“We had better leave. Don’t you think, dear?” Glass looked back at the doors to the main corridor. Four archers stood abreast there, with many palace guards behind and Sherzal somewhere in their midst. An arrow caught Brother Dimeon in the neck and he fell, twisting, gurgling in what sounded like outrage.
“We can’t go that way.” Ara batted an arrow to the floor, glancing around the room. Darla and a few of the Sis who had found weapons were now fighting a retreat towards the banqueting hall. The big novice felled the guardsman before her with a blow that opened his chest, then beckoned them to follow. “Servants’ entrance!”
“Let’s go.” Glass hurried towards the melee on the far side of the chamber. She kept her head bowed, terrified that any moment an arrow would transfix her. In all her long years this was her first time in a battle and it appalled her. The swiftness and the violence, the sheer noise of all that shouting, clashing metal, the injured howling, the stink of blood and death. All of it numbed the mind and reduced a person to a collection of animal fears and the basest of instincts.
Ara kept pace, shielding the abbess, knocking aside any that intervened. Seldom and Agika followed, flanked by Melkir holding up a chair as an improvised shield. Glass picked her way through the detritus of the hastily abandoned room, toppled chairs and benches, here a necklace scattering pearls from a broken string, there a silk shawl edged with gold rings, smeared crimson. A handful of guests still wandered in shock, an old lady toppling gracefully as an arrow meant for Glass or Ara took her between the shoulders.
The blurred whirlwind of fists and feet that was Regol and Safira spun nearer. Ara eyed the conflict, clearly torn between intervening and protecting Glass. If the pair came any closer the two choices would be the same thing. Melkir took the decision from Ara, perhaps driven by thoughts of Sera lying by the judges’ bench with a slit throat, and hurled himself at Safira’s back. Somehow her foot struck him in the stomach, but his armoured bulk still drove her back and Regol took advantage, felling the woman with a punch to the face. Glass heard Safira’s cheekbone shatter and winced.
Moments later Ara had downed two of the guards that were harrying those of the Sis retreating with Darla, and made a path for retreat through the banquet doors. Glass, Regol, Seldom, Agika, and Melkir followed. An arrow caromed off Melkir’s shoulder-plate, another hammering into the door to Glass’s left.
“I’ll hold them, Holy Mother.” Darla towered over the escaping clergy, a wild grin on her face, scarlet splashes across the blue taffeta gown she’d been squeezed into.
Regol sidestepped a guardsman’s thrust and pulled a sword from the hand of a dying lordling. He swept the guard’s blade up and ran him through, then took his place beside Darla, holding the doorway. Ara had hurried ahead, down the passage they proposed to escape along, to check for defenders.
Four long tables ran the length of the banquet hall, leading towards a dais where the high lords must have dined with Sherzal at the circular table. The remains of the feasting were still scattered across the tables. Candles lit the room, scores upon scores in brackets on the walls, and dozens of silver lamps were set in lines down the centre of each table. Across the hall Lord Carvon Jotsis was leading the Sis into the servants’ corridor. The shuddering light gave the scene an unreal quality.
“Hurry, abbess!” Melkir took her arm, trying to lead her on.
Glass held back for a moment. Through the doorway to the reception hall, narrowed by the partly closed doors that framed Darla and Regol, she could see the musicians’ gallery. A figure in cream and saffron skirts approached the broken rail. Joeli!
“Abbess!” Melkir at her shoulder. “They can’t hold for long!”
The crowd of guards before the entrance was growing rather than shrinking. Some had hold of the doors, heaving them back against the makeshift wedges that had been set, so that more could attack the pair denying them passage.
“Joeli . . . you can end this.” A whisper as Melkir pulled her away. The girl would have a clear vision of Sherzal and space in which to work. Even if she could get nothing past Sherzal’s sigil wards but a little doubt it might buy them time.
Up on the gallery Joeli reached out a hand as if to steer someone’s will. But her gaze turned towards the wrong doorway, her unfocused eyes seeming to find Glass. The girl’s fist closed, not in the delicate manipulation of thread-work but a violent snatch. Between the widening doors Regol suddenly leapt back, turning. A moment later he was sprinting past Glass, bewildered terror on his face.
“Dung on it!” A cry from Darla as an arrow sprung from her shoulder. She roared, sweeping her sword out and driving back four palace guards.
“Don’t . . .” Glass’s heels dragged the floor as Melkir hauled her towards the servants’ corridor.
Joeli repeated her action and this time Darla froze in mid-parry, as if suddenly distracted by some vital thought. A heartbeat later the guard to her left drove his sword into her side. Darla had nothing but a tattered gown to armour her. She folded around the steel, cursing, now lost among her attackers.
They closed in, swords rising and falling.
44
CLERA LED KETTLE and Nona back through the palace, aiming to reach the tunnel by which they had entered not long before. They had approached the chambers where Sherzal’s guards crowded but whatever battle had raged seemed to be over, the other participants fled or corpses. Wrapped in Kettle’s shadows, they saw no sign of Abbess Glass.
Nona limped along behind Clera, trying not to wonder whether her friends still lived. She could still sense the shipheart at her back. “We could have . . .” She tried to think what exactly they could have done. Dragged the vault? Hacked their way in with axes. None of it would have worked.
“We’re lucky that the shipheart wasn’t just resting on a table,” Kettle said. “I didn’t know quite how dangerous its effects on people were close up, or how fast they took hold.”
“It would have been a price worth paying to take it from Sherzal.” Nona had meant to say to take it back for the Church, but the truth was that denying Sherzal would give her the most pleasure.
Kettle shook her head. “If it had turned you into a thing like Yisht who knows what you would have done with it or where you would have gone?”
“Yisht brought it all the way here!” Nona protested. “I could have held it for an hour.”
“I doubt that she did. Sherzal would have had transport and containment waiting and ready close to the Rock. The shipheart likely warped her within an hour.”
“Shhhh!” Ahead of them Clera raised her hand.
They both limped up to join her. Voices could be heard on the stairs: “. . . back to help the guards chase them down.” A young man’s voice. One of the Sis.
“You’ll accompany me to my rooms and stand guard like a son should!” An older man, familiar.
“Istead will look after you,” the younger man replied. “What’s Sherzal going to think of us if we just scuttle off and hide? I’ll make for the gates. They don’t know the palace—that’s where they’ll go. They’re not getting out. I’ll bring Sherzal the old woman’s head!”
“Lano—”
“You know I’m right. We outnumber them fifty to one.” The sound of running feet followed, fading into the distance.
“Damn boy!” Thuran Tacsis’s voice. “We’ll get to the rooms and wait this out, Istead.”
“Yes, my lord.”