Holy Sister

‘Animals are easier than people.’ Zole wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth. It didn’t look as if it had been easy. ‘Come.’

Nona followed as Zole led off again. Behind them riders boiled from the last village down into the road. Scores of them. She wondered if the Noi-Guin had misplayed their hand, letting the Scithrowl wear her and Zole down. Perhaps the Battle-Queen’s people would kill them and take the Noi-Guin’s shipheart for their own.

The vegetation died within the space of a quarter mile. Trees stood lifeless and brittle, branches vacant of leaves. The thorn bushes petered out. Brambles became black, twisted things, bloated with ugly growths, then gave up their purchase on the cracked ground altogether. The novices ran through an acre of dead grey grass, fraying where the wind worried at it, and beyond that the soil lay bare.

Nona turned at the drumming of hooves, not ready to risk a spear in the back. Zole stopped a few yards ahead of her. The riders slowed and spread out, seeming unwilling to advance, the animals nervous. Perhaps a hundred Scithrowl had joined the chase. Nona wondered if the knights had managed to get out of the way or if they had been trampled where they lay.

‘How many horses can you scare off?’

‘Perhaps we will find out.’ Zole came to stand at Nona’s shoulder. ‘They are herd animals … but I do not know their minds well.’

The Scithrowl stopped a hundred yards off, among the last scraps of bramble and thorn. Many unslung short bows.

‘They look scared. Perhaps they think this place is haunted,’ Nona said.

‘Do you doubt it?’ Zole began to walk backwards, at a slow and even pace.

The first few arrows winged around them as the archers sought their range. One came close and Zole snatched it from the air. She reversed it, took two paces forward and flung the missile back, her arm cracking through the air. A second later an archer among the riders toppled from his saddle.

‘I didn’t … know we could do that …’ Nona said in a small voice.

A dozen archers loosed at once, more following, and for the next few moments Nona was occupied with the business of knocking their arrows aside. It brought a memory of the ordeal of the Shield all those years ago. Nona had never imagined when Zole arrived that it would be her who she would be shielding – not that Zole needed her help.

They backed away and the business of defence became easier with a slight slowing of the arrows and decreasing accuracy, but harder as their stamina for such speed eroded. Nona slapped away an arrow zipping towards her chest, and moved her foot to avoid another that might have skewered her knee. The shafts were angling out of the sky now as the range lengthened. Nona had to squint to see the black dots against the sun. She hoped the archers’ quivers would empty before her own reserves ran dry. She twisted back from the hips to avoid another shaft and swore as it tore a hot line across her shoulder.

‘Run now.’ Zole turned and started to zigzag through the brittle remains of dead bramble to the road’s side. Nona peeled off in the other direction, a dust cloud rising where she sprinted. Sister Tallow had explained that beyond a certain distance an archer could only aim at where they hoped their target would be by the time their arrow arrived.

They both ran in the stuttering, shifting pattern Mistress Blade drilled into them. More arrows scattered around both novices but their luck held and before long they stood beyond the range of a short bow.

‘It’s good they’re so scared of this place.’ Nona slapped the dust from her coat.

‘Perhaps.’ Zole seemed unconvinced.

‘What are they afraid of? Ghosts? Poison?’ Nona gazed across the barren earth stretching out before them, tumbled-down farmhouses and abandoned villages dotting the area. ‘It’s hardly going to be worse than what we’ll find in there.’ She pointed to the distant ice, sullen grey except for where the ridges gleamed bloody in the sunlight.

‘This bane has been advancing across their lands for centuries. The Scithrowl are not a timid people. They were taught to fear it.’ Zole adjusted her pack, and glanced once more towards the watching soldiers. ‘Let us hope we do not meet that which taught them.’ She set her jaw and led off deeper into the dead zone.

At first it was only a sensation of being watched that pulled Nona’s gaze towards the dark windows of abandoned houses. Here and there the corpses of trees still stood, their limbs all but gone. Even so, Nona glanced at the stark branches that remained, convinced some horror waited there, watching for its chance.

They passed a lonely way-stone, its corners weathered away, bearing only the legend ‘7 miles’. Given the stone’s age the place it spoke of might lie five miles behind the ice, lost to man generations back. The next rise revealed a graveyard and a ruined church of Hope. The markers leaned at drunken angles and every grave mounded like a pregnant belly above its occupant.

The wind picked up closer to the ice, lifting the sour dust and swirling it into momentary shapes somehow more filled with horror than any clear image could ever be. The air had a bitterness to it that made Nona press her lips together in a hard line. Her hands felt parched and the wound the arrow had scored across her shoulder burned more fiercely by the minute.

Ahead the ice walls loomed, the grey taint giving them a strange metallic look. The ice darkened towards the base, becoming jet black right at the bottom to give the impression of a yawning cave mouth. Judging size was difficult but Nona thought the black region could be no more than a hundred yards wide and perhaps thirty yards high, the corruption leaching up through fathoms of ice so that even the tops of the cliffs a thousand yards and more above were grey with it, as if rotten.

In the margins great blocks as yet unmelted by the intensity of the focus moon or the duration of the day lay scattered for a mile before the actual cliffs. The ice boulders ranged in size from lumps no larger than a fist to chunks that would conceal a house. All around them streams of meltwater cut through dead earth to expose bedrock beneath. The whole place gurgled with running water, in places swallowed away through rocky fissures, in others trapped within stinking bogs, swamps of black mud that might suck a person down and not return them before the Corridor closed.

The blocks themselves radiated not only cold but something like malice. Nona found herself staring at them, trying to fathom their translucent greyness. Zole took care to stick to the ridges and the firm ground. Where they had to descend to cross a rill or stream she took trouble not to get her feet wet.

Before long they stood amid ice boulders so thickly clustered that the only open space to be found was in twisting ravines that snaked between them. The black ice yawned ahead, the darkest part proving to cover a significantly larger area than Nona had imagined. The shape was still that of a cave mouth but several hundred yards wide and a hundred tall.

‘What do the ice-tribes say the black ice is?’ Nona asked. She realized it to be a question she should have asked earlier.

‘They do not say,’ Zole replied. ‘They know, but these are not truths to be shared.’

‘Well, perhaps you could make an exception this once? I am your Shield after all. And we’ll be in there very soon …’ Nona moved her head from side to side, trying to make the black wall yield some definition, ‘… if there’s any way in.’ It looked like a yawning mouth filled with midnight but behind the illusion was a solid wall of black ice. Nona’s conviction that there was some kind of tunnel running through it all was based purely on Zole’s assurance and Kettle’s reluctant admission that she had ventured into chambers within the black. Kettle had been following the Scithrowl queen, and faced with the malice radiating from the darkness before her Nona had to agree that anyone who claimed their power from such a place should be feared.