Grey Sister Read online

  An hour later she abandoned the chain to let her muscles recover their speed. Her mind returned to the agony Thuran Tacsis had inflicted and to the threat of his return. The wound on her nose still throbbed and ached. So much hurt for so little a thing. She tried to distract herself.

  What’s Kettle up to? Nona couldn’t understand how the nun could be inside the Tetragode and have the thread-bond between them remain so quiet. Kettle must have joined her when the Tacsis lord had used the Harm on her. Nona hoped Kettle hadn’t felt the full horror of it. The idea that Kettle might suffer the tortures that Thuran Tacsis had planned for her filled Nona with despair. She hadn’t thought you could add anything to being tortured that would make it worse, but forcing Kettle to watch and to share the pain . . . that was worse.

  Finding her thoughts had once again returned to what awaited her, Nona forced them onto a new path. Clearly Kettle’s plan to lie low was working. She only hoped Zole was hidden just as successfully.

  Maybe the nun has run away. The girl from the ice too. Keot had tired of Nona’s efforts against the wall pin, seeming to have abandoned hope and resigned himself to Nona’s destruction. His ambitions now lay in the chance that she could at least maim one of the Lightless before they secured her for the Tacsis lord’s next visit. If she were honest, Nona’s own plans didn’t extend much beyond that either. For Nona, though, what followed would end in pain and death. Keot had hopes that Thuran Tacsis would be his new home once the man finally put an end to Nona.

  Unable to keep her mind from the Tacsis lord and his plans, Nona returned to her work. Coil, twist, coil, twist. One effort became the next, each consuming precious time, devouring the gap before Thuran Tacsis returned from his party. In a pause in which she gathered her strength Nona tried to imagine what social event could have drawn the Sis into the barren mountains she’d seen through Kettle’s eyes. Her imagination failed her and she returned to her labour. Coil, twist, coil, twist. She stopped to examine the pin.

  It’s moved! It turned!

  She tried to twist the pin by hand, and found no give in it.

  Really? Keot sounded unconvinced.

  Nona tried again, coiling the chain and twisting. She returned to the pin once more. It’s moved again. I can feel powdered stone on it.

  She tried again, first to the left, then the right before gripping the pin in her fist. I can almost turn it . . .

  Again to the left. She knelt and seized the chain close to the pin. She yanked it to the right and it shifted minutely, grating against the rock. She repeated the effort, right, left, right, tugging from one side then the other, and suddenly the pin came free, dangling from the end of the chain in her hand. Impossible. A miracle.

  Nona stood, panting. She held the chain taut against her hip, the length of it running up from her ankle.

  What now? Keot asked.

  It was a good question and one for which Nona had no answer.

  A key rattled in the lock.

  Another trick. Keot howled. Like the knife. They were watching. Waiting.

  The cell door began to open. And suddenly Nona had her answer to “what now?”

  Now I kill as many of them as I can before they get me.

  34

  NONA SWUNG HER leg, flailing the chain, getting the feel of it. In the convent the novices’ game of Step involved a rope looped around an ankle with a block of wood at the far end. The game was to spin it around one ankle while stepping over the rope with the other leg each time it came round. Naturally the novices most keen on earning the Red also made a fight of it.

  The first Lightless through the door had a club raised above his head, a two-foot staff that Nona would struggle to close her hand around. She lashed out with her foot and the chain followed, snapping out to its full length. The last two links hit the Lightless between the eyes, breaking his forehead. He collapsed to his knees and toppled to the floor, facefirst.

  Three Lightless stood around the doorway behind the fallen man, black silhouettes against the faint candlelight in the hall. Darkness bloomed around them like ink in water and Nona stood blind in her cell. She dived aside.

  You have to let me see, or we’re done for.

  Trying! Keot’s voice rose to a roar, echoing in her skull. Where he spread from her collarbone towards her neck it felt like the fresh brand of a hot iron. The devil knifed deep into the flesh of her neck to gain distance from the sigil-cut metal and forced a path beneath the collar. Once past it he poured upwards into her eyes.

