Holy Sister

With an oath Nona turned her back on them all and ran from Mally towards the emperor’s spires. On the way past the broken cart she scooped up the shipheart in its casket.

The shipheart’s aura beat at Nona, tearing at the roots of her personality as she ran, eager to reshape her. She endured it for two streets then threw the casket over a high garden wall. A mansion lay behind the garden, and behind that an open plaza that stretched to Crucical’s gates. The ring of imperial guards that had turned her away before would be waiting for her. She scaled the wall and dropped beside the casket before moving away to crouch by the trunk of an elm tree. Dusk filled the garden and for a moment the battle seemed far away, already half a dream.

Nona muttered her serenity poem. ‘She’s falling down, she’s falling down, the moon, the moon …’ and wrapped herself in the cool distance of the trance. ‘Ruli …’ She opened the thread-bond to her friend.

‘Oh, thank the Ancestor!’ Ruli lifted her head from a one-eyed contemplation of the patterned floor.

‘What?’ Jula hissed. ‘What?’

Close by, in front of a pair of tall bronze doors, half a dozen of Sherzal’s guards stood tense and ready as their captain engaged in heated conversation with three men in the emperor’s green and gold who barred his way.

It’s nothing, Nona spoke the words inside Ruli’s skull.

‘It’s … nothing,’ Ruli said. ‘I just remembered that we have a friend looking out for us.’ She tried to open her other eye but it stayed swollen shut.

‘A friend?’ Jula glanced up at the nearest guard. ‘What do you … Oh!’ She closed her mouth and pressed her lips firmly together.

I’m coming to get you both. Just make sure to show me everything. Nona could have deepened the bond and steered Ruli’s gaze where she wanted it but she could feel her friend’s apprehension. Any deeper and she would lose control over how much they shared through the bond, and sharing fear would do neither of them any good. They both had plenty of their own.

The guard captain appeared to have won his argument because the emperor’s men stepped back and pulled open the doors. Ruli found herself being hauled roughly to her feet, and Nona realized for the first time that her wrists had been bound together behind her back.

Before being led through the doors Ruli took a long look back the way they had come. A wide corridor lined with paintings and statuary stretched off towards a distant chamber lit by a curious blue light.

‘Move it!’ A guardsman shoved her and Ruli staggered into another chamber, this one with a domed ceiling offering the darkening sky through a round window high above. Streaks of black crossed the patch of midnight blue and the smell of smoke, absent in the corridor, could be smelled again.

Crucical’s palace appeared to be even more of a warren than Sherzal’s. It seemed that the idea was to impress the emperor’s grandeur on the world by covering as much of it as possible with endless chambers, halls, galleries, shrines, and corridors. Ruli’s good eye flickered left and right, picking out detail. The place seemed almost deserted; no doubt the guards were protecting the exterior. The other occupants were probably huddled together in some inner sanctum since misery loves company and since the empire had run out of places for people of quality to flee to.

Eventually, after descending three flights of stairs they came to an iron door manned by two guards in scarlet and silver. Behind the door lay a library. Not the grand, showy kind that Nona had glimpsed on her rare ventures into rich men’s homes but something more akin to the high priest’s vault or the small collection within Sweet Mercy’s scriptorium.

Among the dusty browns and blacks of leather-bound tomes Sherzal’s diamonds and gown of silver-white seemed wholly out of place.

‘Novices!’ She greeted them with a wide, gleaming smile. The Scithrowl might be cutting a path towards the palace but Sherzal had taken the time to have her rouge applied, her lips painted scarlet, the dark red curls of her mane brushed to a high shine. ‘Ruli … and … Jula.’ She pointed at them in turn with a long, sharp-nailed finger. ‘I’m glad you could join us.’

‘We need to be with our abbess!’ Ruli’s voice came out as a squeak. She deepened it and tried to inject some outrage. ‘The Scithrowl are through the city wall.’

‘Yes, yes. Adoma and her tedious horde.’ Sherzal turned and walked to the back of the room. ‘You girls will do a lot more good here, I can assure you of that. It’s no coincidence that I chose to meet you in a library …’

She pushed aside two piles of books, letting them topple to the floor. Behind her the iron door opened again and a young woman clad in a grey tunic with a black chainmail shirt of very fine gauge entered. She took the novices in with dark eyes above high cheekbones.

‘Safira …’ The recognition leaked from Nona’s mind to Ruli’s lips. The memory of the woman carrying Jula from the aftermath of the explosion rose in both their minds. Days before she had been in the company of Lano Tacsis.

Safira raised a brow at Ruli then turned to Sherzal. ‘I have the code. I had to kill the knight-protector.’

‘No matter.’ Sherzal returned her attention to the area of wall that had been obscured by the piled books. She unsheathed a knife and started to prise at the stone blocks. ‘Now, where are you hiding?’ She tutted and tried the point of her blade a little further along. Without warning the block opened, the whole thing just a stone front attached to a wooden door a foot wide and six inches tall. Behind it lay a set of three gleaming steel wheels set into a steel plate marked with numbers.

‘Ten, twenty, four,’ Safira said.

Sherzal rotated each of the wheels to the numbers she had named.

A grinding noise started up behind Ruli and she turned with a start. A rectangular section of what had seemed to be tiled floor was now drawing back under the rest to reveal a set of stairs.

‘The wonders of our forefathers!’ Sherzal clapped her hands with enthusiasm. ‘But of course you two girls know all about that.’ She picked up one of the lanterns from the reading table and began her descent even before the floor had fully retracted. ‘Come along! Quickly now. It will slide back on you if you dawdle.’

The guards followed, Jula and Ruli prodded along between them, Safira bringing up the rear.

The stairway led down on a square spiral and the turns kept coming. The depth of the emperor’s cellars seemed remarkable, even to novices who had lived with the cave-riddled thickness of the Rock of Faith beneath them.

Eventually they emerged into a surprisingly dry chamber with no hint of cave about it. Sherzal turned to face them and raised her lantern. ‘You’ll like this.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Lights on.’

Across the ceiling rectangles of white light flickered into being. Others appeared along the length of two corridors leading off in opposite directions. Nona had never seen illumination so steady or so white. It wrought strange changes in the colours it shone upon.

‘Come!’ Sherzal led off again, her gown billowing with each long stride.

They passed doorways left and right, opening onto square white rooms, echoingly empty, or sometimes dark rooms, or rooms lit by flickers. Occasionally Ruli would glimpse something within. An object covered with a sheet – a chest or cabinet perhaps – a section of black metal, perforated with circular holes, broken from part of some larger structure maybe, a toothed wheel of a metal too orangey to be gold; a mass of wires emerging from a silver-grey sphere … did they wriggle, or was that a fluttering of the light? While Ruli marvelled, Nona was put in mind of the inner sanctum at the Hope Church in White Lake. What had Preacher Mickel said? The Sis build their homes over the best of what remains in the Corridor. The emperors themselves built their palace above the Ark and bind the Academy to them with its power.