waited for them to emerge. As Zole had suggested, the Noi-Guin were playing a longer game. The column of smoke would bring back the Scithrowl riders and more besides. The two girls made directly for the barrens, favouring speed over stealth. In the distance green turned to brown. And behind miles of dead, unwholesome land the grey ice rose in towering cliffs stepping up nearly two miles to the great southern ice sheet.
The foothills descended into rolling fields in the shelter of the Grampains. With the Corridor wind in the west, hardly a breeze stirred the hedgerows. Jump-corn stood amid a riot of crops that had launched themselves from the fertile darkness of soil such as Nona had never seen. Villages lay almost every mile, the roads well maintained and set with inns, staging posts, and tiny watch-forts. Zole led the way past such places so swiftly that the locals had time only to raise their heads and wonder. Twice groups of children followed, throwing stones. Nona let them bounce off her back. And once a young man in a patched uniform three sizes too big for him chased after them, waving his arms and shouting at them in such thickly accented empire tongue that Nona could understand little past ‘stop’. He grew breathless, angry, and finally laid a hand upon Zole’s shoulder, which saw him hoisted over a wall into a haystack.
‘Here.’ She tossed Nona the leaf-bladed dagger she’d plucked from the youth’s belt – Scithrowl army issue.
With the barrens just a mile ahead and a dark crowd of horsemen thundering through the village on the ridge behind them, the novices found their way blocked by six Scithrowl knights. Nona’s childhood had been peppered with stories of the heretic knights beyond the mountains. In Nana Even’s tales they were always giants in iron armour, their faces hidden behind visors cast in the likeness of snarling beasts, and with the heads of empire children hanging from their belts by the hair.
The truth was six dour men in weathered steel, all looking to be in their thirties or forties, their scars and bleak-eyed contemplation of the novices marking them as veterans. Likely they had served in the endless eastern wars against the kings of Ald.
‘Stop!’ Their leader nudged his stallion out into the road from beneath the copse that had hidden them.
Zole didn’t break her stride. She ran straight at the knight with a remarkable turn of acceleration. To his credit the man cleared his scabbard before she got there but Zole had vaulted his horse and ducked beneath the belly of the next before any blow could be struck. Nona wove after the ice-triber, swaying out of the path of the swinging sword.
They got fifty yards before the knights turned their horses and began to give chase.
‘Trees?’ Nona hissed the suggestion between breaths. Ahead the fields gave way to bramble and thorn bush studded with the occasion stunted copse. Nothing that looked sufficient to slow the horses more than it slowed the novices.
Zole spun, bracing on her heel as she continued to slide in the direction she’d been running. She raised her hands, fingers extended. As one the horses stopped, just as if they’d seen a wall appear before them. The knights went over their mounts’ heads, crashing to the beaten earth in their plate armour. Nona winced.
‘Animals are easier than people.’ Zole wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth. It didn’t look as if it had been easy. ‘Come.’
Nona followed as Zole led off again. Behind them riders boiled from the last village down into the road. Scores of them. She wondered if the Noi-Guin had misplayed their hand, letting the Scithrowl wear her and Zole down. Perhaps the Battle-Queen’s people would kill them and take the Noi-Guin’s shipheart for their own.
The vegetation died within the space of a quarter mile. Trees stood lifeless and brittle, branches vacant of leaves. The thorn bushes petered out. Brambles became black, twisted things, bloated with ugly growths, then gave up their purchase on the cracked ground altogether. The novices ran through an acre of dead grey grass, fraying where the wind worried at it, and beyond that the soil lay bare.
Nona turned at the drumming of hooves, not ready to risk a spear in the back. Zole stopped a few yards ahead of her. The riders slowed and spread out, seeming unwilling to advance, the animals nervous. Perhaps a hundred Scithrowl had joined the chase. Nona wondered if