floor had fully retracted. ‘Come along! Quickly now. It will slide back on you if you dawdle.’
The guards followed, Jula and Ruli prodded along between them, Safira bringing up the rear.
The stairway led down on a square spiral and the turns kept coming. The depth of the emperor’s cellars seemed remarkable, even to novices who had lived with the cave-riddled thickness of the Rock of Faith beneath them.
Eventually they emerged into a surprisingly dry chamber with no hint of cave about it. Sherzal turned to face them and raised her lantern. ‘You’ll like this.’ She cleared her throat. ‘Lights on.’
Across the ceiling rectangles of white light flickered into being. Others appeared along the length of two corridors leading off in opposite directions. Nona had never seen illumination so steady or so white. It wrought strange changes in the colours it shone upon.
‘Come!’ Sherzal led off again, her gown billowing with each long stride.
They passed doorways left and right, opening onto square white rooms, echoingly empty, or sometimes dark rooms, or rooms lit by flickers. Occasionally Ruli would glimpse something within. An object covered with a sheet – a chest or cabinet perhaps – a section of black metal, perforated with circular holes, broken from part of some larger structure maybe, a toothed wheel of a metal too orangey to be gold; a mass of wires emerging from a silver-grey sphere … did they wriggle, or was that a fluttering of the light? While Ruli marvelled, Nona was put in mind of the inner sanctum at the Hope Church in White Lake. What had Preacher Mickel said? The Sis build their homes over the best of what remains in the Corridor. The emperors themselves built their palace above the Ark and bind the Academy to them with its power.
‘Wait.’ Sherzal held up a hand and stopped in a section of corridor that seemed no different to any other. ‘You’ll like this too, novices. My father showed it to my brother and me long ago … before our sister was born.’ She tossed her knife out in front of her. It jerked in the air, becoming a shower of bright pieces that fell to the ground in front of one of the dark doorways. A surprisingly musical tinkle accompanied the destruction. ‘You’ll like it less if you disappoint me. It can be used with more subtlety to unpleasant effect. Well … unpleasant for the person being peeled. It’s quite fun to watch.’ She went to the wall and tapped out a rapid, changing beat. A panel slid back and she pressed her finger upon a glowing disc inside. ‘Safe now!’ Even so she motioned the guardsmen through before her.
Ruli glanced to the left as she stepped over the pieces of Sherzal’s knife. A dark room, the same on the right. Just as her eyes slid away a flicker of light offered a confusion of hard lines and stark shadows. A circle? Nona made her friend’s gaze linger for one more heartbeat, piercing the darkness with Ruli’s shadow-work. A great ring, taller than a man and leaning against the rear wall?
Sherzal stopped again ten yards on and waited for them all to pass before tapping the same pattern on the wall. For a moment the corridor behind them filled with faint lines as if a hundred glass blades were criss-crossing it. They faded from sight in moments. ‘That annoying friend of yours can do something similar, no? But in the days when our people built the Ark we knew how to make mere mechanisms that would do as much! Our forebears could take a few cogs and gears, mix in some wires and lightning, and have a device that could do anything!’
An echo of Nona’s hatred for the woman curled Ruli’s lip. Which of them clenched her hands into fists neither could tell.
Patience, Nona said, as much to herself as to Ruli. I will find you.
Sherzal resumed the lead. A hundred yards on the corridor terminated in a white door. Safira came to join the emperor’s sister at the front. Sherzal stepped forward and the door slid away to reveal a large white-walled chamber. Six white doors stood spaced around the perimeter. A huge circular silver door had been set into the floor at the centre of the chamber, its single hinge thicker than a man’s leg. Around it stood a trio of the emperor’s guards, their breastplates enamelled in green and gold.
‘If you would,’ Sherzal nodded towards Safira. ‘Oh, wait!’ She raised