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  “Hessa?” Nona’s eyes blurred with tears. “How—” She bowed her head, wiping at her face. Hessa had died as a child and Nona had missed her friend every day since. Her death at Yisht’s hands had taught Nona many of the bitter lessons that stand as milestones along the road between girl and woman. Her own fallibility wasn’t the least of those lessons. How many times had a friend died because she lacked what had been necessary to save them? How often had her own faults tripped her up? Her pride, her anger . . . Losing Hessa taught her the hollow lie of vengeance, a conceit to distract oneself with, an addiction that offered no cure.

  “I miss you.” But as she looked up again the world lurched, a new layer of ice breaking, and somehow the room was a different room and she was on her knees beside a bed.

  “Nona?” Abbess Glass lay in the bed, grey-faced, the comfortable weight wasted from her, leaving skin on bones. “Don’t cry, child.”

  Nona snapped her head up, looking wildly around. The abbess’s bedroom in the big house. This was where she had died. This was how she died. Taken by disease, something that ate her from within and that neither Sister Rose nor Sister Apple could touch with all their pills and potions.

  “I don’t understand . . .”

  “Meaning is overrated, Nona.” A cough convulsed the abbess for a moment, rattling in her chest. She had said exactly that, meaning is overrated; Nona remembered it, but not the question she had asked to prompt it. “There might not be a meaning to the world, or in it, but that does not mean that what we do has no meaning.” Glass fell silent and for the longest minute Nona thought she would not speak again. When she did it was weak, faltering. “The Ancestor’s tree is something humanity planted and that we have watered with our deeds, our cares, with each act of love, even with our cruelty. Cling to it, Nona. Cling . . .” And then she did stop, as Nona remembered, and the gleam had gone from her eyes.

  Nona stood, an old sob shuddering through her. Sister Rose had been sleeping in the chair by the window when the abbess died, the sleep that crept in behind too many nights without rest. She had woken at Nona’s sob and sucked in a huge breath of her own. Now, though, the chair sat empty and at the door it was Sister Pan who stood, her eyes bright and wet.

  The old nun spoke, her voice strangely distant. “You’re getting farther from the door, Nona.”

  “What?”

  Sister Pan turned towards the window. Out beyond the rooftops of the refectory Path Tower rose like the line of darkness offered by a door beginning to open, or almost closed.

  Nona frowned, torn between confusion and grief. She knew this for a memory of that awful day but it seemed more real than all those days that had queued between her and it. Glass had been taken by a foe Nona couldn’t stand against and the heart of Sweet Mercy had broken. She had thought when the shipheart was stolen and the convent left cold, its magic gone, that no greater blow could be struck against it. But the abbess had always been the true heart of Sweet Mercy and the emptiness she left behind was more profound than any Nona had known.

  “You’re getting farther from the door.” Sister Pan stood in the doorway but her single hand pointed at Path Tower. And in an instant the tower raced into the distance, becoming tiny, almost lost to sight. The room had gone, Abbess Glass and Sister Pan with it, and instead Nona stood in sunshine gazing out across a formal garden. She staggered, seized by vertigo, but prevented herself from falling.

  She took a step forward, focused on a ficus tree in full bloom. The sound of a heavy blow hitting flesh arrested her. A second blow and an agonized cry turned her around.

  Standing before the grand colonnade of his mansion, High Priest Jacob swung his staff again. The wood thunked into Four-Foot’s side, a dull sound like a hammer hitting meat, and the mule grunted his pain.

  “No!” The horror of the moment pinned Nona to the spot. Another blow descended and her flaw-blades shimmered into being around both hands. “No!”

  Nona tensed as the high priest raised his staff, Four-Foot snorting bloody foam about his muzzle. She knew it was memory or dream but it seemed more real than her life, more solid, more important. Losses like Hessa and Abbess Glass, horrors like Four-Foot’s death, were nails struck into her life, pinning those moments to her forever, the punctuation of sorrow. She could no more tear herself from the scene before her than rip the skin from her body.

  Markus, impossibly young, struggled at the limit of his strength to escape the grip of the high priest’s guard, wild in his passion. Giljohn stood at the cart, held by bonds of the sort that no child can see, the kind made of debt and of a bitter understanding of the world’s truths, the kind that tear at a life as you struggle against them and leave wounds that won’t heal.

