Red Sister (Book of the Ancestor 1)

Yisht unfolded herself slowly, the light from the shipheart breaking around her as she straightened to expose it.

Kill her! Nona shouted. Quick! This close to the shipheart, and with threads drawn from Yisht’s own blood … she could snap the silver tie that bound Yisht’s spirit, and the woman’s warm flesh would topple to the ground, empty.

Hessa worked quickly, the deft fingers of her mind sorting and plucking the threads that connected her to Yisht.

‘Put it down.’ Hessa only mouthed the words but Yisht found herself lowering the shipheart to the ground, not against her will but because her will had changed.

End her! Nona knew killers. Yisht was a killer. Hessa was not. The killer always has the edge. Don’t give her a moment!

Yisht raised a hand and above Hessa a thickness of rock fractured away from the ceiling.

There was no time to react, no pain, no memory of the impact, just the knowledge that the world had turned upon its side, that the lantern oil was flaring somewhere around her legs, and that she now saw Yisht through a single eye full of blood. Nothing hurt, and that worried Hessa most of all.

Yisht approached down the cut, a slim knife in her hand, her gait uncertain as if her collision with the wall had broken something inside.

‘The personal touch.’ Hessa thought the words but her lips scarcely moved and her breath sputtered out wetly.

Nona threw every ounce of her will against the bond that tied her to Hessa, but all that happened was that the world started shaking, as if Yisht had decided against the knife and raised all her earth-magics to crush her foe.

‘Nona!’ A slap that made her cheek blaze. ‘Nona!’ Screamed at her face, full of desperation.

Nona didn’t open her eyes – they were already open – but she started seeing through them again. Darla was shaking her. ‘Wake up! They’re coming! All of them!’

‘Buy me a minute!’ She gasped the words out and Darla dropped her in shock.

‘What?’

‘One minute.’ Nona sat. ‘I need to help Hessa.’ Her shadow lay before her, thrown by the descending sun, stretching out to the rear of the cave where it joined the general gloom. Nona made a fist and extended one finger from it, sheathed in a single flaw-blade.

‘Wait, we’re sending her out,’ Darla shouted from the cave entrance. She ducked back. ‘If they’re going to kill us anyway why are they so keen we send you out?’

‘So I don’t get killed in any fighting. Once swords start swinging anything can happen.’ Nona started to cut at her shadow, slicing it away from below her feet. ‘Arrrgh! Gods damn it, that hurts!’ She’d known her blades cut shadow – that lesson had been taught to her at the Academy. She hadn’t known that cutting her own shadow would hurt as much as cutting her own flesh.

‘What?’ Ruli stared in horror at the ragged edge of Nona’s shadow and the strange twisting of the light about the gap. ‘How will that stop them?’

‘Not them. Her!’ Nona slashed again, a long tearing motion, screaming out the agony of it.

Behind her, Darla scooped up Ara’s stiff body and carried her towards the cave mouth. ‘We had to subdue her with poison!’ she called out.

‘What are you doing?’ Jula joined Ruli, dagger trembling in her grip. Whether she was talking to Nona or to Darla was hard to say.

‘I’m breaking rules.’ Nona threw herself onto her severed shadow before it could escape into the greater dark, and then hurled herself back at Hessa, terrified that she would be too late, terrified that she would throw herself along the threads of the bond forged in such sorrow and so long ago only to find a nothingness, just the vacant space that her friend had once occupied in the world.

The point of Yisht’s knife waited just a finger’s width from Hessa’s eye. Yisht herself sat on the rocks just before her. In her other hand Sherzal’s assassin held the shipheart, a blue-white ball of wonder, its surface a multi-layered thing across which floated the ghosts of forms both familiar and unknown. She kept it pressed to a rip in her tunic, the flesh beneath torn and bloody.

‘… I am not given to cruelty, child.’

Nona realized that Yisht was speaking.

‘But you reached into my mind, and a violation like that cannot go unanswered.’

Hessa could smell meat burning and knew it was her – but still no pain reached her. The knife at her eye terrified her, but she had drawn her head back as far as she could, and still the point advanced.

Nona found herself lost, an impotent observer, her plans ridiculous. Somewhere she had hands, and those hands were full of shadow, but her ambition to draw that unleashed shadow through to Hessa lay so far beyond her talent she had no idea where to start.

Help me, Hessa!

And where Nona’s orders and demands had gone unheard and unheeded, her cry for help caught her friend’s attention – even beneath the heel of Yisht’s revenge.

‘How?’

Help me draw it through! She tried to show Hessa what she needed.

‘Easy!’ Hessa felt herself drifting away, beyond pain, beyond struggle. She heard the Ancestor’s song, many-voiced and more beautiful than anything she had ever imagined possible. Even so – her friend had asked for help …

With the shipheart so close it seemed simplicity itself to take the dark threads from Nona’s clumsy fists, beating ineffectually at the walls between them, and to pull those threads through the bond they shared. We’re Giljohn’s children. The thought rolled across the smoothness of her mind as the Ancestor’s song grew louder. Sisters of the cage.

Stay! Nona tried to hold onto Hessa. She could feel her leaving but had no sense of where she might be going or how to follow.

The point of Yisht’s blade traced a hot line down the side of Hessa’s face, and in that moment of hurt the shadows suddenly swirled, rising from the ground so fast and thick and black that the broken stones rattled with their passage. Nona’s shadow broke from Hessa’s and threw itself at Yisht like an extension of her will, rending, tearing, screaming its hatred in registers above hearing.

From the fading, blood-soaked view that Hessa’s eye provided Nona saw Yisht fall back, open wounds torn across her, shredding her jacket. She twisted, and staggered away, thrusting the shipheart at Nona’s shadow to ward it off. Nona saw her shadow grow huge and monstrous, as if it were the shadow of her true self, barbed with hatred, swollen with rage. Yisht stumbled back, retreating up the shaft she had spent so many hours and so much sweat cutting into the bedrock. The shaft that led nowhere and offered no escape.

‘… coming …’

‘Wake! Up!’

‘I’m awake.’ She opened her eyes.

‘Nona—’ Jula, reaching out, her face without hope and full of goodbyes. Outside the tramp of many feet approaching. An arrow glanced from the wall and rattled on into the cave.

Nona shook her head, rising smoothly into a crouch. The rage she had needed now filled her from toe to head, her body vibrating with it. ‘I was born for killing – the gods made me to ruin.’ She batted aside an arrow and snatched another from the air before it reached Jula’s neck. She tucked it into her belt.

Nona launched herself into motion, driving up and forward, aimed at the bright entrance where tall figures crowded like the shadows of teeth in the cave’s open mouth. Ara lay at their feet, a helpless offering. Arrows, shot blindly into the gloom, ricocheted from the walls, clattering around her on the stone floor. Behind her she heard Darla’s shout as the novice found her courage and defiance. Something sped past Nona’s ear while she closed the distance to the enemy, overtaking her, spinning and scattering the sun’s last rays. Clera’s throwing star, released from Ruli’s considerably more skilled fingers, found the face of the foremost soldier.