“Ancestor’s balls! What did you do to her?” Clera stared past them.
Kettle made no reply, hurrying around the corner and out of sight of Yisht. Nona let the nun go and took a last look at Yisht before joining her. The woman was hunched on the floor, curled around whatever battle was raging through her. Her howling had subsided to terrifying groans.
Nona longed to go back and kill the ice-triber, to give her the end her crimes demanded, but the shipheart lay close at hand and time was short. She pulled back out of sight, turning to see that Kettle had crouched down against the wall, a small ceramic tub of black ointment in her hand. The nun removed some of it on the end of a thin wooden applicator and offered it to Nona, pointing the blackened end towards her throat where she still pinched the sides of the cut together.
The stuff had an acrid smell and Nona knew it for flesh-bind, a costly adhesive that stuck flesh to flesh with frightening swiftness, forming a bond that was hard to break. The price of the ingredients, along with common sense, forbade its use by any but the oldest novices in Holy Class. Too many girls had been glued together in compromising positions in past years to allow its use by the younger and more mischievous novices. An unfortunate side-effect was that if left too long it would permanently dye the skin black too.
Nona applied the stuff to the edges of Kettle’s wound and, steeling her stomach against the grisly business, pressed the skin together, taking care not to get glued in place. The end result proved messy but effective.
Kettle repaid the favour on Nona’s leg, more quickly and with far neater results. Clera hovered anxiously, taking quick glances around the corner to check on Yisht.
Nona stretched her injured leg. It hurt like hell. “Where’s the vault?” she asked.
“Back there.” Clera waved absently towards double doors that stood ajar at the end of the corridor. “It’s a steel box big enough to fit a horse in. Stuffed full of Sherzal’s treasures. You can’t carry it and you’ll never get it open.” She sounded wistful, as if the proximity and inaccessibility of such wealth were a source of great sorrow to her.
Nona could feel the shipheart. The hidden fire that had drawn her forward had now grown into something awful, too fierce to dare. Like the fire in the hearth it was something you wanted to come close to until suddenly you were close enough and another step would see you burned. She lifted her hand, fighting weariness, and forced her flaw-blades into being. They flickered unevenly. “I’ll get in.”
“It’s sigil-worked. I don’t think you’ll cut it.” Clera flinched as a particularly loud howl from Yisht shook the air. “We have to go! I checked ahead. There’s some kind of battle going on in the great halls downstairs. It’s the ideal distraction.”
Nona shook her head. “We came for the shipheart.”
“No.” Kettle gripped Nona’s arm with surprising strength.
“No?” Nona blinked. “But we—”
“The shipheart . . . does things . . . if you get too close. What happened to Yisht . . . It’s too powerful. It takes anything bad in you and gives it voice. It makes—”
“Devils!” Nona said.
Kettle nodded. “I think you just lost something that you don’t want back. How would you fare if the shipheart makes six replacements of your very own from the darkest parts of your mind? Speaking with your own voice?”
“But—”
“It would take someone of extraordinary purity to carry a shipheart unscathed. We’re none of us that.” She looked down. “I hadn’t understood how quickly the effects could occur or how bad they could be,” Kettle said. “We have to go.”
“Now!” Clera shouted. “We have to go now!” Her loudness suddenly made Nona realize how quiet it had become. Yisht had fallen silent, and Nona doubted it was a good thing.
Even so Nona hesitated. “We came for the shipheart . . .” Amidst the consuming aura of the thing she felt something more, there was a bond. Something of her lay in there too . . . her shadow! She understood it in that moment. The shipheart had drawn her shadow in, whether in Yisht’s defence or by its own nature. “We can’t come this close and just leave.”
Clera screwed up her face, locked in some inner battle. At last the words blurted from her. “Ara’s here. That’s what the fighting downstairs must be. They’re trying to rescue the abbess.”
Nona stared at her in disbelief that she would have kept such a thing quiet.
The shipheart was just a thing: but downstairs her friends could be dying.
“Let’s go.”
43
ABBESS GLASS
ARABELLA JOTSIS SHONE brighter than Abeth’s sun had burned during the lives of men. A white light broke from her, like the Hope that stood as a lone diamond in the ruby heavens. Abbess Glass turned away from the girl, shielding her eyes. Someone blundered into her, a perfumed woman, tripping over her long gown. Glass caught her shoulders, steadying her. “Cover your eyes, dear. It will be all right.”
It took Glass a few more moments to realize she held Joeli Namsis. Her grip tightened. “Joeli?” Even now she wasn’t sure, her vision full of afterimages. “Joeli! You can try to end this! With your skills you might make peace here. Try to change Sherzal’s mind towards moderation—”
The girl ripped free, stumbling away. It had been a vain hope. Sherzal would likely be too well warded even for Joeli.
For a long minute screams, shouts, and the thud of falling bodies filled the hall. Glass saw Thuran Tacsis and his son Lano escape into the main corridor, the boy shoving older and less hale lords aside in order to reach the doors.
The blinding white intensity lessened as Ara spent the power she had taken from the Path. Glass watched the girl through her fingers, a white shape, as if stolen from the heat of the smith’s forge, moving swiftly. She wove a path among the silhouettes of palace guards that stumbled towards her, leaving them in her wake, blind, insensible, or smoking, depending on the length of contact made between them. Each step brought her closer to Glass and the judges.
Above the sounds of combat Glass could hear Sherzal shouting orders from the corridor outside the main doorway, commands that the Jotsis girl be taken down and that nobody escape.
As Ara’s light dimmed Glass began to see the rest of the room. Guests wandered, dazzled, or crouched in fear, or lay groaning where they’d been trampled in the exodus. Guards continued to close on Ara, in greater numbers now they could look her way, with more arriving from the adjoining chambers.
Darla had descended from the gallery, possibly by hanging and dropping from the railing. Glass watched her use some kind of heavy wind instrument to flatten a guard then steal the woman’s sword just as two more guards closed on her.
Across the room Regol and Safira were locked in unarmed combat, their battle blisteringly fast. Having witnessed many contests between hunskas Glass could tell that both were full-bloods and extremely skilled. Perhaps Safira had the better technique but Regol’s greater strength restored the balance. Glass suspected Safira too proud to use her Noi-Guin blades or poisons. She had been proud as a novice. Too proud to let Kettle go. She would want to beat this cage-fighter bloody with her own hands.
Ara came through a wall of five guardsmen. A flight of arrows hissed in from the doorway. Ara avoided them with motions too quick to see, one arrow spinning away, another finding the leg of a guardsman hurrying to intercept her.
“Abbess!” Suddenly Ara stood before her, surrounded in light that seemed to emanate from the air around her. “Your instructions?” She snatched another arrow from the air before Glass could speak.