Holy Sister (Book of the Ancestor 3)

A rumble of agreement. ‘Split up, comb the valley.’

The riders climbed back into their saddles and within moments the company had thundered off.

Nona started to rise.

‘No.’ Zole kept her voice low. ‘They could have left someone to watch.’

‘So what do we do?’

‘Rest.’

Nona set her head on her arms and tried to relax. She wondered if there really was a Scithrowl sitting on the slopes watching the hut. She supposed there might be.

Zole’s demon had moved to circle her neck, a scarlet scald as if she’d escaped a hanging halfway through.

‘So, when you force your latest devil out what parts are you cutting away?’ Nona asked. ‘Is the Zole who came across half of the empire to rescue me from the Tetragode in here?’ She put her hand to Zole’s throat, then tapped her forehead. ‘Or here?’

Zole said nothing but narrowed her gaze in concentration and the scald slid away from her neck.

‘Is the Zole who once every three years makes a joke the one to be cut out or left behind?’

‘Once they are separate the raulathu must be purged. Their voices grow louder, their ills more extreme.’

‘But what you cut away … that’s life. Keot, my devil, for all his ills, was alive, with hopes of his own. You’re telling me he was cut away, abandoned? And the perfect beings that remained when all that was excised … what became of them, shriven of their flaws?’

Zole rolled onto her back. ‘They say the Missing left. But some believe they are all around us, unseen, unknowable, existing in their own harmony. Others think the Missing went beneath the sea and live there in golden cities, burning the very water itself for heat, enough to last them until long after the last star has gone dark.

‘In the far north there are peoples that believe it is the Missing whose heat bubbles up to melt the domes beneath the ice, and sometimes to give us the open water that sustains the deep tribes.’

‘Sister Rule said it was volcanoes at the bottom of the sea that did that.’ Nona tried to imagine golden cities beneath miles of ice and dark water.

‘Mistress Academia has her own wisdom.’ Zole shrugged. ‘How can we know the truth?’

Nona fell silent. She didn’t know what death held, what would become of her if the Ancestor gathered her in. She didn’t know if the ice-speakers were right or what Zole would become as she shed every last one of her flaws, her jealousies, every shred of malice … But it didn’t feel right. Not to her. Perhaps it was her pride talking, her own multitude of sins, each with their own small voice, but imperfect as she was, Nona wanted to stay here, whole, untouched, while her heart beat and her lungs drew breath.

‘Where do you think the Noi-Guin are?’ Nona found it hard to believe the assassins had given up. They had hounded her for nearly half her life simply for having the temerity not to die. Zole had stolen their shipheart.

‘Waiting,’ Zole said.

‘Waiting?’ Nona would have accepted ‘coming’. ‘Where? Why?’

‘They are waiting because they know now that we are dangerous. They want the Scithrowl to weaken us. To deplete our reserves. The bulk of the Noi-Guin will be waiting at the ice, because they know it is the way I would choose to get past Sherzal’s soldiers and back into the empire. They will want to keep us on the move. To exhaust us. They are at their most dangerous when waiting.’

‘So we’ll have to get through them to get to the ice sheet?’ Taking on Noi-Guin with the advantage of surprise had been difficult enough. Walking into an ambush would be suicidal. Especially with the Scithrowl in pursuit.

‘It would be best not to have to,’ Zole said. ‘That’s why we’re going to the black ice.’

‘The black—’ Nona broke off to sniff. ‘Something’s burning!’ She turned to see white feelers of smoke rising through the woven sticks of the wall.

Zole moved into a crouch. ‘Our rest is over.’

12

Three Years Earlier

The Escape

The fire drove the novices out but whoever had thrown the incendiary had not waited for them to emerge. As Zole had suggested, the Noi-Guin were playing a longer game. The column of smoke would bring back the Scithrowl riders and more besides. The two girls made directly for the barrens, favouring speed over stealth. In the distance green turned to brown. And behind miles of dead, unwholesome land the grey ice rose in towering cliffs stepping up nearly two miles to the great southern ice sheet.

The foothills descended into rolling fields in the shelter of the Grampains. With the Corridor wind in the west, hardly a breeze stirred the hedgerows. Jump-corn stood amid a riot of crops that had launched themselves from the fertile darkness of soil such as Nona had never seen. Villages lay almost every mile, the roads well maintained and set with inns, staging posts, and tiny watch-forts. Zole led the way past such places so swiftly that the locals had time only to raise their heads and wonder. Twice groups of children followed, throwing stones. Nona let them bounce off her back. And once a young man in a patched uniform three sizes too big for him chased after them, waving his arms and shouting at them in such thickly accented empire tongue that Nona could understand little past ‘stop’. He grew breathless, angry, and finally laid a hand upon Zole’s shoulder, which saw him hoisted over a wall into a haystack.

‘Here.’ She tossed Nona the leaf-bladed dagger she’d plucked from the youth’s belt – Scithrowl army issue.

With the barrens just a mile ahead and a dark crowd of horsemen thundering through the village on the ridge behind them, the novices found their way blocked by six Scithrowl knights. Nona’s childhood had been peppered with stories of the heretic knights beyond the mountains. In Nana Even’s tales they were always giants in iron armour, their faces hidden behind visors cast in the likeness of snarling beasts, and with the heads of empire children hanging from their belts by the hair.

The truth was six dour men in weathered steel, all looking to be in their thirties or forties, their scars and bleak-eyed contemplation of the novices marking them as veterans. Likely they had served in the endless eastern wars against the kings of Ald.

‘Stop!’ Their leader nudged his stallion out into the road from beneath the copse that had hidden them.

Zole didn’t break her stride. She ran straight at the knight with a remarkable turn of acceleration. To his credit the man cleared his scabbard before she got there but Zole had vaulted his horse and ducked beneath the belly of the next before any blow could be struck. Nona wove after the ice-triber, swaying out of the path of the swinging sword.

They got fifty yards before the knights turned their horses and began to give chase.

‘Trees?’ Nona hissed the suggestion between breaths. Ahead the fields gave way to bramble and thorn bush studded with the occasion stunted copse. Nothing that looked sufficient to slow the horses more than it slowed the novices.

Zole spun, bracing on her heel as she continued to slide in the direction she’d been running. She raised her hands, fingers extended. As one the horses stopped, just as if they’d seen a wall appear before them. The knights went over their mounts’ heads, crashing to the beaten earth in their plate armour. Nona winced.