  Nona thanked the Ancestor that here in this strange dream the chains of duty and service had no purchase on her. Every muscle gathered itself as she prepared to leap at High Priest Jacob, ready to rend him into pieces.

  It was raining that day. The heavens wept to see such cruelty.

  At the back of Nona’s mind a small voice asked why it wasn’t raining.

  Her leap never happened. Unbalanced, she fell to her knees, hands upon the dry stones of the path. It had been raining. It had. The water had run from Giljohn’s empty socket like the tears he should have shed. Nona looked up. She knew it to be memory. She knew there was nothing she could do for the mule straining against his rope, or Markus twisting in the grasp of Jacob’s guard. Even so her mind clamoured for revenge, for the joy of bloody retribution. She stood, blades ready, intent on attack.

  Some distant glint caught her eye. Over the wall of the garden. Over the roofs of nearby mansions, out across the five miles of farmland to the Rock of Faith. Her gaze drawn to the tiny bumps that at this distance were all the Convent of Sweet Mercy had to offer. Again the glint. The sun reflecting on a window, perhaps. A stained-glass window high in Path Tower? Something told her she needed to be there. A path seemed to stretch out before her in that direction.

  You’re getting farther from the door.

  Gritting her jaw against the sound of blows raining down on Four-Foot, Nona ran. She refused to look away from the Rock and from the convent’s faint outline. She climbed the wall with a great leap and a lunge.

  As Nona dropped into the next garden the convent vanished behind the chimneys of the neighbouring mansion. She made to rise but the wall’s shadow deepened into night, miring her like the thickest mud. “No!” She struggled, desperate to return to the convent, but the darkness took her into some other place and a night filled with screaming and with fire.

  Nona stood between two dark buildings. She looked slowly around, less worried by any danger than by what new tragedy might unfold, by what black milestone of her life this nightmare had brought her to.

  Across an open space in front of her another building burned, the flames so bright that even the dying focus of the moon seemed pale. And although the night gave her nothing but angles and the ferocity of fire, Nona knew exactly where she stood. To her right, the home of James and Martha Baker. To her left, the stone walls of Grey Stephen’s house, he who had fought the Pelarthi in his youth. Rellam Village burned around her. The shapes moving across the background of blazing huts were those of children she had grown up with, of their parents, and of the soldiers the emperor’s sister had sent to cut them down.

  Nona knew it for illusion or forgery or memory or all three woven together. Somehow she had fallen into a trap. Perhaps it had happened when she touched the Path. Sister Pan had endless stories of the dire ends to which it could lead the unwary, and used them regularly to scare any quantal novice in her care. Nona had to get back to Path Tower but the chance was gone and every shift of scene took her farther from the convent, putting mile upon mile in her way and allowing no time to cross them. Whatever had gone wrong, it must have happened when she had tried to walk through the wall to the Third Room. She had wandered into som
e realm of nightmare manufactured out of her past.

  Nona ran through the darkness and smoke and confusion, ready to meet any challenge. Though she told herself that a lie surrounded her, the truth of it seduced her senses. There was nothing counterfeit here. Beneath the stink of burning, this place smelled of home, of a childhood now wrapped about her bones. This was hers, like it or not, her foundation though it stood in mud and ignorance.

  Somehow no soldier came near her. Within moments she stood at the door to her mother’s cottage. The two rooms where she had spent so many years, growing from mewling infant to the girl who had taken half a dozen lives in the forest upon her doorstep. It was the price of one of those lives in particular that the whole village was now paying for her.

  The thatch above had begun to smoulder, sparks from the Bluestones’ house starting to land among the straw. The interior lay dark. “It’s not real.” Nona approached the entrance. Something would be different. Something would be wrong. Every scene so far had someone out of place, some detail changed. It was a clue, a riddle. Somehow. She stepped in, steeling herself, pulling her serenity around her like a shawl. “It’s not real.”

