flames and screams ahead of the catapult line the three nuns sped forward, swift and indistinct. They kept low and passed between two soldiers guarding the tent. Nona pushed at the man facing them with whatever marjal empathy she had: you don’t see us.
Kettle slit the pavilion’s billowing side, low down, and all three of them slid through in a trice on knees and elbows.
Nona understood their mistake the moment she came through. The interior was a single space lit by shifting colours as the sunlight penetrated the walls. The ground was uncovered grass. Five figures in the mottled white tunics of softmen stood around a man seated in a plain wooden chair at the centre. Softmen were dangerous enough on their own, assassins as deadly as the Noi-Guin, versed in their own martial arts and peculiar variants of shadow-work. It was the man at the centre who caught Nona’s attention though, even before she was off her knees. Sigils sewn in threads of silver and of gold overwrote the black velvet of his robe. Dozens of them. Such expense might be lavished on a king or queen, but here in this empty tent it meant only one thing. The whole thing was a trap designed to draw in the best assassins the enemy had. The man was clearly a mage, waiting here to ensure that none of those lured in would escape again. Either the Scithrowl had learned from their long haul across the Corridor not to signal where their battle commanders slept, or they had been deliberately stupid, sacrificing leaders, or perhaps even simply using actors, in a game of bait-and-switch. They must have known that the best of the empire’s assassins would strike in the last days and hours before they reached the emperor’s walls.
To their credit, Kettle and Bhenta rolled smoothly away on either side, coming to their feet while unleashing a barrage of throwing stars. Sadly the distraction that had allowed them to enter unobserved from the outside had simply let the softmen know that something was coming. Each of them held a pair of pain-sticks, thin iron rods about two feet in length. The sigil at the end, activated by shadow-work, caused such agony that even a light brush against exposed flesh would leave the victim screaming on the floor. The artefact that Thuran Tacsis called the Harm had been fashioned along the same principles.
With hunska speed the softmen deflected the hail of missiles, taking particular care to protect the man in their midst. The mage rose to his feet. He looked to be in his fifties, grey hair cropped short, a hard dark stare. A tattoo dominated his face, blue lines radiating from between his eyes. It had something of a flower about it. Also something of a spider spreading its legs. Nona knew him for a quantal. She couldn’t say how, except perhaps that he lacked any of the deformities common to many marjals who draw too deeply on the elemental arts or those rarer and more strange talents sometimes brought to bear.
‘Three! Three is a prize worthy of my efforts.’
Nona felt the man set foot on the Path. The weight of his footfall shuddered through the fabric of everything. He smiled. A Scithrowl Path-mage with decades of experience preparing to snuff out a trio of Grey Sisters who would likely have fallen to his softmen, though not without cost. Even if he knew Nona for a quantal he had nothing to fear, armoured as he was in sigils of the highest order. To her eye the robes were surely capable of draining thirty steps’ worth of Path energy to the void. More likely they would withstand fifty or even more. Nona had never come close to thirty steps. She had nearly died trying to own what she had taken from fewer than twenty steps outside the cave where Raymel Tacsis had come for her.
The anger that had been waiting its moment ever since she had first realized that she had led her sisters into a trap now burst loose inside Nona, an explosion against which the oil bomb’s flare seemed pale. An instant later, driven by that same fury, Nona hit the Path running.
This close to the Ark, Nona saw the Path with new clarity, finding it wide beneath her feet, though in truth it was no more beneath her than it was above. The Path was a mountain river, an avalanche, a lightning bolt all in one, all that and