Nona could feel the shipheart. The hidden fire that had drawn her forward had now grown into something awful, too fierce to dare. Like the fire in the hearth it was something you wanted to come close to until suddenly you were close enough and another step would see you burned. She lifted her hand, fighting weariness, and forced her flaw-blades into being. They flickered unevenly. “I’ll get in.”
“It’s sigil-worked. I don’t think you’ll cut it.” Clera flinched as a particularly loud howl from Yisht shook the air. “We have to go! I checked ahead. There’s some kind of battle going on in the great halls downstairs. It’s the ideal distraction.”
Nona shook her head. “We came for the shipheart.”
“No.” Kettle gripped Nona’s arm with surprising strength.
“No?” Nona blinked. “But we—”
“The shipheart . . . does things . . . if you get too close. What happened to Yisht . . . It’s too powerful. It takes anything bad in you and gives it voice. It makes—”
“Devils!” Nona said.
Kettle nodded. “I think you just lost something that you don’t want back. How would you fare if the shipheart makes six replacements of your very own from the darkest parts of your mind? Speaking with your own voice?”
“But—”
“It would take someone of extraordinary purity to carry a shipheart unscathed. We’re none of us that.” She looked down. “I hadn’t understood how quickly the effects could occur or how bad they could be,” Kettle said. “We have to go.”
“Now!” Clera shouted. “We have to go now!” Her loudness suddenly made Nona realize how quiet it had become. Yisht had fallen silent, and Nona doubted it was a good thing.
Even so Nona hesitated. “We came for the shipheart . . .” Amidst the consuming aura of the thing she felt something more, there was a bond. Something of her lay in there too . . . her shadow! She understood it in that moment. The shipheart had drawn her shadow in, whether in Yisht’s defence or by its own nature. “We can’t come this close and just leave.”
Clera screwed up her face, locked in some inner battle. At last the words blurted from her. “Ara’s here. That’s what the fighting downstairs must be. They’re trying to rescue the abbess.”
Nona stared at her in disbelief that she would have kept such a thing quiet.
The shipheart was just a thing: but downstairs her friends could be dying.
“Let’s go.”
43
ABBESS GLASS
ARABELLA JOTSIS SHONE brighter than Abeth’s sun had burned during the lives of men. A white light broke from her, like the Hope that stood as a lone diamond in the ruby heavens. Abbess Glass turned away from the girl, shielding her eyes. Someone blundered into her, a perfumed woman, tripping over her long gown. Glass caught her shoulders, steadying her. “Cover your eyes, dear. It will be all right.”
It took Glass a few more moments to realize she held Joeli Namsis. Her grip tightened. “Joeli?” Even now she wasn’t sure, her vision full of afterimages. “Joeli! You can try to end this! With your skills you might make peace here. Try to change Sherzal’s mind towards moderation—”
The girl ripped free, stumbling away. It had been a vain hope. Sherzal would likely be too well warded even for Joeli.
For a long minute screams, shouts, and the thud of falling bodies filled the hall. Glass saw Thuran Tacsis and his son Lano escape into the main corridor, the boy shoving older and less hale lords aside in order to reach the doors.
The blinding white intensity lessened as Ara spent the power she had taken from the Path. Glass watched the girl through her fingers, a white shape, as if stolen from the heat of the smith’s forge, moving swiftly. She wove a path among the silhouettes of palace guards that stumbled towards her, leaving them in her wake, blind, insensible, or smoking, depending on the length of contact made between them. Each step brought her closer to Glass and the judges.
Above the sounds of combat Glass could hear Sherzal shouting orders from the corridor outside the main doorway, commands that the Jotsis girl be taken down and that nobody escape.
As Ara’s light dimmed Glass began to see the rest of the room. Guests wandered, dazzled, or crouched in fear, or lay groaning where they’d been trampled in the exodus. Guards continued to close on Ara, in greater numbers now they could look her way, with more arriving from the adjoining chambers.
Darla had descended from the gallery, possibly by hanging and dropping from the railing. Glass watched her use some kind of heavy wind instrument to flatten a guard then steal the woman’s sword just as two more guards closed on her.
