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“That’s why I’m going alone,” Nona said.
Kettle finished binding Nona’s arms and tucked the end of the chain away. “If Clera doesn’t think she can disable the three of them quickly enough what makes you think you can?”
“That’s right.” Clera scowled. “I’m as fast as you are! These men aren’t pushovers. It just takes a moment for them to touch the right sigil and then—”
“Because I want to kill them.” Nona let Keot take her tongue, her voice becoming a snarl, something alien. “I hunger for their deaths. I want their blood to spill. I’ve been trapped, boxed, poisoned, abused, and now it’s my turn. I don’t fear destruction. It’s the desire to survive that slows you, girl. I—” Nona wrested control back from Keot, coughed and added in her normal voice, “If that’s all right with you?”
Clera, pale now, backed against the tunnel wall, her eyebrows raised, and offered her palms in the “be my guest” gesture.
Nona walked on alone, the ribbons of her smock loose around her, body filthy with grime and gore, her chained arms held up before her. Days of starvation had taken flesh from her bones and she hadn’t any to spare before she was captured. She put a limp into her step and hung her head as she came into the circle of the first lantern’s light.
“Ice!” An oath from the trio in the corridor ahead of her.
“Help me.” Croaked out, too soft for them to hear perhaps.
“It’s a girl.” The sound of swords clearing scabbards.
“One of their prisoners?” A deep voice.
“A child.” The one with a hint of sympathy. “Chained.”
“Get away!” Barked at her, harsh.
Nona kept up her advance all the while, slow, steady. “Help me.”
“We can’t help you, girl.”
“Get yourself back. There’s ways out. You might find one before they catch you.” This one took a certain pleasure in her predicament. The Noi-Guin would not be kind to any escaped prisoner.
“Help me.”
“I’m warning you! Come any closer . . .”
Nona set her fingertips to the chain and rippled her flaw-blades into being.
“Help.” She lifted her head. “Me.”
In the moment while the three men registered the alien blackness of her eyes Nona tore one arm across the other, shredding iron links beneath her blades. She scattered chain segments at the guards and sprinted the remaining five yards, hurling herself sideways into the air. Deep in the moment, Nona twisted to ride both above and below the sword blades reaching towards her. She hit all three men with her back to them, one arm extended to drive blades into the neck of the leftmost man, the other arm crooked to skewer the groin of the middle man, her legs tangling with the legs of the man on the right.
All of them fell. Before they hit the ground Nona had ripped her blades from the leftmost man’s neck and doubled up to stab the rightmost in the head. She cut short the cries of the groin-stabbed man with a slash across his throat.
Kettle and Clera ran from the shadows where corridor gave way to natural tunnel, and found Nona sitting across the three bodies, panting, blood arcs spattering the sigil-scribed walls.
“I thought we were going to . . . knock them out,” Clera said in a small voice.
Nona levered herself up, her exhaustion returning with a vengeance. “Let’s go.”
* * *
• • •
NONA WATCHED THE corridor while Clera and Kettle searched the dead for keys or anything else of use. The symbols etched into the walls pulled at the corners of her vision. Which of the sigils would collapse the tunnel Nona had no idea, but had there been even a single additional guard it would have been hard to stop them activating one and bringing the roof down. Had there been a whole barracks full of them, it would have been impossible.
Kettle distributed the throwing stars she had recovered from the bodies of her earlier targets. Nona found a length of rope in the barracks room to replace her chain belt. She thrust her Noi-Guin sword through it and accepted two stars from the nun.
Clera led them on, nerves showing. “I’ve no idea how you talked me into this, Nona.” She flattened herself against the wall and peered around the corner before moving on towards a flight of stone stairs. “I mean, I missed you . . . but I had a good thing going here. Sherzal and Lord Tacsis are—”
“Vicious maniacs who would fill the Corridor with blood just to float themselves a little higher than their already lofty stations,” Kettle finished for her.
“Well.” Clera advanced soft-footed up the stairs. “Yes.” She paused and advanced again. “But very rich.”
Nona brought up the rear, a throwing star in each hand.
I like your friend. Keot seemed louder in her skull than he had for some time.
An understanding struck Nona as moments of clarity sometimes do when all the parts of a problem come momentarily into some chance alignment. When I kill and rage . . . your grip on me grows stronger.
Only a silence where Keot should be.
And when I show mercy or kindness you’re driven to the surface.
“Nona!” Kettle beckoned her to the corner ahead. “Servants.” The nun reached a hand around Nona’s shoulder, the other arm around Clera, sharing her weight on the pair of them rather than her injured leg. “I’ll hide us.” Shadows rose to wrap them and although Nona still felt visible, albeit darkly shadowed, she knew that Kettle had worked the trick of hers that would deceive any casual and untrained eye into seeing nothing but perhaps a thickening and a flicker of the shade. She concealed them from the worry-faced servants who came and went. Of Sherzal’s guards there were few signs.
Stealth is best achieved in the patience trance. Nona had conquered the clarity trance first, and finally serenity, but she had never truly mastered patience. She tried though, focusing on her mantra, an image of a green shoot just broken through the soil and waiting to grow. She found that being exhausted helped. With Kettle’s weight on her shoulder and the shadows flowing cold around her, she found a kind of patience and schooled both her breathing and her footfalls to match the palace ambience, fitting them into the spaces provided by the moan of the wind, the distant clatter of feet or shutting of doors, the sounds that underwrote each day beneath that roof, unmarked and unheard.
They paused at a second flight of stairs.
“We’ve been incredibly lucky so far,” Kettle whispered. “So lucky it almost feels like a trap. We can’t count on things staying this way. Whatever problem is drawing the guards off is unlikely to keep them away for long.”
“Once I’ve got my hands on the shipheart it won’t matter,” Nona said. “Let them come.” She could feel its power even now, and Hessa’s memory promised so much more as they got closer.
The arm with which Kettle held Nona to her stiffened a little and, after a pause, the nun spoke. “A shipheart is a dangerous thing. As dangerous to the person who holds it as to anyone they aim that power at. If we’re going to do this I think I should be the one to carry it . . .”
“You can hardly walk!” Nona said.
“I don’t know what it would do to you, Nona.” Kettle’s voice was tight with conflicting concerns. “There are books at Sweet Mercy that say the shipheart is too strong for mortals to get close to. It twists them.” She was talking about Keot. Nona felt sure Kettle knew she carried a devil beneath her skin, and the nun didn’t believe her pure enough to touch a shipheart. It hurt to hear Kettle’s doubt in her. But it was probably well founded.
