took a step forward, focused on a ficus tree in full bloom. The sound of a heavy blow hitting flesh arrested her. A second blow and an agonized cry turned her around.
Standing before the grand colonnade of his mansion High Priest Jacob swung his staff again. The wood thunked into Four-Foot’s side, a dull sound like a hammer hitting meat, and the mule grunted his pain.
‘No!’ The horror of the moment pinned Nona to the spot. Another blow descended and her flaw-blades shimmered into being around both hands. ‘No!’
Nona tensed as the high priest raised his staff, Four-Foot snorting bloody foam about his muzzle. She knew it was memory or dream but it seemed more real than her life, more solid, more important. Losses like Hessa and Abbess Glass, horrors like Four-Foot’s death, were nails struck into her life, pinning those moments to her forever, the punctuation of sorrow. She could no more tear herself from the scene before her than rip the skin from her body.
Markus, impossibly young, struggled at the limit of his strength to escape the grip of the high priest’s guard, wild in his passion. Giljohn stood at the cart, held by bonds of the sort that no child can see, the kind made of debt and of a bitter understanding of the world’s truths, the kind that tear at a life as you struggle against them and leave wounds that won’t heal.
Nona thanked the Ancestor that here in this strange dream the chains of duty and service had no purchase on her. Every muscle gathered itself as she prepared to leap at High Priest Jacob, ready to rend him into pieces.
It was raining that day. The heavens wept to see such cruelty.
At the back of Nona’s mind a small voice asked why it wasn’t raining.
Her leap never happened. Unbalanced, she fell to her knees, hands upon the dry stones of the path. It had been raining. It had. The water had run from Giljohn’s empty socket like the tears he should have shed. Nona looked up. She knew it to be memory. She knew there was nothing she could do for the mule straining against his rope, or Markus twisting in the grasp of Jacob’s guard. Even so, her mind clamoured for revenge, for the joy of bloody retribution. She stood, blades ready, intent on attack.
Some distant glint caught her eye. Over the wall of the garden. Over the roofs of nearby mansions, out across the five miles of farmland to the Rock of Faith. Her gaze drawn to the tiny bumps that at this distance were all the Convent of Sweet Mercy had to offer. Again the glint. The sun reflecting on a window, perhaps. A stained-glass window high in Path Tower? Something told her she needed to be there. A path seemed to stretch out before her in that direction.
You’re getting further from the door.
Gritting her jaw against the sound of blows raining down on Four-Foot, Nona ran. She refused to look away from the Rock and from the convent’s faint outline. She climbed the wall with a great leap and a lunge.
As Nona dropped into the next garden the convent vanished behind the chimneys of the neighbouring mansion. She made to rise but the wall’s shadow deepened into night, miring her like the thickest mud. ‘No!’ She struggled, desperate to return to the convent, but the darkness took her into some other place and a night filled with screaming and with fire.
Nona stood between two dark buildings. She looked slowly around, less worried by any danger than by what new tragedy might unfold, by what black milestone of her life this nightmare had brought her to.
Across an open space in front of her another building burned, the flames so bright that even the dying focus of the moon seemed pale. And although the night gave her nothing but angles and the ferocity of fire, Nona knew exactly where she stood. To her right, the home of James and Martha Baker. To her left, the stone walls of Grey Stephen’s house, he who had fought the Pelarthi in his youth. Rellam Village burned around her. The shapes moving across the background of blazing huts were those of children she had grown up with, of their parents, and of the soldiers the emperor’s sister had sent to cut them down.
Nona knew it for illusion or forgery or memory or all three woven together. Somehow she had fallen into a trap. Perhaps it had happened