is that direction.’ She pointed. ‘Otherwise there is a possibility you will emerge from another more distant ring.’
‘Zole! Come home with me.’ Nona’s voice caught in her throat. The hardships of the journey, and being constantly caught between the mind-tearing power of the shipheart on one side, the invading malice of the klaulathu on the other, had left her weak, awash with broken emotion.
‘I want to,’ Zole said, her voice low.
‘Who did you promise?’ Nona took another step back. An idea blossomed within her skull repeated by voices that were hers and yet not hers. ‘Yisht was there to steal the shipheart … She was from your tribe!’ Nona had seen it when she saw Zole and Tarkax together with their companions, but she hadn’t understood it, not until this moment. They all had the same look. ‘Yisht was from your tribe … neither of you was working for Sherzal. Not really. You were both working for the tribe. To open the Ark whichever way you could!’ Nona stopped dead and tilted her head, staring at Zole as if she could tear the truth from her with the power of her will. ‘Hessa? Hessa was a price worth paying?’
‘I never intended for—’
An awful conviction seized Nona and in that moment she didn’t care whether it sprang from reason or from the devils of the Missing. ‘Who is Yisht to you? Cousin? Older sister? Mother …’
‘I—’
‘Whose promise is it that’s keeping you here?’ Nona was shouting. What dark vow would have Zole remain in this unholy place and see her scale two miles of black ice to begin a trek into the awful wilderness above? ‘Whose promise?’
‘I cannot say—’
‘Whose promise, sister?’ Nona put every ounce of her marjal skill behind the question to compel an answer, an effort so fierce that it even quietened the strange voices in her mind.
‘Abbess Glass. I promised Abbess Glass.’
And with that Zole threw the shipheart at Nona, hard, fast, straight and true. All around her the ring’s sigils lit with an ancient light. And Nona was falling, and though she clung to the moment she couldn’t save herself.
Without the passage of enough time for her heart to take a beat Nona stumbled through a free-standing metal ring. She stepped into a limestone cave, with the shipheart dropping from the hand she had used to ward it away. On every side the air was filled with broken flowstone, fragments tumbling lazily away, blasted from the ring that they had coated. And for the first time in an age Nona knew exactly where she was.
22
Present
Holy Class
The defenders behind Verity’s wall gave Nona free rein, which to her mind was a considerable lapse since she had come over from the Scithrowl side in the enemy’s uniform and the walls of the emperor’s own palace lay just two hundred yards further on. It seemed that she was so smoke blackened, muddy, and blood-spattered that others could no longer tell what she was wearing. In the general chaos at the base of the wall just not trying to kill anyone proved sufficient to identify her as not being Scithrowl.
She picked her way through the injured, lying haphazard in the wall’s shadow among scattered equipment. Carts stood laden with all manner of things from barrels of tar and sheafs of arrows to tight-wrapped bandages and water tubs. One cart was a foot deep in scattered pieces of antique armour, as if the grand houses had turned out their spares, and another sported dozens of fresh army tabards in the emperor’s green and gold, unsullied by use, as if someone expected to recruit fresh conscripts while the veterans rained down from on high, arrow-shot or run through with Scithrowl steel.
‘I know you.’ A young soldier bumped into her as his sergeant led the way to the nearest wall ladder.
‘Cage! From the Caltess!’ The soldier’s companion stopped to stare. ‘You are her! You have her eyes. You beat Denam—’
The man behind him pushed him on and the column passed Nona by, all of them staring, eager to distract themselves from the screams above and the zip of arrows sailing past.
Nona turned towards the nearest buildings. The city had long ago flowed out to press against boundaries that had once seemed foolishly over-generous. The houses of the great and the good stood cheek by jowl, crowding to find a place beside the emperor’s own. Close by, in the shadows of the city wall, nestled all the services that money likes to keep on hand.