Holy Sister

7

Three Years Earlier

The Escape

‘They’re 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. Sherzal’s 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. ‘That’s 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. Nona’s 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 Adoma’s 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 she’d just got out of bed. Coming to the spear, jammed against an outcrop, she picked it up.

Nona followed, frowning at the clouds. ‘We’ll 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 Zole’s hair with jewels of dew that froze into tiny pearls. Nona stumbled on in exhaustion, the shipheart’s 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 hadn’t 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 Corridor’s 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 didn’t 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 ice’s 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 Corridor’s 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 Adoma’s 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 recipient’s 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 Adoma’s 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 palace’s 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 Adoma’s 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 Adoma’s 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 it’s as if he’s 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 Ald’s borders rather than our own!’

Adoma had spoken on the subject of the west and of Scithrowl’s destiny to claim the coast of Marn.

Nona had seen the queen through Kettle’s 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 Adoma’s sacrifice. In order to secure the strength to lead her people to victory she had dared the black ice and been marked by it.

Adoma’s 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. ‘She’s 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 someone’s death. The only objection I have is that it’s 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 hadn’t 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 shipheart’s 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 hadn’t 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 don’t 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 Nona’s stream trickled over.

Nona peered over the drop. ‘Damn.’ She glanced up at the dark spots moving on the higher slopes. With a shrug she gathered her aching body into a focused knot, stepped out into space, and let the fall have her.

They left the clouds behind them, clinging to the mountains’ shoulders, and early sunshine welcomed the two novices into the eastern foothills. Nothing dared the rugged terrain save a few varieties of wire-grass and the goats that pursued them up from the plains. Zole led the way although she had no better idea of the geography than Nona, both of them relying on memories of Sister Rule’s endless maps. They moved quickly, following streams down into the valleys, alert for any herders checking on their flocks.

‘It could be the empire,’ Zole said. ‘It looks no different from the other side.’

‘A couple of centuries ago it was the empire.’

‘Perhaps the people will not be so different either, for all that Sister Wheel calls them eaters of children and deviants.’ Zole veered up towards the crest of the valley.

‘Maybe.’ Nona felt it hard to shake off the expectations built by a hundred fireside tales so easily. She fixed her eyes on Zole’s back and forced unwilling legs to match the girl’s pace down the slope. Sherzal’s soldiers appeared to have given up the chase, not prepared to venture onto Scithrowl territory. Of the Noi-Guin there was no sign, but Nona doubted that they would relent so easily. Even if their shipheart weren’t at stake.

‘This devil of yours …’ Nona returned to the conversation abandoned on the rock-faces far above them.

‘A raulathu.’

‘It’s some part of you that the shipheart has … broken off?’

‘An impurity of the spirit. In this state it can be purged, leaving a person closer to the divine.’

‘And.’ Nona paused to clamber over a shoulder of rock. ‘And you’ve touched a shipheart before? On the ice?’

‘My tribe calls them klauklar affac, “the footsteps of the Missing”. Most on the ice know them more simply as “Old Stones”. And yes, I have touched such a thing before. Two such things, in fact. When the ice-speakers find a child that can approach the Old Stones they test them. Each new raulathu takes longer to split from a person than the one before and is more difficult to purge. I gave twelve to the fire. It was hard to do. Neither of the tribe’s stones could find more.’

‘How old were you?’ Nona knew that when Zole described a thing as ‘hard’ it meant that anyone else would have been killed by it.

‘Nine. The ice-speaker banished me to the Corridor. He did not say why. My uncle took me to the empire margins. I was sold to Sherzal’s agent in a village called Shard.’

‘Do you … do you think that’s why you have no threads?

Zole made no answer. She had reached the ridge from where she could look down into the next valley and away towards the fortress to the north, the closest in the chain. ‘It seems that the Battle-Queen has ears in Sherzal’s palace, and swift access to them.’

Nona scrambled up to join Zole on the ridge. She straightened, wiping the grit from her palms. ‘Oh.’

A column of riders was spilling down the far side of the valley, a skirmish band on the shaggy ponies that dwelt wild in the region and could run all day over such terrain.

‘Sixty.’ Zole turned and dropped back below the ridge.

‘We can’t outrun them.’ Nona wasn’t sure she could outrun a three-legged mule right then.

Zole narrowed her eyes. A momentary frown and she was moving, back down into the valley again, angling towards their original path tracking the stream. On this side of the Grampains the rivers ran their course a while before vanishing beneath the ice sheets. On Sister Rule’s globe you could reverse the glaciers’ advance and set your fingers to ancient oceans picked out in blue enamel. Nona imagined they still lay there under miles of ice and that the sun-warmed waters of the Corridor must eventually reach those hidden seas.

‘If we’re going to fight we should do it here,’ Nona called after Zole.

‘Sixty is too many,’ Zole called back. ‘And more will come. I would rather rest.’

Nona shrugged and followed. Sixty was too many, and rest sounded good.

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