Nona panted away the hurt and rose to her knees. This was the test. This was the trap. She wiped her eyes, sought her centre.
Somewhere, it must be somewhere. She stood and cast around her. Something must be wrong. Something out of place? The serenity trance insulated her against grief but her eyes kept returning to her mothers body, small and broken. Theres nothing Nona fell back to her knees, drawn down despite her trance by a weight she couldnt understand. Tears returned to fill her eyes, blurring her vision as she gathered the woman who had been her everything into her lap.
tired
Mother? Nona blinked away the tears. But the brown eyes she found herself looking down into were not her mothers, the hand that enfolded hers was huge.
Darla? Nona choked out her friends name.
Darlas brown eyes clouded with confusion, a kind of wonder, staring at some distant place above Nonas head. The smoke and fire around them wasnt that of Rellam Village. It was Sherzals stables starting to burn. The eighty miles to Path Tower had become hundreds.
Shes gone, Nona. Kettle put her hand on Nonas shoulder.
Darla Another raw wound. Nona ground her teeth. Darlas hand still held hers, warm, solid, real. Maybe she could still be saved Maybe this time it would be different.
To drag her eyes from Darlas almost broke Nona. To turn her face from a friend who needed her, a dying friend. Its not real. Nona swung her head around, trying to call the clarity trance though her heart ached and pounded. None of its real.
Nona Kettle shook her head slowly as if the sorrow had made it too heavy. We have to go.
There! Amid the swirls of smoke and the red tongues of fire a door that had not been present when all this happened, a door with no place in Sherzals stables and no place to lead.
Nona! Cries from the great carriage before the main exit. We need you.
Letting Darlas head fall felt like the ultimate betrayal. Every part of her wanted to stay. Every part of her wanted to face the danger with her friends. To save them. To do it better this time.
But she sprang to her feet and threw herself across the burning hall even as the door upon which her eyes were fixed started to fade from view.
No! She reached it just as the last lines melted away. No! Flaw-blades dug deep and in a frenzy of hacking and a storm of splinters Nona staggered through.
Curved, sigil-crowded walls surrounded her, the inlaid silver gleaming in a light that seemed to be dying swiftly. Nona turned in time to see a doorway fading, and beyond it the spiral steps of Path Tower. A persons shadow, Rulis or Aras, lay across stone steps lit by the coloured whispers of the day that shone in the classroom above, streaming in through stained-glass windows.
A moment later the doorway had gone and Nona stood blind and alone.
It wasnt true. Any of it. Whispered to the darkness.
Some of it was true though. Abbess Glass had died and Sweet Mercy would never be the same again.
7
Three Years Earlier
The Escape
Theyre catching up again. Nona hunched against the hard-packed snow, too cold to shiver now. The wind stole her words and ran away with them, howling. Sherzals soldiers knew the mountains and had found better routes to gain the heights. Nona could see black figures to the south, little more than dots, almost at the shoulder between two peaks where she and Zole would have to cross if they were to make further progress towards the ice sheet.
We have to go down. Zole pointed to an icy defile where the east side of the ridge had fractured along some hidden fault line.
Down? Nona tried to imagine any way she could achieve that other than falling. Thats Scithrowl. She stared at the foothills, hazy in the distance and partly obscured by wisps of cloud around the waist of the mountains.
They will be unlikely to follow us there. Zole shrugged and continued along the ridge. Their path proved to be a serrated blade of stone coated with two feet of icy snow on the southern face and with black ice on the northern side.
The descent proved as hard as the ascent, though in different ways. It found a whole new set of muscles to stress. Nonas legs began to feel as if they belonged to someone else, paying scant regard to her instructions but letting her have full share of the hurting. Several times she started to fall and saved herself only by digging her flaw-blades through ice into rock. They climbed down for an hour and the world below seemed to grow no closer, though the expanse of black rock towering behind them assured her that they were making progress.
The wind blew less fiercely on the slopes that faced Queen Adomas lands but it was far from calm. The clouds surged below them, lapping the slopes like a grey sea. Nona heard shouts before they reached the swirling layer of mist, and looking back she saw that those leading the pursuit were less than a hundred yards away. A spear rattled past her.
