‘I see no signs of it. Is it so hard to believe that in battle she made poor decisions?’
Nona slid a flaw-blade through Joeli’s bonds. ‘I don’t like you. If you cross me I will give worse than I get. I will speak the truth of your service to Sherzal and hope to see justice brought to bear. But your crimes are not mine to judge, and your punishment not mine to give.’
It was Tarkax who spoke into the astonished silence that followed. ‘Are we done here?’
‘We need to get out of the palace,’ Nona agreed. ‘The emperor is probably on his way already.’
‘And?’ Clera asked. ‘He should heap gold on us until only the tops of our heads show!’
‘His sister is lying in the passage, and she’s not pretty,’ Ara said.
‘She was betraying him!’ Ruli sounded outraged.
‘So you say,’ Ara replied. ‘Will Crucical choose to believe you, novice? The killing of a royal never goes unpunished. It sets a bad precedent.’
‘Are we leaving the shiphearts?’ Jula asked.
‘I’m returning Sweet Mercy’s shipheart to the convent,’ Nona said. ‘It has something of mine that I want back. Besides, the other one was never so good at heating the water.’
‘Will you take the others, Zole?’ Ara asked. ‘Or leave the Noi-Guin’s shipheart for the emperor? It might allow him to overlook his recent loss …’
Zole left the Noi-Guin shipheart bedded in the centre of the silver-steel door. She left the door closed. ‘Let Crucical take it if he can.’
She activated the travel-ring with greater mastery than Nona could manage and left it open while she stepped away to allow her fellow ice-tribers to return.
‘How will you get out of the black ice?’ Nona asked as Tarkax, the last of them, approached the ring.
‘We’re going to a different ring,’ he said. ‘A thousand miles from the Corridor.’ Then a sigh. ‘But we still have to climb three miles! So think of us, little Nona, when you’re warming your toes by the light of your own private moon!’
‘Little?’ Nona grinned. She was a hand taller than the man.
Tarkax returned the grin. ‘Never call the Ice-Spear short!’ He stepped into the light and was gone.
Zole made to follow him, the shiphearts burning in her hands.
‘What will you do?’ Nona called after her. She had been to the ice and yet she couldn’t imagine how people endured up there, let alone lived. ‘What will you do, now you’re so … perfect?’
‘What will you do with your imperfection, Nona Grey?’ Zole asked. ‘We will both seek our purpose just as we have always done.’
‘And what’s that?’ Nona genuinely hoped for an answer. The Book of the Ancestor held answers aplenty but they had never seemed to fit her questions. ‘What are our purposes?’
‘Do you assume they are not the same?’ Zole asked, curious. She turned towards the ring. ‘I am changed. The Ark called me “purified”. I hear a whisper and it seems important. Perhaps the Missing are calling to me. Perhaps their voice will be clearer up on the ice where the wind blows. I think that is my purpose for now, and maybe it is yours too. To listen.’ She made to leave.
‘Thank you, Zole.’ Nona felt a sudden hollowness, a pain in her throat. She wanted to say more, but the words seemed too clumsy to speak. ‘I’ll miss you.’
‘I will miss you too, my friend.’
And Zole was gone.
30
Holy Class
In a time of crisis the sisters of Sweet Mercy were expected to minister to the injured, say the rites over the dead, and to pray that the Ancestor would receive all who had crossed the Path.
It turned out that the survivors of Abbess Wheel’s flock were so few in number and their dead so numerous that it was all they could do to tend their own.
Nona and Ara found themselves the only two of the convent’s nuns uninjured, though their wounds were newly healed and the flesh beneath was still sore. As such it fell to them to gather the survivors and to set those still able to walk to helping drag or carry from the battlefield those unable to fend for themselves.
The emperor and the Academy both opened their doors to the wounded but Nona had the injured nuns and novices taken to St Helliot’s. The new cathedral stood a quarter of a mile from the palace and the eastern wing was still smoking from an earlier impact by a particularly far-flung incendiary. Torches lit the main steps where High Priest Nevis himself stood organizing the treatment of injured nuns, monks, and novices by overworked Church healers and volunteers from among the faithful.
‘Place the dead in the mausoleum. With honour! We will hold services for them on this day for a hundred years. I will have them carve it upon the walls.’ Nevis looked overwhelmed but he kept working with the grim efficiency of a merchant squeezing the margins, directing his resources to maximize survival.
Nona helped carry Abbess Wheel into the mausoleum. High Priest Jacob had commissioned the building for himself as soon as he took office. Under Nevis the work had continued, though quite who would now be interred within had become less clear.
‘Lay her here.’
Nona hadn’t needed any help. Wheel seemed to weigh nothing in her arms. Without her fierce will to animate her she seemed small, an old woman, mostly skin and bones. Ara, Sister Oak, and Ghena had insisted on lending their strength to the effort though, despite the latter two being barely able to stand. Ghena bore a host of minor cuts and perhaps had broken ribs. Sister Oak sported a livid bruise across her forehead and the left side of her face. Being knocked senseless early on had saved her life. She seemed dizzy, unsure of herself.
The four of them laid the abbess out, straightening her limbs, arranging her habit. They stood around her corpse, careful not to step upon the dozens all around them, and said the prayers of farewell. Nona had last heard them from Wheel’s own mouth when old Sister Bone had failed to rise from her bed on a cold morning three weeks before.
It took many trips back and forth from the King’s Road to find the fallen. Some they couldn’t locate. Nona had seen Ketti drop, the wound mortal. She remembered roughly where it had happened, but even so, despite lifting and rolling a hundred bodies, she couldn’t find her friend.
‘Could she have crawled away to die?’ Clera asked, white-faced, wiping at her eyes, claiming that the smoke stung them.
‘I don’t see how she could have.’ Nona blinked and tried to keep the waver out of her voice. ‘I can’t …’ She snarled, lifted a large stone from a collapsed wall, throwing it several yards. Nothing lay beneath.
In the end they had to let it go.
In the east the sky paled to grey and dawn threatened, as if this had been a night just as any other and the sun would rise to bear witness on a new day.
They laid Apple and Iron and Tallow and Rock and Chrysanthemum close to Abbess Wheel. Kettle lay across Apple heaving with sobs yet making no sound. Ruli wept, Ara was pale, Jula ran outside to be sick. Nona called on her serenity and wore it as armour, unwilling to face her feelings. Wheel would have told her that sorrow was a luxury she could keep for later, when the work was done.
However, even the armour of Nona’s serenity proved ineffective when they set to carrying the novices through to lie with their sisters. Two girls from Red Class had somehow joined the abbess’s war-party, though Wheel had said only seniors were to come. How their presence had been missed Nona couldn’t say. They were children, and she cried as she set them down beneath the great marble dome of the high priest’s mausoleum.