me weak, serving a man who did something like that? I suppose you would have beaten him to death?’ Markus didn’t try to hide the mix of anger and shame bubbling through him.
‘Maybe I would have killed him, but you’re a better person than I am. I’m not proud of my temper.’
Markus twisted his lips into half of a doubtful smile. ‘So, you need me, and you trust me. What is it that you need me for, and trust me not to betray you over?’
Nona glanced over her shoulder into the night. From inside the Caltess the crowd’s roar swelled. Another bout coming to a bloody end, no doubt. ‘I have to break into the Cathedral of St Allam and steal something from High Priest Nevis’s vault of forbidden books.’
2
Three years earlier
The Escape
In the dark of the moon by the side of the Grand Pass two dozen citizens of the empire huddled away from the wind. Dawn would show them an unparalleled view of that empire, spread out before them to the west, marching between the ice towards the Sea of Marn.
Nona stood close to the rock wall, pressed between Ara and Kettle. Her leg ached where the stump of Yisht’s sword had driven in, pain shooting up and down as she shifted her weight, the whole limb stiffening.
Abbess Glass had gathered the survivors in a bend where the folds of the cliff offered some shelter. There were among their number men and women who owned substantial swathes of the Corridor, who had been born to privilege and to command. But here in their bloodstained finery, with flames from the palace of the emperor’s sister licking up into the night behind them, it was to Abbess Glass they turned for direction.
‘It will take Sherzal’s soldiers a while to navigate around Zole’s landslide but they’ll come. It won’t take long then to alert the garrisons and send riders down the road to Verity. There’s no chance of making the capital that way.’
‘We don’t need to reach Verity.’ Lord Jotsis spoke up. ‘My estates are closer.’
‘Castle Jotsis is formidable,’ Ara said, looking between her uncle and the abbess.
Abbess Glass shook her head. ‘Sherzal will bottle us up anywhere but the capital. She might not be insane enough to lay siege to your castle, my lord, but she would likely encircle your holdings to prevent word reaching the emperor. And besides, I fear that closer is not close enough.’
‘So we’ve escaped only to be hunted down on the road?’ One side of old Lord Glosis’s face had swollen into a single bruise but she still had enough energy to be temperamental. ‘Unacceptable.’
‘It’s the shipheart that Sherzal wants above anything else.’ The abbess nodded to where Zole waited, some thirty yards closer to the landslide, her hands dark around the glowing purple sphere she had recovered from the Tetragode. ‘If we give her good reason to think that it has gone in another direction she won’t spare many soldiers for chasing us. Maybe none.’
‘And how,’ Lord Jotsis asked, ‘can we make her think we haven’t taken the shipheart with us?’
Abbess Glass turned to stare at the darkness of the slopes rising above them. ‘By making them think it has gone south, towards the ice.’
‘How can we make them think it’s been sent south?’ Lord Glosis asked, leaning on the arm of a young relative.
‘By actually sending it south, to the ice,’ the abbess said. ‘Zole will take it and let them see the glow upon the slopes.’
‘But that’s madness.’ Lord Jotsis drew himself to his full height. ‘You can’t entrust a treasure like that to a lone novice!’
‘I can when it’s the lone novice who somehow stole that treasure from the heart of the Noi-Guin’s stronghold in the first place,’ Abbess Glass replied.
‘She won’t be alone.’ Nona limped forward.
Ara hobbled to stand beside Nona. Kettle put her hands on their shoulders. ‘In our state we’re going to be slowing the abbess down on the road. None of us will be any use to Zole trying to outdistance soldiers across the mountains.’
Kettle was right. Nona gritted her teeth against the pain in her thigh and refused to let the admission out.
The abbess advanced on them, windswept, grey hair straggled across her face. ‘The Noi-Guin’s shipheart is a marjal one. It’s said that in the hands of a marjal healer it can mend any wound but that it can also bring harm.’
‘Well, I don’t want to go near it.’ Nona shuddered. She knew what harm the