Across the room Regol and Safira were locked in unarmed combat, their battle blisteringly fast. Having witnessed many contests between hunskas Glass could tell that both were full-bloods and extremely skilled. Perhaps Safira had the better technique but Regol’s greater strength restored the balance. Glass suspected Safira too proud to use her Noi-Guin blades or poisons. She had been proud as a novice. Too proud to let Kettle go. She would want to beat this cage-fighter bloody with her own hands.
Ara came through a wall of five guardsmen. A flight of arrows hissed in from the doorway. Ara avoided them with motions too quick to see, one arrow spinning away, another finding the leg of a guardsman hurrying to intercept her.
“Abbess!” Suddenly Ara stood before her, surrounded in light that seemed to emanate from the air around her. “Your instructions?” She snatched another arrow from the air before Glass could speak.
“We had better leave. Don’t you think, dear?” Glass looked back at the doors to the main corridor. Four archers stood abreast there, with many palace guards behind and Sherzal somewhere in their midst. An arrow caught Brother Dimeon in the neck and he fell, twisting, gurgling in what sounded like outrage.
“We can’t go that way.” Ara batted an arrow to the floor, glancing around the room. Darla and a few of the Sis who had found weapons were now fighting a retreat towards the banqueting hall. The big novice felled the guardsman before her with a blow that opened his chest, then beckoned them to follow. “Servants’ entrance!”
“Let’s go.” Glass hurried towards the melee on the far side of the chamber. She kept her head bowed, terrified that any moment an arrow would transfix her. In all her long years this was her first time in a battle and it appalled her. The swiftness and the violence, the sheer noise of all that shouting, clashing metal, the injured howling, the stink of blood and death. All of it numbed the mind and reduced a person to a collection of animal fears and the basest of instincts.
Ara kept pace, shielding the abbess, knocking aside any that intervened. Seldom and Agika followed, flanked by Melkir holding up a chair as an improvised shield. Glass picked her way through the detritus of the hastily abandoned room, toppled chairs and benches, here a necklace scattering pearls from a broken string, there a silk shawl edged with gold rings, smeared crimson. A handful of guests still wandered in shock, an old lady toppling gracefully as an arrow meant for Glass or Ara took her between the shoulders.
The blurred whirlwind of fists and feet that was Regol and Safira spun nearer. Ara eyed the conflict, clearly torn between intervening and protecting Glass. If the pair came any closer the two choices would be the same thing. Melkir took the decision from Ara, perhaps driven by thoughts of Sera lying by the judges’ bench with a slit throat, and hurled himself at Safira’s back. Somehow her foot struck him in the stomach, but his armoured bulk still drove her back and Regol took advantage, felling the woman with a punch to the face. Glass heard Safira’s cheekbone shatter and winced.
Moments later Ara had downed two of the guards that were harrying those of the Sis retreating with Darla, and made a path for retreat through the banquet doors. Glass, Regol, Seldom, Agika, and Melkir followed. An arrow caromed off Melkir’s shoulder-plate, another hammering into the door to Glass’s left.
“I’ll hold them, Holy Mother.” Darla towered over the escaping clergy, a wild grin on her face, scarlet splashes across the bl
ue taffeta gown she’d been squeezed into.
Regol sidestepped a guardsman’s thrust and pulled a sword from the hand of a dying lordling. He swept the guard’s blade up and ran him through, then took his place beside Darla, holding the doorway. Ara had hurried ahead, down the passage they proposed to escape along, to check for defenders.
Four long tables ran the length of the banquet hall, leading towards a dais where the high lords must have dined with Sherzal at the circular table. The remains of the feasting were still scattered across the tables. Candles lit the room, scores upon scores in brackets on the walls, and dozens of silver lamps were set in lines down the centre of each table. Across the hall Lord Carvon Jotsis was leading the Sis into the servants’ corridor. The shuddering light gave the scene an unreal quality.
“Hurry, abbess!” Melkir took her arm, trying to lead her on.
