Gravity and rocks provide a harsh but swift education.
Navigating the raw flanks of the Grampains proved a worryingly slow affair. Nona had no experience of mountains and Zole had little more. The ice was, as she said, mostly flat. The first shock had been in discovering how quickly a sharp incline could sap your strength. Nona knew herself to be fit, but within half an hour her breath came in ragged gasps and her newly healed leg ached almost as badly as it had when the wound lay open. The strength and coldness of the wind was an unwelcome revelation too. The Grampains forced the gale to climb just as the novices must, and the wind seemed displeased by the task, dumping any warmth it might have held back on the plains as if to lighten the load. Above them the rocks glistened with frost, and ice collected in every crevice.
‘They’re catching up.’ Nona’s glance back showed a serpent of fireflies weaving its way along the ridge she’d toiled up not long before. Distance reduced each lantern in the pursuit to a glowing point. Slowly but surely Nona and Zole were losing ground. The soldiers giving chase knew these slopes and patrolled across them regularly. The advantage was theirs. ‘Close now.’
Zole grunted.
‘We’re not going to be able to outrun them.’ Nona felt as if she were whining but the truth was that she was frozen and exhausted. Also terrified of the invisible drops beyond those jagged edges picked out in violet light on either side. The unseen falls held more fear than the empty yards below the blade-path ever had. ‘Zole!’
Zole paused, not looking back. ‘We are not trying to outrun them.’
‘What then?’ Nona furrowed her brow.
‘I am looking for the best place to kill them.’
‘Kill …’ Nona turned to face the pursuit. ‘But there are hundreds …’
‘Hundreds foolish enough to follow into the heights someone who has already shown them a landslide.’
Nona watched the points of light twinkle, their advance almost imperceptible. A warm hand held each of those lanterns, other soldiers clambered up between them.
‘Can’t we hide instead?’ Killing came easy when an enemy raised their weapon against her, but to end so many lives, soldiers of the empire following the orders of their commander … it felt wrong. She pictured Zole’s face when she had first hauled herself up onto the road, lit from beneath by the heart-light, something demonic in the play of shadows. Did devils own her now? Their claws around her heart?
Zole turned and the light flooded across Nona’s shoulders, the pressure building, an almost physical push. ‘It is harder to hide ourselves in the rock than to bring it down upon them. And if we hid we would not be able to travel. They would surround us. There will be Noi-Guin among their number and some may be able to sense the proximity of the shipheart just as you and I can. We might not stay hidden long.’
Nona hugged herself and said nothing. There seemed to be nothing to say. For once Zole had said it all.
Dawn broke over the peaks, a grey wave spilling pale light across the slopes. The black serpent, its head now only a few hundred yards behind them, began to resolve into individual figures.
Zole set to scaling a rock-face so close to vertical that ‘cliff’ seemed a reasonable description. Nona, staring at the smooth stone, could see no way it could be climbed, and yet the Chosen One made relentless progress, the shipheart in her backpack now, its illumination no longer required.
‘How …?’ Nona shrugged, gathered her strength, and started to follow, stabbing her flaw-blades into the rock.
Here and there as she climbed Nona spotted patches where the rock-face looked different, the stone somehow rippled, like butter melted then returned to solid before it could flow away. Zole was digging herself handholds and allowing them to reseal as she moved on. It would buy them time. The soldiers would need to find a true mountaineer among their number to lay them a rope, or they would have to discover a longer path.
After sixty or seventy yards of climbing, Nona joined Zole on a ledge of fractured stone that led across the gradient, with another cliff rising above it. She hauled herself onto the flat space between the two rock-faces and lay bonelessly, drawing a deep lungful into her aching chest. Clera would have moaned, ‘Carry me.’ The thought made Nona cough out a painful laugh.