  Nona saw a club swinging down and jerked her head back with no time to spare. The weapon’s end scraped her cheek. Two other Lightless were coming forward, drifting to either side. More in the doorway, dragging the dead man aside. Keot’s vision painted all the walls in fire-tones and the Lightless themselves as black-skinned, wearing robes of pale, shifting silver.

  Nona, having evaded the club, punched the man in the eye. She swung her leg, wrapping the chain around his ankles, then stepped away, yanking his feet from under him. He fell heavily on his back.

  Great, now you have an anchor.

  Nona ignored Keot. She swayed out of the path of another descending club and elbowed the woman wielding it in the throat. The man attacking simultaneously from the other side swung horizontally. Nona kicked his wrist, sending his club flying. None of the Lightless so far had much more than a touch of hunska blood and they proved easy work.

  The man on the floor in front of Nona kicked loose of the chain and started to rise. As he did so a Noi-Guin flitted across the doorway, releasing, with a crack of the wrist, a spreading cloud of needles. Keot’s sight painted them as a score or more of glowing red dashes in the enchanted dark.

  Nona turned side-on to minimize the target she presented and dove to the left. Hunska can’t fall faster than anyone else. A hunska can rise faster, driven by swift muscles, but with the needles centred on her torso Nona couldn’t jump clear without first crouching.

  Think. It’s a puzzle.

  Nona saw the needles, envisioned their lines of flight, saw the voids between them. If she was fast enough she could adopt a shape that would evade many of them, but no contortion would permit all the needles to pass her by.

  She fell, twisting, flexing her knees to allow one of the widest-spread needles passage beneath them. Still five needles would hit her square on, with perhaps three more that might catch her. The tatters of her smock wouldn’t slow them.

  The needles closed half the distance as Nona swept her arms up. She deflected the first on the wristband of her right hand. Her enemy had provided her armour. She knocked aside another with the back of that hand and stopped two more against the metal of her left wristband. The fifth she let hit her in the throat. It bounced off her collar.

  Was the Noi-Guin Tellasah? Nona hoped so. The assassin had stalked her for years and finally captured her for Thuran Tacsis’s demented pleasures. If Nona had to fight a Noi-Guin she would rather it be the one she hated.

  Nona hit the ground awkwardly, a bruising impact, her hands instantly hunting to see if she had been stuck by any of the other needles. Nothing. She rolled, kicking the Lightless she had tripped. The blow landed between his legs while still rising, and he lost all interest in continuing to get up.

  The Lightless that Nona had disarmed now drew his knife rather than chase his club. Nona hauled herself around and up him, using his body to shield her from any further attacks from the doorway. The man hardly moved to stop her, mired in the moment as he was. She brought her elbow down in an overhead blow, hammering into the base of his neck. He started to fall.

  The Noi-Guin came in fast, knives in hand, amid billowing darkness that even registered on Keot’s sight like swirls of mist. Nona stepped around the falling man to meet the assassin, tugging the knife from the Lightless’s hand as he dropped, and circled her ankle, swinging the chain towards the assassin’s legs. The Noi-Guin, whose shape hinted at female, leapt over the chain’s arc. Nona slowed the world to the limit her body allowed,
exhausted as it was from constant efforts to free the wall-pin. The Noi-Guin came straight on without hesitation, stabbing both her blades towards Nona’s chest. Nona turned the first on her stolen dagger and the other on her wristband, struggling not to let it slide off and gash her arm. They slipped past each other and separated.

  No cross-knives.

  Keot was right: Tellasah had been wearing a bandolier of cross-knives. This Noi-Guin had none.

  Nona threw herself forward, still furious. Zole would have been coldly clinical. Kettle fought in the serenity trance. But Tarkax Ice-Spear had been the one to see Nona’s true nature, reflecting his own. Rage drove them both at such times and only by embracing that rising fury could they approach perfection.

  The clash of metal on metal punctuated the brief exchange that followed, as rapid a tempo as any drummer could beat. The Noi-Guin’s attack left no time for thought. Nona sank into instinct, letting her muscles lead by memory. Once she slashed across the woman’s torso, finding her blade unable to cut what lay beneath. Once the Noi-Guin’s thrust came too close as Nona twisted, and scored a burning line across her upper arm.

