and invisible. Ruli’s agony. It reached out across their thread-bond like a spear thrust.
When Nona was new to the skill, the distress would have hauled her mind across to join Ruli without allowing her any choice. Now, she had the mastery to resist the pull, but it had never been in Nona to ignore a friend, even if not doing so meant that she had to share their pain.
In a heartbeat Nona occupied Ruli’s flesh. They had her on the floor with wrists and ankles bound, hands behind her back. The guardsman who had been kicking her stepped aside to reveal Sherzal smiling broadly. Behind her Jula, similarly tied, sat at the feet of several more guards.
‘Well, this is rather silly.’ Sherzal came closer, her smile fading into concern. ‘Look at you, all bloody.’ Nona reminded herself that the emperor’s sister had all but owned the Inquisition and had watched them burn her court rivals alive on trumped-up charges over matters as slight as unkind, though likely accurate, gossip. The concern on her face was entirely manufactured. ‘You understand that Dillon here is just softening you up? The idea is to save us having to go through the part where I ask you about the book and you pretend that you don’t know what I’m talking about.’
‘But—’ Ruli’s protest was cut off by a heavy kick to the stomach.
‘We’ll get to the questions in a short while. And if we don’t get answers Dillon will have to take out his knife. And if that doesn’t work …’ Sherzal gestured past the guards with Jula to the door behind. Safira stood poised and ready, and at her side a sulky-looking Joeli Namsis. Nona’s hatred for the girl curled Ruli’s lip. Joeli must have been just ahead of her all this time.
‘… Safira has her poisons and needles. And look! She’s brought your friend to play. I really want to keep young Joeli fresh for what comes later, but if we must then she can pull what we need out of your skull. Though I’m told it may leave you rather broken.’
Ruli groaned and rolled her head, bringing the other half of the chamber into the view of her one good eye. The pristine floor lay spattered with blood from the killing of Crucical’s guards, and long smears indicated that the trio had been dragged away through a door opposite. A kick took Ruli in the back below the ribs, and as she jerked her head up Nona saw something that pushed the rising agony back down into being a mere distraction. Glowing molten and gold at the end of a long length of chain that had presumably been used to drag it to the chamber lay the Sweet Mercy shipheart.
Another kick crunched into Ruli’s ribs doubling her up with pain. Sherzal moved around so that her feet came into Ruli’s eye-line.
‘A little bird has told me that you and your friends have been busy stealing books. And by your friends I mean Nona Grey and Arabella Jotsis, both of whom owe me a great debt for damaging my alliance with Adoma.’
‘Damaging?’ Ruli spat out a bloody laugh and Nona loved her for it. ‘Adoma …’ She hadn’t the breath to say it but Adoma had driven her armies through the Grand Pass and taken Sherzal’s palace at the very start of the invasion three years earlier. As soon as the Noi-Guin shipheart was lost to them the alliance to secure the Ark had fallen apart. It was ‘damaged’ in the same way a snail is damaged beneath a descending heel. Officially of course the treachery had never existed, but if Crucical truly believed that then he had never really known his sister at all.
‘Yes, damaging.’ Sherzal frowned. ‘But with the right incentives Adoma can be brought back into line. We have what she really wants right here, and all the doors are locked tight. Further, you will notice the cylinders attached to the walls.’ Sherzal waved an arm. Ruli fixed on one of maybe a dozen white cylinders somehow adhering to the sides of the chamber, each longer and thicker than her leg. ‘My brother entrusted these into my care. They date from the Second Age when our ancestors mastered the secret fire again. At the push of a particular button they will explode with as much force as a quantal Path-walker can direct.’ She drew from her gown a short, fat stick with a red button at the end. ‘They