Holy Sister

The memory of Sherzal striking the wall became Nona’s sole focus. Her joint trance gave it a crystal clarity. Sherzal’s hand hit the beat, the vision repeating, recycling until the tempo ran through Nona’s veins like the erratic pounding of a second heart.

Nona stood up and struck the required pattern. The opening appeared in the wall and she pressed the glowing disc inside the recess. A second cloth test showed the trap to be disarmed and Nona hurried on.

Before she cleared the area protected by the blades something struck her, not a flaw-blade but still sharp and invisible. Ruli’s agony. It reached out across their thread-bond like a spear thrust.

When Nona was new to the skill, the distress would have hauled her mind across to join Ruli without allowing her any choice. Now, she had the mastery to resist the pull, but it had never been in Nona to ignore a friend, even if not doing so meant that she had to share their pain.

In a heartbeat Nona occupied Ruli’s flesh. They had her on the floor with wrists and ankles bound, hands behind her back. The guardsman who had been kicking her stepped aside to reveal Sherzal smiling broadly. Behind her Jula, similarly tied, sat at the feet of several more guards.

‘Well, this is rather silly.’ Sherzal came closer, her smile fading into concern. ‘Look at you, all bloody.’ Nona reminded herself that the emperor’s sister had all but owned the Inquisition and had watched them burn her court rivals alive on trumped-up charges over matters as slight as unkind, though likely accurate, gossip. The concern on her face was entirely manufactured. ‘You understand that Dillon here is just softening you up? The idea is to save us having to go through the part where I ask you about the book and you pretend that you don’t know what I’m talking about.’

‘But—’ Ruli’s protest was cut off by a heavy kick to the stomach.

‘We’ll get to the questions in a short while. And if we don’t get answers Dillon will have to take out his knife. And if that doesn’t work …’ Sherzal gestured past the guards with Jula to the door behind. Safira stood poised and ready, and at her side a sulky-looking Joeli Namsis. Nona’s hatred for the girl curled Ruli’s lip. Joeli must have been just ahead of her all this time.

‘… Safira has her poisons and needles. And look! She’s brought your friend to play. I really want to keep young Joeli fresh for what comes later, but if we must then she can pull what we need out of your skull. Though I’m told it may leave you rather broken.’

Ruli groaned and rolled her head, bringing the other half of the chamber into the view of her one good eye. The pristine floor lay spattered with blood from the killing of Crucical’s guards, and long smears indicated that the trio had been dragged away through a door opposite. A kick took Ruli in the back below the ribs, and as she jerked her head up Nona saw something that pushed the rising agony back down into being a mere distraction. Glowing molten and gold at the end of a long length of chain that had presumably been used to drag it to the chamber lay the Sweet Mercy shipheart.

Another kick crunched into Ruli’s ribs doubling her up with pain. Sherzal moved around so that her feet came into Ruli’s eye-line.

‘A little bird has told me that you and your friends have been busy stealing books. And by your friends I mean Nona Grey and Arabella Jotsis, both of whom owe me a great debt for damaging my alliance with Adoma.’

‘Damaging?’ Ruli spat out a bloody laugh and Nona loved her for it. ‘Adoma …’ She hadn’t the breath to say it but Adoma had driven her armies through the Grand Pass and taken Sherzal’s palace at the very start of the invasion three years earlier. As soon as the Noi-Guin shipheart was lost to them the alliance to secure the Ark had fallen apart. It was ‘damaged’ in the same way a snail is damaged beneath a descending heel. Officially of course the treachery had never existed, but if Crucical truly believed that then he had never really known his sister at all.

‘Yes, damaging.’ Sherzal frowned. ‘But with the right incentives Adoma can be brought back into line. We have what she really wants right here, and all the doors are locked tight. Further, you will notice the cylinders attached to the walls.’ Sherzal waved an arm. Ruli fixed on one of maybe a dozen white cylinders somehow adhering to the sides of the chamber, each longer and thicker than her leg. ‘My brother entrusted these into my care. They date from the Second Age when our ancestors mastered the secret fire again. At the push of a particular button they will explode with as much force as a quantal Path-walker can direct.’ She drew from her gown a short, fat stick with a red button at the end. ‘They were supposed to seal the Grand Pass and make it a tomb for ten thousand Scithrowl. I told my brother they failed to function, and at the time I said it I believed it to be true, thanks to some clever thread-work. But sweet Safira, keeper of my secrets, showed me their hiding place and I brought them here.

‘I doubt they can open or destroy the Ark but they can certainly bury it deeply enough that it would take Adoma many years to dig her way back to it. So she needs me, just as she needs my shipheart and I need hers. I give you this information because if you tell me what I want to know there could be a place for you in my service, little unruly Ruli.’

Ruli shook her head. ‘If it was true, if you really thought they would still work, that they might explode, you wouldn’t be here. You would be on the other side of the city, or in the west, if there are any forts still holding there.’

‘Sadly it requires the ignition button to be close. It won’t even work through a wall. Once, perhaps, but not now. All these wonders are fading … Besides, I know what happens to losers. It isn’t pretty. If it must come to that then my end will be swift and glorious and my grave deep.’

‘So … the shipheart you stole. The two the battle-queen owns …’ Nona spoke using Ruli’s mouth. ‘That only makes three.’

Sherzal held out four fingers and started to count them down. ‘Well, there’s one—’ the guard marked the count with a kick to Ruli’s thigh, ‘here that Abbess Glass kindly donated. And numbers two—’ a kick to the ribs, ‘and three—’ and the head, ‘are with Adoma. The fourth—’ The guard stamped on Ruli’s ankle. ‘The fourth shipheart I need will be delivered to me by Lano Tacsis and the Singular of the Noi-Guin from the sack of the Convent of Sweet Mercy.’ Sherzal leaned over and waited for Ruli’s groaning to subside. ‘So you see, Adoma needs me. I have quite a bit to bargain with.’

The convent! Even as she shared Ruli’s pain Nona found it crushed to insignificance beneath the terror that Sherzal’s words brought crashing down on her. Lano Tacsis at the convent. The thought of Ara standing lone guard against the Tacsis forces and the Noi-Guin had her tumbling back towards her own body. Ara! She had forced Ara to stay. She’d thought she was saving her!

Nona clung to Ruli even as her fear for the convent tried to steal her away. Sherzal was still talking.

‘But it has come to my attention that even when we open the Ark actually controlling the moon may be an annoyingly complicated business. My little bird tells me that Abbess Glass set you children on the path to finding a book that should help on that front. Quite a wonder that woman. I’m so glad she’s dead. But her annoying cleverness is the reason I can’t afford not to take this book seriously. Owning that knowledge would really be the cherry on the cake. Which is why I had you two brought here. Disappointingly you don’t have the book on you, but you can tell me where it is. And if young Jula really is as studious as Joeli tells me she is then I think it’s worth investing the time to torture her on the assumption she has the information we need locked behind that plain little face of hers.’