“What are you doing?” Jula joined Ruli, dagger trembling in her grip. Whether she was talking to Nona or to Darla was hard to say.
“I’m breaking rules.” Nona threw herself onto her severed shadow before it could escape into the greater dark, and then hurled herself back at Hessa, terrified that she would be too late, terrified that she would throw herself along the threads of the bond forged in such sorrow and so long ago only to find a nothingness, just the vacant space that her friend had once occupied in the world.
• • •
THE POINT OF Yisht’s knife waited just a finger’s width from Hessa’s eye. Yisht herself sat on the rocks just before her. In her other hand Sherzal’s assassin held the shipheart, a blue-white ball of wonder, its surface a multi-layered thing across which floated the ghosts of forms both familiar and unknown. She kept it pressed to a rip in her tunic, the flesh beneath torn and bloody.
“. . . I am not given to cruelty, child.”
Nona realized that Yisht was speaking.
“But you reached into my mind, and a violation like that cannot go unanswered.”
Hessa could smell meat burning and knew it was her—but still no pain reached her. The knife at her eye terrified her, but she had drawn her head back as far as she could, and still the point advanced.
Nona found herself lost, an impotent observer, her plans ridiculous. Somewhere she had hands, and those hands were full of shadow, but her ambition to draw that unleashed shadow through to Hessa lay so far beyond her talent she had no idea where to start.
Help me, Hessa!
And where Nona’s orders and demands had gone unheard and unheeded, her cry for help caught her friend’s attention—even beneath the heel of Yisht’s revenge.
“How?”
Help me draw it through! She tried to show Hessa what she needed.
“Easy!” Hessa felt herself drifting away, beyond pain, beyond struggle. She heard the Ancestor’s song, many-voiced and more beautiful than anything she had ever imagined possible. Even so—her friend had asked for help . . .
With the shipheart so close it seemed simplicity itself to take the dark threads from Nona’s clumsy fists, beating ineffectually at the walls between them, and to pull those threads through the bond they shared. We’re Giljohn’s children. The thought rolled across the smoothness of her mind as the Ancestor’s song grew louder. Sisters of the cage.
Stay! Nona tried to hold on to Hessa. She could feel her leaving but had no sense of where she might be going or how to follow.
The point of Yisht’s blade traced a hot line down the side of Hessa’s face, and in that moment of hurt the shadows suddenly swirled, rising from the ground so fast and thick and black that the broken stones rattled with their passage. Nona’s shadow broke from Hessa’s and threw itself at Yisht like an extension of her will, rending, tearing, screaming its hatred in registers above hearing.
From the fading, blood-soaked view that Hessa’s eye provided Nona saw Yisht fall back, open wounds torn across her, shredding her jacket. She twisted, and staggered away, thrusting the shipheart at Nona’s shadow to ward it off. Nona saw her shadow grow huge and monstrous, as if it were the shadow of her true self, barbed with hatred, swollen with rage. Yisht stumbled back, retreating up the shaft she had spent so many hours and so much sweat cutting into the bedrock. The shaft that led nowhere and offered no escape.
• • •
“. . . COMING . . .”
“Wake! Up!”
“I’m awake.” She opened her eyes.
“Nona—” Jula, reaching out, her face without hope and full of goodbyes. Outside the tramp of many feet approaching. An arrow glanced from the wall and rattled on into the cave.
Nona shook her head, rising smoothly into a crouch. The rage she had needed now filled her from toe to head, her body vibrating with it. “I was born for killing—the gods made me to ruin.” She batted aside an arrow and snatched another from the air before it reached Jula’s neck. She tucked it into her belt.
Nona launched herself into motion, driving up and forward, aimed at the bright entrance where tall figures crowded like the shadows of teeth in the cave’s open mouth. Ara lay at their feet, a helpless offering. Arrows, shot blindly into the gloom, ricocheted from the walls, clattering around her on the stone floor. Behind her she heard Darla’s shout as the novice found her courage and defiance. Something sped past Nona’s ear while she closed the distance to the enemy, overtaking her, spinning and scattering the sun’s last rays. Clera’s throwing star, released from Ruli’s considerably more skilled fingers, found the face of the foremost soldier.
