just as they had proved impotent against Raymel Tacsis’s devil-haunted skin.
Gaining height, they found the ice riddled with meltwater channels where surface water had drained away after the passage of the focus moon. The sound of running water penetrated the ice, a constant behind which deep-throated gurgling reverberated as chambers filled and emptied around natural airlocks.
In several places vents in the tunnel walls would erupt without warning, blasting out spray-laden air at tremendous velocity. Nona had been dimly aware of such phenomena from her father’s tales but it was Zole who dived and took her to the floor when she walked unknowingly in front of one fissure just as it started to blast.
The spray of black mist hurt where it found skin, neither scalding nor freezing nor acid but somehow worse than all three, as if wrongness had been made into liquid.
‘How did you know it was coming?’ Nona wiped her hands on the range-coat Kettle had given her.
‘Working air and water is not so different from working rock.’ Zole helped Nona to her feet. ‘There are chambers in the ice that fill with meltwater until they reach a certain level then empty rapidly. The sudden changes in air pressure can be extreme.’
Zole called several halts as they went on, waiting for vents to blow. Each time they paused the ice’s blackness faded to grey around the shipheart. In one long gallery they passed the gauntlet of a dozen vents, each blowing to their own rhythm. Zole explained that the previous night’s surge of meltwater must be passing around them on its way to the hidden seas. The most powerful of the vents was fringed with icicles and blasted with regular ferocity. Nona learned the tempo of it before she crossed and was still almost driven from her feet by the tail end of the previous gust.
Nona marvelled at the volume of water that must have flowed through the gallery but it opened onto a chamber that dwarfed it. Nona could see no further than the shipheart’s glow but Zole described the space beyond as if a vast bubble had been trapped beneath the ice.
‘There are several exits we—’ Zole fell silent.
‘We what?’
‘Yisht is there.’
Nona heard a tremor in Zole’s voice for the first time and found it mirrored in her own. ‘Yisht? You said the Noi-Guin wouldn’t come near the black ice!’ She strained to see further into the darkness ahead. ‘You can’t get much more susceptible to devils than Yisht, right?’
‘Maybe, maybe not. Her mind is far from weak.’ Zole lifted the shipheart. ‘But Yisht no longer has need to fear the klaulathu.’
‘She doesn’t?’ Nona drew her sword.
‘No.’ Zole sat at the lip of the tunnel, setting her empty hand to the ice, ready to slide into the great chamber. ‘She is full.’
Yisht stood waiting for them close to the great drain at the lowest point of the bubble chamber, a yawning mouth into which thin cataracts of black water cascaded on all sides. Nona knew that nobody who fell down there would be coming out again. The hole seemed to exert a pull all its own, above and beyond that of gravity on a slope of slick, wet ice.
‘Why here?’ Nona hissed. She released a dagger, slid a foot down the ice, anchored the dagger, pulled the other clear. ‘Why wasn’t she waiting at the entrance?’
‘We might have run away,’ Zole replied, sliding lower. ‘Here she believes she has us trapped.’
Yisht had found, or cut a niche where she could stand. Zole and Nona remained on their sides, Nona anchored by her knife hand, Zole somehow finding purchase with her fingers.
Their enemy stood impassive, watching, her stocky figure statue-still. The shipheart’s violet light picked out edges, coaxing a detail here and there, the dark glimmer of an eye, the angular planes of her face, the razored length of her tular. Nona had already felt the kiss of a tular in Yisht’s hands. Her thigh still bore the scar. Her thighbone too had been notched by the jagged end of the ice-triber’s broken sword. The leg ached now as if the cold had entered her through the old wound.
It seemed somehow that through all Nona’s dreams of vengeance Yisht might have been waiting for her here within the cathedral vastness of this lightless cavern, black waters rushing past her, the meltwater rain falling endlessly around her.
Yisht saw the short game with unequalled clarity just as Abbess Glass saw the long game. Nona had difficulty seeing either, but somehow