Grey Sister

“Well we’re not going to find out standing here.” Clera bumped them both back into motion.

With Clera’s direction and Kettle’s shadows the three of them wound their way deeper into the palace, through galleries and halls so numerous that Nona wondered who used them, and whether Sherzal saw any of these grand spaces more than once a year. They crossed a small internal courtyard, like a deep sky-roofed pit in the palace, at the heart of it a lonely fountain, and came at last to a corridor where an iron gate blocked their progress.

“Locked.” Clera ran her hands up the scroll-worked bars. “Solid.”

Kettle sat, leg held stiffly to the side, fresh blood glistening amid the dried. Taking three heavy picks from her sleeve, she addressed the lock. Within seconds the mechanism yielded, clunking as she rotated the picks together. “Done.”

They helped Kettle up and went on, advancing down a long lamp-lit corridor, passing many closed doors.

“We’re getting close,” Nona said. The shipheart’s presence pushed on her, filled her, set her nerves tingling, the feeling both exciting and a little terrifying.

“We are.” Clera shot her a look. “There’s a barracks room ahead and to the left. They say Yisht’s quarters are around here too, but I’ve not seen her since that day with the barrel.” Clera bit her lip, frowning. “And you know what? I really don’t want to see her again. Especially not when all I’ve got for protection is you two walking wounded.” She shrugged off Kettle’s arm. “We really should go back.”

“We’re going to get our shipheart!” Nona helped Kettle on alone.

“Sherzal’s guards are scared of Yisht.” Clera’s voice came from behind them now. She wasn’t moving. “They say she came back changed.”

“There’s a reason the shipheart was kept walled up in the caves,” Kettle said.

Nona’s mind was full of the shipheart now, close, powerful, the beat of it running through her, not kind, not comforting, just vast and endless.

I feel it too. Keot’s voice held a certain hunger.

You do?

Like a memory. I know this thing. It’s old, as old as I am. He sounded stronger by the moment.

But . . . the shiphearts are older than the empire! Nona wasn’t sure how old they were but certainly thousands of years. Enough time for nations to rise and fall, for knowledge to fail and be rebuilt. The shiphearts brought the tribes to Abeth.

Do you think so?

You don’t? Nona didn’t like the smugness in the devil’s voice. Everyone knows they did.

Maybe they drew your people here. They didn’t carry them.

What do you know about it? You never know the answer to anything interesting. All of a sudden you know things?

The heart is waking up my memories.

And why would it do that? Nona kept her eyes on the doorways ahead, trying not to let Keot distract her.

Because it’s where I was born.

Nona made no reply, returning her attention to the corridor. Keot’s certainty unsettled her. There was a draw to the shipheart’s presence. Perhaps the fascination that the flame holds for the moth. She felt its pull in the marrow of her bones.

They advanced around another corner. From her time with Hessa Nona knew that the shipheart had to be within fifty feet or so now. Keot blazed across her chest and down over her abdomen. He seemed to be feeding on the shipheart’s power in ways that Nona couldn’t understand. His natural anger and lust to kill began to bleed out into her. Earlier she had felt his grip on her weakening and thought that one day she might be able to drive him out. Kettle must know of the devil now, having worn Nona’s flesh and bones back in the Tetragode. What she might do about it was a problem for later. If there was a later.

A cold shiver ran through Nona, toes to head, pulling her away from thoughts of Keot. Something had changed. Suddenly the halls of Sherzal’s palace seemed echoingly empty, not conveniently empty but as if Nona had turned around in a crowded market square to find in that instant the place stood deserted with just the wind to stir the space where people should have been.

“She’s watching us,” Nona said, knowing it to be true though not knowing how. She tried to reach for her own anger rather than Keot’s and found only fear. Over her shoulder she saw that Clera was backing away.

The cracking of stone was their only warning. Shards of masonry broke from the wall at the margins of the area from which Yisht stepped. She emerged behind them, the stonework releasing her with reluctance, as if she were pulling free of thick mud.

Clera spun around with a squeal of fear. Nona and Kettle disentangled, turning as they did, the nun hopping back on her good leg.

Yisht broke clear about the same time that Clera recovered enough of her wits to hurl the throwing stars she’d been given. Kettle and Nona threw theirs a fraction later, six in the first volley, more following.

Clera had never been particularly accurate with throwing stars. Her right-hand throw at least centred on Yisht’s body mass, the left angled wide of target. Lacking hunska speed, though, the warrior should have been hit at least five times. She stepped through the hail of sharp metal unharmed. Her ability to read the immediate future allowed her to begin plotting a path that would evade the stars even before her opponents had decided to throw them.

Yisht had changed. She wore the same black garb, knives across her chest in a black leather harness, her tular—the flat-bladed sword favoured by the ice-tribes—at her hip. She seemed to wear the same body too, though it moved in unnatural ways as if occupied by some larger presence. The flat bones of her face cut the same angles, but her black eyes sat in a crimson sea rather than the whites she once had, and her skin had become a moving patchwork of scarlet, deep purple, black, grey, and bone-white.

Nona knew exactly what she was looking at. “She’s full of devils.”

Where Nona had one, and Raymel had returned from death’s border with four, Yisht had so many that they competed for space, surging across any exposed skin. Nona could almost hear them screaming for her blood.

Clera, who had been closest to the point where Yisht emerged, now passed Kettle and Nona, moving fast. “I know another way out!”

“We want the vault, not a way out!” Kettle called after her. To Nona’s ear the nun didn’t sound as convinced as she had before.

Nona gathered her courage, reaching for another weapon. Kettle set her back against the wall, calling on the shadows. The sword Nona drew from her rope belt felt unfamiliar in her hand, a Noi-Guin blade, a little shorter, straighter, and heavier than the swords Sister Tallow trained the novices with.

Yisht had never been one for smiling, but she smiled now, her teeth bloody. She pulled her tular from the grip of its scabbard, along the side slit as tulars are nearly twice as broad at the end as at the hilt. By rights she should be the one afraid, facing a sword-trained novice whose speed could leave her swinging at air.

Nona held her ground, making test cuts to learn the feel of her weapon. Behind her the darkness began to thicken and clot as Kettle focused her strength to give the night claws.

Yisht came in at a steady pace, sword before her, arm extended.

“Clera!” Nona called after her departing friend. Yisht had defeated them both once before, along with a classful of other novices, but they had been children then.