As Nona’s feet drove her forward across the uneven floor of the cave she let her anger, every piece of hurt and rage and despair, throw her mind towards the Path. Nona had no trouble gathering what she needed. She had felt Hessa leave, felt her sweet and clever soul join something larger and more distant, as streams find the ocean. Hessa had gone, her last mile not limped or shuffled, not even walked upon her own two feet, but run. Hessa had not feared dying. But Nona feared living without her.
As she hit the Path Nona made no attempt to slow herself or find the balance she had always sought; instead she used her speed as she had on the blade-path, letting rage propel her where serenity had held her back, riding the twisting impossibility of the Path, shooting through the convolutions and relying on instinct to keep her on course, whatever came.
At the same time that Nona’s mind ran the Path her feet drove her towards the soldiers crowding through the cave mouth. She angled herself towards the wall, leapt at it, and kicked off, gaining height. Her speed and the unexpected nature of the attack, coming at the day-blind men from the darkness of the cave, took her over the points of their swords. Her target, quicker than the rest, managed to raise his blade but she twisted about it, her movements in the physical world somehow complementing and complemented by her simultaneous running of the Path.
Nona flew, arms extended, and hit the man in the face with both fists. Her flaw-blades, six inches long and spiking from her knuckles, gave her the purchase to leapfrog him, bringing her feet to his shoulders and springing away, her blades slicing clear as she jumped. A sword hissed towards her while she sailed over the last of the soldiers. She managed to swing her arms wide before her as it cut across her path. There was a moment’s contact, a bright metallic sound, and she came to ground tumbling across the rocky slope with sections of neatly divided longsword clattering down around her.
Nona fell from the Path at the same moment as she hit the ground. The impact against rough stone could have broken bones, at the least torn flesh and left her too injured to put up much of a fight. Instead, wrapped in the Path’s power, Nona left a channel of shattered stone in her wake and rolled to her feet, crouched in the fighting stance. She didn’t know how many steps she had remained on the Path for but there were many of them, the energies building inside her with each one. Past the tenth or twelfth step Nona had noticed that energy was bleeding off her, and that each new step built her reserves a little more slowly than the one before, but still, the build-up was inexorable and exhilarating. Such a magnificent feeling, in fact, that had she not fallen then she would never have voluntarily left the Path.
Crouched there, with the soldiers still turning to follow the line of her attack, Nona knew that the impact with the ground had saved her life. Even now she struggled to own what the Path had given her. The raw energy of it smoked from her skin. All about her the rock trembled, and the broken fragments, shattered loose by her passage, now started to rise, each making slow revolutions as it lifted from the ground.
Nona opened her mouth and the scream that came from it was larger than her body, a hammer that smote the rock, cut down the soldiers like wheat before the scythe, and rattled away down every gully, even reaching out to smite the distant walls of the Spine and come echoing back. The scream tore her lungs an
d throat, spattering bright crimson blood across the rocks before her. Nona felt herself separate into broken pieces, each an image of herself, resonances in time as the power she struggled to contain vibrated through the stuff of reality.
Ara had been broken into three pieces by the Path energies she used on the day Zole came to the convent. She had struggled to pull herself together. Nona stood in nine parts, some captured in the moments as she had tumbled across the rock, others held around her, some just rising into the crouch, others lifting from it.
At the same time as Nona’s borrowed power threatened to scatter her across the slope something stabbed at her chest. A cold, sucking something, lanced into her, a hungry void syphoning off some of what she had taken.
Nona knew that in a heartbeat each piece of her would fly apart, torn one from the next by the Path’s energy. She needed to pull herself back into one unified whole, to find a common thread that would bind them together. All she could think of, all that was in her mind as she watched the soldier she had jumped from, still in the act of falling, his head a ruin, was that she ached to kill the rest of them.