  It took a moment for Nona’s eyes to adjust to the gloom. A single candle burned, spilling wax where it had fallen at the doorway to her mother’s workroom, the place where she wove the reeds. Nona’s mother lay sprawled, one arm reaching for the exit, her fingers nearly touching the toes of Nona’s shoes. A ruinous wound had opened her back, the blood pooling around her, the candle’s flame dancing across it in reflection. And despite all her protestations a hurt noise broke from Nona’s chest, a wet splutter, a numbness in her cheeks as she fell to her knees, hot tears jolted from her eyes by the impact with the hard-packed earth. Nona’s serenity shattered. She stayed on all fours, heaving in broken breaths. Her mother lay dead. Her mother. No matter what had passed between them there had always been a bond of love buried beneath the denials. Gentle times remembered, shared smiles, laughter, hugs. The bonds that formed a branch of the great tree of the Ancestor, a chain of humanity reaching back through eons to the singular taproot of the arborat.

  Nona panted away the hurt and rose to her knees. This was the test. This was the trap. She wiped her eyes, sought her centre.

  “Somewhere, it must be somewhere.” She stood and cast around her. Something must be wrong. Something out of place? The serenity trance insulated her against grief but her eyes kept returning to her mother’s body, small and broken. “There’s nothing . . .” Nona fell back to her knees, drawn down despite her trance by a weight she couldn’t understand. Tears returned to fill her eyes, blurring her vision as she gathered the woman who had been her everything into her lap.

  “. . . tired . . .”

  “Mother?” Nona blinked away the tears. But the brown eyes she found herself looking down into were not her mother’s; the hand that enfolded hers was huge.

  “Darla?” Nona choked out her friend’s name.

  Darla’s brown eyes clouded with confusion, a kind of wonder, staring at some distant place above Nona’s head. The smoke and fire around them wasn’t that of Rellam Village. It was Sherzal’s stables starting to burn. The eighty miles to Path Tower had become hundreds.

  “She’s gone, Nona.” Kettle put her hand on Nona’s shoulder.

  “Darla . . .” Another raw wound. Nona ground her teeth. Darla’s hand still held hers, warm, solid, real. Maybe she could still be saved . . . Maybe this time it would be different.

  To drag her eyes from Darla’s almost broke Nona. To turn her face from a friend who needed her, a dying friend. “It’s not real.” Nona swung her head around, trying to call the clarity trance though her heart ached and pounded. “None of it’s real.”

  “Nona . . .” Kettle shook her head slowly as if the sorrow had made it too heavy. “We have to go.”

  “There!” Amid the swirls of smoke and the red tongues of fire a door that had not been present when all this happened, a door with no place in Sherzal’s stables and no place to lead.

  “Nona!” Cries from the great carriage before the main exit. “We need you.”

  Letting Darla’s head fall felt like the ultimate betrayal. Every part of her wanted to stay. Every part of her wanted to face the danger with her friends. To save them. To do it better this time.

  But she sprang to her feet and threw herself across the burning hall even as the door upon which her eyes were fixed started to fade from view.

  “No!” She reached it just as the last lines melted away. “No!” Flaw-blades dug deep and in a frenzy of hacking and a storm of splinters . . . Nona staggered through.

  Curved, sigil-crowded walls surrounded her, the inlaid silver gleaming in a light that seemed to be dying swiftly. Nona turned in time to see a doorway fading, and beyond it the spiral steps of Path Tower. A person’s shadow, Ruli’s or Ara’s, lay across stone steps lit by the coloured whispers of the day that shone in the classroom above, streaming in through stained-glass windows.

  A moment later the doorway had gone and Nona stood blind and alone.

  “It wasn’t true. Any of it.” Whispered to the darkness.

  Some of it was true, though. Abbess Glass had died and Sweet Mercy would never be the same again.

  7

  THE ESCAPE

  Three Years Earlier

  “THEY’RE CATCHING UP again.” Nona hunched against the hard-packed snow, too cold to shiver now. The wind stole her words and ran away with them, howling. Sherzal’s soldiers knew the mountains and had found better routes to gain the heights. Nona could see black figures to the south, little more than dots, almost at the shoulder between two peaks where she and Zole would have to cross if they were to make further progress towards the ice sheet.

