Holy Sister

The Escape (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)

In the dark of the moon by the side of the Grand Pass two dozen citizens of the empire huddled away from the wind. Dawn would show them an unparalleled view of that empire, spread out before them to the west, marching between the ice towards the Sea of Marn.

Nona stood close to the rock wall, pressed between Ara and Kettle. Her leg ached where the stump of Yisht’s sword had driven in, pain shooting up and down as she shifted her weight, the whole limb stiffening.

Abbess Glass had gathered the survivors in a bend where the folds of the cliff offered some shelter. There were among their number men and women who owned substantial swathes of the Corridor, who had been born to privilege and to command. But here in their bloodstained finery, with flames from the palace of the emperor’s sister licking up into the night behind them, it was to Abbess Glass they turned for direction.

‘It will take Sherzal’s soldiers a while to navigate around Zole’s landslide but they’ll come. It won’t take long then to alert the garrisons and send riders down the road to Verity. There’s no chance of making the capital that way.’

‘We don’t need to reach Verity.’ Lord Jotsis spoke up. ‘My estates are closer.’

‘Castle Jotsis is formidable,’ Ara said, looking between her uncle and the abbess.

Abbess Glass shook her head. ‘Sherzal will bottle us up anywhere but the capital. She might not be insane enough to lay siege to your castle, my lord, but she would likely encircle your holdings to prevent word reaching the emperor. And besides, I fear that closer is not close enough.’

‘So we’ve escaped only to be hunted down on the road?’ One side of old Lord Glosis’s face had swollen into a single bruise but she still had enough energy to be temperamental. ‘Unacceptable.’

‘It’s the shipheart that Sherzal wants above anything else.’ The abbess nodded to where Zole waited, some thirty yards closer to the landslide, her hands dark around the glowing purple sphere she had recovered from the Tetragode. ‘If we give her good reason to think that it has gone in another direction she won’t spare many soldiers for chasing us. Maybe none.’

‘And how,’ Lord Jotsis asked, ‘can we make her think we haven’t taken the shipheart with us?’

Abbess Glass turned to stare at the darkness of the slopes rising above them. ‘By making them think it has gone south, towards the ice.’

‘How can we make them think it’s been sent south?’ Lord Glosis asked, leaning on the arm of a young relative.

‘By actually sending it south, to the ice,’ the abbess said. ‘Zole will take it and let them see the glow upon the slopes.’

‘But that’s madness.’ Lord Jotsis drew himself to his full height. ‘You can’t entrust a treasure like that to a lone novice!’

‘I can when it’s the lone novice who somehow stole that treasure from the heart of the Noi-Guin’s stronghold in the first place,’ Abbess Glass replied.

‘She won’t be alone.’ Nona limped forward.

Ara hobbled to stand beside Nona. Kettle put her hands on their shoulders. ‘In our state we’re going to be slowing the abbess down on the road. None of us will be any use to Zole trying to outdistance soldiers across the mountains.’

Kettle was right. Nona gritted her teeth against the pain in her thigh and refused to let the admission out.

The abbess advanced on them, windswept, grey hair straggled across her face. ‘The Noi-Guin’s shipheart is a marjal one. It’s said that in the hands of a marjal healer it can mend any wound but that it can also bring harm.’

‘Well, I don’t want to go near it.’ Nona shuddered. She knew what harm the shipheart could bring. It had even squeezed a devil out of Zole, the most tightly bound person she had ever met. ‘And we don’t have a marjal healer.’

‘We have Zole,’ the abbess said, and raising her voice she called to the ice-triber. ‘Zole, time to show us what Sister Rose has been teaching you.’

Zole beckoned them rather than approach and bring with her the awful pressure of the shipheart’s presence. Nona took a few uncertain steps towards the girl, Ara behind her, then Kettle, all of them limping, the novice because of the arrow wound in her calf, the nun because of a knife wound in her thigh.

‘We shouldn’t be doing this, Abbess.’ Nona looked back. ‘The Sweet Mercy shipheart did terrible things to Yisht.’

‘And yet Zole is untouched.’ The abbess and the others were black shapes now, with just edges picked out here and there by the deep purple light of the shipheart.

But Zole was not untouched …

‘Find your serenity.’ Zole’s voice resonated through the night. ‘Serenity will preserve you.’

Nona didn’t feel serene. She felt scared and in pain, but she reached for her trance, running the lines of the old song through her head, imagining the slow descent of the moon and the children of her village chanting in a circle around the fire. And with the moon’s fall a blanket of serenity settled upon her, setting the world apart, her pain not gone but no longer personal, more a curio, an object for study.

