and launched it before either archer had made it fifty yards. Iron’s spear gave chase and both struck their targets between the shoulder blades. The soldiers’ mail prevented them from being transfixed, but both fell, badly hurt.
Iron reached the two fallen archers first. One of the Scithrowl raised her hand for quarter. She received a quick death, the sweetest mercy on offer.
Abbess Wheel led her flock through the carnage, pausing only to recite St Hedgemon’s Cursed is the Heretic over the corpses. Many of the Holy Sisters paled as they passed the fallen. Ugly wounds gaping, the stink of death too ripe and real to ignore. The novices, closer to their training, seemed more composed, though Jula did retch once. Nona glanced across at Joeli, stepping over a man whose head lay at an odd angle, neck half-severed. At least her smug little smile had vanished.
Looking back, Nona saw that Apple had stopped among the dead with Kettle and Cauldron, all three of them tugging armour and clothes from corpses.
‘You were up all night reading that book, Jula?’ Nona asked, dropping back a few steps to walk beside her.
‘Ssssh!’ Jula motioned for Nona to keep her voice down, eye-pointing towards Joeli.
‘Did you find anything good?’ Nona moved closer.
‘I found out that I would have spent the time better practising with an axe.’ Jula swapped the weapon in question from her left shoulder to her right.
‘Wasn’t there anything useful in there?’
Jula made a sigh that turned into a yawn. ‘There’s a lot in there. Aquinas seemed pretty confident about it all. But without seeing the parts of the Ark he claims to be describing I’ve no way of knowing if it’s all a fever dream. And even if it makes any sense at all to someone inside the Ark sanctum it still doesn’t mean that any of it would actually work.’
‘You didn’t bring the book with you, did you?’ Nona asked.
‘Of course not. You told me to hide it. I memorized what I thought was most important … Though I should have stuffed it under my habit. It’s good and thick. Could probably stop an arrow!’
Nona glanced at Joeli once more, now closer to them and feigning indifference, then returned to her place behind Wheel.
On the Rutland Road leading into Verity they joined an almost continuous line of wagons, carts, ragged soldiers, worn travellers, whole villages afoot, driving the flocks before them. Despite the crowding a sizeable space opened up around the convent cart and its iron casket. People moved out of the way whether there was room or not, and lingered behind with troubled expressions.
A battalion from the Seventh Army under General Jalsis was stationed in and around a large commandeered farmhouse close to the road. Possibly the plan had been to oversee the safety of incoming refugees, though the place looked more like a field hospital now, treating casualties from ongoing skirmishes out across the nearby fields.
Abbess Wheel began the battle hymn again and the sisters joined in. Many of those on the road took up the song and it seemed to lift them. For a moment Nona felt a pang of sadness at the thought that Clera would have liked this part. She was always proud of her voice. Their friendship had fallen into pieces and now the world seemed to be doing the same thing. Nona only hoped that, as with Clera, some element of what had been precious would survive.
Things grew more chaotic the closer they got to Verity. The officer that General Wensis had appointed to direct their efforts was called away by a senior officer to join a small group of cavalry. They galloped off towards the north gates, trampling crops and leaping hedges. A vast wave of smoke rose from the east of the city, subsuming the smoke of all the lesser fires. Nona knew a great battle must be raging but even though the nuns had dropped their song she could hear nothing save the wind, the creak and rattle of carts, and the worried complaint of peasants. It amazed her that things had come to this so swiftly, but Sister Tallow had often said when teaching the lessons of war that a defence could hold and hold and suddenly, like a dam collapsing, be swept away with little warning.
They passed bodies by the roadside, peasants, farm labourers, travellers, some hewn down by sword or axe, some studded with arrow shafts, some blackened and burned. Not all were dead but any that