  Nona found herself pitted against a better knife-fighter; but she was a beat faster. She broke from their sharp engagement, pivoting on one heel, throwing her torso towards the floor and bringing her other leg up in a kick towards the woman’s face, trailing chain. The Noi-Guin snapped back away from the kick, but the chain slammed across her mouth and cheek.

  Nona went into a roll and came up onto her feet. The Noi-Guin staggered back towards the doorway. The black-skin across her face took the chain’s force but the shock of the impact still rattled her brain. Behind her two Lightless took off running down the corridor.

  Nona followed the assassin, knocking aside the dagger thrown at her. They met in the doorway, one knife each now. Nona kicked at the Noi-Guin’s off hand, stopping her attempt to pull some new weapon or poison from her belt. They feinted, jabbed, slashed, Keot raging behind Nona’s eyes, howling for blood.

  The Noi-Guin seemed to have gone on the defensive, maybe still recovering from the blow to her head. Nona reminded herself that the Noi-Guin was the better knife-fighter and had only to wait for her to tire and slow. Also, the cut on her arm had started to burn, more than a cut in the heat of combat should. The Noi-Guin’s knife had blade-venom on it, not useful in the scant seconds of a hunska fight, but if she slowed things down and drew them out, the venom would do her work for her.

  Nona launched herself, releasing every piece of the rage and frustration that had built inside her since her capture and before, since her flight from Sweet Mercy. She slid through the air, knife angled for the Noi-Guin’s heart, her other hand coming forward too. The Noi-Guin, knowing her centre was protected by the armour that had stopped Nona’s earlier slash, focused on driving her blade at Nona’s chest. At the last fragment of a second, as her knife point drove under the Noi-Guin’s blade Nona angled it upward and tore a furrow from the base of the woman’s palm, down through veins, arteries, and tendons towards the crook of her elbow. Her other hand caught the Noi-Guin’s wrist before the blood had even begun to squirt, and pushed it up so that her thrust cleared Nona’s shoulder by a hair. Nona’s own knife-thrust carried on and hammered uselessly against the black-skin beneath the assassin’s jacket.

  The pair of them went down together, Nona on top as they spilled out into the corridor. She dashed the Noi-Guin’s blade from her injured hand, sliding over her to control the other arm with both legs. The Noi-Guin hammered her knees up into Nona’s side. The white pain of breaking ribs threatened to take her consciousness but Nona hung on, cursing. She reached down to cut the arteries in the woman’s thigh. The Noi-Guin thrashed but Nona shifted her weight to keep her pinned. One surge nearly flipped her off, and then the assassin’s strength was spent, pooled in crimson around her.

  At the far end of the corridor the heavy door slammed and a key turned in the lock. The fight had taken only the time required for the two Lightless to run the length of the passage.

  Nona pushed herself clear and made an end of her enemy, cutting first the black-skin’s straps, then the pale throat revealed as she lifted it. The assassin made no cry, only gargled on her blood, then stiffened and went limp.

  Painfully, Nona got to her feet. Her vision was blurred, her body weighed three times what it ought to, and her breath came laboured.

  You are poisoned.

  I know. It didn’t really seem important.

  Do something about it.

  I didn’t know you cared.

  If you die here I have nowhere to go.

  I might like you more if you were less honest. Nona felt herself floating up, out of her body.

  Nona!

  Almost with regret she fought the sensation. Inch by hard-won inch she clawed her way back into her heavy, painful flesh and found herself kneeling beside the Noi-Guin, knees in the blood-pool. She began cutting open the woman’s leather tunic. A score or more steel vials with glass liners studded the garment’s interior, arranged in a row of tight little pockets. All identical, marked with raised symbols that meant nothing to her.

  Nona took the only one that stood out, being larger than the others, which were all the size of half her little finger. She worked the stopper free and sniffed from a distance. “Thought so.”

  The cure?

  Nona tried to laugh and ended up coughing, nearly spilling the contents. “No.”

