The front of the carriage hit the stable doors at a brisk walking pace and they shuddered aside, billowing smoke out into the courtyard. Sherzal’s carriage emerged, wheels clattering, thick white smoke all around, terrified horses streaming past on both sides.
The archers lining the walls hesitated, uncertain what they were dealing with. Sherzal’s carriage carried on past those of the Sis, lining the walls to either side. With every yard Nona imparted more speed to it. The palace gates, more accurately described as fortress gates, would of course bring its progress to an abrupt and devastating halt.
The first arrows began to hammer into the carriage. Those inside had already made efforts to reinforce the shutters with seating. On the outside Ara was a popular target, but even with only one hand free she managed to deflect those arrows that would otherwise have hit her.
With the carriage moving at a good speed, Nona let it run and sprinted to get ahead of it. Every archer on her side of the courtyard took the opportunity to let fly at a clear target and their arrows hissed around her, breaking on the flagstones, hammering into the carriage’s sides, or finding her flesh. The same energies that allowed Nona’s body to contain and use the Path’s strength also resisted arrowheads. The arrows ricocheted from her as if she were a statue, leaving just pinpricks.
Feeling the Path-energies begin to ebb and fade, and with Sherzal’s carriage rumbling along behind her, Nona threw herself at the palace gates. Her final leap took her six feet off the ground and her shoulder hit the heavy timbers with a bone-jarring impact. The doors stopped her dead and she slid into a heap at their base. Arrows hammered into the timber on both sides, several hitting her in the back.
“Too light,” Nona muttered. It didn’t matter how strong you were, nobody could knock a man down by throwing a feather at him.
She stood, the carriage only twenty yards behind her now. The gates’ huge locking bar had not been lowered but they were still held by a series of bolts driven into the stonework above and below by some system of cables anchored across the inner surface. Nona lacked both the time and the reach to rip it all clear.
How to open the gates when her own strength would just throw her aside? Even if she had the time to dig footholds Nona thought that they would probably give way before the bolts surrendered.
Academia lessons came to Nona’s aid where her Blade and Path education kept silent. Inertia keeps even the lightest of things stationary in the face of great forces—you just have to act fast enough. Nona punched the left gate a foot from the edge where it met the right one. The speed of the action allowed no time for her to be pushed back. Instead her fist burst through the timbers and she stood with her arm elbow-deep in a splintered hole, her fist just emerging into the wind that scoured the outer surface. Nona slammed herself forward until her shoulder met the timbers and her elbow cleared the far side of the door. She bent her arm and clung on. More arrows studded the woodwork around her. More hit her back and fell away leaving just shallow wounds.
Now, anchored by the thickness of the gates themselves, Nona set her other hand, palm out, to the other gate. And pushed. When she punched the door had no time to move and so she punched through. Now she pushed with slow, inexorable force. Anchored to the left-hand gate, she couldn’t move back. Instead the gate had to take all the pressure. She curled around, setting her shoulder and hip to the other gate, using all the core strength of her body, magnified a thousand times by the fading energies taken from the Path. Behind her the rumbling clatter of the carriage grew ever closer.
With squeals of protest the bolts above and below began to fail, pieces of stone shooting away, shards of wood as long as an arm breaking free as the housings gave way. A shadow loomed. Time had run out. Sherzal’s carriage smashed into the gates, Nona caught between its hammer blow and the gates’ anvil.
A moment of darkness, of light, of whirling motion, screams and broken wood. Nona found herself on the ground with something huge rushing above her.
47
THE ROAD DOWN from the side valley that housed Sherzal’s palace was a long curving sweep of modest gradient. It ended at the highway that threaded the Grand Pass.
Despite the arrow transfixing her left calf Ara had managed to scramble on top of the carriage, climb to the heavily damaged front, and find the braking levers. The slope was too steep for the brakes to fully arrest the carriage’s motion but they helped to tame it.
Steering proved to be a different matter. The carriage steered itself by scraping along the rocky wall where engineers had cut into the valley’s side to make the road. It was a process that removed a new section of the carriage’s side every twenty yards or so and threatened, at every collision with a larger outcropping, to send them all veering across the narrowness of the road to pitch over the drop into whatever heart-stopping fall the darkness hid.
Eventually, with about two-thirds of the mile-long journey to the pass road complete, the ruins of Sherzal’s grand carriage lurched sideways and came to a halt with the front right wheel hanging over an unknown drop. Ara stood panting, braced against the brake lever.
A minute’s work saw most of the carriage’s passengers disembarked, or carried off. Two older men had been killed by arrows that found their way past shutters and seat bases. A matronly woman in a voluminous dress had been shot through the shoulder, the arrow still in place, its steel head emerging from her back. Regol, Kettle, and Ara kept close around the abbess.
* * *
• • •
NONA CRAWLED FROM beneath the wreckage of the carriage, her arms aching, legs scraped and torn. She had lunged for the axle and let it drag her, with only the fading power of the Path to shield her from harm.
“Nona!” Ara hobbled across to help her up. Behind Ara Nona could see the distant flames licking up above Sherzal’s walls. She hoped the conflagration would spread and gut the place from lowest cellar to tallest tower.
“Where’s Clera?” Nona asked looking over the survivors.
“She never got in,” Ara said.
“I called to her.” Kettle pressed her mouth into a speculative pucker. “She backed away into the smoke.”
“But—” It made no sense. The abbess would have taken her back. Nona knew it.
“She made a choice, Nona.” Abbess Glass spoke in a low voice. “She helped you when you needed help, but she fancied her chances better with the emperor’s sister.”
Nona looked around her. Starlight washed the roadway through a wind-torn hole in the clouds. It lit the ruined carriage, one side torn away, the roof sagging, and shone red across a score of Sis in ballgowns and formalwear, ill-suited for walking the mountains. Many bore injuries, including Kettle, Ara, and herself. Her gaze settled on Regol, the only fighter among them fit for combat, save for Melkir.
“My lady.” He executed a half-bow, showing her that same old smile, even now.
She found herself suddenly aware of how tattered and inadequate her smock was, the wind playing it around her, and how filthy everything beneath it lay. “Regol.” She had meant to tell him she was a novice rather than a lady, but she wasn’t sure she was either right at that moment. And with his gaze upon her she was no longer sure which she would rather be.