“Where does it come from?”
“It’s the gift of the Hope.” Mickel tugged the door again. Nona held it open. One more tug and Mickel relented, hanging his head. “The Sis build their homes over the best of what remains in the Corridor. The emperors themselves built their palace above the Ark and bind the Academy to them with its power. We pay explorers to hunt beneath the ice.”
“My father—”
“Your father sold my predecessor much of what we keep here.”
Nona blinked and in her moment of surprise the preacher pulled the door free and slammed it between them.
Nona turned slowly from the doorway. The wind came laced with a cold rain. A graveyard lay before her, scores of headstones black in the moonless night. Her mother was dead. Her bones buried, waiting for the Hope. They would never speak again. Nona would never ask whether her mother truly sent her child away to save her from Sherzal’s revenge. She felt nothing, only an emptiness that reached up from her chest to constrict her throat. She stumbled between the headstones, dazed, trembling with a hurt that had no centre to it.
Where are we going? You said you’d kill someone. That was the deal when I helped you win your game with the tree and the box.
Nona straightened. The headstones were thinning out now, the ground overgrown with bramble. A few buildings lay ahead, lights at their windows, more behind them, their number building rapidly towards the town. The hurt and loss that had taken her breath contracted into a tight ball of rage. “I am going to kill someone.” She spoke it to the night and to the dead. “Perhaps a lot of people.”
Yisht? Is she first? How will you find her?
“I’m going to Sherzal’s palace and when I leave the emperor will only have one sister living.”
Something punched Nona in the shoulder. She turned and stared back into the darkness of the graveyard, trying to find her opponent. Her fingers discovered something like a narrow stick standing proud from her coat and she yanked it clear. A black shaft similar to Giljohn’s, but thinner. Another hit her just below the collarbone. Too late Nona dived for cover behind the nearest headstone. She could feel a stiffness in her muscles already, lock-up, the same toxin that Clera had jabbed her with on the day they parted company.
Did you see them? Keot asked.
No. The attacker had to be close: the darts couldn’t be fired more than thirty yards with any accuracy, but Nona hadn’t seen anything save blackness and hints of the graveyard. I can’t stay here. I need to kill them while I can still move. Was it the preacher? Or had Giljohn followed her for a second bite at the hundred sovereigns? If she were properly prepared she would have a dozen antidotes in her habit, but she had fled the convent empty-handed. Help me see!
Keot needed no encouragement. He poured into her eyes and when the burning sensation dulled enough for her to unscrew them Nona saw a world on fire. She gathered herself, ready to spring. Belatedly she pulled out the second dart and stared at the yellow line of it for a moment, trying to focus her thoughts. They refused to order themselves.
Something . . . different . . . on this one . . . groton? Was it really Giljohn again, after she had spared him?
With an oath Nona flung herself from cover, the graveyard revealing itself in shades of orange. She could see no attacker, only a clot of darkness beside one of the larger tombs sporting a winged Hope.
Darkness? Keot saw through darkness . . .
A third dart came hissing towards her out of that impenetrable inkiness. This one at least she could see. She reached for it with the remnants of her quickness, muscles screaming in protest. Darla had once described her father coming home drunk from a military banquet. Nona felt as if she were re-enacting Darla’s mimicry of her father’s uncoordinated stagger. The dart slipped past her grasping fingers and sunk into her flesh just above her left hipbone.
“Oh.” And she pitched forward into her own midnight.
25
ABBESS GLASS
WITH SISTER KETTLE gone from the convent Abbess Glass had to rely more heavily on Mistress Shade’s network of Grey novices for information on the inquisitors’ activities. Apple used her most trusted and promising candidates for the Grey to observe Brother Pelter and his watchers. However well trained the inquisitors might be nobody knew the convent better than the novices who grew up there, and it was easy enough to keep an open ear in most corners.
“Here comes trouble.” Glass watched Sister Spire cross the square, habit flapping around her legs, her walk close enough to a run that it might be called either. The abbess’s window comprised a dozen panes of puddle-glass, their unevenness lending a flowing quality to the nun’s approach. Sister Spire vanished around the corner of the building and Glass went to her desk to wait.
The knock came a minute later, evidence of Spire’s urgency.
“Come.”
The mistress of Mystic Class hurried in, her blunt face flushed, headdress tugged down across her forehead almost hiding the puckered burn there. Glass had discovered that the young nun had earned her scars carrying children clear of a house fire. The information had arrived the previous week in Archon Kratton’s report on the mission to the Meelar territory. Spire had spoken of the blaze when asked, but made no mention of returning for children.
“Ancestor’s blessings, abbess.”
“And to you, sister.”
“Novice Zole is missing!” Spire blurted out the words as if it were her failing.
“I see.” Glass folded her hands, elbows on the desk. “Do we know where she might have gone?”
Spire shook her head. “She’s taken her ranging equipment. Nobody saw her leave. One of the watchers asked me where she was this morning.”
“Well, if the Inquisition
