over those still advancing on the palace. Spinning fragments of flaw-blade sliced through armour, flesh, bone. Even the paving slabs beneath the enemy’s feet were cut into pieces.
Nona led the charge, slipping and sliding in a street that had become a charnel house. The gerant captain who had sought to block her passage into the palace as night fell now joined her counterattack.
They couldn’t win. Perhaps a dozen Nonas might turn the tide, but even as the Scithrowl died in heaps their dead were trampled by fresh warriors eager to bleed for their queen. And all along the road the Scithrowl were starting to spread out, clambering over rubble, seeking ways to encircle the palace, ways to come at it from all angles while Nona could defend only one.
Nona let the empire soldiers advance around her. She saw little Ghena hurry past, a bloody spear gripped in both hands, looking both fierce and exhausted at the same time.
For a moment Kettle’s weakness overwhelmed her and Nona found no strength of her own to replace it. So much death and hurt lay before her. So much blood that the storm drains would soon overflow. Murder, murder, and more murder. What else could they expect when the ice kept closing? All of mankind reduced to wild animals in an ever-shrinking cage.
‘The moon is coming.’ Nona used Kettle’s mouth to speak words for Kettle’s benefit. ‘Be ready to get out of its way.’
28
Holy Class
Nona jerked her head up. Only she and Zole remained in the chamber. Nona lay slumped against the wall. The others stayed outside, watching from the passage.
Zole could be seen only indistinctly, a dark figure orbited by four balls of light, four shiphearts, one attuned to each of the tribes that had come to Abeth in the long ago, plunging from the darkness amid a galaxy of dying stars. They had come seeking the warmth of a sun that burned hotter than those they left behind. Whether it was desperation or miscalculation that had beached them on Abeth’s shores the stories could never agree upon. Perhaps they could travel no further, but they had found a world already abandoned by those who had settled it. Scant millennia passed before the continued retreat of Abeth’s star from the red fury of its expansion began to see Abeth freeze. The world started its return to the ice-bound sphere it had always been before the sun’s death throes briefly thawed it.
Zole had said the Old Stones were things of the Missing, just as the Arks were. The Church taught that they were shiphearts, the vital force that had driven the vessels which brought the four tribes across the blackness of infinity to Abeth, and that the Arks were the work of Nona’s ancestors too. Perhaps that story was simple pride though, claiming some wonder for the Ancestor rather than having all of humanity’s tribes be painted as savages living within the ruins of a greater race. Now as Zole advanced towards the great round door at the chamber’s centre Nona could easily imagine her a creature very different to any that walked the Corridor.
Zole reached the vault door, light and shadow in constant motion around her as the shiphearts continued on their slow trajectories. Nona had thought that the door would fight her, that the earth would shake around them, that the ceiling would crack and the dust sift down. Instead the huge circular slab of silver-steel rose without noise or drama until it stood vertical, revealing a flight of stairs. Zole raised her arms and the shiphearts shot outwards to the four points of the compass, embedding themselves in the walls about halfway between floor and ceiling. Nona couldn’t tell if there had already been structures to receive them or if they had made their own holes.
‘How do you feel?’ She limped across to Zole, who looked like a statue. Now that she could approach her Nona realized how tall her friend had grown. She lacked the thick muscle of a gerant but she had the height, making Nona feel like a child beside her and dwarfing the others. Zole’s skin had turned greyish, as if the shiphearts’ power had burned her to fine ash, awaiting just the lightest touch to fall apart. Nona wouldn’t have been surprised to find on closer inspection that Zole’s flesh was polished to a high shine or just gently smoking. ‘Are you … Are you … still you?’