We will lose them in the clouds, Zole said. She hopped down from rock to rock making it seem that her legs were as fresh as if shed just got out of bed. Coming to the spear, jammed against an outcrop, she picked it up.
Nona followed, frowning at the clouds. Well lose ourselves in there too. But she supposed down to be an easy direction to follow whatever the visibility.
The mist rose to meet their descent, a cold white sea wrapping them, beading Zoles hair with jewels of dew that froze into tiny pearls. Nona stumbled on in exhaustion, the shiphearts fire filling her mind with unfocused energy but doing nothing for the muscles in her thighs.
Have you been into Scithrowl before? Nona asked, sliding down onto a ledge as Zole led off.
No.
Their armies are at the border
If we need to kill soldiers to get to the ice, would it not be better that they were Scithrowl?
I suppose so Nona had a fear of the Scithrowl, a heritage of endless stories told across the Grey. She expected that every part of the empire had its tales of Scithrowl horrors. Told no doubt by old ladies like Nana Even who hadnt ever been sufficiently far east to glimpse the Grampain peaks, let alone an actual heretic. Did they burn prisoners, eat babies, and practise peculiar tortures? Best not to get captured and find out.
The wind began to shred the cloud layer around them, tearing the whiteness across the flanks of the mountain and affording glimpses of Scithrowl stretching east. It looked remarkably like the empire had from the other side. In the north the ice was a glimmering white line, to the south it lay less than five miles away, a vaulting wall, all in shadow now.
The ice. Nona stopped. She had seen the Corridors great wall before, shorn off by the focus moon, but for the first time ever she had the elevation to look down upon what lay beyond. Zole stopped too. Even a life on the shelf itself didnt offer an overview. Mile upon mile of merciless ice, bloody with the touch of the morning sun. Here and there internal pressures rucked the sheet up into ridges or split it with chasms that looked like wrinkles at this distance but must be large enough to swallow any tower built by man. The roots of the Grampains cut across the ice every few miles, grey ribs of stone stretching from the main ridge, becoming frost-wrapped and at last drowned beneath the glacial flow.
The ice. Nona stopped. She had seen the Corridors great wall before, shorn off by the focus moon, but for the first time ever she had the elevation to look down upon what lay beyond. Zole stopped too. Even a life on the shelf itself didnt offer an overview. Mile upon mile of merciless ice, bloody with the touch of the morning sun. Here and there internal pressures rucked the sheet up into ridges or split it with chasms that looked like wrinkles at this distance but must be large enough to swallow any tower built by man. The roots of the Grampains cut across the ice every few miles, grey ribs of stone stretching from the main ridge, becoming frost-wrapped and at last drowned beneath the glacial flow.
It is a sight to behold. Zole stood statue-still, the wind tugging at her cloak.
The black ice! Nona pointed at a wound in the ice sheet you could almost imagine it a hole, its sides shadowed. A black teardrop, impossible not to see now that her eyes had found it, haloed in grey, shading through the surrounding ice and drawn away to the north with the ices flow in a broad path, dark grey at the centre. Where the grey streak across the surface reached the Corridor the ice wall also shaded grey and the land all around lay barren, a dead zone reaching out into the farmlands of the Scithrowl levels. The margins of this dead zone were edged in brown where the Corridors flora fought to endure. In the narrow gap between the tainted area and foothills of the Grampains to the west a chain of four fortresses stepped from one ridge to the next towards the clear ice.
Zole allowed a moment to rest. Nona collapsed into the lee of an outcrop. She huddled there, shivering, and stared at Scithrowl, stretching endlessly to the east. The land lay green and grey, shadowed by scudding cloud, and further coloured by the rumoured cruelties of its people. If the stories were to be believed their queen was a monster, darker by far than Sherzal.
Sister Kettle had told Nona the story of her mission years earlier to learn Queen Adomas secrets, passing images of that time along the thread-bond that bound them. Memories shared in such a manner strike hard and often burn as bright as the recipients own until it becomes hard to tell them from genuine recollection.
Kettle was not the first or the last Grey Sister to be sent to Adomas capital, but she had come closer to the queen than any other of the order had managed in a long time. Close enough to stand within her court in the guise of a Noi-Guin and listen to the queen hold forth to her nobles.
