through the bond, and sharing fear would do neither of them any good. They both had plenty of their own.
The guard captain appeared to have won his argument because the emperor’s men stepped back and pulled open the doors. Ruli found herself being hauled roughly to her feet, and Nona realized for the first time that her wrists had been bound together behind her back.
Before being led through the doors Ruli took a long look back the way they had come. A wide corridor lined with paintings and statuary stretched off towards a distant chamber lit by a curious blue light.
‘Move it!’ A guardsman shoved her and Ruli staggered into another chamber, this one with a domed ceiling offering the darkening sky through a round window high above. Streaks of black crossed the patch of midnight blue and the smell of smoke, absent in the corridor, could be smelled again.
Crucical’s palace appeared to be even more of a warren than Sherzal’s. It seemed that the idea was to impress the emperor’s grandeur on the world by covering as much of it as possible with endless chambers, halls, galleries, shrines, and corridors. Ruli’s good eye flickered left and right, picking out detail. The place seemed almost deserted; no doubt the guards were protecting the exterior. The other occupants were probably huddled together in some inner sanctum since misery loves company and since the empire had run out of places for people of quality to flee to.
Eventually, after descending three flights of stairs they came to an iron door manned by two guards in scarlet and silver. Behind the door lay a library. Not the grand, showy kind that Nona had glimpsed on her rare ventures into rich men’s homes but something more akin to the high priest’s vault or the small collection within Sweet Mercy’s scriptorium.
Among the dusty browns and blacks of leather-bound tomes Sherzal’s diamonds and gown of silver-white seemed wholly out of place.
‘Novices!’ She greeted them with a wide, gleaming smile. The Scithrowl might be cutting a path towards the palace but Sherzal had taken the time to have her rouge applied, her lips painted scarlet, the dark red curls of her mane brushed to a high shine. ‘Ruli … and … Jula.’ She pointed at them in turn with a long, sharp-nailed finger. ‘I’m glad you could join us.’
‘We need to be with our abbess!’ Ruli’s voice came out as a squeak. She deepened it and tried to inject some outrage. ‘The Scithrowl are through the city wall.’
‘Yes, yes. Adoma and her tedious horde.’ Sherzal turned and walked to the back of the room. ‘You girls will do a lot more good here, I can assure you of that. It’s no coincidence that I chose to meet you in a library …’
She pushed aside two piles of books, letting them topple to the floor. Behind her the iron door opened again and a young woman clad in a grey tunic with a black chainmail shirt of very fine gauge entered. She took the novices in with dark eyes above high cheekbones.
‘Safira …’ The recognition leaked from Nona’s mind to Ruli’s lips. The memory of the woman carrying Jula from the aftermath of the explosion rose in both their minds. Days before she had been in the company of Lano Tacsis.
Safira raised a brow at Ruli then turned to Sherzal. ‘I have the code. I had to kill the knight-protector.’
‘No matter.’ Sherzal returned her attention to the area of wall that had been obscured by the piled books. She unsheathed a knife and started to prise at the stone blocks. ‘Now, where are you hiding?’ She tutted and tried the point of her blade a little further along. Without warning the block opened, the whole thing just a stone front attached to a wooden door a foot wide and six inches tall. Behind it lay a set of three gleaming steel wheels set into a steel plate marked with numbers.
‘Ten, twenty, four,’ Safira said.
Sherzal rotated each of the wheels to the numbers she had named.
A grinding noise started up behind Ruli and she turned with a start. A rectangular section of what had seemed to be tiled floor was now drawing back under the rest to reveal a set of stairs.
‘The wonders of our forefathers!’ Sherzal clapped her hands with enthusiasm. ‘But of course you two girls know all about that.’ She picked up one of the lanterns from the reading table and began her descent even before the