The pair of them went down together, Nona on top as they spilled out into the corridor. She dashed the Noi-Guin’s blade from her injured hand, sliding over her to control the other arm with both legs. The Noi-Guin hammered her knees up into Nona’s side. The white pain of breaking ribs threatened to take her consciousness but Nona hung on, cursing. She reached down to cut the arteries in the woman’s thigh. The Noi-Guin thrashed but Nona shifted her weight to keep her pinned. One surge nearly flipped her off, and then the assassin’s strength was spent, pooled in crimson around her.

At the far end of the corridor the heavy door slammed and a key turned in the lock. The fight had taken only the time required for the two Lightless to run the length of the passage.

Nona pushed herself clear and made an end of her enemy, cutting first the black-skin’s straps, then the pale throat revealed as she lifted it. The assassin made no cry, only gargled on her blood, then stiffened and went limp.

Painfully, Nona got to her feet. Her vision was blurred, her body weighed three times what it ought to, and her breath came laboured.

You are poisoned.

I know. It didn’t really seem important.

Do something about it.

I didn’t know you cared.

If you die here I have nowhere to go.

I might like you more if you were less honest. Nona felt herself floating up, out of her body.

Nona!

Almost with regret she fought the sensation. Inch by hard-won inch she clawed her way back into her heavy, painful flesh and found herself kneeling beside the Noi-Guin, knees in the blood-pool. She began cutting open the woman’s leather tunic. A score or more steel vials with glass liners studded the garment’s interior, arranged in a row of tight little pockets. All identical, marked with raised symbols that meant nothing to her.

Nona took the only one that stood out, being larger than the others, which were all the size of half her little finger. She worked the stopper free and sniffed from a distance. “Thought so.”

The cure?

Nona tried to laugh and ended up coughing, nearly spilling the contents. “No.”

She held her wristband up and dribbled liquid from the vial into the lock. Immediately it started to smoke and the air filled with acrid fumes that set Nona coughing again. She tried to open the band but found it still locked. She dripped more acid in. The lock fizzed and bubbled, the metal protested . . . and then gave suddenly. A hot spatter of half-spent acid drops ate holes in Nona’s smock and her skin. The wristband fell away.

“That took a lot.” Nona shook the vial. Most of the contents had been used.

Make your blades.

Nona tried, straining the nonexistent muscle that sat at the back of the mind. Her flaw-blades pushed into being, shimmering out to their full length, vanishing, appearing again, unstable. In Keot’s sight the blades were a blue-white that was almost painful to look upon.

Nona made to slice the other wristband off but the blades melted away from it, refusing to cut just as they had once refused to cut Raymel Tacsis. “Sigil protected.”

Burn it open.

Nona shook the vial. Not enough.

Her fingers sought the lock on her collar, hoping it would be smaller. It wasn’t.

She lifted the vial.

You will waste it. It is not enough. You said.

Nona’s fingertips found the sigils on her collar. Three of them. She fell back across the assassin’s corpse, tilting her head. Gritting her teeth, she spilled the acid across the sigil marks. Searingly hot trickles ran down onto her neck and Nona cursed, tearing pieces from her smock to wipe them away. She kept still though, letting the acid hiss and bubble, eating at the metal, pitting it.

The shipheart’s presence reached her as the acid spoiled the sigils’ deep-cut perfection. Not the full measure of it, but some of that old pressure she remembered from the convent, fingering in past the fractured wards. Familiar but different: this wasn’t the Sweet Mercy shipheart but another, beating with its own rhythm.

Nona tried to see the Path but the collar’s damaged sigils still blocked her way like a thicket of thorns. She felt the poison closing her throat, driving her heart into a frenzy.

Find the cure!

She looked down at the vials. Too many of them. She wasn’t sure what had been on the blade. Fevercut would race the heart to destruction, bitterwode would strangle, redwort would paralyse with pain. It could be any of those, all of them, or something else, and to identify the antidotes by smell and taste alone . . .

Nona? Another voice in her skull, not Keot’s. Come to me!

And as the pain from Nona’s broken ribs turned from unbearable to incandescent, magnified by the venom in her blood, Nona leapt from her flesh to Kettle’s.

35

NONA FOUND HERSELF running. Awkwardly, careening from one side of the uneven natural passage to the other. She understood that she was in Kettle’s mind once again, but not why Kettle was staggering as if drunk, nor why she couldn’t hear even a whisper of Kettle’s thoughts.

The unlit passage hid no secrets from Kettle’s eyes and yet she still managed to stub her toe against a ridge of rock and go sprawling clumsily onto all fours. The pain from Kettle’s foot was small compared to what Nona had left behind but she still swore at the shock.

“Bleed on it!”

Kettle remained on all fours, looking from one splayed hand to the other.

She wiggled the fingers of the left hand.

“I’m doing this!” She raised her head. “Me. Nona, Nona, Nona.” Her voice echoed.

The sound of distant running reached down the tunnel into the silence that followed. People were coming.

“Oh hells.” Nona stood Kettle up, finding the length of her somehow disorienting even though they were of a similar height now. She ran her hands . . . Kettle’s hands . . . over Kettle’s body. “Where are you?”

The sounds of pursuit grew louder, closer. Nona patted her unfamiliar body once more then set it running again, concentrating on the task of not tripping over “her own” feet, a task that had somehow become very taxing. Ten steps later on she tangled her legs on Kettle’s scabbarded sword and fell again.

“Help?” Nona got to all fours again. Her legs felt too long, her top unbalanced. She spotted a sinkhole, a stone gullet just wide enough to take her. Kettle’s dark-sight revealed no bottom, just a near-vertical shaft plummeting away.

Nona hesitated. Shouts rang out. Not far away, she thought, though the echoes could play tricks. “They’re hunting me . . . where are you, Kettle?”

She could jump down and risk being trapped in a narrowing rock throat, a gift for the Lightless, who could either winkle her out or leave her to die. Or run on, slow and falling, to be overtaken and killed within minutes.

There’s a paralysis in choice, especially when what’s at stake is more precious to a person than what they own. Nona risked her own life with frightening regularity and without hesitation, but tasked with deciding how to save Kettle, from the inside, she found herself frozen. “Kettle?”

* * *

• • •

KETTLE’S WHOLE WORLD was pain, a white sea of hurt. With enormous effort she uncoiled and forced her eyelids to part. She blinked. The world looked wholly alien, the colours strange, stone alive with fire. Her eyes burned too, as if rubbed with pepper. She lay in a corridor, the floor awash with blood, the Noi-Guin who seemed to have supplied it close enough to touch. The assassin’s flesh looked black, her black-skin mask dark but with glints of gold as if something brilliant swam beneath its surface.