“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.
“Well we’re not going to find out standing here.” Clera bumped them both back into motion.
With Clera’s direction and Kettle’s shadows the three of them wound their way deeper into the palace, through galleries and halls so numerous that Nona wondered who used them, and whether Sherzal saw any of these grand spaces more than once a year. They crossed a small internal courtyard, like a deep sky-roofed pit in the palace, at the heart of it a lonely fountain, and came at last to a corridor where an iron gate blocked their progress.
“Locked.” Clera ran her hands up the scroll-worked bars. “Solid.”
Kettle sat, leg held stiffly to the side, fresh blood glistening amid the dried. Taking three heavy picks from her sleeve, she addressed the lock. Within seconds the mechanism yielded, clunking as she rotated the picks together. “Done.”
They helped Kettle up and went on, advancing down a long lamp-lit corridor, passing many closed doors.
“We’re getting close,” Nona said. The shipheart’s presence pushed on her, filled her, set her nerves tingling, the feeling both exciting and a little terrifying.
“We are.” Clera shot her a look. “There’s a barracks room ahead and to the left. They say Yisht’s quarters are around here too, but I’ve not seen her since that day with the barrel.” Clera bit her lip, frowning. “And you know what? I really don’t want to see her again. Especially not when all I’ve got for protection is you two walking wounded.” She shrugged off Kettle’s arm. “We really should go back.”
“We’re going to get our shipheart!” Nona helped Kettle on alone.
“Sherzal’s guards are scared of Yisht.” Clera’s voice came from behind them now. She wasn’t moving. “They say she came back changed.”
“There’s a reason the shipheart was kept walled up in the caves,” Kettle said.
Nona’s mind was full of the shipheart now, close, powerful, the beat of it running through her, not kind, not comforting, just vast and endless.
I feel it too. Keot’s voice held a certain hunger.
You do?
Like a memory. I know this thing. It’s old, as old as I am. He sounded stronger by the moment.
But . . . the shiphearts are older than the empire! Nona wasn’t sure how old they were but certainly thousands of years. Enough time for nations to rise and fall, for knowledge to fail and be rebuilt. The shiphearts brought the tribes to Abeth.
Do you think so?
You don’t? Nona didn’t like the smugness in the devil’s voice. Everyone knows they did.
Maybe they drew your people here. They didn’t carry them.
What do you know about it? You never know the answer to anything interesting. All of a sudden you know things?
The heart is waking up my memories.
And why would it do that? Nona kept her eyes on the doorways ahead, trying not to let Keot distract her.
Because it’s where I was born.
Nona made no reply, returning her attention to the corridor. Keot’s certainty unsettled her. There was a draw to the shipheart’s presence. Perhaps the fascination that the flame holds for the moth. She felt its pull in the marrow of her bones.
They advanced around another corner. From her time with Hessa Nona knew that the shipheart had to be within fifty feet or so now. Keot blazed across her chest and down over her abdomen. He seemed to be feeding on the shipheart’s power in ways that Nona couldn’t understand. His natural anger and lust to kill began to bleed out into her. Earlier she had felt his grip on her weakening and thought that one day she might be able to drive him out. Kettle must know of the devil now, having worn Nona’s flesh and bones back in the Tetragode. What she might do about it was a problem for later. If there was a later.
A cold shiver ran through Nona, toes to head, pulling her away from thoughts of Keot. Something had changed. Suddenly the halls of Sherzal’s palace seemed echoingly empty, not conveniently empty but as if Nona had turned around in a crowded market square to find in that instant the place stood deserted with just the wind to stir the space where people should have been.
“She’s watching us,” Nona said, knowing it to be true though not knowing how. She tried to reach for her own anger rather than Keot’s and found only fear. Over her shoulder she saw that Clera was backing away.
The cracking of stone was their only warning. Shards of masonry broke from the wall at the margins of the area from which Yisht stepped. She emerged behind them, the stonework releasing her with reluctance, as if she were pulling free of thick mud.
Clera spun around with a squeal of fear. Nona and Kettle disentangled, turning as they did, the nun hopping
