Over by the garden wall Abbess Wheel called Nona’s name. The foremost of the Scithrowl horde were now charging through the charnel-filled trench where their brothers and sisters had perished just minutes before. Sister Iron and Sister Tallow were leading the way towards the breach, with soldiers emerging from the side streets to support them. The setting sun threw their shadows towards the enemy and stained all their steel with blood. On the nearest stairs from the city wall defenders queued to descend and join the stand.
Mally came running back from the main group. ‘The abbess wants you to bring the shipheart, Nona … I mean Sister Cage.’
Nona ignored her, taking Ketti’s face in her hands and steering it towards her own. Once Ketti had been much taller than her. Now she had to look up. ‘Concentrate! The men, what were they wearing?’
‘Scarlet. Guards’ uniform.’
Nona released her. Ketti wiped the blood from her hand and started back towards the other novices around the abbess. ‘And silver!’ she called over her shoulder before drawing her sword from its scabbard.
‘The shipheart, Nona!’ Mally pointed, unwilling to go near the fallen casket.
Scarlet and silver. Sherzal’s colours. The men who had caught Nona in Rellam Forest just outside her village, the men who had set her on the long path to the place where she now stood: beneath the dirt and blood those men had worn Sherzal’s colours too.
‘Sherzal’s guards have taken Jula!’ Nona tried to open the thread-bond she had forged with Ruli using the commonality of their marjal blood. Immediately deafening echoes of Sister Pan’s final act filled her skull and she doubled up, both hands pressed to the sides of her head.
‘Are you … all right, Nona?’ Mally, at her side now.
Nona looked towards the breach where the Scithrowl charge was already within the long shadow of the walls. Abbess Wheel was leading Nona’s classmates and teachers towards that gap. The people who had been Nona’s life since she was a small girl. Before them lay only torn earth, broken stone, and certain death. The Scithrowl were numberless, unstoppable. She saw Ketti at the back. Alata and Leeni side by side, ready to die as they had lived; together. Ghena looking short beside Sister Oak. A fresh pang of sorrow stabbed through Nona. She saw Sister Pan’s sad smile. None of them wanted to die. Not even Pan with a hundred years behind her. But at least they would die together, and fighting.
With an oath Nona turned her back on them all and ran from Mally towards the emperor’s spires. On the way past the broken cart she scooped up the shipheart in its casket.
The shipheart’s aura beat at Nona, tearing at the roots of her personality as she ran, eager to reshape her. She endured it for two streets then threw the casket over a high garden wall. A mansion lay behind the garden, and behind that an open plaza that stretched to Crucical’s gates. The ring of imperial guards that had turned her away before would be waiting for her. She scaled the wall and dropped beside the casket before moving away to crouch by the trunk of an elm tree. Dusk filled the garden and for a moment the battle seemed far away, already half a dream.
Nona muttered her serenity poem. ‘She’s falling down, she’s falling down, the moon, the moon …’ and wrapped herself in the cool distance of the trance. ‘Ruli …’ She opened the thread-bond to her friend.
‘Oh, thank the Ancestor!’ Ruli lifted her head from a one-eyed contemplation of the patterned floor.
‘What?’ Jula hissed. ‘What?’
Close by, in front of a pair of tall bronze doors, half a dozen of Sherzal’s guards stood tense and ready as their captain engaged in heated conversation with three men in the emperor’s green and gold who barred his way.
It’s nothing, Nona spoke the words inside Ruli’s skull.
‘It’s … nothing,’ Ruli said. ‘I just remembered that we have a friend looking out for us.’ She tried to open her other eye but it stayed swollen shut.
‘A friend?’ Jula glanced up at the nearest guard. ‘What do you … Oh!’ She closed her mouth and pressed her lips firmly together.
I’m coming to get you both. Just make sure to show me everything. Nona could have deepened the bond and steered Ruli’s gaze where she wanted it but she could feel her friend’s apprehension. Any deeper and she would lose control over how much they shared