Holy Sister

With hunska speed the softmen deflected the hail of missiles, taking particular care to protect the man in their midst. The mage rose to his feet. He looked to be in his fifties, grey hair cropped short, a hard dark stare. A tattoo dominated his face, blue lines radiating from between his eyes. It had something of a flower about it. Also something of a spider spreading its legs. Nona knew him for a quantal. She couldn’t say how, except perhaps that he lacked any of the deformities common to many marjals who draw too deeply on the elemental arts or those rarer and more strange talents sometimes brought to bear.

‘Three! Three is a prize worthy of my efforts.’

Nona felt the man set foot on the Path. The weight of his footfall shuddered through the fabric of everything. He smiled. A Scithrowl Path-mage with decades of experience preparing to snuff out a trio of Grey Sisters who would likely have fallen to his softmen, though not without cost. Even if he knew Nona for a quantal he had nothing to fear, armoured as he was in sigils of the highest order. To her eye the robes were surely capable of draining thirty steps’ worth of Path energy to the void. More likely they would withstand fifty or even more. Nona had never come close to thirty steps. She had nearly died trying to own what she had taken from fewer than twenty steps outside the cave where Raymel Tacsis had come for her.

The anger that had been waiting its moment ever since she had first realized that she had led her sisters into a trap now burst loose inside Nona, an explosion against which the oil bomb’s flare seemed pale. An instant later, driven by that same fury, Nona hit the Path running.

This close to the Ark, Nona saw the Path with new clarity, finding it wide beneath her feet, though in truth it was no more beneath her than it was above. The Path was a mountain river, an avalanche, a lightning bolt all in one, all that and more, pouring through her. She forced her mind to impose the simplest interpretation on what lay before her and ran the Path as she had run so many times. At each stride boundless energy swelled inside her. She felt the fierceness of its gift start to fray her mind, start to unravel every fibre of her being.

Nona knew she needed to find her enemy before he took his power, shaped it, and blasted her to ash. She had no protection. Even if she could take enough steps and own enough energy to overload his robes, which she knew she couldn’t – she hadn’t the time. The mage would leave the Path and destroy her before that could happen.

Sister Pan had taught Nona that when a quantal runs the Path they are in no one place along its length. When something has no end and no beginning it has no middle either, and soon your mind begins to realize that if there is no way in which to specify where you are along its length then in many ways you are everywhere along its length.

That, Sister Pan had said, is the key to finding your enemy. It merely requires the understanding that there is no place they could ever be other than before you.

Nona had never been sure of the logic and she couldn’t claim to understand the Path, but she believed the ancient woman who had taught her with such patience, and somehow, there on the Path itself, she knew every word to be true.

Belief proved sufficient. She saw the Scithrowl mage ahead, walking towards her on a beam of twisting light now grown as narrow as the pipe the novices trod in blade-path. She saw the idea of him rather than the person, etched by streamers of the Path’s energy.

Sister Pan had spoken at length of contesting the Path but never allowed the novices to practise as such contests were almost invariably fatal to the loser. Falling from the Path and owning what you took from it was hard enough, but being pushed from it made the task far more difficult. Most quantal Path-walkers avoided such duels because they were often fatal not only to the loser but to both contestants. Sister Pan likened it to wrestling on a tightrope. It wasn’t so hard to make the opponent fall, but to not fall after them was almost impossible.

Nona’s vision of the approaching Path-mage told her that he stood deep in whatever meditation mages used to find their serenity, advancing in cautious steps. He walked the Path as Sister Pan taught, as all quantals Nona knew walked it. Sister Pan in all her years had never met another who threw herself at the Path and raced its length with such disregard. Now Nona hoped that speed might somehow save her.

Nona charged on with the reckless haste that she always brought to the Path, clutching her growing power around herself like a cloak. The mage saw her only at the last fraction, lifting his gaze from the study of the way before him, shock and horror in his eyes.

There was an impact, at once both vast as worlds colliding and as slight as the momentary chill of a passing cloud. Nona knew herself to be both on the Path and at the same time scattered from it in all directions, her bones tumbling as they burned. Falling and not falling. A choice. Her flat sprint had thrown the mage from the Path, dumping half her energy into his lap, slowing her but deflecting her only by degrees. Still, her balance escaped her one fraction at a time and just as on the convent blade-path she knew that the error would grow with each step until she fell. She took two more steps and dropped from the Path by choice.

Her race along the Path had taken almost no time. Kettle and Bhenta had closed half the distance to the first of the softmen. Throwing stars hung in the air between them, their rotations lazy. Nona saw that the Path-mage had begun to fall. Bright crackles of blue-white energy had broken from his skin, and his face was starting to twist with horror.

Even as Nona struggled to own the Path energies raging through her, the out-of-kilter resonances that throbbed between her and the mage confirmed that he was failing to do the same. Being thrown from the Path with such violence had left him off-balance, unable to contain what he had taken. And although he wore the value of half a city in the sigils upon his robes, capable of deflecting the strongest blast Nona might throw his way, his protections couldn’t save him from himself.

Nona sucked into her flesh all that the Path had given her. Her skin wanted to blister and bubble away, her bones wanted to ignite. She screamed her denial and launched herself at Kettle’s back. She brought the nun to the floor a yard before the first of the softmen. The legendary impassivity of the softmen cracked at the sight of one enemy tackling another. Shaved brows rose in momentary surprise. Nona shook with barely contained power, pale violet flame licked across her skin and versions of herself kept trying to escape along their own courses. She hauled them all back in. The pain made her want to faint but it was too cruel to allow any such relief.

With a sob Nona used her Path-born strength to throw Kettle one-armed, aiming her like a skittle to take out Bhenta even as she slashed at the first softman to intercept her. Both Grey sisters went tumbling towards the pavilion wall. Already the Path-mage shone brighter than the day, shuddering with power he couldn’t contain. Nona followed her friends, her feet tearing deep gouges in the ground as she hunted for acceleration. A pain-stick lashed out at her but the Path’s invisible armour turned it away.

The detonation behind Nona came at the same moment she landed on top of her sisters, still tangled together on the grass. She spread her arms as the shockwave rippled overhead. A light, whiter and more intense than that of the sun, lit the material of the tent walls as the shockwave shredded them in strange geometric patterns. They hung there for an instant and in the next they were gone. The explosion that scattered the Path-mage reduced the perimeter of guards outside the tent to a red mist, and then shot that mist at the surrounding army who fell like corn before the scythe for fifty yards on all sides. A moment later the oil stores went up with a woof and a firestorm swirled skyward around the catapults.