Even so, Nona wriggled on for another yard. No more smoke-blackened walls here. She started to inch back, but paused and sniffed. Her own lantern gave off the acrid tarry smoke of burning rock-oil, but a sweeter scent hung on the air, just the faintest memory of it. Old smoke, but not the cheap stuff novices burned: Nona had smelled such smoke in the entrance hall of the abbess’s house, and in Heart Hall when the high priest sat in judgement.
She pressed forward, gripped on both sides now, twisting where the crack in the stone was too narrow for her hips. At one point the rock’s jaws gripped her head and she could neither advance nor retreat. Fear proved to be sufficient lubricant and she escaped a moment later. Her courage gave up before the fissure started to widen again but by that point forward had become the only option and, weeping in terror, cursing herself for her stupidity, Nona inched forward.
Finally the walls released her and she stumbled into a wider space. Another tunnel. Above her a shaft opened in the tunnel’s ceiling. It looked neither hand-hewn nor natural, having instead a strangely ‘melted’ character, the walls being smooth and uneven. Debris covered the tunnel floor, rubble from the shaft above, in places fractured, in others smooth, in others bearing pick-marks. Nona could make little sense of it.
The shaft was too high above her to reach, a rockfall blocked the tunnel to the left, and Nona’s nerves weren’t yet ready to attempt the return, so the passage to the right remained the only option.
She pressed on, scraped and dirty, passing smaller fissures, and once a curtained waterfall where freezing water from the plateau above leaked down. A moment of panic seized her as she imagined the vast weight of the Glasswater somewhere close by. How thin were the walls that held that reservoir in place? What would it take to set those waters flooding along these ancient courses to drown her in the dark?
‘Apple never came this way. Not for stores.’ The sound of Nona’s own voice convinced her and she started to edge back.
That was when she heard it. Just once, and distant. The sound of metal on stone. She held her breath and waited, ears straining. Nothing. She strove for deeper clarity, wrapping her mind in the mantra Sister Pan had taught her. A single flame in the dark. A single note hanging in an empty place. A single sparkle upon a wind-rippled lake. Still nothing … no, nothing, except the faintest voice of the pouring water several twists and many yards back along her path. The sound came again. Metal on rock.
Snarling as if to drive away her fear with anger, Nona pressed on. Twenty yards on, the tunnel widened still further but the broad mud floor showed no sign of anyone’s passing. The sounds came more frequently now, or Nona heard more than just the loudest of them. A pick on stone. Someone was digging, but the echoing passageway gave no clue to the direction.
Further on and the sounds faded. Nona retraced her steps and found a rocky gullet in the fissure wall, above her head height. The sounds were louder here. She undid the cord that bound her habit and tied one end to the lantern’s carrying loop, the other to her ankle. She leapt, catching the edge of the higher tunnel, a thing no wider than a sewage pipe, and hauled herself up, the lantern swaying beneath her.
A minute later and she was inching along the tunnel on her belly. The crashes came so loud now that she cowled the lantern and moved ahead blind.
After what seemed a cold, wet age, in which she banged her head on the rock twice and scraped her knees raw, a whisper of light reached her amid the shouts of pick biting stone. She could see the end of the tunnel, glowing so faintly that only in the blind depths would it be noticed.
Mastering her breathing, Nona crawled to the edge, where some larger, newer tunnel had cut through the old one she was in. Down in the larger passage a lone figure in black was hacking at the wall, already nearly out of sight in the short cut they had made. Debris from the excavation littered the water-smoothed floor behind them. The work must have taken weeks.
Nona watched, fascinated, becoming aware as she did so of a new sensation. Until this point her mind had been filled with the pressing knowledge of the weight of stone above her and how long and narrow the return to the surface – if she could even remember all the twists and turns. But now something larger commanded her attention. Louder than the crash of the pick, heavier than the fathoms of rock. A fullness. An otherness. Something ancient and full of an energy that made her hands tremble and her skin burn.
The digger paused and turned to scoop up a leather bottle set on a rock at the mouth of the cut. She raised a hand, pushing sweat-soaked hair from her brow, and drank.
Yisht! Even as Nona named her in her mind the woman’s eyes swept towards the tunnel mouth. Nona shrank back, pressing herself into the rock, holding her breath. She waited for a moment, long enough for Yisht to return to drinking from her water bottle if she was going to, then started to reverse.
Going backwards through the tunnel, without the space to turn, pulling a smoking lantern whilst trying not to make a sound was not easy. The glow at the tunnel’s end grew brighter: Yisht must be approaching! Nona scrambled backwards as fast as she could while still not making a clatter. If Yisht climbed up she might see or smell traces of Nona’s lantern. How long then before a knife came flying through the air? And if not a thrown knife then Yisht herself. The woman had practically defeated the whole of Grey Class together. She could easily murder Nona down here and her body would lie undetected long after her bones had crumbled.
Nona’s feet eventually found open air and she dangled over the edge before slithering down into the lower tunnel, jolting her chin badly on a protruding piece of rock. Moments later she was hurrying back towards the fissure, her lantern bleeding just enough light through its cowl to stop her knocking herself senseless. She raced on, chased by shadows, slipping and sweating, sure at every moment a hand would close upon her shoulder.
‘Did you get them?’
‘Yes,’ Nona hissed back. ‘Shhh!’
Clera rolled from her bed and crossed to Nona’s. Ara slumped down in hers, yawning and stretching beneath her blanket. Hessa appeared to be fast asleep.
‘Everything go all right?’ Clera whispered close enough to Nona’s ear to make it tingle.
‘Yes, go back to bed.’ She counted out the stolen ingredients into her clothes chest. Blackroot wrapped in linen, red garlic powder in a paper wrap, quicksilver in a greased leather pouch, aclite salts, and sulphur. The stores cave had been the next one along, large, easily accessed, the ingredients laid out on shelves in labelled bags, bunches, vials, and pots. If she hadn’t been led astray by the mark of Yisht’s shoe she would have been in and out in a quarter of the time.
‘How are you feeling? I could stay with you?’
‘I’m fine. Go to bed.’
‘But you got everything? Even the quicksilver?’
‘Yes.’