Glass held back for a moment. Through the doorway to the reception hall, narrowed by the partly closed doors that framed Darla and Regol, she could see the musicians’ gallery. A figure in cream and saffron skirts approached the broken rail. Joeli!
“Abbess!” Melkir at her shoulder. “They can’t hold for long!”
The crowd of guards before the entrance was growing rather than shrinking. Some had hold of the doors, heaving them back against the makeshift wedges that had been set, so that more could attack the pair denying them passage.
“Joeli . . . you can end this.” A whisper as Melkir pulled her away. The girl would have a clear vision of Sherzal and space in which to work. Even if she could get nothing past Sherzal’s sigil wards but a little doubt it might buy them time.
Up on the gallery Joeli reached out a hand as if to steer someone’s will. But her gaze turned towards the wrong doorway, her unfocused eyes seeming to find Glass. The girl’s fist closed, not in the delicate manipulation of thread-work but a violent snatch. Between the widening doors Regol suddenly leapt back, turning. A moment later he was sprinting past Glass, bewildered terror on his face.
“Dung on it!” A cry from Darla as an arrow sprung from her shoulder. She roared, sweeping her sword out and driving back four palace guards.
“Don’t . . .” Glass’s heels dragged the floor as Melkir hauled her towards the servants’ corridor.
Joeli repeated her action and this time Darla froze in mid-parry, as if suddenly distracted by some vital thought. A heartbeat later the guard to her left drove his sword into her side. Darla had nothing but a tattered gown to armour her. She folded around the steel, cursing, now lost among her attackers.
They closed in, swords rising and falling.
44
CLERA LED KETTLE and Nona back through the palace, aiming to reach the tunnel by which they had entered not long before. They had approached the chambers where Sherzal’s guards crowded but whatever battle had raged seemed to be over, the other participants fled or corpses. Wrapped in Kettle’s shadows, they saw no sign of Abbess Glass.
Nona limped along behind Clera, trying not to wonder whether her friends still lived. She could still sense the shipheart at her back. “We could have . . .” She tried to think what exactly they could have done. Dragged the vault? Hacked their way in with axes. None of it would have worked.
“We’re lucky that the shipheart wasn’t just resting on a table,” Kettle said. “I didn’t know quite how dangerous its effects on people were close up, or how fast they took hold.”
“It would have been a price worth paying to take it from Sherzal.” Nona had meant to say to take it back for the Church, but the truth was that denying Sherzal would give her the most pleasure.
Kettle shook her head. “If it had turned you into a thing like Yisht who knows what you would have done with it or where you would have gone?”
“Yisht brought it all the way here!” Nona protested. “I could have held it for an hour.”
“I doubt that she did. Sherzal would have had transport and containment waiting and ready close to the Rock. The shipheart likely warped her within an hour.”
“Shhhh!” Ahead of them Clera raised her hand.
They both limped up to join her. Voices could be heard on the stairs: “. . . back to help the guards chase them down.” A young man’s voice. One of the Sis.
“You’ll accompany me to my rooms and stand guard like a son should!” An older man, familiar.
“Istead will look after you,” the younger man replied. “What’s Sherzal going to think of us if we just scuttle off and hide? I’ll make for the gates. They don’t know the palace—that’s where they’ll go. They’re not getting out. I’ll bring Sherzal the old woman’s head!”
“Lano—”
“You know I’m right. We outnumber them fifty to one.” The sound of running feet followed, fading into the distance.
“Damn boy!” Thuran Tacsis’s voice. “We’ll get to the rooms and wait this out, Istead.”
“Yes, my lord.”
Clera had already turned from the corner and hurried back along the hall, waving frantically at Nona and Kettle to follow. Kettle turned but Nona remained, gripped both by a debilitating fear and by a rising anger. Just the sound of the man’s voice brought back the full horror of those endless hours waiting for his return, it made her remember the unbelievable agonies from just a brief touch of the Harm and her gut-churning disgust at the tortures he planned. But the fear brought rage with it, a fire roaring out its defiance, refusing to be made small by an old man’s threats—threats issued when all the advantage was his.
