“More about shiphearts in one page than I’ve discovered in all the books I’ve searched through since we started looking!” Jula grinned. “According to Levinin there were four shiphearts within the empire’s boundaries: the one at Sweet Mercy which is most closely tuned to quantals; another we knew about in the Noi-Guin’s keeping at the Tetragode, which is attuned to marjals; one he says is rumoured in the city of Tru; and one from a gerant ship in the keeping of the mage Atoan.”
Ara frowned. “I’ve never heard of a city called Tru or a mage called Atoan. And if a shipheart were in a city someone would own it or it would get taken.”
Jula nodded. “Levinin was writing two hundred years ago. Tru is under the ice now. The black ice! And it was ruins before the ice took it. Tru’s a city the Missing left. And Atoan died years ago but he had a son Jaltone who was also a mage and somehow is still alive!”
“Him I’ve heard of,” Darla said. “He lives on the coast and helped General Hillan when the Durnish tried to land at Port Treen two years ago. My father was the general’s second-in-command.”
“It’s interesting and everything . . .” Ruli said. “But I don’t see how it helps us. We’re not going to walk up to the Tetragode and—”
“It helps us because we know where Sherzal will have to look next,” said Ara.
“And we are going to the ice . . .” Everyone went on the ice-ranging in Mystic Class. Over the ice though, not under it. Nona remembered her father’s tales about hunting in the ice tunnels. The worst of them, the scariest stories, were from the time he ventured into the grey ice. The trip he never came back from was the one to the black.
“The ice is a big place. And Tallow is never going to take us up to the black ice. Even if it wasn’t on the Scithrowl side of the mountains.” Darla shivered. “Let’s go explore some caves!”
Nona looked around the circle of lantern-lit faces. “Any more contributions? No?”
Jula bit her lip. “Well I thought it was interesting.” She shrugged and led off.
• • •
IT TOOK LESS than half an hour’s walk to reach the furthest limit of their explorations, but to expand their territory initially had taken the best part of a year, following dead ends or routes that grew too narrow or too dangerous. In several places they had fixed knotted ropes to aid in difficult climbs. It was Nona’s private hope that they would find an alternative route into the convent undercaves but there were no guarantees that the two systems connected.
“I love it down here.” Jula fell in beside Nona as they trekked the Gullet, a long water-smoothed passage wide enough to walk shoulder to shoulder. “It’s so quiet. Just the drip of water. And footsteps. And Darla swearing.”
They passed a stand of stalagmites, blunt and glistening in the lantern light. Ketti said nothing. Even she had grown tired of her innuendo after the tenth or twelfth time. A little further along a veil of dripping water crossed the passage. Nona hunched and pressed on through the icy deluge. Five tight winding twists rising steeply took them past the niche where two skeletons lay, limed over with rock-scale. One grown and one a child, locked together. A rusty stain between them may once have been a knife. They always made Nona sad, huddled there in the dark, watching with empty sockets as the centuries scurried by.
After the rising turns came a scramble up a rockfall, with the cavern roof slanting just three feet above. Finally a cliff some twenty yards high, perhaps once a waterfall, the wet stone offering few handholds. Fortunately the old watercourse had allowed room to swing and throw a grapple. The locating and pilfering of both rope and hook had taken a week but the hours spent trying to catch some edge far above them had seemed much longer. On perhaps the seventieth throw Darla had snagged the hook and Ruli, the lightest of them, had scrambled up. The rope was now secure and knotted at intervals. Climbing it brought them to the limits of their exploration, a roundish chamber, mud-floored, from which three new passages led.
Nona stood with Ara, Jula, and Ruli, catching their breath, staring at the exits, Ketti and Darla still climbing behind them.
“I want to get under the convent,” Nona said. She blinked. She hadn’t been intending to speak, but now the words had left her mouth she realized it was better that the truth was out. For three years she had seen the only route to revenge on Yisht to be training. To make herself into a weapon suited to the task of finding then destroying the woman. Neither would be easy. The empire was large, and Yisht expert at hiding, deadly when found. Nona had been very lucky in their first encounter and had still only just survived. But Joeli’s taunting had put into Nona’s mind the idea that there might be some clue at the spot where Hessa died. Something the nuns had overlooked. Something her friend had left for her alone. It was a very faint hope. Too faint perhaps to justify exposing her companions to such dangers . . . but Joeli’s words were an itch that refused to be scratched. “Hessa’s name is so important to you? And yet you’ve never even visited the spot where she died.” The accusation repeated in her mind, an echo that grew rather than died away.
“I need to visit the shipheart vault.” Nona spoke the words into the silence that had followed her first statement.
“Because we won’t be in enough trouble just for being in the tunnels,” Ruli said. “We should go where we’re more likely to be caught and will have broken more rules.”
Jula frowned. Despite her cleverness sarcasm always seemed to go over her head. “But—”
“I’m banned from leaving the
