and bent to pick up the ball of light. It seemed to weigh nothing and to burn her bones. With a snarl she stepped over the edge into the void beyond.
She slid nearly to the maw at the chamber’s base before her knife found sufficient purchase to bring her to a halt. All around her narrow streams of meltwater divided the ice, cutting deeply into it before spraying out into the shaft. A dozen voices filled Nona’s head and she could hardly tell which of them, if any, was hers.
‘… ooona!’
‘What?’ Nona tried to concentrate. She needed to edge around the hole and somehow climb the far side of the chamber one-handed in search of another exit. She wondered if her father’s explorations had ever left him this terrified, this lost …
‘Noooo!’ A distant echoing cry amid the cacophony inside her skull. ‘Na!’
‘What?’ Nona lifted the shipheart for greater illumination but the shaft dropping away just beyond her heels devoured its light and gave nothing in return. ‘Who’s there?’ She bit down on further questions. Even she knew better than to talk to the voices. It made them real. Helped them break free.
‘… ole!’
‘I know you’re a hole.’ Nona lay cold against the wet ice, anchored by the point of her knife, the shipheart burning in her hand and in her mind. ‘I’m talking to the hole …’
‘Zoooole!’
‘Zole?’ Nona sat up.
‘… heart!’
‘What?’ she shouted.
‘Need the …’
Nona felt suddenly terrified. ‘You’re in my head, aren’t you? One of my devils …’
‘… eeeeed …’
Nona stared into the inky nothing before her. ‘You want me to drop the shipheart into that hole? After all I’ve been through to keep it?’ A laugh spluttered past teeth beginning to chatter with the cold once more. All around her the ice had paled to a translucent grey. Of course the devils wanted her to throw the shipheart away. It was all that was keeping them from sliding beneath her skin and turning her into something worse than Yisht.
‘Noooonaaa?’
The voice seemed to echo up from the depths where Zole had fallen, but so many other voices clamoured for attention. How could she accept any of them as real?
‘Zole?’ She leaned forward, yelling into the hole.
‘… ooow it to meeee’
‘Throw it to you?’ Nona’s laugh came edged with hysteria. ‘You’re dead!’ The shipheart burned her and splintered her thoughts but it was also precious beyond measure and the only source of light in this place of endless darkness.
The voice in the hole fell silent while those in Nona’s skull grew louder.
‘Zole?’
Nothing.
‘Zole?’
Only the clamour behind her forehead as her mind began to break into the fragments that would drive her mad. It was the silence that convinced her. Zole would never plead. The ice-triber had said her piece and there was nothing more to say.
Nona looked into the glare. Zole had called it an Old Stone. No part of Nona wanted to let it go, even as it hurt her. She tilted her palm and felt the voices falter. The greatest treasure she had ever held rolled across her fingers. The shipheart fell from her hand, rolled to the edge and dropped suddenly from view. A rapidly descending band of violet light lit the black gullet, finding the occasional gleam from faults and fractures. A moment later it was gone and Nona sat alone, blind in the dark.
Time needs something to be counted against. Nona had nothing except for the slowly building pressure as the devils made their return to the ice beneath her. The shipheart’s presence had driven them from it and now they reclaimed what was theirs. She felt their malice like tiny claws, trying to slice a way under her skin.
‘I won’t die here.’ Numb fingers fumbled a second dagger from her belt and she turned to begin the climb back to the tunnel. She would rather stagger back into the Corridor half-dead and fight the Noi-Guin than face insanity alone in the freezing dark.
She reached, stabbed, and hauled herself up. With no light she might miss the entrance entirely but trying would at least warm her a little.
What followed was a long, blind nightmare of stabbing, straining, and slipping. Nona had no idea how many minutes or hours she laboured at it, how many times she slid back, how many times she cursed the Ancestor. She even called upon her father’s ghost for help.
‘I can’t …’ She hung on the ice wall, so steep it was near vertical. The strength had left her arms and