Grey Sister

Clera screwed up her face, locked in some inner battle. At last the words blurted from her. “Ara’s here. That’s what the fighting downstairs must be. They’re trying to rescue the abbess.”

Nona stared at her in disbelief that she would have kept such a thing quiet.

The shipheart was just a thing: but downstairs her friends could be dying.

“Let’s go.”

43

ABBESS GLASS

ARABELLA JOTSIS SHONE brighter than Abeth’s sun had burned during the lives of men. A white light broke from her, like the Hope that stood as a lone diamond in the ruby heavens. Abbess Glass turned away from the girl, shielding her eyes. Someone blundered into her, a perfumed woman, tripping over her long gown. Glass caught her shoulders, steadying her. “Cover your eyes, dear. It will be all right.”

It took Glass a few more moments to realize she held Joeli Namsis. Her grip tightened. “Joeli?” Even now she wasn’t sure, her vision full of afterimages. “Joeli! You can try to end this! With your skills you might make peace here. Try to change Sherzal’s mind towards moderation—”

The girl ripped free, stumbling away. It had been a vain hope. Sherzal would likely be too well warded even for Joeli.

For a long minute screams, shouts, and the thud of falling bodies filled the hall. Glass saw Thuran Tacsis and his son Lano escape into the main corridor, the boy shoving older and less hale lords aside in order to reach the doors.

The blinding white intensity lessened as Ara spent the power she had taken from the Path. Glass watched the girl through her fingers, a white shape, as if stolen from the heat of the smith’s forge, moving swiftly. She wove a path among the silhouettes of palace guards that stumbled towards her, leaving them in her wake, blind, insensible, or smoking, depending on the length of contact made between them. Each step brought her closer to Glass and the judges.

Above the sounds of combat Glass could hear Sherzal shouting orders from the corridor outside the main doorway, commands that the Jotsis girl be taken down and that nobody escape.

As Ara’s light dimmed Glass began to see the rest of the room. Guests wandered, dazzled, or crouched in fear, or lay groaning where they’d been trampled in the exodus. Guards continued to close on Ara, in greater numbers now they could look her way, with more arriving from the adjoining chambers.

Darla had descended from the gallery, possibly by hanging and dropping from the railing. Glass watched her use some kind of heavy wind instrument to flatten a guard then steal the woman’s sword just as two more guards closed on her.

Across the room Regol and Safira were locked in unarmed combat, their battle blisteringly fast. Having witnessed many contests between hunskas Glass could tell that both were full-bloods and extremely skilled. Perhaps Safira had the better technique but Regol’s greater strength restored the balance. Glass suspected Safira too proud to use her Noi-Guin blades or poisons. She had been proud as a novice. Too proud to let Kettle go. She would want to beat this cage-fighter bloody with her own hands.

Ara came through a wall of five guardsmen. A flight of arrows hissed in from the doorway. Ara avoided them with motions too quick to see, one arrow spinning away, another finding the leg of a guardsman hurrying to intercept her.

“Abbess!” Suddenly Ara stood before her, surrounded in light that seemed to emanate from the air around her. “Your instructions?” She snatched another arrow from the air before Glass could speak.

“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.