through all that for nothing?’ Now that Nona had set the Noi-Guin shipheart against the far wall with the Sweet Mercy shipheart both novices could approach her.
‘Maybe not a lie,’ Nona said. ‘Perhaps just misguided and unnecessary. What was important was that you believed its value. That’s what got us in here and what kept you both alive. It was always Abbess Glass’s intention that the book would be the key that got us to the door of the Ark. I don’t imagine she knew it would be with the Scithrowl fighting in Verity’s streets.’
‘So how do we control the moon, if we could even get in there? Which we can’t,’ Jula asked. ‘Aquinas’s instructions are very complex … If they’re wrong then I don’t know what to do.’
‘Well. The first thing to do is to open the door, no?’ Nona tried to shut out the voices of her devils as they raged against Jula’s stupidity. If the girl came any closer Nona might just reach out in an unguarded moment and end her. She leaned back against the wall. ‘Before that though … I need this fucking knife out of my leg!’
Jula flinched as Nona’s voice rose to a shout, or perhaps at the cursing, or both. Even so she came forward, already unbinding her habit cord to use as a torniquet. Nona put her head to the wall and ground her teeth while Jula set to work.
‘How can we open the Ark?’ Ruli asked. She had a right to ask. She had had envenomed needles driven under her fingernails.
‘I—’ Nona roared as Jula drew the cross-knife from the back of her thigh and tightened her habit tie above the lacerated muscle.
‘Nona!’ Clera came back in, trailed by Ara, pale-faced and bloody-handed. ‘Are you …’
Jula stood up, tossing the little knife to the floor. ‘She’ll live.’
Nona turned her black-eyed stare on Sherzal’s guards. ‘Out!’ She snarled the word through gritted teeth. ‘Join the defence if you want to survive the night.’
Clera spotted Joeli, sitting bound on the floor. ‘I know her. One of Sherzal’s creatures.’
Nona bit back on the accusation that Clera was nothing more than that herself, and tried to drive the devils from her tongue.
‘We should get the truth out of her,’ Clera said, ignoring Jula and Ruli’s staring. ‘Sherzal didn’t have all her eggs in one basket. She was only going to share with Adoma as a last resort. She was after more shiphearts of her own. I know that much. She had an agent among the ice-tribes and she’d set her hunting down Old Stones. You really don’t want to know who I heard it was … But rich girl here, she knows for sure.’
‘Nona!’ A call from Ara at the doorway.
Out in the corridor a fierce light had overwhelmed the ambient illumination. It glared from the doorway of the chamber that held the travel-ring. The blaze made harsh silhouettes of the guardsmen now frozen a few yards from it. A deep throbbing buzz trembled through the ground.
Nona drew her sword. Ara struggled to draw her own. Clera’s blade cleared her scabbard with a hiss.
A crack rang out, like the world ending, and the light died. At first Nona could see nothing. Afterimages filled the corridor, swimming across each other. As they faded and the dark shapes of Sherzal’s men reasserted themselves Nona saw that a new figure stood there ahead of them, and in her hands burned two balls of light, one a virulent green, the other the red of iron just starting to glow.
‘Yisht!’ A scream from Joeli behind them.
‘Oh hells …’ Clera’s blade wavered, the point dropping.
Nona blinked away the remaining traces of her blindness, and there, alone in the corridor now as the guardsmen ran off in terror, stood the ice-triber, so thickly patterned in devils that no patch of unstained skin showed.
I cannot die. Yisht’s last words and Raymel Tacsis’s too. Perhaps if the black ice taught any lesson it was that evil never truly dies …
‘Nona?’ Yisht’s smile twisted. A moment later the rest of her rippled and in her place stood Zole, her face tight with strain.
‘Zole?’ Ara gasped. ‘You’re dead!’
‘She’s playing games with our minds!’ Clera backed a few paces.
‘With two shiphearts in my hands I could make you see anyone I wanted to,’ the figure said. ‘But I am Zole.’
‘She’s lying,’ Ara said. ‘Zole died.’
‘No,’ Nona said. ‘It’s Zole.’
And as she said it Tarkax Ice-Spear stepped out into the corridor, ten yards behind his niece and