  “We have to go down.” Zole pointed to an icy defile where the east side of the ridge had fractured along some hidden fault line.

  “Down?” Nona tried to imagine any way she could achieve that other than falling. “That’s Scithrowl.” She stared at the foothills, hazy in the distance and partly obscured by wisps of cloud around the waist of the mountains.

  “They will be unlikely to follow us there.” Zole shrugged and continued along the ridge. Their path proved to be a serrated blade of stone coated with two feet of icy snow on the southern face and with black ice on the northern side.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE DESCENT PROVED as hard as the ascent, though in different ways. It found a whole new set of muscles to stress. Nona’s legs began to feel as if they belonged to someone else, paying scant regard to her instructions but letting her have full share of the hurting. Several times she started to fall and saved herself only by digging her flaw-blades through ice into rock. They climbed down for an hour and the world below seemed to grow no closer, though the expanse of black rock towering behind them assured her that they were making progress.

  The wind blew less fiercely on the slopes that faced Queen Adoma’s lands but it was far from calm. The clouds surged below them, lapping the slopes like a grey sea. Nona heard shouts before they reached the swirling layer of mist, and looking back she saw that those leading the pursuit were less than a hundred yards away. A spear rattled past her.

  “We will lose them in the clouds,” Zole said. She hopped down from rock to rock, making it seem that her legs were as fresh as if she’d just got out of bed. Coming to the spear, jammed against an outcrop, she picked it up.

  Nona followed, frowning at the clouds. “We’ll lose ourselves in there too.” But she supposed “down” to be an easy direction to follow whatever the visibility.

  The mist rose to meet their descent, a cold white sea wrapping them, beading Zole’s hair with jewels of dew that froze into tiny pearls. Nona stumbled on in exhaustion, the shipheart’s fire filling her mind with unfocused energy but doing nothing for the muscles in her thighs.

  “Have y
ou been into Scithrowl before?” Nona asked, sliding down onto a ledge as Zole led off.

  “No.”

  “Their armies are at the border . . .”

  “If we need to kill soldiers to get to the ice, would it not be better that they were Scithrowl?”

  “I suppose so . . .” Nona had a fear of the Scithrowl, a heritage of endless stories told across the Grey. She expected that every part of the empire had its tales of Scithrowl horrors. Told no doubt by old ladies like Nana Even who hadn’t ever been sufficiently far east to glimpse the Grampain peaks, let alone an actual heretic. Did they burn prisoners, eat babies, and practise peculiar tortures? Best not to get captured and find out.

  The wind began to shred the cloud layer around them, tearing the whiteness across the flanks of the mountain and affording glimpses of Scithrowl stretching east. It looked remarkably like the empire had from the other side. In the north the ice was a glimmering white line; to the south it lay less than five miles away, a vaulting wall, all in shadow now.

  “The ice.” Nona stopped. She had seen the Corridor’s great wall before, shorn off by the focus moon, but for the first time ever she had the elevation to look down upon what lay beyond. Zole stopped too. Even a life on the shelf itself didn’t offer an overview. Mile upon mile of merciless ice, bloody with the touch of the morning sun. Here and there internal pressures rucked the sheet up into ridges or split it with chasms that looked like wrinkles at this distance but must be large enough to swallow any tower built by man. The roots of the Grampains cut across the ice every few miles, grey ribs of stone stretching from the main ridge, becoming frost-wrapped and at last drowned beneath the glacial flow.

  “It is . . . a sight to behold.” Zole stood statue-still, the wind tugging at her cloak.

  “The black ice!” Nona pointed at a wound in the ice sheet; you could almost imagine it a hole, its sides shadowed. A black teardrop, impossible not to see now that her eyes had found it, haloed in grey, shading through the surrounding ice and drawn away to the north with the ice’s flow in a broad path, dark grey at the centre. Where the grey streak across the surface reached the Corridor the ice wall also shaded grey and the land all around lay barren, a dead zone reaching out into the farmlands of the Scithrowl levels. The margins of this dead zone were edged in brown where the Corridor’s flora fought to endure. In the narrow gap between the tainted area and foothills of the Grampains to the west a chain of four fortresses stepped from one ridge to the next towards the clear ice.