone easily.
Kettle withdrew and began to set traps in the corridor behind her. First a scattering of envenomed caltrops: small, razored pieces of tempest-glass, tough enough to pierce any boot sole, small enough to be overlooked. Next she set a small sigil-marked piece of iron to the rock wall. It bound fast and she drew out the Ark-steel wire attached to it, pulling it taut and binding it to the opposite wall with a second sigil-marked fastener. The device would require a fortune to replace, and not a small one. Finally, with great care, she felt among her poisons and antidotes, removing a screw-topped steel tube. She undid the lid and extracted a leather tube from within. She coated the tube with a thick tar-based adhesive, holding it by the weak, untreated ends. Nona sensed the Grey Sister’s anxiety . . . Without further hesitation Kettle threw herself at the nearest wall, kicked off, gaining height, stretched up, pressed the tube to the ceiling, and landed on soft feet. The tube stayed where she stuck it.
Nona knew she had to leave. She was no use to the nun as a mute watcher. She had to get back to her body, deal with Clera. Quite how to do that was another matter. Nona set to work.
Ducking under the near-invisible wire, Kettle returned to the corner with her mirror in one hand, a throwing star in the other. She peered around. The Lightless were beginning to advance, the Noi-Guin behind them. Soft feet had not been soft enough.
The nun took her enemy’s measure, threw her star, exposing only her hand, and started to run away. A leap over the caltrops turned into a slide beneath the slanting wire. A moment later she was sprinting away down the tunnel.
Kettle turned on her lead foot, body spinning, her other heel scraping against stone as it absorbed her momentum, the timing a simple judgment call. The first of the Lightless were rounding the corner. Throwing stars spat from both her hands, the aim of less importance than the rate of fire. The Lightless, hunska-fast themselves, spun and twisted to avoid the incoming stars. Caltrop spikes pierced leather soles and found flesh, the ball of a foot, the soft instep, the heel. A point that’s driven through leather is apt to have any venom wiped from it but the weapon-smiths who wrought these particular works of devilry for the convent included shallow wells along each spike, reservoirs where toxins might be smeared, waiting to be washed out with blood.
Some Lightless failed in their attempts to dodge Kettle’s throwing stars, others lamed themselves on the caltrops. The first to pass these twin threats unscathed, a woman, ran into the wire. The effects were ugly. Ark-steel is reluctant to break. The wire cut in across her face, sliding down across the resistance offered by the skull beneath, cutting into her neck. The man hopping behind her hit the wire lower down. It sliced into his thigh. A third Lightless, tearing at the throwing star embedded in his pectoral muscle, stumbled into the pair before him and their joint weight at last parted the wire. The three of them fell in a welter of blood and sliced flesh.
The Noi-Guin came around the corner at a rush, batting away a throwing star that would have hit him. He wove between the remaining pair of Lightless.
Kettle had six stars left. She threw one high. So high that the Noi-Guin became suspicious at the last and lunged upwards with his knife, trying to intercept it. His effort came too late. The throwing star hit the tube Kettle had stuck to the ceiling. Grey mustard powder jetted out with the force of the impact, blooming into a cloud.
If the Noi-Guin hadn’t been lunging upward, tracking the star, he might have been able to run on, avoiding all but the outermost edges of the cloud. As it was he dropped immediately, but not quite fast enough. Kettle allowed herself no pity. When the Noi-Guin tore off his black-skin mask with a blistered hand, reaching towards his mouth with the other, a steel vial in his grip, she threw another star at his fingers then drew back from the screaming.
Grey mustard spores become rapidly denatured by exposure to air with even a slight moisture content. Quite how quickly they would lose their bite in the dampness of the Tetragode Kettle wasn’t sure, but she also knew she couldn’t afford to wait long. She smeared mud from a nearby seep over her face, neck, ears, and hands, took a deep breath, drew her sword, and ran, avoiding
the bodies of those still busy dying. She rounded the corner, praying to every aspect of the Ancestor that there wouldn’t be another Noi-Guin lined against her, and slid into the turn, dropping to avoid the reflex-thrown cross-knives. There wasn’t a Noi-Guin waiting for her. There were three. A dozen Lightless stood ready before them.
“Take her alive.” The voice of the central Noi-Guin. She held a sword that looked like a ribbon of darkness. “You may injure her.”
The Lightless came forward, fearless despite the fact that her sword overreached their knives. Kettle considered retreat but the tunnel behind her was strewn with bodies and blood, not to mention caltrops. Instead, she charged the foe, sword sweeping out at throat height in a wide arc.
It’s perhaps not true to say that no amount of training or skill concentrated into one person will undo a determined group of fighters, but when space is limited and the opposition are themselves swift and skilled it turns out almost always to be true.
Kettle had time for two swings of her sword. Both killed and injured, but she could find no way through or around the Lightless nor could she retreat faster than they could advance. After two blood-soaked seconds she found herself tackled, grappled, stabbed, and brought to the ground, where she lay cursing, bleeding and struggling beneath several assailants with a knife to her neck. In that moment she had no regrets. She gathered her strength for the sudden lunge that would push the blade through her throat. Being taken alive wasn’t an option.
It wasn’t fear that stopped her: it was the light. It was so unexpected that Kettle turned her head and watched it from the floor through slitted eyes and a forest of limbs. Something impossibly bright was coming from the cell-block. First a metal ring, perhaps six inches wide, rolled out into the corridor, sparking. It wobbled and fell, dancing on its rim like a spinning coin that has almost stopped. The light grew and grew again. A figure stepped out of the cell-block, a figure wreathed in arc-bright streamers of crackling energy that snapped back and forth from one path across her body to another. She looked like the night sky in the worst of lightning storms, the land-breakers that rage on those rarest of occasions when a northern ice-wind meets a southern one above the Corridor.