Jula snorted at that. “Did you bring a weapon?”
Nona pulled out the knife they’d discovered on their last exploration.
Ara frowned at it. “That’s the same as before . . . you know, the one they tried to assassinate you with. It’s Noi-Guin!”
“It’s the same as the shadow-poisoned one that got stuck in Kettle,” Nona said. “One very persistent assassin, three knives. I must have hurt their pride by surviving.”
“Do you think the . . . monster . . . scared the Noi-Guin away too?” Ruli shivered, then hugged herself as if to show it was just the wind.
“I’m guessing so.” Nona put the knife back inside her habit. “What did you bring?”
“Half a quarterstaff!” Ara reached back into the crevice they’d been waiting in. “I guess that’s an eighth-staff?”
Nona grinned: she recognized it as one she’d broken when Joeli’s friends caught her.
“I got a hammer from the cooper’s stores.” Ruli let it slip from her sleeve into her hand.
“This.” Jula sheepishly produced a frying pan. “It’s all I could get.”
“And Sister Coal won’t beat you as hard if she catches you stealing from the kitchen as Sister Tallow would if she caught you stealing from Blade stores!” Nona nodded.
“Are we being stupid here?” Ara frowned at her broken staff. “There’s a monster down there we know nothing about, and Jula has a frying pan.”
“Maybe.” Nona put her knife in Jula’s other hand and folded her fingers around the hilt. “But they’re going to send us out into the world soon enough and we’ll be expected to deal with whatever we find. If we can’t even face up to something on our own doorstep . . . under our own doorstep . . . what use are we?” She flexed her hands and brought the flaw-blades into existence shimmering briefly. “And I brought my own weapons.”
• • •
THE FISSURE WAITED for them as it had always waited, hidden before there were people to hide from. Ara led the way into the corridor, lantern held high. The entrance held that faint rankness of old bones, damp stone, and rotting vegetation. A few dozen yards took them past the point where even the most shade-loving plant could cling to survival using whatever light bled through the entrance and soon the only smell was that of wetness on rock. They retraced their steps, a familiar route now, none of them speaking. Nona felt the weight of stone above her, the walls pressing in, the heavy silence. In places their footsteps echoed, elsewhere an emptiness, like that of the Ancestor’s dome, swallowed the sound.
“I’ve worked out why I like this place so much,” Jula said.
Nona looked back from her inspection of the long scramble up towards the chamber with the three exits. “Yes?”
“It’s the wind.”
“There isn’t any.”
“Yes. And it’s not just that. There’s no wind inside at the convent, but you can always hear it. Here, there’s nothing.”
“Serenity now.” Nona let the lines of the children’s song run through her head. “It will work. That girl at the Academy tried to make me run with her shadows. Serenity kept them from me.
“She’s falling down, she’s falling down . . .” Nona muttered the words beneath her breath and her serenity rose around her like the sides of a deep well.
Beside her Ara, Ruli, and Jula each walked their own path into the serenity trance.
“Let’s go.” Ara began to climb.
Ten minutes later the tunnel that led to the holothour and its cave of horror yawned before them. Ara walked on without a word. Nona and Jula followed, Ruli at the rear.
“I can feel it.” Nona’s skin prickled as if a thousand eyes watched her from the dark.
It can feel you. Keot rose across the back of her neck like a scald and her anger rose with him, darker emotions too, palpable through the thick velvet wrapping of her serenity.
“Me too.” Ruli sounded calm, almost sleepy.
The light from Ara’s lantern reached out across stone walls smoothed by ancient waters. Thick, glistening deposits of limescale coated every surface, like treacle frozen in mid flow, somehow organic, as if they were advancing down the gullet of some vast beast.
Nona wore her serenity as if it were a protective bubble, extending yards past the reach of her arms, beyond even the limits of their illumination, with the fear pushing at its borders a distant thing. Ahead, shapes loomed among the shifting shadows, the rock-bound skeletons of the holothour’s victims.
The four girls pressed tight together, calm but seeking the comfort of one another’s warmth and a side from which attack would not come. The ancient night of the cave began to roll back before the lantern’s advance, leaving calcified skeletons behind like rocks revealed by retreating waves. Shadows swung.
“It’s coming.” A whisper.
Nona felt it, like a squall racing across the flatness of open fields, something big, something vast that would carry her off. The walls seemed to pull away, the touch of her friends fade to nothing. Every fear she owned hurtled towards her out of the night at terrifying speed.
Then it struck.
The bubble of her serenity collapsed in less than a heartbeat, from something wide and confident to the thinnest skin moulded to her body with the holothour’s unclean touch scratching dry-fingered across every inch. In a moment Nona hung high above herself, seeing her body in the small patch of illumination, a tight circle around her, and beyond that an endless void both wholly empty and full of implacable hate.
Run!
It wasn’t Keot’s command that set Nona turning to flee, it was the sound of running feet. The sound of being abandoned. She glimpsed Ruli’s white face, stretched into a scream, horror in every line. Jula shrieking, dropping her knife as she started to run. Ara crashing into the nearest wall as she ran blind. The terror breached Nona’s barriers and flooded through her. She tore off after Ruli, Keot demanding she run faster.
Ruli leapt Ara’s sprawled body. Nona followed. Ara’s collision with the wall had
