tried to see something of her friend within them. ‘I am shriven.’
‘I …’ Nona reached along their thread-bond but found nothing. ‘Zole …’ Her heart hurt. She wished in that moment she had known the woman who stood in front of her before she had ever touched an Old Stone, before the imperfection was burned from her. She would have held her friend but the devils in her own flesh refused to move any closer.
‘Hurry up!’ Clera arrived at Nona’s shoulder, with Ara and Ruli coming along behind. Tarkax and Jula had hold of Joeli and were bringing her too. The rest of the ice-tribers remained to guard the corridor. ‘Quickly!’
Clera’s urgency was born of the desire to get further from the shiphearts but it reignited Nona’s own. Outside, her sisters were still dying.
‘Lights on,’ Nona ordered and the dark steps beneath the door were illuminated just as the corridors outside had been when Sherzal demanded light. She led the way down, cursing each time her damaged leg had to take her weight.
The Ark proved completely different to anything Nona had anticipated, and her imagination had painted dozens of possible scenes. The stairs led down some fifty feet to a small circular chamber, a room, dirty and bare of anything save a single curving chair of some unfamiliar material, lying on its side near the wall.
‘Aquinas said there would be levers, a machine … He saw them in a holy vision!’ Ruli pushed in past Nona. ‘I kept that bastard’s lies secret when that bitch was wedging needles under my fingernails!’
Jula stumbled in with Joeli. It was getting crowded. ‘There are supposed to be four dials, each within the other …’
‘There’s nothing here.’ Even Joeli sounded disappointed.
‘How would you have worked such an engine, even if it hadn’t been stolen centuries ago?’ Clera spat on the ground and sent the chair skittering across the floor with a kick. The years had turned it brittle and it shattered against the far wall.
Nona frowned, staring furiously at the broken pieces. ‘Aquinas’s book was the key to get us in. A lie. I never expected it to help once we were inside. Though it would have been nice if it had.’ She looked slowly around the chamber, hunting for any clue. ‘The abbess told me that the goal of any design is simplicity.’ She spoke the words haltingly, gathering certainty as fragments of the day’s events came together. ‘What makes our most complex devices hard to use is that we lack the understanding to make them easy to use.’
All of them watched her.
‘Lights off.’ The room plunged into darkness. ‘Lights on.’ The illumination returned, soft, pervasive, casting no shadows and having no source. ‘When Sherzal closed the blast door … she just asked for it to close. Why would you think that the builders of an Ark where that happened would require levers and dials to command the moon? Sherzal’s first instinct was right. The abbess just made her doubt herself, made her think she needed a book full of secret knowledge.’
‘Show us the Corridor,’ Zole said. She spoke it to the air.
Instantly a ring of light appeared before them, hanging in the air, crowded with tiny features in shades of green and brown, fringed with white. A shadow divided it into night and day.
‘Show me the moon’s focus.’
A wide red circle appeared, wider than the Corridor, maybe half as wide again. A much broader pinkish region extended around it within an elongated ellipsis.
‘Show us where we are,’ Nona said.
The ring turned and grew steadily larger, the bulk of it fading from view as a closer and closer look filled the space before them.
‘The Grampains,’ Jula whispered, ‘and the Sea of Marn.’
‘Closer!’ Nona said. And in moments she saw forests and rivers spread before her as if Sister Rule’s precious maps had joined hands and unfolded themselves for inspection. All washed with a faint pinkish tinge.
‘Closer!’
They saw Verity, the Rock of Faith, and the farmlands all around. Tiny fires twinkled. Smoke streaks followed the wind.
‘Closer!’
They saw the city walls, the streets, individual rooftops, the flicker of flames, the dark mass of Adoma’s army, the palace itself.
‘What does the pink mean?’ Jula asked.
‘There is sufficient angle and resource to centre the focus at any point within the pink zone.’
All of them save Zole jumped at the unexpected voice. Like the light, the voice seemed to have no source, and like the light there was nothing about it that was natural. Clera glanced around nervously.