‘The Scithrowl do not run from lights and tricks! This is our home now. Before me lies my palace.’ Power lay behind those words. Hers was a voice to stir a heart to violence, to wake pride in any chest. The army around her had claimed hundreds of Corridor miles in the battle-queen’s name. They wouldn’t run. Not beneath her gaze and with victory just a spear’s throw ahead of them. The Scithrowl warriors began to raise their weapons and find their voice.
The rising cheer faltered as the moon went wholly dark, leaving twice a hundred thousand eyes night-blind. Kettle cursed herself for letting her training slip and allowing herself to lose an edge. Apple would scold—
The moon lit again though not to full focus. A brilliant light fell around Adoma’s throne, filling half the width of the road. The intensity rose from dazzling to blinding so swiftly that there was almost not enough time to look away. A moment later the searing circle of light had gone, replaced by a general illumination bringing the day to Verity’s night.
Kettle blinked away afterimages and tried to see what had happened. She heard the screaming before she saw the source. All around the fringes of the area where the brilliance had risen Scithrowl were burning. The screams came from further back, where warriors rolled around the pain of their scalded flesh but were not actually on fire. In the place where Adoma’s platform had been borne on the shoulders of a hundred men there was nothing. Just a black circle twenty yards across. No trace of the platform, of the throne, of the people upon it or beneath it. Even their smoke seemed to have been burned from the air.
The moon dimmed and the words returned.
Go home.
And everywhere the Scithrowl started to run.
In the Ark chamber silence reigned. Nona had controlled the moon by voicing her desires and using her fingers to place and size the focus on the image before them. She had watched the results through Kettle’s eyes. It seemed wrong to see the death of a queen and so many of her subjects as a flash of light that could be covered by a fist and have the ant-sized survivors run noiselessly from the fringes of the blackened circle left behind.
‘You should have killed them all,’ Clera said. ‘While they were in one place. They’ll scatter now. You can’t use the moon to hunt down thousands of small bands roaming the countryside.’
Nona stepped back from the image and looked around at her friends. Ruli still hugging her injured hand. Jula red-eyed, forehead furrowed with concentration. Ara slumped, breath labouring but watching even so. Joeli stood amazed, as if she had forgotten where she was or that she was bound, a traitor to the emperor whose palace they stood beneath. Tarkax watched Nona, his dark eyes unreadable. And Zole … Zole stood tall, apart from them all though she was within arm’s reach, her head cocked as if she were listening to music that no one else could hear.
‘Why didn’t you kill them all?’ Jula asked.
Nona frowned. ‘I had thought Abbess Glass made me promise to take the Black and become a Holy Sister because she knew it would change Wheel’s mind about me. That was part of it. But the abbess rarely did something with only one goal or said anything with just one meaning.’ Nona looked down at her habit, sticky with blood. ‘At Sweet Mercy they made a weapon of me. They honed every skill into a sharp edge. They put a sword in my hand, because there will always be foes who must be opposed, always violence that must be met with violence.
‘But that was never the heart of Sweet Mercy. The shipheart wasn’t the foundation of the convent. It was always the faith. Always the notion that all men and women are our brothers and our sisters. And that faith doesn’t end with borders. It doesn’t care about heresies used to divide us, or whether you speak your prayers to a white star, or to the fields and forests and stones.
‘Abbess Glass spoke to me on the day she died. She told me that when she lost her child, at first she took every novice at Sweet Mercy as her own, to fill that hole, the emptiness only a mother can know. But the Ancestor taught her not to be so narrow. She came to understand that the children before her, those she could see,