Nona ran the Path and all her hurts were left behind her in the very first step. Her wounds, her exhaustion, even the ache of Darla’s death, something small behind her, growing pale and faint. Each step flooded her with an energy so fierce, so exhilarating, that it overwrote her, became her, replaced her centre.
In the end only Darla brought her back. Nona would have run the Path forever. Something so right couldn’t be denied. But for the fact of her friend’s death diminishing behind her. Something like that couldn’t simply be thrown away, discarded, abandoned as if it held no worth or meaning. And with a howl Nona turned in a place where there could be no turning, and fell back into the world.
She hit the ground and only with effort managed to stop falling. The world held too many possibilities and her body wanted to explore them, wanted to flow like the smoke, dance like the flames licking around her, follow gravity’s pull deep into the ground; wanted to run as she had run on the Path, not in one direction but in all of them at once. Aspects of Nona began to separate, some to answer the horses’ distress, some to explore the smoke, others to play with fire.
A faint noise penetrated the vastness of Nona’s wonder and she turned towards it, towards the black carriage, wrapped in smoke. A figure clung to its side. Ara!
Nona drew a breath as if breaking the surface of some bottomless lake. It hurt, as if her lungs were wrapped in broken glass, but she had been schooled in pain of late. Nona drew the breath and drew back into herself the possibilities, the myriad choices, until at last she was focused, one, whole, shuddering with power.
She approached the carriage, suddenly aware of the fragility of everything around her, even the flagstones beneath her feet. In the past she had thrust the Path’s power from her rather than keep it. She had thrown it as heat when she brought fire to the forest outside Verity, and as lightning against the Noi-Guin. Now, though, she turned it inward, running it through muscle and bone, owning it as strength, not just the kind that moves mountains but the kind that preserves the flesh doing the moving. Sister Pan had explained that one at length. The strength to punch through walls is of little use if the arm you punch with shatters before the rock does.
Nona moved behind the carriage. She inched her hands forward with caution. Too much pressure too swiftly and her palms would break through the timber before her and she would be elbow-deep in splintered wood. Hands met lacquered panelling, pressure mounted. And Nona’s bare feet began to slide across the flagstones.
“No!”
Armoured in the Path’s energies, Nona kicked at the stones beneath her feet, pulverizing the rock, excavating small craters to push against. The boards beneath her palms creaked and the huge carriage stole into motion. Nona kept up the pressure, feet scraping the flagstones, shattering several more.
The front of the carriage hit the stable doors at a brisk walking pace and they shuddered aside, billowing smoke out into the courtyard. Sherzal’s carriage emerged, wheels clattering, thick white smoke all around, terrified horses streaming past on both sides.
The archers lining the walls hesitated, uncertain what they were dealing with. Sherzal’s carriage carried on past those of the Sis, lining the walls to either side. With every yard Nona imparted more speed to it. The palace gates, more accurately described as fortress gates, would of course bring its progress to an abrupt and devastating halt.
The first arrows began to hammer into the carriage. Those inside had already made efforts to reinforce the shutters with seating. On the outside Ara was a popular target, but even with only one hand free she managed to deflect those arrows that would otherwise have hit her.
With the carriage moving at a good speed, Nona let it run and sprinted to get ahead of it. Every archer on her side of the courtyard took the opportunity to let fly at a clear target and their arrows hissed around her, breaking on the flagstones, hammering into the carriage’s sides, or finding her flesh. The same energies that allowed Nona’s body to contain and use the Path’s strength also resisted arrowheads. The arrows ricocheted from her as if she were a statue, leaving just pinpricks.
Feeling the Path-energies begin to ebb and fade, and with Sherzal’s carriage rumbling along behind her, Nona threw herself at the palace gates. Her final leap took her six feet off the ground and her shoulder hit the heavy timbers with a bone-jarring impact. The doors stopped her dead and she slid into a heap at their base. Arrows hammered into the timber on both sides, several hitting her in the back.
“Too light,” Nona muttered. It didn’t matter how strong you were, nobody could knock a man down by throwing a feather at him.
She stood, the carriage only twenty yards behind her now. The gates’ huge locking bar had not been lowered but they were still held by a series of bolts driven into the stonework above and below by some system of cables anchored across the inner surface. Nona lacked both the time and the reach to rip it all clear.
How to open the gates when her own strength would just throw her aside? Even if she had the time to dig footholds Nona thought that they would probably give way before the bolts surrendered.
Academia lessons came to Nona’s aid where her Blade and Path education kept silent. Inertia keeps even the lightest of things stationary in the face of great forces—you just have to act fast enough. Nona punched the left gate a foot from the edge where it met the right one. The speed of the action allowed no time for her to be pushed back. Instead her fist burst through the timbers and she stood with her arm elbow-deep in a splintered hole, her fist just emerging into the wind that scoured the outer surface. Nona slammed herself forward until her shoulder met the timbers and her elbow cleared the far side of the door. She bent her arm and clung on. More arrows studded the woodwork around her. More hit her back and fell away leaving just shallow wounds.
Now, anchored by the thickness of the gates themselves, Nona set her other hand, palm out, to the other gate. And pushed. When she punched the door had no time to move and so she punched through. Now she pushed with slow, inexorable force. Anchored to the left-hand gate, she couldn’t move back. Instead the gate had to take all the pressure. She curled around, setting her shoulder and hip to the other gate, using all the core strength of her body, magnified a thousand times by the fading energies taken from the Path. Behind her the rumbling clatter of the carriage grew ever closer.
With squeals of protest the bolts above and below began to fail, pieces of stone shooting away, shards of wood as long as an arm breaking free as the housings gave way. A shadow loomed. Time had run out. Sherzal’s carriage smashed into the gates, Nona caught between its hammer blow and the gates’ anvil.
A moment of darkness, of light, of whirling motion, screams and broken wood. Nona found herself on the ground with something huge rushing above her.
47
THE ROAD DOWN from the side valley that housed Sherzal’s palace was a long curving sweep of modest gradient. It ended at the highway that threaded the Grand Pass.
Despite the arrow transfixing her left calf Ara had managed to scramble on top of the carriage, climb to the heavily damaged front, and find the braking levers. The slope was too steep for the brakes to fully arrest the carriage’s motion but they helped to tame it.
Steering proved to be a different matter. The carriage steered itself by scraping along the rocky wall where engineers had cut into the valley’s side to make the road. It was a process that removed a new section of the carriage’s side every twenty yards or so and threatened, at every collision with a larger outcropping, to send them all veering across the narrowness of the road to pitch over the drop into whatever heart-stopping fall the darkness hid.