‘Get the barrel in, quick!’
Moments later they had the gate closed again, with the barrel propped against it.
‘That won’t stay there,’ Nona said, poking at the barrel. ‘A strong gust will send it end over end down the stairs after us.’
‘Well we can hardly leave someone to hold it. We’re going to need all of us to move Yisht.’ Ara poked the barrel, frowning as it wobbled. A third of the base overhung the first step.
‘We don’t need all four of us to take Yisht out though.’ Nona patted the bulge where Clera’s gourd of boneless, brewed from the catweed, sat under her habit. ‘I’ll get in position and wait for her. When it’s done I’ll come back for you to help me drag her.’ Without waiting for an answer, she snatched the lantern from Clera and hurried down the stairs.
‘Be careful!’ Clera called after her. ‘If you break that gourd when you’re squeezing through then you’re going to be down there a while!’
It took perhaps a quarter of an hour for Nona to retrace her route from her first exploration and reach Yisht’s excavations. It felt closer to quarter of a lifetime. In the tight sections, through the narrowest part of the fissure and wriggling along the slim connecting tunnel at the end, she expected at each moment to hear a dull crack as the gourd surrendered to the pressure and catweed liquor to begin leaking down her leg. If the victim drank the liquor the effects were said to be almost instant, each muscle relaxing rapidly to the point at which they couldn’t so much as lift a finger. The important thing was to make sure the victim didn’t swallow their tongue and suffocate. They had laid Hessa out with great care, in line with the Poisoner’s lessons, to ensure her safety.
When the liquor was absorbed through the skin the effects were slower and varied, depending on which part of the body took the dose. Nona’s plan was to splatter the gourd’s contents in Yisht’s face and run for it. The boneless would undo her pretty swiftly. With luck she’d swallow some too and go down even faster.
Nona waited in the mouth of the narrow connecting tunnel, the lantern behind her on its rope. She watched for any glimmer of light, or any hint of sound. Nothing. She waited anyway. In the Blade class after Yisht had single-handedly felled all of Nona’s fellow novices, save Zole, Sister Tallow had commented on the display.
‘A good fighter lives in the moment, but they see into the future. The better the fighter the further they see. Everyone can develop whatever natural talent the Ancestor gave them for this. Some however, some marjals, have an unnatural talent for it. Seeing five heartbeats into every future goes a long way towards compensating for any amount of hunska speed.’ On reflection Nona realized that every move made against her Yisht had seen coming. But had it been experience though, or something more?
She pulled her lantern to her and dropped to the floor of the larger tunnel. The slightest rotation of the lantern’s cowl let enough light bleed out to show the dark entrance to Yisht’s excavation. Nona could feel the shipheart’s power thrumming through the marrow of her bones, singing in her blood, setting every small hair on its end, filling her with possibility. She had but to will it and her feet would leave the floor, she felt sure of it.
Nona advanced, buzzing with energy, but with feet firmly on the stone. Yisht had cut a narrow rising slot into the limestone, tall enough to stand in and swing a pick. The excavation led upward for twenty yards: extraordinary progress that left Nona open-mouthed. In places the walls lay scored with pick-marks, in others they had the peculiar melted quality that Nona had noticed in the vertical shaft she suspected led to Yisht’s sleeping quarters.
At the cutting face the air seemed to throb with the shipheart’s pulse. Nona’s own heart slowed to match the tempo. She closed her eyes and the Path lay before her, broad as a river, too bright to look upon and too bright to look away from.
She turned and hurried down the passage, her feet slipping on loose stone scattered over bedrock. Hessa had said to ambush the woman as close to the entrance as possible. It seemed obvious now, but Nona hadn’t even thought of waiting anywhere save at the cut itself, waiting for Yisht to return to the scene of her crime. She retraced her steps. More climbing, more wriggling, more stealthy advance, and at last she settled herself some yards back from the shaft down which her enemy must come. She turned her lantern low, hooded it, and crouched to wait.
The waiting and the natural darkness put far more fear in Nona than Luta’s efforts with enchanted shadow at the Academy had. Yisht scared Nona in a way that Raymel Tacsis never had, not even with demons writhing beneath his skin or peering at her from his bloody eye. Raymel would murder her with glee, with passion: he would enjoy her death. Yisht would cut her down without reflection, with no more concern than the butcher carries for pigs when their throats are cut. Somehow that idea felt worse.
When something slithered and thumped close at hand Nona almost cried out. She pressed herself to the wall, dry-mouthed, the gourd clutched in a trembling hand. A faint glow lit the circle of the shaft in the ceiling, the black length of the rope dangling beneath, twitching as someone climbed down, still out of sight in the shaft.
Nona forced the fingers around the gourd to unclench even as a pair of black boots, the rope trapped between them, slid into view. Black-clad legs. Narrow hips. Without warning, Yisht released the rope and dropped to the floor.
Nona dug as deep into the moment as ever she had, slowing Yisht’s descent to a crawl. She flung the gourd out of the darkness of the tunnel, her arm so stiff with nerves that Nona doubted her ability to hit Yisht at all, even if she were standing still, let alone strike her face while she was dropping. Even so, when the gourd left her fingers and passed beyond her control Nona knew it to be a true throw – the same way that when she loosed a throwing star she might not always hit her target but she always knew whether she would or not.
Yisht raised her hand as she fell. She caught the gourd a foot before her face, her hand moving to reduce the impact as if she knew the gourd to be fragile and dangerous to break. Her off-hand had already dropped her lantern and now produced a throwing knife, releasing it back along the path the gourd had taken. A cold terror gripped Nona even as she twisted aside. It was as if Yisht knew precisely what would happen and had practised exactly this situation a thousand times.
Nona dropped to her left, her mind running furiously through her options and finding precious few that held even a glimmer of hope.
She sees the future. She knows what I’m going to do.
Nona hit the ground and rolled, twisting out of the path of another thrown dagger. She rose, a rock in her left hand and a collection of smaller stones in her right. She threw the stones at the fastest tempo consistent with accuracy, shaking each up into a throwing grip as its turn came. She loosed them, miss, hit, hit, miss, all in flight, their fate known before the first covered half the distance. Another knife angled through the darkness, just the glimmer of its edge to betray its approach. Nona deflected it with the rock.
Nona’s first stone passed within a finger’s width of the gourd and sailed past to strike Yisht in the chest. The ice-triber already had her hand open, the flask dropping. She’d understood what would happen if a stone broke the gourd while it was in her grasp.