Holy Sister

Nona followed, frowning at the clouds. ‘We’ll lose ourselves in there too.’ But she supposed ‘down’ to be an easy direction to follow whatever the visibility.

The mist rose to meet their descent, a cold white sea wrapping them, beading Zole’s hair with jewels of dew that froze into tiny pearls. Nona stumbled on in exhaustion, the shipheart’s fire filling her mind with unfocused energy but doing nothing for the muscles in her thighs.

‘Have you been into Scithrowl before?’ Nona asked, sliding down onto a ledge as Zole led off.

‘No.’

‘Their armies are at the border …’

‘If we need to kill soldiers to get to the ice, would it not be better that they were Scithrowl?’

‘I suppose so …’ Nona had a fear of the Scithrowl, a heritage of endless stories told across the Grey. She expected that every part of the empire had its tales of Scithrowl horrors. Told no doubt by old ladies like Nana Even who hadn’t ever been sufficiently far east to glimpse the Grampain peaks, let alone an actual heretic. Did they burn prisoners, eat babies, and practise peculiar tortures? Best not to get captured and find out.

The wind began to shred the cloud layer around them, tearing the whiteness across the flanks of the mountain and affording glimpses of Scithrowl stretching east. It looked remarkably like the empire had from the other side. In the north the ice was a glimmering white line, to the south it lay less than five miles away, a vaulting wall, all in shadow now.

‘The ice.’ Nona stopped. She had seen the Corridor’s great wall before, shorn off by the focus moon, but for the first time ever she had the elevation to look down upon what lay beyond. Zole stopped too. Even a life on the shelf itself didn’t offer an overview. Mile upon mile of merciless ice, bloody with the touch of the morning sun. Here and there internal pressures rucked the sheet up into ridges or split it with chasms that looked like wrinkles at this distance but must be large enough to swallow any tower built by man. The roots of the Grampains cut across the ice every few miles, grey ribs of stone stretching from the main ridge, becoming frost-wrapped and at last drowned beneath the glacial flow.

‘It is … a sight to behold.’ Zole stood statue-still, the wind tugging at her cloak.

‘The black ice!’ Nona pointed at a wound in the ice sheet – you could almost imagine it a hole, its sides shadowed. A black teardrop, impossible not to see now that her eyes had found it, haloed in grey, shading through the surrounding ice and drawn away to the north with the ice’s flow in a broad path, dark grey at the centre. Where the grey streak across the surface reached the Corridor the ice wall also shaded grey and the land all around lay barren, a dead zone reaching out into the farmlands of the Scithrowl levels. The margins of this dead zone were edged in brown where the Corridor’s flora fought to endure. In the narrow gap between the tainted area and foothills of the Grampains to the west a chain of four fortresses stepped from one ridge to the next towards the clear ice.

Zole allowed a moment to rest. Nona collapsed into the lee of an outcrop. She huddled there, shivering, and stared at Scithrowl, stretching endlessly to the east. The land lay green and grey, shadowed by scudding cloud, and further coloured by the rumoured cruelties of its people. If the stories were to be believed their queen was a monster, darker by far than Sherzal.

Sister Kettle had told Nona the story of her mission years earlier to learn Queen Adoma’s secrets, passing images of that time along the thread-bond that bound them. Memories shared in such a manner strike hard and often burn as bright as the recipient’s own until it becomes hard to tell them from genuine recollection.

Kettle was not the first or the last Grey Sister to be sent to Adoma’s capital, but she had come closer to the queen than any other of the order had managed in a long time. Close enough to stand within her court in the guise of a Noi-Guin and listen to the queen hold forth to her nobles.

Among the glittering crowds beneath the palace’s gilt roof Kettle had seen half a dozen of the Scithrowls’ most feared Path-mages standing shoulder to shoulder with the nobility. Each of these full-blood quantals wore a golden medallion marking them as members of Adoma’s Fist, a band of quantal and marjal mages whose reputation was known far beyond the borders of both Scithrowl and the empire. It was said that when Adoma’s Fist struck even the ice shook.

Their leader, Yom Rala, had stood before the throne on the first step of the dais, a place of high honour. Kettle described him as a chewed stick of a man with a predilection for scarlet finery.

‘He may look weak and foolish,’ Kettle had said, ‘but when he turns his gaze your way it’s as if he’s uncoiling every secret you own, and where he steps the ground is left smoking. Pray the Scithrowls’ wars in the east keep the Fist on Ald’s borders rather than our own!’

Adoma had spoken on the subject of the west and of Scithrowl’s destiny to claim the coast of Marn.

Nona had seen the queen through Kettle’s eyes. A tall woman, blunt-faced, solid, conveying a sense of physical power, of barely suppressed energies. Black-haired, a frothing mass of curls contained by hoops of gold, her pale skin stained and streaked as if rubbed with fresh ink. This, the Scithrowl said, was Adoma’s sacrifice. In order to secure the strength to lead her people to victory she had dared the black ice and been marked by it.

Adoma’s enemies called her mad, blood-drunk, cruel beyond measure, ready to inflict any torture that imagination could frame. Her people called her ruthless, relentless, born to deliver the full length of the Corridor into their keeping.

When she spoke though, addressing her court in the fluid Scithrowl tongue, Kettle found her articulate and entirely reasonable.

‘If I were a Scithrowl I would follow her,’ Kettle had said. ‘She’s right. The ice is closing on us and how else are we to live but to forge east or west? The world is cruel, our choices harsh, and every alternative leads to someone’s death. The only objection I have is that it’s us that she plans to forge a path through.’

However inspiring her speeches might be, the truth of the Battle-Queen lay in the black ice, that place of horror where even Kettle had lost her way, and from where Adoma was said to gain her power. Kettle would share no memories of that darkness, only the conviction that nothing save evil could come from it.

Zole glanced at the cloud base billowing just a hundred feet above them and made to move on. ‘Come.’

‘I saw it. The devil.’ Nona hadn’t meant to speak. Maybe the sight of the black ice put it in her mind. ‘I saw it at your wrist when you climbed onto the road.’

Zole hesitated, just missing a beat, then continued her descent. ‘I did not think that I had any more left in me.’

‘Any more?’ Nona hurried after her, gritting her teeth against the shipheart’s pressure.

‘It seems that it might take a shipheart from each of the bloods to wholly purify us. Or perhaps it is just me who needs that.’

‘Purify? What are you talking—’ Nona slipped, one tired foot tangled the other, and she was falling. She clung to the moment but although she fell through treacle she still fell, her hands too far from any surface to save her.

‘Careful.’ Zole closed the gap with hunska speed and caught her wrist.