Zole held the shipheart out towards them, a sphere the size of a child’s head, resting on both palms, dark purple, almost black, but somehow glowing with a violet light that seemed to shade beyond vision. Nona advanced. She felt the pressure of the thing, as if she had fallen into deep water. She had plunged into the black depths of the Glasswater sinkhole before, and this was no less terrifying. The need to breathe built in her and threatened her serenity, before, with a gasp, she remembered that there was no reason not to draw breath.

With just a yard between them Nona’s skin began to prickle then burn, as if the devils were there already just waiting for their true colours to be made known. Nona had shared her skin with a devil before, Keot, not one of her own making but one that had infected her when she killed Raymel Tacsis. The rocks around the man’s corpse had been stained black beneath the crimson.

‘Hold to yourself.’ Zole closed the remaining distance that Nona’s feet proved unwilling to cross. Zole had seen Nona’s old devil and kept the secret. Zole said they called them klaulathu on the ice. Things of the Missing.

Without preamble, Zole pressed the heart’s orb to the wound above Nona’s knee. Nona had expected her flesh to sizzle, the blood in her veins to boil like the water in Sweet Mercy’s pipes, but instead icy fingers wrapped around her bones and a black-violet light stole her vision. For a moment she saw strange spires silhouetted against an indigo sky, swept away in the next beat of her heart as if by a great wind. The Path opened before her; not the narrow and treacherous line that had to be hunted, but broad, blazing, so wide that its direction became uncertain, a place one might wander, drunk on power until the end of days. Voices began to sound within Nona’s head, all of them hers but speaking from different places, some raging, some jealous, some whispering secret fears or wants, a babble at first but each taking on a separate identity, becoming clearer, more distinct.

‘Done.’ Zole pushed Nona back, the base of her palm against Nona’s sternum.

Nona staggered and Ara kept her from falling with help from Kettle. The heart-light caught their faces, making something alien of them both.

‘Are you all right?’ Kettle asked.

‘I …’ Nona stood straight, stamped her leg. It still ached but the flesh had been made whole, a white line of scar tissue marking the passage of Yisht’s blade. ‘Yes.’ The voices that had filled her mind became jumbled together once more, fading back into the shadows.

‘Go on.’ Kettle sent Nona back towards the abbess and the rest of the group, giving her shoulder a small shove to get her going.

By the time Nona reached the ruins of the carriage that they had escaped the palace in she was calm again, her serenity intact.

‘How do you feel?’ The abbess watched Nona’s eyes with an uncomfortable intensity.

‘I don’t know,’ Nona said. ‘Tired. But full of energy. If that makes sense.’ She looked back down at her leg, the scar visible through the tattered smock. The cold no longer touched her. ‘I don’t know how Zole can stand it.’ Part of her wanted to tell the abbess about the devil she had seen at Zole’s wrist when she first arrived with the shipheart. She bit down on the impulse. She had lived with Keot for years and Zole hadn’t informed on her. Zole would have to deal with her own demons. The abbess probably couldn’t help in any case. And the inquisitors with her would want to burn the devil out of Zole.

Abbess Glass took Nona’s hand and led her back to the main group. ‘You’re mended? You can walk the distance now?’

‘I could run it!’ Ara caught them up, her hair rising around her head as if backcombed, a blonde confusion defying the wind. She had a wild look in her eye. Nona met her gaze and a grin broke across both their faces, a shared understanding, and something more complex that perhaps neither understood. Nona wanted to run with her, to chase her. Wanted her friend.

The three of them turned to see Kettle silhouetted against the shipheart’s glow, Zole on one knee, applying the heart to the nun’s inner thigh. Kettle broke away with a cry after just a moment’s contact. She came hurrying down the road, not glancing back. She moved quickly, though still with a slight limp.

‘Sister Kettle?’ The abbess stepped forward to meet her.

‘Mother …’ Kettle’s wide eyes sought the abbess as though she were night-blind.

‘Here.’ Abbess Glass took the nun’s hands. ‘You’re safe.’

Nona raised her brows at the enormity of that lie but said nothing.

‘I can’t go near it again. I can’t.’ Kettle shot a glance over her shoulder as if Zole might be approaching with the shipheart even now.

‘It’s all right, sister.’ The abbess led them further away. ‘I need you to protect us as we journey west. Even if all Sherzal’s forces follow the shipheart towards the ice the empire roads are no longer a safe place for the vulnerable. And unguarded Sis lords are likely to be a tempting prize to any bandits we might pass.’

‘But Zole …’