It was enough.
With a snap like some deep bone clicking into place Nona stood whole, the Path’s energies owned, bound into her flesh, armouring her, strengthening her. All around her the rocks, once suspended, began to fall.
Nona tore at her breast where the coldness somehow knifed through her new-found strength. Her habit shredded and Yisht’s amulet fell from the torn inner pocket. Nona batted it away before the iron sigil of negation could drink any more of her power.
She slowed the turning of the world, dug deeper into the moment than she had ever been. The falling stones seemed to crawl towards the ground, and when she launched herself at the tall axeman who stood closest to her she hurtled through the air fast as any spear was ever thrown. Her cry of rage had set him falling, but she didn’t give him time to hit the ground.
Nona moved among the mailed bodies of her foe spinning and swinging, opening disastrous wounds wherever her hands passed. Shields and chainmail offered no resistance to her blades. With the Path-power bound into her, muscle and bone, a well-placed kick could shatter a grown man’s hip through his armour. Her blood sang with the violence. Ducking beneath the swing of a sword, she clawed through a woman’s knee and threw herself onto the largest of their number, a seven-foot warrior, thick with muscle. Nona sprang up the height of him. The punch she delivered to his throat held such force that her arm passed through his neck, scattering the small bones of his spine in a crimson splatter.
The red work of killing carried on. At some point in the midst of it Nona took the arrow from her belt and stuck it into the eye of the man who had fired it at her. Nona had hidden her secret so long, worked so hard to be . . . normal, but the truth lay all around her in crimson arcs of gore written out across the rocks. She had come to Sweet Mercy bearing the title “murderer” and come to that deed from a cage where her first act of slaughter had placed her. Even before that the children of the village had seen her for what she was, a fox among hens. Billem Smithson tried to hurt me—she had said—this was inside him. She must have been all of three or four years old.
She twisted away from the lazy descent of two swords and a thrust spear, diving between a forest of legs, slicing into the meat of a thigh, opening muscle and arteries, scoring the bone. The novices, the nuns, the abbess herself, would all know her now for the monster she was, a rabid animal unfit for the company of decent people, holy or otherwise.
An axe scythed towards her, the wielder white-faced and desperate, more likely to wound a friend than to connect with Nona, and yet by luck he caught her on the turn with almost no time to act.
Her blades divided the hilt into tumbling sections that she dived through. The axehead flew free and bedded itself in the chest of the woman whose knee Nona had ruined, who was still in the act of collapsing.
The men who had been at the fore of the rush into the cave now returned to a scene of carnage. Apart from the four emerging into the light only one soldier stood uninjured. The four paused—an ill-advised hesitation that allowed Nona to leap at the face of their companion and bear him screaming to the rocks amid the wreckage of his comrades.
When Nona lifted her head, gore dripping from her hair, the four survivors took a step back. Darla’s tular came down in an inexpert but devastating swing, nearly beheading the leftmost of the men and embedding the blade deep in his sternum. Jula appeared with her arm around the shoulders of the next, screaming and stabbing furiously at his neck. Ruli felled another of them by smashing a rock, two-handed, into the back of his knee.
The last man started to run, angling away across the slopes. Nona plucked a blood-slick spear from its fallen owner and threw it. The Path-energy was burning out of her limbs and the spear felt heavy. Even so it flew true and took him between the shoulder blades, carrying him to the ground.
Nona stood, panting, blood dripping from her hands, blood in her hair, the taste of it in her mouth, blood running down her legs, blood cloaking her habit as if she were already a Red Sister. She looked up, her gaze travelling slowly across the twitching of the injured and the stillness of the dead, dreading to see the condemnation in her friends’ faces.
