Now, anchored by the thickness of the gates themselves, Nona set her other hand, palm out, to the other gate. And pushed. When she punched the door had no time to move and so she punched through. Now she pushed with slow, inexorable force. Anchored to the left-hand gate, she couldn’t move back. Instead the gate had to take all the pressure. She curled around, setting her shoulder and hip to the other gate, using all the core strength of her body, magnified a thousand times by the fading energies taken from the Path. Behind her the rumbling clatter of the carriage grew ever closer.
With squeals of protest the bolts above and below began to fail, pieces of stone shooting away, shards of wood as long as an arm breaking free as the housings gave way. A shadow loomed. Time had run out. Sherzal’s carriage smashed into the gates, Nona caught between its hammer blow and the gates’ anvil.
A moment of darkness, of light, of whirling motion, screams and broken wood. Nona found herself on the ground with something huge rushing above her.
47
THE ROAD DOWN from the side valley that housed Sherzal’s palace was a long curving sweep of modest gradient. It ended at the highway that threaded the Grand Pass.
Despite the arrow transfixing her left calf Ara had managed to scramble on top of the carriage, climb to the heavily damaged front, and find the braking levers. The slope was too steep for the brakes to fully arrest the carriage’s motion but they helped to tame it.
Steering proved to be a different matter. The carriage steered itself by scraping along the rocky wall where engineers had cut into the valley’s side to make the road. It was a process that removed a new section of the carriage’s side every twenty yards or so and threatened, at every collision with a larger outcropping, to send them all veering across the narrowness of the road to pitch over the drop into whatever heart-stopping fall the darkness hid.
Eventually, with about two-thirds of the mile-long journey to the pass road complete, the ruins of Sherzal’s grand carriage lurched sideways and came to a halt with the front right wheel hanging over an unknown drop. Ara stood panting, braced against the brake lever.
A minute’s work saw most of the carriage’s passengers disembarked, or carried off. Two older men had been killed by arrows that found their way past shutters and seat bases. A matronly woman in a voluminous dress had been shot through the shoulder, the arrow still in place, its steel head emerging from her back. Regol, Kettle, and Ara kept close around the abbess.
• • •
NONA CRAWLED FROM beneath the wreckage of the carriage, her arms aching, legs scraped and torn. She had lunged for the axle and let it drag her, with only the fading power of the Path to shield her from harm.
“Nona!” Ara hobbled across to help her up. Behind Ara Nona could see the distant flames licking up above Sherzal’s walls. She hoped the conflagration would spread and gut the place from lowest cellar to tallest tower.
“Where’s Clera?” Nona asked looking over the survivors.
“She never got in,” Ara said.
“I called to her.” Kettle pressed her mouth into a speculative pucker. “She backed away into the smoke.”
“But—” It made no sense. The abbess would have taken her back. Nona knew it.
“She made a choice, Nona.” Abbess Glass spoke in a low voice. “She helped you when you needed help, but she fancied her chances better with the emperor’s sister.”
Nona looked around her. Starlight washed the roadway through a wind-torn hole in the clouds. It lit the ruined carriage, one side torn away, the roof sagging, and shone red across a score of Sis in ballgowns and formalwear, ill-suited for walking the mountains. Many bore injuries, including Kettle, Ara, and herself. Her gaze settled on Regol, the only fighter among them fit for combat, save for Melkir.
“My lady.” He executed a half-bow, showing her that same old smile, even now.
She found herself suddenly aware of how tattered and inadequate her smock was, the wind playing it around her, and how filthy everything beneath it lay. “Regol.” She had meant to tell him she was a novice rather than a lady, but she wasn’t sure she was either right at that moment. And with his gaze upon her she was no longer sure which she would rather be.
“Every time I dine somewhere that you are also a guest, Nona, I find myself attacked.” He rubbed his jaw as if remembering a punch. “By the same woman!”
“Safira?” Kettle stepped forward. “Is she . . .”
“I punched her pretty hard,” Regol said. “But she’ll get up again. I can’t claim it as a fair fight, though.”
“Are we safe?” Terra Mensis broke into their circle, cradling her injured wrist. She seemed to have picked up new injuries in the carriage and sported a livid bruise across most of the left side of her face.
“I rather doubt it,” Abbess Glass replied. “Sherzal will send her soldiers after us. How soon depends on how bad a fire we left her with, but I can’t see us outrunning them.”
As if to answer her the sky cleared further and beneath the starlight the whole curve of the road could be seen, leading back to the broken gates of the palace. A troop of perhaps fifty soldiers was advancing along it at speed. They’d covered half the distance already.
• • •
NONA SET HER back to the rocks beside the road, as spent as she had ever been. Yisht had called friends a weakness. The pain that Hessa’s death, and now Darla’s, had caused her was very different from that of the Harm, but it was deeper and longer-lasting. A weakness, though? It had been friendship that had Kettle follow her half the length of the empire, friendship that had Clera spirit her
