Grey Sister (Book of the Ancestor 2)

The Noi-Guin came around the corner at a rush, batting away a throwing star that would have hit him. He wove between the remaining pair of Lightless.

Kettle had six stars left. She threw one high. So high that the Noi-Guin became suspicious at the last and lunged upwards with his knife, trying to intercept it. His effort came too late. The throwing star hit the tube Kettle had stuck to the ceiling. Grey mustard powder jetted out with the force of the impact, blooming into a cloud.

If the Noi-Guin hadn’t been lunging upward, tracking the star, he might have been able to run on, avoiding all but the outermost edges of the cloud. As it was he dropped immediately, but not quite fast enough. Kettle allowed herself no pity. When the Noi-Guin tore off his black-skin mask with a blistered hand, reaching towards his mouth with the other, a steel vial in his grip, she threw another star at his fingers then drew back from the screaming.

Grey mustard spores become rapidly denatured by exposure to air with even a slight moisture content. Quite how quickly they would lose their bite in the dampness of the Tetragode Kettle wasn’t sure, but she also knew she couldn’t afford to wait long. She smeared mud from a nearby seep over her face, neck, ears, and hands, took a deep breath, drew her sword, and ran, avoiding the bodies of those still busy dying. She rounded the corner, praying to every aspect of the Ancestor that there wouldn’t be another Noi-Guin lined against her, and slid into the turn, dropping to avoid the reflex-thrown cross-knives. There wasn’t a Noi-Guin waiting for her. There were three. A dozen Lightless stood ready before them.

“Take her alive.” The voice of the central Noi-Guin. She held a sword that looked like a ribbon of darkness. “You may injure her.”

The Lightless came forward, fearless despite the fact that her sword overreached their knives. Kettle considered retreat but the tunnel behind her was strewn with bodies and blood, not to mention caltrops. Instead, she charged the foe, sword sweeping out at throat height in a wide arc.

It’s perhaps not true to say that no amount of training or skill concentrated into one person will undo a determined group of fighters, but when space is limited and the opposition are themselves swift and skilled it turns out almost always to be true.

Kettle had time for two swings of her sword. Both killed and injured, but she could find no way through or around the Lightless nor could she retreat faster than they could advance. After two blood-soaked seconds she found herself tackled, grappled, stabbed, and brought to the ground, where she lay cursing, bleeding and struggling beneath several assailants with a knife to her neck. In that moment she had no regrets. She gathered her strength for the sudden lunge that would push the blade through her throat. Being taken alive wasn’t an option.

It wasn’t fear that stopped her: it was the light. It was so unexpected that Kettle turned her head and watched it from the floor through slitted eyes and a forest of limbs. Something impossibly bright was coming from the cell-block. First a metal ring, perhaps six inches wide, rolled out into the corridor, sparking. It wobbled and fell, dancing on its rim like a spinning coin that has almost stopped. The light grew and grew again. A figure stepped out of the cell-block, a figure wreathed in arc-bright streamers of crackling energy that snapped back and forth from one path across her body to another. She looked like the night sky in the worst of lightning storms, the land-breakers that rage on those rarest of occasions when a northern ice-wind meets a southern one above the Corridor.

Persistent lines of jagged lightning reached out from all across the figure, touching the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the burning points of contact wandering slowly over the stone. It looked almost as if the person were some strange and many-legged insect, propelled by a multitude of thin, brilliant limbs. Light shone from dazzling eyes, erupted from an open mouth, bled from their skin. The whole of their body pulsed erratically, brightening to a blinding intensity, dying away to leave Kettle watching a dance of afterimages. It seemed at any moment the creature’s skin might lift with the brightening, and the flesh melt from their bones. The angle of its legs and arms, its uneven advance, spoke of agony, as if whatever energies it contained might at any moment tear the creature apart.

The leftmost of the Noi-Guin recovered first and, shielding his eyes behind a hand, reached for some weapon at his belt.

The explosion happened in that instant. A directed release, snapping the newcomer upright, arms splayed. A crackling bolt of white energy erupted from its chest, turning every body into a silhouette. The central horizontal column of power extended the length of the hall, surrounded by smaller threads or streamers that quested in all directions. It blasted through the Noi-Guin and Lightless as if they weren’t there.

An agonizing shock ran through the Lightless holding Kettle, ran through Kettle herself, and leaked away into the floor, taking everything with it.

* * *

• • •

NONA COLLAPSED, DIMLY aware that her body was smoking. The stone lay scorched all around her and somewhere far off Keot was howling. A yard from her rested the sigil collar that she had rolled ahead of her entry to the tunnel, now charred almost beyond recognition.

“Ancestor!” Clera fell back on the simplest of oaths, taking her hands from her eyes. “I didn’t know you could do that!”

“I didn’t either.” Nona lay where she had fallen. Steam issued with her words, drifting up in the lantern-light. The flame behind the cowl seemed pale now, weak though it had been turned to full. “Don’t ask me to do it again any time soon.” She felt hollow, cored, brittle. As if her arm might simply come away should Clera take it to haul her to her feet. “Go and find Kettle.”

“She’ll probably try to arrest me or something.” Clera looked dubiously at the charred and smoking ruin of the Noi-Guin and the heap of their servants behind them. Some of the corpses were still twitching.

“I’ll probably arrest you or something.” Nona tried to make her blades form but failed.

Clera rubbed at her neck where four thin parallel cuts wept blood, and shrugged. She drew a knife and advanced on the fallen with caution. Nona watched as Clera tugged aside the dead and put holes in those who weren’t yet quite finished with living. Nona’s limbs twitched from time to time, like those of the Lightless, and the memory of how close she’d come to being torn apart kept returning, distressingly vivid.

Nona had extracted herself from Kettle’s mind and woken inside her own flesh, still dimly aware of Kettle’s progress. Opening one eye a crack, Nona had found that Clera had dragged her to a place where the tunnel pierced a small natural void. Feigning unconsciousness, Nona had waited until Clera drew near and had reached out for the girl’s neck with all the speed she could muster.

“You’re going to get this collar off me, and I’m going back for Kettle,” Nona had said. The hint of flaw-blade along the middle of each finger had convinced Clera of Nona’s sincerity. Clera had produced an array of square lockpicks, suited to the simple heavy mechanism on the manacles, and in short order the collar had dropped away to clang against the rocks.

* * *

• • •

“SHE’S HERE,” CLERA called, standing up.

Nona crawled towards them. She lacked the energy to stand, though strangely her limbs seemed to be buzzing with the stuff, legs twitching, hands atremble, the occasional miniature lightning bolt arcing from one finger to the next. The Path’s gift was raw power, to be shaped and released, as light, as heat, as a blast. Nona’s rage had given the energies form as lightning. It seemed to suit the storm that had built within her over her captivity.