Nona put up her blade, relieved.

“Your fear is beating you.” Sister Tallow pinned Nona with narrow eyes. “Zole doesn’t even have to try.”

“I’m not afraid!” A snarl. And a lie. Blade-work held a fear for Nona that was absent when she fought empty-handed. Perhaps it had started with Raymel Tacsis swinging his sword at her as exhaustion robbed her speed. Perhaps before. Against most novices blade-work was just a game, but facing hunska primes and full-bloods her control slipped away and slaughterhouse images crept in.

“Find your centre, novice. Wear your serenity like a second skin.” Tallow motioned for them to continue.

Nona scowled and raised her blade. Serenity had never helped her find the Path. It had been passion that led her there. Rage. On the blade-path, suspended high above the ground in the chamber behind the changing room, it had been the discovery that she needed to slide rather than stick that made her stop falling. Where the other novices stepped with ever greater caution Nona had raced in.

Zole came at her again, efficient, relentless, cold. Their blades clashed and clashed again. Serenity would wrap up the fear that hampered her, but it would also keep away the anger that she needed. Nona had to have her heart in the battle or it wasn’t a battle at all, just some game. What she required was the right balance.

Nona swung at Zole’s side. The ice-triber stepped inside the blow, trapping Nona’s wrist against her ribs and laying her own blade along the thick collar around Nona’s neck.

“Break!” Tallow raised her hand. “Work through the standard thrust and parry routines. And think on my instruction, novice. They don’t call me Mistress Blade for nothing . . .”

* * *

• • •

AFTER THE LESSON there was time for half an hour at blade-path before hitting the bathhouse. Nona changed into the lightest of her combat habits and joined the other Mystic novices who had chosen to practise.

She found that most of the class were there, half on the platform high above the net, half below staring up at the show. Even Darla, who Nona almost never saw in the chamber, had turned up. Joeli too, at the doorway down below, watching with her three closest cronies. The blonde girl, Mesha, stood at her side, and before them the hunska half-bloods Elani and Crocey, solid and sly, so similar they might be twins. A novice from Holy Class joined them. One Nona often saw walking with Joeli.

Nona found a spot on the platform’s edge beside Zole and sat, dangling her legs over the drop. “Now you’re in Mystic you’ll get to go on the ice-ranging.”

Zole grunted.

“You notice how they put us up a class on the same day?” Nona watched Alata on the blade-path. She moved well and had covered half the distance.

“That’s Wheel’s doing. She wants Argatha and Shield together. She has been sitting on my merit certificate until they were ready to let you up,” Zole said.

Nona narrowed her gaze and, as if her stare had become a weapon, Alata faltered, slipped, and fell with an oath.

“It is your temper that held you where you were,” Zole continued, gazing into space.

“I—” Nona bit off a sharp reply. It was true. Mostly true. Keot had returned with her from the Corridor ranging. She had lost a shadow, lost two friends, and gained a devil. Nona supposed she had never been the mildest of novices but with a devil beneath her skin she had turned wild. It had taken the best part of two years to get the upper hand, to slowly regain control and concentration, and even more slowly to regain the trust and respect of the sisters who taught her. “I wasn’t holding you back, if that’s what you think.”

Zole shrugged. Everyone knew she’d been ready for Mystic Class for an age, but the abbess didn’t want her ice-ranging. Abbess Glass didn’t think Zole would come back. More importantly Sherzal didn’t want her to go. Her opinion counted in the matter. Despite very obviously being behind the theft of the convent’s shipheart the emperor’s sister remained free, unpunished, and a power in the land. If anything she had tightened her grip on the Inquisition since the theft.

Another novice fell from the blade-path. Nona didn’t register which. “So why did they let you move up?”

“I do not know.” Zole hardly seemed to care. If Nona hadn’t met Tarkax she would have imagined everyone from the tribes to be carved from ice.

Zole stood to take her turn on the blade-path. Several of the novices raised a cheer as if they were pilgrims crowding on the Rock, hoping to see a miracle. They at least looked embarrassed when Zole turned to stare at them.

Nona watched Zole’s progress without truly seeing. Zole was right that her temper had held her down. Keot might fan the flames but the fire had been there before the devil came to warm himself in its midst. Four devils had found Raymel Tacsis while he waited to cross the Path and enter death. They had made their home within his flesh. The focused will of Academics in Thuran Tacsis’s pay had kept Raymel from joining the Ancestor, and in time they had returned him to health, alive but changed. But not even the power of the Academy could drive a devil from a man’s flesh if it found enough sin to anchor it.

Before the Tacsis giant died Nona had thrust her knife into his back a score of times. Perhaps more: it had been a frenzy. Three of the four devils had returned to the hollow places from where devils watch eternity, but the fourth, spilling out with Raymel’s blood, had slipped through some crack into Nona. At first he had seemed only a scarlet stain on Nona’s knife-hand, one that refused to be washed away with the gore that had reached up past her elbows. But later, in the depths of the night, he had spoken to her. He called himself Keot and claimed it had been neither the blood nor the rage that had let him get under her skin. Rather it had been the pleasure Nona had taken in driving the knife home into her enemy. That had been the crack into which he had squeezed.

“You’re up.” A novice tapped Nona’s shoulder.

“What?” Nona shook away her thoughts and went to stand at the start of the blade-path. Another girl reset the pendulum.

“Let’s see you do your trick then.” Joeli’s voice from below, sounding for all the world as if she were in her father’s halls and Nona was the entertainment, an acrobat hired to amuse.

Nona ran onto the cold, swaying pipe. She never slid along it except late at night when she came to clear her mind. Greasing her feet left the blade-path slippery and brought howls of protest from everyone but the handful of novices who had taken up her approach. Even so, whenever she took the path she went quickly. On the twisting narrowness of the blade-path pipe she ran faster than a non-hunska could sprint. The quickness of it gave the path beneath her feet too little time to sway or shift. In eight counts she had run up the first twist of the spiral. When sliding Nona took the inner path, letting her speed hold her to the metal as she turned momentarily upside-down inside the spiral. Running, she took the outer path and jumped from the top of the first turn to the second, then to the third, breaking the rules. The leap from the last turn of the spiral to the next flattish section was a dangerous one, several yards, risking injury if she missed and struck the pipe in passing.

“Cheat!” Joeli’s cry as Nona took off.

Keot twisted beneath her skin, scalding hot. Both feet hit the bar, but neither met it perfectly and on the blade-path one tiny error is multiplied with every step. Over-correction built on over-correction and five paces later Nona fell. No sound escaped her. The bounce of the net brought her to her feet and a moment later she landed cat-footed among the watchers.