  She held her wristband up and dribbled liquid from the vial into the lock. Immediately it started to smoke and the air filled with acrid fumes that set Nona coughing again. She tried to open the band but found it still locked. She dripped more acid in. The lock fizzed and bubbled, the metal protested . . . and then gave suddenly. A hot spatter of half-spent acid drops ate holes in Nona’s smock and her skin. The wristband fell away.

  “That took a lot.” Nona shook the vial. Most of the contents had been used.

  Make your blades.

  Nona tried, straining the nonexistent muscle that sat at the back of the mind. Her flaw-blades pushed into being, shimmering out to their full length, vanishing, appearing again, unstable. In Keot’s sight the blades were a blue-white that was almost painful to look upon.

  Nona made to slice the other wristband off but the blades melted away from it, refusing to cut just as they had once refused to cut Raymel Tacsis. “Sigil protected.”

  Burn it open.

  Nona shook the vial. Not enough.

  Her fingers sought the lock on her collar, hoping it would be smaller. It wasn’t.

  She lifted the vial.

  You will waste it. It is not enough. You said.

  Nona’s fingertips found the sigils on her collar. Three of them. She fell back across the assassin’s corpse, tilting her head. Gritting her teeth, she spilled the acid across the sigil marks. Searingly hot trickles ran down onto her neck and Nona cursed, tearing pieces from her smock to wipe them away. She kept still though, letting the acid hiss and bubble, eating at the metal, pitting it.

  The shipheart’s presence reached her as the acid spoiled the sigils’ deep-cut perfection. Not the full measure of it, but some of that old pressure she remembered from the convent, fingering in past the fractured wards. Familiar but different: this wasn’t the Sweet Mercy shipheart but another, beating with its own rhythm.

  Nona tried to see the Path but the collar’s damaged sigils still blocked her way like a thicket of thorns. She felt the poison closing her throat, driving her heart into a frenzy.

  Find the cure!

  She looked down at the vials. Too many of them. She wasn’t sure what had been on the blade. Fevercut would race the heart to destruction, bitterwode would strangle, redwort would paralyse with pain. It could be any of those, all of them, or something else, and to identify the antidotes by smell and taste alone . . .

  Nona? Another voice in her skull, not Keot’s. Come to me!

  And as the pain from Nona’s broken ribs turned from unbearable
to incandescent, magnified by the venom in her blood, Nona leapt from her flesh to Kettle’s.

  35

  NONA FOUND HERSELF running. Awkwardly, careening from one side of the uneven natural passage to the other. She understood that she was in Kettle’s mind once again, but not why Kettle was staggering as if drunk, nor why she couldn’t hear even a whisper of Kettle’s thoughts.

  The unlit passage hid no secrets from Kettle’s eyes and yet she still managed to stub her toe against a ridge of rock and go sprawling clumsily onto all fours. The pain from Kettle’s foot was small compared to what Nona had left behind but she still swore at the shock.

  “Bleed on it!”

  Kettle remained on all fours, looking from one splayed hand to the other.

  She wiggled the fingers of the left hand.

  “I’m doing this!” She raised her head. “Me. Nona, Nona, Nona.” Her voice echoed.

  The sound of distant running reached down the tunnel into the silence that followed. People were coming.

  “Oh hells.” Nona stood Kettle up, finding the length of her somehow disorienting even though they were of a similar height now. She ran her hands . . . Kettle’s hands . . . over Kettle’s body. “Where are you?”

  The sounds of pursuit grew louder, closer. Nona patted her unfamiliar body once more then set it running again, concentrating on the task of not tripping over “her own” feet, a task that had somehow become very taxing. Ten steps later on she tangled her legs on Kettle’s scabbarded sword and fell again.

  “Help?” Nona got to all fours again. Her legs felt too long, her top unbalanced. She spotted a sinkhole, a stone gullet just wide enough to take her. Kettle’s dark-sight revealed no bottom, just a near-vertical shaft plummeting away.

  Nona hesitated. Shouts rang out. Not far away, she thought, though the echoes could play tricks. “They’re hunting me . . . where are you, Kettle?”

  She could jump down and risk being trapped in a narrowing rock throat, a gift for the Lightless, who could either winkle her out or leave her to die. Or run on, slow and falling, to be overtaken and killed within minutes.