? ? ?
NONA CRACKED OPEN her eyes an unknown length of time later. They had her on her belly, two of them at least, in a dimly lit room. One was clasping some kind of collar around her neck, the other putting restraints on her ankles. Nona twisted her head as fast as she could, lunging to take a bite of the nearest wrist, but her teeth snapped shut on nothing, the hand withdrawn too swiftly. Another hand pressed her head to the hard floor with awful pressure and the first person returned to fixing the collar.
“It is done.” A soft voice without urgency.
Someone knelt on Nona’s back, struggling with something. A sudden snap and a rattle of chain. Nona’s arms slid to her sides, lifeless but no longer bound together at the wrists.
The three of them retreated a few paces. Nona tried to rise but her arms hung limp, the pain of returning circulation just beginning as pins and needles, running down her veins.
The first bucket of water took her by surprise, ice-cold and sudden. She hauled breath back into her near-paralysed lungs and had begun to curse when the second bucket hit her with the third a fraction behind it. Somewhere in the middle of it all it occurred to her that she was naked.
“Roll over.” The same soft voice, empty of mockery or compassion.
Nona lay where she was, shivering around her pain. She didn’t think she could roll even if she wanted to.
One of the shadowy figures approached, bending low. Nona willed her blades into being to lash at the person’s leg, but all that happened was that her arm flopped out from her side. Her captor stepped over it and, seizing her opposite shoulder, rolled Nona onto her back.
The figure stepped away again and several more buckets of icy water followed. When the last one had been thrown and Nona’s spluttering had calmed she could hear the water gurgling away down a nearby drain.
“Stand.”
Nona tried. With minimal help from her arms and unbalanced by waves of nausea and confusion she ended up pitching to one side whilst still on her knees and lay there shivering uncontrollably. Two of her captors pulled her to her feet. Both were dressed in grey robes with long sleeves, their hair shaved to a finger’s width. Nona found it hard to guess their age or sex. Perhaps the one to the left was a woman, perhaps the one to the right a man, neither of them young, but neither old yet.
The third approached with a white linen smock that they worked to get Nona into. She noticed as they did it that she had metal bands around her wrists, her ankles too, presumably matching the collar at her throat.
Nona shook her arms, trying to get more life into them. She couldn’t see much of the chamber. The only light filtered in through a barred window in the door. From what hints the gloom offered, the room seemed to be fairly small and bare, maybe a washroom.
For people who had gone to great lengths to abduct her and keep her incapacitated Nona’s captors didn’t seem to be particularly wary. She puzzled. They must know of her Path-walking, and likely they would know of her blades too. If they had taken the trouble to find her they would have taken the trouble to find out about her first.
“Come.” The tallest of the three walked to the door, knocked, and led through when it opened.
Nona followed, flanked, and occasionally supported, by the other two. A fourth person, similarly shaven-headed and robed, waited in the corridor and joined the escort. Nona supposed they knew how the drugs must still be affecting her and thus felt safe enough from any display of violence on her part.
Single candles burned at irregular intervals in niches along the corridor, just bright enough so that at the darkest spots a hint of the surroundings could still be seen. The doors that they passed looked like cell doors, heavy, each set with a small barred window and a large iron lock. Nona gave silent thanks to Hessa for showing her how to deal with those. Mistress Shade taught classes on overcoming the various mechanisms with a dozen curiously shaped picks, or a vial of acid, but Nona had never fared too well at these, perhaps lacking the motivation of those who can’t open a lock by pulling its thread.
A sewer-stench hung around the corridor. Nona knew that she had smelled worse before they sluiced her. The stink put her in mind of Harriton gaol, whose bars she hadn’t thought of in an age. Smells will do that for you, reach out and pull you back across the years. She remembered being walked along to the cells with Saida, two little girls, only one of whom would come out again with her neck unbroken.
“Here.” The woman at the front—Nona was sure she was female now—stopped at a door no different to the previous half dozen. A key appeared from the woman’s robes and once the door stood open she led the way inside. In the blackness against the back wall somehow the woman found a chain and locked the clasp at its end into the cuff around Nona’s ankle. Nona considered kicking her in the head and making a break for it but she still felt weak and ill. Better to escape in private later.
Her four captives left without further words, locking the door behind them. Nona supposed that at least one of them must be a marjal touch with some shadow-weaving skill in order to perform their task in such gloom.
You’re in trouble. Keot moved across her collarbones, stinging like an old scald.
“First I need to get this chain off.” Nona tried to force her flaw-blades into being but nothing happened. “Bleed me! I’ll try later. Unless you can do something to clean this muck out of my blood.”
It won’t make any difference. The collar and the bands are sigil-worked. I can’t move under them. They must be to disrupt your abilities . . . such as they are.
“Hells.” Nona felt the metal cuffs around her wrists. The sensation in her fingers had returned. The cuffs were heavy pieces of metal, hinged, locked, smooth except for where the sigils had been engraved in deep, swirling lines. Sister Pan had told her that to permanently imprint power into a sigil was an act that required far more than just marking the correct symbol. A marjal full-blood would have to train at the task for half a lifetime and even after such training the setting of a single sigil could take anything from hours to days, months for the most potent sigils. Sigil-marked armour and swords lay beyond the pockets of even many of the Sis. Such things were passed from lord to heir as treasures of the house. “If I get out of here wearing these I’ll be richer than Joeli Namsis.”
Nona leaned back against the wall, finding it cold and uncomfortable. Her body appeared to be made entirely from aches connected by pains. She retched then gathered her will and tried to find the Path. Her eyes saw nothing but darkness. She tried to defocus her vision, to look past the world to the network of threads that underlie all things, including darkness. Again nothing.
“I’m going to have to do this the hard way.”
The bravado was for any ears that might be listening. It was also a lie.
* * *
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“A LONELY TRAIL, sister. Are you lost?” The man stepped into the path from the treeline and Kettle’s heartrate doubled from one beat to the next.
In a dark cell miles from the forested foothills of the Artinas Ridge Nona’s head snapped back and what Kettle saw replaced her blindness.