‘… there’s no sign they left again!’ A raised voice.
‘Well they’re not here.’ A woman’s voice, deep and belligerent.
‘We should burn it to be sure.’
Zole began to mutter to herself. Tiny veins in her eyes surrendered under mounting pressure, lacing the whites with crimson.
‘Burn it? It’s a hut and a stall.’
‘There’s nowhere to hide.’
‘… plenty to burn on the other side of the mountains …’
A rumble of agreement. ‘Split up, comb the valley.’
The riders climbed back into their saddles and within moments the company had thundered off.
Nona started to rise.
‘No.’ Zole kept her voice low. ‘They could have left someone to watch.’
‘So what do we do?’
‘Rest.’
Nona set her head on her arms and tried to relax. She wondered if there really was a Scithrowl sitting on the slopes watching the hut. She supposed there might be.
Zole’s demon had moved to circle her neck, a scarlet scald as if she’d escaped a hanging halfway through.
‘So, when you force your latest devil out what parts are you cutting away?’ Nona asked. ‘Is the Zole who came across half of the empire to rescue me from the Tetragode in here?’ She put her hand to Zole’s throat, then tapped her forehead. ‘Or here?’
Zole said nothing but narrowed her gaze in concentration and the scald slid away from her neck.
‘Is the Zole who once every three years makes a joke the one to be cut out or left behind?’
‘Once they are separate the raulathu must be purged. Their voices grow louder, their ills more extreme.’
‘But what you cut away … that’s life. Keot, my devil, for all his ills, was alive, with hopes of his own. You’re telling me he was cut away, abandoned? And the perfect beings that remained when all that was excised … what became of them, shriven of their flaws?’
Zole rolled onto her back. ‘They say the Missing left. But some believe they are all around us, unseen, unknowable, existing in their own harmony. Others think the Missing went beneath the sea and live there in golden cities, burning the very water itself for heat, enough to last them until long after the last star has gone dark.
‘In the far north there are peoples that believe it is the Missing whose heat bubbles up to melt the domes beneath the ice, and sometimes to give us the open water that sustains the deep tribes.’
‘Sister Rule said it was volcanoes at the bottom of the sea that did that.’ Nona tried to imagine golden cities beneath miles of ice and dark water.
‘Mistress Academia has her own wisdom.’ Zole shrugged. ‘How can we know the truth?’
Nona fell silent. She didn’t know what death held, what would become of her if the Ancestor gathered her in. She didn’t know if the ice-speakers were right or what Zole would become as she shed every last one of her flaws, her jealousies, every shred of malice … But it didn’t feel right. Not to her. Perhaps it was her pride talking, her own multitude of sins, each with their own small voice, but imperfect as she was, Nona wanted to stay here, whole, untouched, while her heart beat and her lungs drew breath.
‘Where do you think the Noi-Guin are?’ Nona found it hard to believe the assassins had given up. They had hounded her for nearly half her life simply for having the temerity not to die. Zole had stolen their shipheart.
‘Waiting,’ Zole said.
‘Waiting?’ Nona would have accepted ‘coming’. ‘Where? Why?’
‘They are waiting because they know now that we are dangerous. They want the Scithrowl to weaken us. To deplete our reserves. The bulk of the Noi-Guin will be waiting at the ice, because they know it is the way I would choose to get past Sherzal’s soldiers and back into the empire. They will want to keep us on the move. To exhaust us. They are at their most dangerous when waiting.’
‘So we’ll have to get through them to get to the ice sheet?’ Taking on Noi-Guin with the advantage of surprise had been difficult enough. Walking into an ambush would be suicidal. Especially with the Scithrowl in pursuit.
‘It would be best not to have to,’ Zole said. ‘That’s why we’re going to the black ice.’
‘The black—’ Nona broke off to sniff. ‘Something’s burning!’ She turned to see white feelers of smoke rising through the woven sticks of the wall.
Zole moved into a crouch. ‘Our rest is over.’
12
Three Years Earlier
The Escape
The fire drove the novices out but whoever had thrown the incendiary had not