‘Ara, you have to go down.’ Nona pointed after the shipheart.

‘Down?’ Ara groaned. ‘I can’t.’

‘Seriously.’ Nona patted through the dark towards her and grabbed a handful of habit. ‘It’s a ten-foot climb. The floor’s another eight foot below the bottom of the fissure.’

‘I can’t!’

Nona started to drag Ara towards the crack. ‘You have to climb.’

‘The drop will kill me!’

‘Stay here and it will be the Noi-Guin who kill you instead of the drop.’

‘Noi-Guin?’ Ara sounded faint.

‘Eight of them.’ Nona hauled Ara to the edge, wincing at the girl’s groan of agony. ‘I made footholds for you.’

Ara descended painfully. Nona wriggled in after her. She hung by her blades from just beneath the lip of the fissure. Below her Ara reached the roof of the passage underneath them and cried out in pain as she tried to hang down into it. A dull thud followed, then silence. The hurt that flared along the thread-bond almost made Nona lose her own hold and suggested that Ara had fainted from the pain.

Nona waited, hanging from invisible claws, one shoulder starting to ache with the strain of her suspension, blood dripping from the other, her thigh a mass of white-hot agony, her stomach sick, her body weak with echoes of what the Noi-Guin’s venom wanted to do to her. It seemed to take an eternity before anything happened, and all the while the voices of her devils grew louder in the silence, their demands harder to ignore. They made her sanity seem insane. Why wasn’t she running?

‘You know where the bitch is heading?’

Nona had already known they were coming. She had felt her thread return to its natural place when the first of them had passed through it. Nona had tied her knot to fail at such intrusion and, as it snapped back, the thread she had set sent ripples through something deeper than the stone. Sister Pan had tried to teach her the trick but it was from Joeli Namsis that Nona had finally learned the subtle arts of thread-traps, watch-threads, and warning-threads. She’d had to fall foul of a lot of them before she mastered the technique. As Keot had once told her: your foes shape your life more than friends ever could.

Nona had known they were coming but until Lano Tacsis spoke she hadn’t dared to hope that he had joined the hunting party. He must have shed a royal fortune in sigil-stamped armour at the well-head, but he would still have enough protection in the form of sigilled amulets and robes to stop a Path-blast. Not that Nona could manage one of those.

‘There’s an exit near the base of the plateau. It’s where I’d go.’ Clera’s voice. ‘She’ll have set traps for us somewhere. Wires maybe.’

Nona steeled herself, against her pain, against her weakness, against the voices in her head telling her, not unreasonably, that Clera had betrayed her again, that Clera would not have followed her instruction.

Nona waited. A figure began to step over the fissure. With all the speed and strength left to her Nona lunged up, ignoring the scream of her injured shoulder, and seized the person’s ankle. In the same movement she retracted her flaw-blades and let the whole of her weight haul both of them into the depths.

The fissure crawled around them as if they sank in honey. Nona left her victim to fend for themself, concentrating instead on her own landing. When her head cleared the fissure she hunted the shipheart’s glow. As the rubble-strewn floor approached Nona extended her good leg to absorb the first impact. She knew one leg would not be sufficient. Her other foot hit the ground and she strained to keep her body from hammering into the rocks. The wicked little knife embedded in the back of her thigh cut deeper as her muscles tightened around it.

With a howl Nona sank to her haunches and immediately launched herself at the shipheart. She slapped a hand to it and with an effort that she thought might shatter her already-clenched teeth she brought fissure walls tumbling in. Quicker than thought she rolled, hand extended towards Ara, slumped senseless beneath the opening. At the touch of Nona’s rock-work several large chunks of stone became dust, sifting down through the air while smaller pieces bounced everywhere but on Ara.

A black-cloaked figure rolled to a halt beside Nona.

‘What in the—’ It scrambled rapidly away. ‘Ancestor’s balls! That’s a fucking shipheart!’ Clera arrived against the opposite wall on her backside, straining to get further away. ‘My brain feels like it’s being cooked!’

Nona glanced up at the jumble of broken stone choking the fissure in the roof above them. The effort of bringing it down had left her with a headache that was bad enough to compete with her shoulder and thigh for attention.

‘That’s your plan?’ Clera followed her gaze, her face pale and beaded with sweat. ‘That’s not a plan!’ She slapped a dirty palm to her forehead. ‘No! I can’t believe I’ve been this stupid. What is it you do to me, Nona? Some marjal mind-trick? That’s it, isn’t it, a mind-trick?’

Nona ignored her and crawled to Ara’s side. Her friend’s headdress had come loose and her golden hair was crimson with blood from some new head wound. Nona took a vial from her Grey Sister supplies and opened it beneath Ara’s nose. The sharp smell that rose made Nona’s eyes water, and with a cough and a splutter Ara came back to herself, pushing the vial away.

‘You’ve just bought yourself half an hour, an hour tops!’ Clera stamped away then stamped back. ‘They’ll find a way round, they’ll track us, they’ll kill us.’ She kicked a rock and limped off cursing. ‘You’ve just killed me! What were you thinking? This isn’t a plan!’

‘No,’ Nona said. ‘This is a plan.’ She raised the shipheart, her grip so tight that she thought her finger-bones might break. For a moment the light within the stone flickered and dimmed. Nona reached out along silent, lightless tunnels, her rock-sense questing. She found the distant wall she wanted … and broke it. It felt as if the effort had broken something inside her in return. She fell to the floor, hot blood welling from her mouth, and the shipheart rolled from her nerveless hand.

The Rock of Faith rumbled.

‘Nona?’ Ara asked, her voice trembling. ‘What have you done?’

Nona lay where she had fallen. ‘Sinkhole.’

‘The Glasswater?’ Clera breathed. ‘What did you do?’

Nona got a hand under her chest and pushed herself from the ground. It seemed that she weighed as much as ten nuns should. The rock beneath her palm trembled.

‘The tunnel above us is about to become a river again.’ She used the wall to help herself to one leg. ‘Then a bit later so will this one.’ She reached to drag Ara from the ground. ‘So we have to get out of here fast.’

25

Holy Class

Nona knew that the darkness, and the speed with which water under pressure will travel through a tunnel, meant that all they would know at the end was that the distant rumble would suddenly become a whoosh and a heartbeat later they would all be dead.

Already the air was in motion, blasting them from behind no matter how fast they moved.

‘We’ll never make the Seren Way!’ A frantic Clera paused twenty yards ahead of Nona and Ara. The shipheart’s glow caught faintly on her face and hands, making her a suggestion in the dark.