“A CORD.” NONA wondered how she had missed seeing it. Even disguised and in a darkened room the cord shouldn’t have escaped her. She had been trained to see. She sat up straighter, shrugging off self-pity, and applied her training, focusing on the memory of a flame, the start of the route into her clarity trance. Not every discipline she had learned could be forbidden by sigil-marked iron.
Clarity settled upon Nona, frosting across her skin, cleansing the darkness of ambiguity, and bringing every faint sound into focus as if the instrument of her being had been tuned to perfection. Nona isolated one sense then the next as Sister Pan had taught her, then brought all five together. She could hear the man outside the door draw breath, exhale, draw breath. The dark still hid what it hid, but those shapes it did offer were extracted and given meaning. Nona ran her fingertips across her restraints, learning all their secrets, from the sigils cut into the curved iron to the details of hinge and clasp.
“Nothing.”
The iron peg that anchored the end of the chain attached to her ankle cuff had been driven between two great stones in the wall, held there more by the weight pressing on the stone above it than by the mortar filling the joint.
Nona moved the chain to one side and pulled, bracing her legs against the floor and tugging slightly upward.
Every prisoner tests their chains. If they came loose then the gaolers would replace them with stronger ones. An untold number of desperate men and women have tested these cells before you and helped refine them.
Why don’t you help me then? Nona replied. When I die you’re going back to lurking on the boundary where Raymel found you.
There’s nothing I can do. I can’t make you stronger.
Nona put her head back against the cold stone wall. They had taken her blades, taken all of the marjal skills she had been working on in private. Her flame-work was still remedial, her rock-work hardly enough to fracture a pebble, but both might have been useful. They had shut her off from the Path and threads. All they’d left her was her speed.
With a lever I could turn this pin. Work it free. Nona imagined a steel rod narrow enough to slide through the eye of the pin alongside the last link of chain. With a long enough lever and a fulcrum a person could move the world.
You don’t have a lever.
It doesn’t have to be a lever. Anything that could wrap it, grip it, allow her to apply her strength further out to twist it. If she held the pin in her fist and tried to rotate it she could break her bones and not move it a degree. If the pin were fixed at the centre of a cart-wheel she could grip the outer rim and twist it with little effort no matter how tightly it was anchored.
You don’t have anything else. Keot sounded as if he were already thinking of his return to the chaos he came from and of his next escape. Nona doubted opportunities came along often. Perhaps there wouldn’t be another chance for Keot before the ice closed and the moon fell.
Nona began to wind the chain around the wall pin. After one turn the second layer of chain started to slip off the first. There wasn’t enough pin exposed to wrap one turn next to the other, and no point to that anyway. She needed to build out.
Slowly and with enormous care she managed to wrap three turns around the pin, each layer of chain resting on the one below, but inevitably the whole lot began to slide, then collapsed and fell off the pin.
She knelt, the gritty stone hurting her knees, racking her brain for other ideas. How many prisoners had done the same before? How long had it taken before they resigned themselves to failure and sat helpless, shivering in the dark, waiting on the mercy of the Noi-Guin?
“I was in that convent five years . . . They must have taught me something useful.”
They taught you to reach the Path. That’s the only true power.
Nona frowned. “Actually they didn’t. They told me to go slow, serene, approach it gently. I didn’t have any success until I learned to use my anger. To run at it. Use my speed . . .”
She wrapped the chain around the pin again, slow, thoughtful. It slipped off.
I need to use my speed.
Nona threw herself into the space between heartbeats. In the darkness of the cell nothing changed save that the chain went from flexible to stiff, resisting motion at the speed she demanded of it. She began to wrap it around the pin again, forming an ever-widening coil against the wall. Unable to slip, because she gave them no time in which to slip, the layers of chain spiralled out to six inches on each side before Nona ran out of chain. She threw herself at the circular coil, with the wall pin at its midst, and gripped the outer edges, hauling to try to rotate the whole lot. With no time to slip, the links locked together and for one small fraction of a second the whole coil acted as if it were a solid, unbreakable body. A moment later the mass of links fell away from the wall, a shapeless weight of chain hanging from her fingers.
Did it move? A note of interest from Keot now.
Nona didn’t know, but she got ready to try again. Struggling with a hopeless task in a dark cell might offer little comfort, but it beat thinking about that knife and what was coming.
31
THE GRAMPAIN MOUNTAINS rose in a ridge that crossed the Corridor. North and south the range marched into the ice, buckling the sheet for scores of miles until at last the ice grew deep enough to drown even the peaks. Many referred to them as the Empire Wall, tacit acknowledgement that it was the terrain more than the legions sent by successive emperors that took most credit for holding back the Scithrowl hordes for the last century.
“Sherzal’s palace is not far from this place.” Zole paused to scan the snowcapped ridge. She had abandoned her range-coat in favour of the jacket worn by the Lightless who had been pretending to be a hunter. They had managed to wash most of the blood spatters off and to disguise the rest with mud. “I’m sure I know these mountains.”
Kettle raised a brow. “I’ve not visited the area. I crossed to Scithrowl through Windsong Pass, twenty miles north of here.” Her gaze roamed the landscape of fractured rock ahead of them. Lightless watchers could be stationed anywhere.
A minute earlier a mountain goat had broken from the shadow of a boulder on the slope just above them. The shock had set Kettle’s heart pounding, and the moment of panic had allowed Nona’s awareness to push along the bond they shared. Kettle could feel the girl, watching from her eyes. Why they couldn’t speak to each other she couldn’t say. Perhaps the Tetragode had barriers that limited their contact. Either way, she hoped Nona would draw comfort from their approach. She tried to bury the thought that even with all the Grey Sisters and all the Red she would not be confident of breaching the Noi-Guin’s stronghold.
“That peak, with the snow pluming off it.” Zole nodded towards it. She couldn’t point: her wrists were bound behind her, tethered to a rope Kettle held. “I am sure it can be seen from the palace.”
“How sure?”
Zole paused before answering. “It is hard to say. It might just be similar, or appear very different from a new angle. But Sherzal’s palace is on the western flanks of the Grampains and you can see the southern ice from her towers. It cannot be too many miles from here.”