The three of them stood over the bodies of the soldiers they had brought down. Jula with her mousey hair wild and sticking up at all angles, her face, neck and shoulders spattered with gore, Tarkax’s knife glistening in her hand. Ruli raised her face, the rock in her hands dark with gore. She had shattered the soldier’s head when he fell and the splash of it decorated her in scarlet. Darla freed the tular with a wet wrench and held it above her head. All three of them stood for a moment, panting. Then as one they roared out their victory and, raising her hands, Nona howled it out with them. She stood, her heart pounding, eyes full of tears, her chest full of that strange mixture of sorrow and exultation that she could never explain, a feeling that words could neither shape nor own.
It took her a moment to remember Hessa. Her death didn’t feel real yet. Nona stood there, casting no shadow, and found she could feel nothing for her friend. Some emotions are like that, too big to be seen from within, like the ice patterns, written across empty miles, which make sense only from a great height. She slumped, staggering as weariness caught up with her. She would find that distance in time, and there would be sorrow enough to make the dead weep, and she feared it.
• • •
NONA WENT ACROSS to Ara, who lay by the edge of the slope, rope around her wrists where one of the soldiers had started to bind her. They hadn’t trusted the poison to keep her immobile but it was still doing a good job. Nona met Ara’s eyes as she sliced away her bonds.
“They’re all dead, Ara.” Nona looked down at herself, still red with slaughter. She couldn’t bring herself to speak of Hessa yet. She wanted to set off for the convent, to run all the way, to kill Yisht with her own hands.
“Some are just wounded.” Ruli came across, empty-handed now. Nona became aware of groaning behind her as Ruli spoke.
“We should do something about that.” Darla raised her bloody tular and eyed it speculatively.
“They’re no threat,” Jula said, the sleeve of her habit red and dripping. “We need to get the others moving. Then we can go.”
The slope stank of death, an ugly smell. “Let them be.” Nona shook her head. “Help me with Ara.” She made to stand. As she moved, the gleam of sunlight on metal further down the gully caught her eye.
The last edge of the sunset still caught the Devil’s Spine, and its light beaded on the smooth curve of a steel shoulder-plate as it came into view. The man walking towards them was armoured from head to toe, lobstered in interlocking steel, his helm a cylinder faced by perforated doors. Nona was amazed anyone could walk in such a weight of metal.
“Get Ara back into the cave!” she shouted.
At least five of
the soldiers still had breath in them, though perhaps none would last the night. She crouched by a woman, a scar-faced veteran, her breathing shallow, the point of an axehead bedded in her ribs where it had driven the links of her chainmail into the wound, and shook her roughly. “Who is that?”
“Can’t . . . you tell?” The woman grimaced. “Wait . . . until he gets . . . closer.”
“It’s Raymel Tacsis?” Nona understood. Only a gerant could carry such armour.
She advanced down the slope, skidding on loose stone, into the gully where a small stream gurgled. When Raymel drew closer, Nona once again got that shock of realization as her eyes understood the scale of him. The sword he drew from over his shoulder must have been six foot in length and heavier than her.
“It always pays to bide your time with witches.” Raymel Tacsis set the point of his sword upon the ground. “Perhaps I should have brought more soldiers. I would have preferred you captured so we could spend a while together. But my father keeps a tight rein on his troops and he felt that you’re not worth breaking a promise to the emperor over. Not this year anyway. I disagreed.” His voice was as deep and rich as Nona remembered, but beneath it, just at the edge of hearing, it seemed that she heard other tones, other voices whispering the words, voices that were older, crueller, and more hungry.
Nona backed off, matching Raymel’s advance.
“I thought you were a fighter, little girl?” Three more strides. “You seemed keen enough at the Caltess. Both times.”
Nona continued to back away.
“Not so brave now you’ve spent your magic?” The trailing tip of Raymel’s sword rattled through the loose stones by the stream, scoring the bedrock with a discordant noise.
Nona blinked. The ghostly echo of the Path hung in the darkness behind her eyes, but it lay beyond her reach, like a spent passion. She might be able to reach for it by the next morning, but not any time soon. And her flaw-blades—she had seen that they barely scratched the man, warded as he was by the devils that shared his skin. She kept backing away.