Holy Sister

Nona watched while Keot finally drained away and she wondered whether it had been him who had made the knife slip from Yisht’s fingers as she tried to block that final blow. Some things were beyond knowing. Nona left Yisht’s body untouched. The woman might be carrying things of use, but the Noi-Guin often set traps in unused pockets with venomed needles for the unwary, and Nona had no wish to find out if it was a habit Yisht had acquired too. She stood and waited, timing the blasts from the vents, and crossed to the shipheart.

Even moving the shipheart awkwardly before her with the tip of her sword brought Nona far deeper into the thing’s radiance than she felt she could endure for long. The light dazzled rather than illuminated, seeming unaffected by niceties such as whether her eyes were open or closed. The shipheart drove from her mind the insidious whispers haunting the dark all around her, but replaced them with a louder muttering that bubbled many-voiced from her own interior darkness.

‘I don’t know where I’m going. I’ve forgotten why I’m going there.’ Nona spoke so that her own voice would sound louder than any of the competition. She nudged the shipheart ahead. It rolled a few feet and stopped. On the blade of her sword Yisht’s blood looked black in the strange light.

As she approached the bubble-shaped chamber where they had first encountered Yisht, Nona took care that the shipheart not run away from her. If it went over the lip where the tunnel met the chamber it would roll down to the bottom and vanish down the throat that had claimed Zole.

Nona sheathed her sword and took a knife in her left hand. ‘I have to do this.’ She gathered around her all that could be found of her serenity and bent to pick up the ball of light. It seemed to weigh nothing and to burn her bones. With a snarl she stepped over the edge into the void beyond.

She slid nearly to the maw at the chamber’s base before her knife found sufficient purchase to bring her to a halt. All around her narrow streams of meltwater divided the ice, cutting deeply into it before spraying out into the shaft. A dozen voices filled Nona’s head and she could hardly tell which of them, if any, was hers.

‘… ooona!’

‘What?’ Nona tried to concentrate. She needed to edge around the hole and somehow climb the far side of the chamber one-handed in search of another exit. She wondered if her father’s explorations had ever left him this terrified, this lost …

‘Noooo!’ A distant echoing cry amid the cacophony inside her skull. ‘Na!’

‘What?’ Nona lifted the shipheart for greater illumination but the shaft dropping away just beyond her heels devoured its light and gave nothing in return. ‘Who’s there?’ She bit down on further questions. Even she knew better than to talk to the voices. It made them real. Helped them break free.

‘… ole!’

‘I know you’re a hole.’ Nona lay cold against the wet ice, anchored by the point of her knife, the shipheart burning in her hand and in her mind. ‘I’m talking to the hole …’

‘Zoooole!’

‘Zole?’ Nona sat up.

‘… heart!’

‘What?’ she shouted.

‘Need the …’

Nona felt suddenly terrified. ‘You’re in my head, aren’t you? One of my devils …’

‘… eeeeed …’

Nona stared into the inky nothing before her. ‘You want me to drop the shipheart into that hole? After all I’ve been through to keep it?’ A laugh spluttered past teeth beginning to chatter with the cold once more. All around her the ice had paled to a translucent grey. Of course the devils wanted her to throw the shipheart away. It was all that was keeping them from sliding beneath her skin and turning her into something worse than Yisht.

‘Noooonaaa?’

The voice seemed to echo up from the depths where Zole had fallen, but so many other voices clamoured for attention. How could she accept any of them as real?

‘Zole?’ She leaned forward, yelling into the hole.

‘… ooow it to meeee’

‘Throw it to you?’ Nona’s laugh came edged with hysteria. ‘You’re dead!’ The shipheart burned her and splintered her thoughts but it was also precious beyond measure and the only source of light in this place of endless darkness.

The voice in the hole fell silent while those in Nona’s skull grew louder.

‘Zole?’

Nothing.

‘Zole?’

Only the clamour behind her forehead as her mind began to break into the fragments that would drive her mad. It was the silence that convinced her. Zole would never plead. The ice-triber had said her piece and there was nothing more to say.

Nona looked into the glare. Zole had called it an Old Stone. No part of Nona wanted to let it go, even as it hurt her. She tilted her palm and felt the voices falter. The greatest treasure she had ever held rolled across her fingers. The shipheart fell from her hand, rolled to the edge and dropped suddenly from view. A rapidly descending band of violet light lit the black gullet, finding the occasional gleam from faults and fractures. A moment later it was gone and Nona sat alone, blind in the dark.

Time needs something to be counted against. Nona had nothing except for the slowly building pressure as the devils made their return to the ice beneath her. The shipheart’s presence had driven them from it and now they reclaimed what was theirs. She felt their malice like tiny claws, trying to slice a way under her skin.

‘I won’t die here.’ Numb fingers fumbled a second dagger from her belt and she turned to begin the climb back to the tunnel. She would rather stagger back into the Corridor half-dead and fight the Noi-Guin than face insanity alone in the freezing dark.

She reached, stabbed, and hauled herself up. With no light she might miss the entrance entirely but trying would at least warm her a little.

What followed was a long, blind nightmare of stabbing, straining, and slipping. Nona had no idea how many minutes or hours she laboured at it, how many times she slid back, how many times she cursed the Ancestor. She even called upon her father’s ghost for help.

‘I can’t …’ She hung on the ice wall, so steep it was near vertical. The strength had left her arms and although she could no longer feel her grip on either knife she knew that it was weakening. Her hands looked shockingly pale. ‘I can’t.’ No hope remained to her. Not even the hope of an easy death.

She looked again at her hands, hardly feeling she still owned them. Both were tinged with violet. ‘How?’ How could she see them?

Nona turned her head and there, far below her, Zole stood at the edge of the shaft into which she had fallen, the shipheart in her hands.

At the sight of Zole Nona lost her grip on first one knife then the other and plummeted down the side of the chamber. Somehow Zole managed to intercept her and arrest her considerable momentum with just one hand while keeping both her balance and her grip on the shipheart.

The ice-triber seemed unhurt, untroubled by the cold. Nona wondered if she were a ghost, the product of her own fractured mind. But the grip on her wrist was warm and real. ‘How … How are you here?’ Nona gasped.

‘You threw me the Old Stone,’ Zole said. ‘It gave me the control over the ice that I needed in order to climb out.’ She managed the smallest smile. ‘Thank you.’