Nona put her weight on her injured leg, gritting her teeth against the hurt. She didn’t know who this Istead was. He could be a deadly warrior employed as Lord Tacsis’s personal bodyguard. In her current state it wouldn’t take much of a fighter to take her down, and then she’d be in Thuran Tacsis’s clutches again, the whole nightmare that she’d escaped reinstated simply because she was too proud to run. The silence where Keot should be felt like a hole. The devil would have had advice, and she probably would have opted to do the opposite.
You can only hesitate so long before choice is lost. The two men’s shadows preceded them. Nona pressed herself into the corner. The unknown quantity, Istead, came first. A tall man, well-built, his blond hair and square jaw reminiscent of Raymel Tacsis. Nona wasted no more time. She surged up as fast as she could on her good leg and punched him at the junction of chin and neck, driving flaw-blades deep into his brain. Ripping free in a crimson spray, Nona made to throw herself at Lord Tacsis.
Abused flesh can only tolerate so much. Nona’s leg collapsed beneath her and she fell sprawling before her enemy. Thuran immediately began to turn to flee, drawing breath to shout for aid. Nona managed to swing her non-traitor leg to kick his trailing foot and he toppled facefirst onto the rug that ran the length of the corridor.
Nona scrambled onto Thuran’s back, grabbed two handfuls of greying hair and banged his face repeatedly into the floor with measured violence. It was an expensive rug but not so thick that it would stop Lord Tacsis feeling the floorboards below.
“Unlock that door.” Nona gestured to the nearest door with her head.
Kettle, who Nona knew would have returned for her, limped past and set to work with her picks. The lock surrendered in moments.
“Help me drag him.” This to Clera who had just that second popped her scarf-wrapped face around the corner. “Wait.” Nona sliced and lifted Thuran’s thick jacket, winding it around his head so there would be no trail of blood.
“You’re mad,” Clera hissed, but she took a leg and between the three of them they got the man into the room, closing the door behind them.
The chamber was a spacious drawing room, perhaps for one of the many guest suites in the wing. The furniture was draped with sheets and the place had a musty smell as if it were not often used.
“Under here.” Nona lifted the sheet covering a table set against the wall that must be the palace’s outer wall.
Clera rolled Thuran into place, keeping her head averted in case eve
n in his dazed state he might recognize her over her scarf. She left him face down.
“Flesh-bind.” Nona held her hand out to Kettle, and the nun dug into her robe. She retrieved and handed over the small tub without comment, passing across a wooden applicator a moment later.
Nona knelt, put the tub to one side, and further sliced apart Thuran’s jacket, a thing of gold thread and silk embroidery that must have cost more than a labourer could earn in a lifetime. She found the leather pouch containing the Harm and extracted the sigil-worked disc of iron with considerable care. Her fingers didn’t want to go anywhere near it. She forced them to their task, requiring the same effort as if she had wanted to hold them to hot coals. Next she applied the last of the flesh-bind to the sigiled surface. Her mouth twisted as she contemplated the pallid skin covering the small of Lord Thuran Tacsis’s back. He had started to moan, returning to his senses.
“A better person wouldn’t do this . . .” Part of her wanted Keot to be there in her mind, screaming at her to act. She glanced at Kettle, finding the woman’s face free of expression.
“Any fair court would give the death sentence for his crimes,” Kettle said at last. “It’s for you to decide how.”
Nona remembered the Tacsis, father and son, leaning over her in that Noi-Guin cell, and pressed the Harm firmly into the small of Thuran Tacsis’s back, holding it there as he went rigid with an agony whose measure she could not forget. She held the disc in place long enough for the flesh-bind to form its bond.
“Why isn’t he screaming?” Clera whispered.
“You can’t,” Nona said. “It hurts too much.”
She moved back, lowered the sheet, and got up. “Lock the door behind us.” There was no knowing how long it would take before he was discovered. If they took too long perhaps the pain would kill him or maybe he would survive until he died of thirst. Twinges of regret and shame ran through Nona while Kettle set to work on the lock again, but each time she thought of returning to put an end to the man some image from the cells would rise to stop her.