Among the glittering crowds beneath the palaces gilt roof Kettle had seen half a dozen of the Scithrowls most feared Path-mages standing shoulder to shoulder with the nobility. Each of these full-blood quantals wore a golden medallion marking them as members of Adomas Fist, a band of quantal and marjal mages whose reputation was known far beyond the borders of both Scithrowl and the empire. It was said that when Adomas Fist struck even the ice shook.
Their leader, Yom Rala, had stood before the throne on the first step of the dais, a place of high honour. Kettle described him as a chewed stick of a man with a predilection for scarlet finery.
He may look weak and foolish, Kettle had said, but when he turns his gaze your way its as if hes uncoiling every secret you own, and where he steps the ground is left smoking. Pray the Scithrowls wars in the east keep the Fist on Alds borders rather than our own!
Adoma had spoken on the subject of the west and of Scithrowls destiny to claim the coast of Marn.
Nona had seen the queen through Kettles eyes. A tall woman, blunt-faced, solid, conveying a sense of physical power, of barely suppressed energies. Black-haired, a frothing mass of curls contained by hoops of gold, her pale skin stained and streaked as if rubbed with fresh ink. This, the Scithrowl said, was Adomas sacrifice. In order to secure the strength to lead her people to victory she had dared the black ice and been marked by it.
Adomas enemies called her mad, blood-drunk, cruel beyond measure, ready to inflict any torture that imagination could frame. Her people called her ruthless, relentless, born to deliver the full length of the Corridor into their keeping.
When she spoke though, addressing her court in the fluid Scithrowl tongue, Kettle found her articulate and entirely reasonable.
If I were a Scithrowl I would follow her, Kettle had said. Shes right. The ice is closing on us and how else are we to live but to forge east or west? The world is cruel, our choices harsh, and every alternative leads to someones death. The only objection I have is that its us that she plans to forge a path through.
However inspiring her speeches might be, the truth of the Battle-Queen lay in the black ice, that place of horror where even Kettle had lost her way, and from where Adoma was said to gain her power. Kettle would share no memories of that darkness, only the conviction that nothing save evil could come from it.
Zole glanced at the cloud base billowing just a hundred feet above them and made to move on. Come.
I saw it. The devil. Nona hadnt meant to speak. Maybe the sight of the black ice put it in her mind. I saw it at your wrist when you climbed onto the road.
Zole hesitated, just missing a beat, then continued her descent. I did not think that I had any more left in me.
Any more? Nona hurried after her, gritting her teeth against the shiphearts pressure.
It seems that it might take a shipheart from each of the bloods to wholly purify us. Or perhaps it is just me who needs that.
Purify? What are you talking Nona slipped, one tired foot tangled the other, and she was falling. She clung to the moment but although she fell through treacle she still fell, her hands too far from any surface to save her.
Careful. Zole closed the gap with hunska speed and caught her wrist.
Nona shook free and wordlessly scrambled away from the shipheart, its fire burning in her blood.
Do you think that in all the vastness of the ice there are no more of these? Zole jerked her head back towards her pack. None of your shiphearts? You think they exist only in this narrow strip of Abeth where green things still grow?
Well Nona hadnt really thought about it. But the ice covers
There are ways down. And the ice-tribes are the descendants of those who refused to run before its advance, peoples who walked the green face of Abeth thousands of years ago. They took their treasures up onto the ice with them.
Zole moved on and for what seemed an age it was all Nona could do to keep up with her. The ice-triber stopped where a trickle of freezing water spilled from a crack in the rocks. Drink. She began to fill her waterskin.
Nona found a still smaller trickle spilling from an overhang and stood with her mouth open to receive it. After a few gulps she stepped away. You have a devil in you, one of those did you call them klaulathu?
You had a klaulathu under your skin, Nona Grey, an echo of the Missing. This, she opened her hand and the palm lay scarlet, is a raulathu, it is not of the Missing. It is an echo of me.
I dont understand.
Zole narrowed her eyes, looking past Nona, up at the slopes above her. The clouds did not slow them as much as I had hoped. They have found us again. She turned and dropped away, landing on a huge boulder twenty feet below the ledge that Nonas stream trickled over.