“Help.” She lifted her head. “Me.”
In the moment while the three men registered the alien blackness of her eyes Nona tore one arm across the other, shredding iron links beneath her blades. She scattered chain segments at the guards and sprinted the remaining five yards, hurling herself sideways into the air. Deep in the moment, Nona twisted to ride both above and below the sword blades reaching towards her. She hit all three men with her back to them, one arm extended to drive blades into the neck of the leftmost man, the other arm crooked to skewer the groin of the middle man, her legs tangling with the legs of the man on the right.
All of them fell. Before they hit the ground Nona had ripped her blades from the leftmost man’s neck and doubled up to stab the rightmost in the head. She cut short the cries of the groin-stabbed man with a slash across his throat.
Kettle and Clera ran from the shadows where corridor gave way to natural tunnel, and found Nona sitting across the three bodies, panting, blood arcs spattering the sigil-scribed walls.
“I thought we were going to . . . knock them out,” Clera said in a small voice.
Nona levered herself up, her exhaustion returning with a vengeance. “Let’s go.”
* * *
? ? ?
NONA WATCHED THE corridor while Clera and Kettle searched the dead for keys or anything else of use. The symbols etched into the walls pulled at the corners of her vision. Which of the sigils would collapse the tunnel Nona had no idea, but had there been even a single additional guard it would have been hard to stop them activating one and bringing the roof down. Had there been a whole barracks full of them, it would have been impossible.
Kettle distributed the throwing stars she had recovered from the bodies of her earlier targets. Nona found a length of rope in the barracks room to replace her chain belt. She thrust her Noi-Guin sword through it and accepted two stars from the nun.
Clera led them on, nerves showing. “I’ve no idea how you talked me into this, Nona.” She flattened herself against the wall and peered around the corner before moving on towards a flight of stone stairs. “I mean, I missed you . . . but I had a good thing going here. Sherzal and Lord Tacsis are—”
“Vicious maniacs who would fill the Corridor with blood just to float themselves a little higher than their already lofty stations,” Kettle finished for her.
“Well.” Clera advanced soft-footed up the stairs. “Yes.” She paused and advanced again. “But very rich.”
Nona brought up the rear, a throwing star in each hand.
I like your friend. Keot seemed louder in her skull than he had for some time.
An understanding struck Nona as moments of clarity sometimes do when all the parts of a problem come momentarily into some chance alignment. When I kill and rage . . . your grip on me grows stronger.
Only a silence where Keot should be.
And when I show mercy or kindness you’re driven to the surface.
“Nona!” Kettle beckoned her to the corner ahead. “Servants.” The nun reached a hand around Nona’s shoulder, the other arm around Clera, sharing her weight on the pair of them rather than her injured leg. “I’ll hide us.” Shadows rose to wrap them and although Nona still felt visible, albeit darkly shadowed, she knew that Kettle had worked the trick of hers that would deceive any casual and untrained eye into seeing nothing but perhaps a thickening and a flicker of the shade. She concealed them from the worry-faced servants who came and went. Of Sherzal’s guards there were few signs.
Stealth is best achieved in the patience trance. Nona had conquered the clarity trance first, and finally serenity, but she had never truly mastered patience. She tried though, focusing on her mantra, an image of a green shoot just broken through the soil and waiting to grow. She found that being exhausted helped. With Kettle’s weight on her shoulder and the shadows flowing cold around her, she found a kind of patience and schooled both her breathing and her footfalls to match the palace ambience, fitting them into the spaces provided by the moan of the wind, the distant clatter of feet or shutting of doors, the sounds that underwrote each day beneath that roof, unmarked and unheard.
They paused at a second flight of stairs.
“We’ve been incredibly lucky so far,” Kettle whispered. “So lucky it almost feels like a trap. We can’t count on things staying this way. Whatever problem is drawing the guards off is unlikely to keep them away for long.”
“Once I’ve got my hands on the shipheart it won’t matter,” Nona said. “Let them come.” She could feel its power even now, and Hessa’s memory promised so much more as they got closer.
The arm with which Kettle held Nona to her stiffened a little and, after a pause, the nun spoke. “A shipheart is a dangerous thing. As dangerous to the person who holds it as to anyone they aim that power at. If we’re going to do this I think I should be the one to carry it . . .”
“You can hardly walk!” Nona said.
“I don’t know what it would do to you, Nona.” Kettle’s voice was tight with conflicting concerns. “There are books at Sweet Mercy that say the shipheart is too strong for mortals to get close to. It twists them.” She was talking about Keot. Nona felt sure Kettle knew she carried a devil beneath her skin, and the nun didn’t believe her pure enough to touch a shipheart. It hurt to hear Kettle’s doubt in her. But it was probably well founded.
“Well we’re not going to find out standing here.” Clera bumped them both back into motion.
With Clera’s direction and Kettle’s shadows the three of them wound their way deeper into the palace, through galleries and halls so numerous that Nona wondered who used them, and whether Sherzal saw any of these grand spaces more than once a year. They crossed a small internal courtyard, like a deep sky-roofed pit in the palace, at the heart of it a lonely fountain, and came at last to a corridor where an iron gate blocked their progress.
“Locked.” Clera ran her hands up the scroll-worked bars. “Solid.”
Kettle sat, leg held stiffly to the side, fresh blood glistening amid the dried. Taking three heavy picks from her sleeve, she addressed the lock. Within seconds the mechanism yielded, clunking as she rotated the picks together. “Done.”
They helped Kettle up and went on, advancing down a long lamp-lit corridor, passing many closed doors.
“We’re getting close,” Nona said. The shipheart’s presence pushed on her, filled her, set her nerves tingling, the feeling both exciting and a little terrifying.
“We are.” Clera shot her a look. “There’s a barracks room ahead and to the left. They say Yisht’s quarters are around here too, but I’ve not seen her since that day with the barrel.” Clera bit her lip, frowning. “And you know what? I really don’t want to see her again. Especially not when all I’ve got for protection is you two walking wounded.” She shrugged off Kettle’s arm. “We really should go back.”
“We’re going to get our shipheart!” Nona helped Kettle on alone.
“Sherzal’s guards are scared of Yisht.” Clera’s voice came from behind them now. She wasn’t moving. “They say she came back changed.”
“There’s a reason the shipheart was kept walled up in the caves,” Kettle said.
Nona’s mind was full of the shipheart now, close, powerful, the beat of it running through her, not kind, not comforting, just vast and endless.
I feel it too. Keot’s voice held a certain hunger.
You do?
Like a memory. I know this thing. It’s old, as old as I am. He sounded stronger by the moment.
But . . . the shiphearts are older than the empire! Nona wasn’t sure how old they were but certainly thousands of years. Enough time for nations to rise and fall, for knowledge to fail and be rebuilt. The shiphearts brought the tribes to Abeth.
Do you think so?
You don’t? Nona didn’t like the smugness in the devil’s voice. Everyone knows they did.