the darkest hours. Faith!’ She stared past Nona at the ranks of novices behind, daring any to disagree. Her gaze returned to Nona. She drew back her hand. ‘Perhaps I was wrong about you …’ A shake of her head. ‘Perhaps.’
The old woman embraced her as every abbess must embrace each soul called to the Ancestor’s service.
‘May I serve, abbess?’ Nona went to her knees as all novices do to receive their orders, rising again as nuns.
Wheel stood above her. She patted the front of her habit, then frowned as if remembering some annoyance. Her fingers paused over a lump beneath the cloth. The frown deepened. She reached to her neck and drew from beneath her collar a necklace of prayer beads, the Ancestor’s tree in gold on a silver chain, the keys to her front door and … on a knotted leather thong, her seal of office. Nona had tied it around Wheel’s neck during their embrace just a moment before. She hoped that she had hidden the act in the moment as Mistress Shade had taught her. Times when all eyes are upon you are often those when such sleight of hand is most easily accomplished.
‘A day of miracles!’ A rare smile twisted the abbess’s lips. She took the seal and pressed it to Nona’s lips. ‘Stand, Sister Cage, stand!’
And Nona stood. Sister Cage of Sweet Mercy Convent, Bride of the Ancestor. Holy Sister.
‘Novice Arabella!’ Abbess Wheel called. ‘Approach the steps.’
16
Three Years Earlier
The Escape
Nona crouched in the margins of the shipheart’s glow and watched the devils slowly leach from Yisht’s corpse into the ice, a sliding patchwork of grey moving across the woman’s hands. Rats abandoning a ship that had sunk.
One patch of colour lingered on the back of Yisht’s hand even as others flowed over, under, and around it. In the end it remained, sinking by fractions towards the two fingertips that touched the ice and through which the rest had drained into the greater blackness.
For a moment the blasting of vents and the gurgling of meltwater in hidden channels fell almost silent.
‘Keot?’ A whisper. In this frozen place of horrors, so deeply buried, anything familiar could be counted a comfort. Even a devil carved from the mind of one of the Missing aeons ago. ‘Is that you?’
Nona sensed no reply. Whatever fault line had let the devil into her when she killed Raymel Tacsis no longer seemed wide enough to admit Keot. Killing Yisht had been an empty thing. Even now, with the woman’s torso cooling in front of her and her severed head lying somewhere in the dark, Nona felt no satisfaction in the deed, just the echoing loss of her friends.
Nona watched while Keot finally drained away and she wondered whether it had been him who had made the knife slip from Yisht’s fingers as she tried to block that final blow. Some things were beyond knowing. Nona left Yisht’s body untouched. The woman might be carrying things of use, but the Noi-Guin often set traps in unused pockets with venomed needles for the unwary, and Nona had no wish to find out if it was a habit Yisht had acquired too. She stood and waited, timing the blasts from the vents, and crossed to the shipheart.
Even moving the shipheart awkwardly before her with the tip of her sword brought Nona far deeper into the thing’s radiance than she felt she could endure for long. The light dazzled rather than illuminated, seeming unaffected by niceties such as whether her eyes were open or closed. The shipheart drove from her mind the insidious whispers haunting the dark all around her, but replaced them with a louder muttering that bubbled many-voiced from her own interior darkness.
‘I don’t know where I’m going. I’ve forgotten why I’m going there.’ Nona spoke so that her own voice would sound louder than any of the competition. She nudged the shipheart ahead. It rolled a few feet and stopped. On the blade of her sword Yisht’s blood looked black in the strange light.
As she approached the bubble-shaped chamber where they had first encountered Yisht, Nona took care that the shipheart not run away from her. If it went over the lip where the tunnel met the chamber it would roll down to the bottom and vanish down the throat that had claimed Zole.
Nona sheathed her sword and took a knife in her left hand. ‘I have to do this.’ She gathered around her all that could be found of her serenity