Run! Keot fled into her eyes and suddenly the passage ahead revealed itself to her as if the stone itself were glowing with a reddish light.
Nona got five more steps, each slower than the last, before Jula overtook her, habit flapping.
Run! The voice that filled her brain rang with terror as the holothour’s fear infected even the devil. It’s an old one. Too powerful!
“She’s my friend.” The words brought Nona to a halt as effectively as a rope about her neck. She turned. Ara moved her head, groaning, the lantern lying on its side close to her hip. Keot retreated from her eyes, unwilling to see what followed them.
Take the lantern and run!
Nona took one step back towards Ara, then another, bowed as if braving a headwind. It wasn’t that her fear had gone, simply that a greater one drove her, the thought of Ara’s bones lying with the rest, slowly devoured by stone, a constant silent accusation that the foundation of her own existence lay as hollow as the Rock of Faith.
“No . . .” A whisper. Trembling in each limb, Nona stepped over Ara for a second time and faced the darkness. “No!” A shout.
She stood in an invisible wind. At the back of her head Keot hung, bleeding out into the air, trying to free himself from her skin and flee back to the Path. The intensity built: the cave’s empty night reverberated with it, skins of stone shattered from the walls, warm blood ran from Nona’s eyes and nose. She sank to her knees beneath the weight of it, every nerve screaming to run.
The rocks around her began to bleed. An awful rasping breath shuddered through the blackness. And out there a howling hate, condensing. A darker clot of night. The stench of decay surrounded her. Screams of pain worse than the abbess had made when they’d burned her. A novice emerged into the trembling illumination, thin limbs, rotting skin, dragging a withered leg, lifting up her face. Hessa!
RUN!
“No.” A whisper.
And suddenly the fear blew out. From one moment to the next it had gone. The darkness was again just darkness. Nona fell forward onto all fours and vomited everything she had in her.
• • •
JULA AND RULI came back, patting their way along the walls. They emerged pale-faced into the light to find Ara kneeling by Nona, holding Nona’s hair back as she wiped drool from her mouth.
“Where is it?” Ruli bent to pick up the hammer she’d dropped. It shook in her hand.
“Gone, I think.” Nona spat and rose to her knees.
What does she mean, where is it? Keot sounded weak, distant, he shivered over the very surface of her skin.
She means, where is it?
That was it. Holothour have nothing so primitive as flesh.
“I think it’s gone.” Nona helped Ara up, raising her fingers to the scrape on Ara’s forehead. “You’re all right?”
“You should see the other girl.” Ara managed a grin. It was an old joke.
“I see what you mean.” Jula tapped her frying pan to the wall where Ara had collided with it, and more layers of stone cracked away.
Ara scooped up the lantern. “Come on.”
She led them back.
“Where are all the bones?” Ara held the lantern high. The cavern floor lay clear of anything but rocks and stalagmites. Further back something large and circular loomed.
“Were the skeletons part of it? Like the fear?” Ruli whispered. “In our heads?”
“There’s one here.” Jula pointed at a limed skeleton sprawled between two rocks. “Just the one, like those two in the niche. The rest were illusion?”
Nona turned towards the object at the limits of the lantern light and advanced with Ara. It was a ring, four yards across, standing upright with the lowest part of it buried in the stone floor. The ring itself was the thickness of a roof beam and covered in flowstone, stalagmites and stalactites decorating the top of the arch.
“What is it?” Jula stopped and they all stopped with her.
“Something the Missing left,” Nona said.
“No?” Ruli looked at her, round-eyed.
“Anyone could have put it here,” Jula said. “The people who built the pillars.”
“Sister Rule said it takes two hundred years for a stalactite to grow an inch,” Nona said. “How long would you say those were?”
“Two feet? Three?” Ruli stepped closer.
“That’s the best part of ten thousand years since someone knocked them off last.” Nona advanced too, her voice a whisper. “We should push on.” She looked past the ring to the back of the cavern where two tunnels led off, one rising, one falling. “Which way, Jula?”
“Shouldn’t we . . .” Jula returned her gaze to the ring.
“It’s been there forever. I need to see where Hessa died.” She saw the others’ doubt. “It’s the key to finding Yisht and recovering the shipheart,” she added, with more confidence than she felt.
“That one.” Jula nodded towards the tunnel heading up.
Ara led off, touching her fingers to her forehead every now and then. “Did you . . . come back for me?” she muttered as Nona came close.
“I tripped over you.”
They walked on in silence.
Your friends will get you killed. I don’t understand why you need them. Keot ran along the veins of her right arm, faint and petulant. Especially the other two. They’re weak. There’s no gain.
Nona thought about it. About the ties that bound her to those she had named her friends. Sister Pan’s words returned to her, how she described the Path and the threads that bound each thing to every other thing, a web of influence and dependence, invisible, eternal, ever-changing.
I’ve been at this convent five years, Keot, and I’ve learned to believe in something more than myself. All this time Wheel has been banging on about the Ancestor, about all those who came before and have gone beyond. But the larger thing I believe in is what’s here and now. Those novices are my friends and I would die for them. I would face
