Again! Keot urged.
Nona threw the material out, drew it back, threw it out, drew it back. She threw again. It snagged! She pulled. The knife’s weight resisted her. It seemed well entangled. She pulled harder. Somewhere outside, close at hand, something fell with a clatter . . . a small bell perhaps?
The door began to open almost immediately. Nona pulled harder. The knife resisted. She pulled harder still . . . and the smock came free with a tearing sound.
A figure stood in the doorway, one of the Lightless, framed by illumination that had seemed barely enough to see by when Nona had been escorted down the corridor, and now made her screw up her eyes.
The man bent down and picked up the cord that tied the knife in the cell to the bell that had rested just outside the door. He looked at her, lying there before him, his face too shadowed for any expression to be read, then backed out, closing the door behind him. A key turned in the lock.
A game. He was sitting just outside all this time. Waiting. Keot sounded grudgingly appreciative.
Nona opened her mouth to curse her gaoler, or Keot, or both, and finding she had no words sufficiently vile, closed it again. She levered herself to her knees and retreated to the wall, wrapping herself in failure, misery, and the tatters of her smock.
• • •
“A CORD.” NONA wondered how she had missed seeing it. Even disguised and in a darkened room the cord shouldn’t have escaped her. She had been trained to see. She sat up straighter, shrugging off self-pity, and applied her training, focusing on the memory of a flame, the start of the route into her clarity trance. Not every discipline she had learned could be forbidden by sigil-marked iron.
Clarity settled upon Nona, frosting across her skin, cleansing the darkness of ambiguity, and bringing every faint sound into focus as if the instrument of her being had been tuned to perfection. Nona isolated one sense then the next as Sister Pan had taught her, then brought all five together. She could hear the man outside the door draw breath, exhale, draw breath. The dark still hid what it hid, but those shapes it did offer were extracted and given meaning. Nona ran her fingertips across her restraints, learning all their secrets, from the sigils cut into the curved iron to the details of hinge and clasp.
“Nothing.”
The iron peg that anchored the end of the chain attached to her ankle cuff had been driven between two great stones in the wall, held there more by the weight pressing on the stone above it than by the mortar filling the joint.
Nona moved the chain to one side and pulled, bracing her legs against the floor and tugging slightly upward.
Every prisoner tests their chains. If they came loose then the gaolers would replace them with stronger ones. An untold number of desperate men and women have tested these cells before you and helped refine them.
Why don’t you help me then? Nona replied. When I die you’re going back to lurking on the boundary where Raymel found you.
There’s nothing I can do. I can’t make you stronger.
Nona put her head back against the cold stone wall. They had taken her blades, taken all of the marjal skills she had been working on in private. Her flame-work was still remedial, her rock-work hardly enough to fracture a pebble, but both might have been useful. They had shut her off from the Path and threads. All they’d left her was her speed.
With a lever I could turn this pin. Work it free. Nona imagined a steel rod narrow enough to slide through the eye of the pin alongside the last link of chain. With a long enough lever and a fulcrum a person could move the world.
You don’t have a lever.
It doesn’t have to be a lever. Anything that could wrap it, grip it, allow her to apply her strength further out to twist it. If she held the pin in her fist and tried to rotate it she could break her bones and not move it a degree. If the pin were fixed at the centre of a cart-wheel she could grip the outer rim and twist it with little effort no matter how tightly it was anchored.
You don’t have anything else. Keot sounded as if he were already thinking of his return to the chaos he came from and of his next escape. Nona doubted opportunities came along often. Perhaps there wouldn’t be another chance for Keot before the ice closed and the moon fell.
Nona began to wind the chain around the wall pin. After one turn the second layer of chain started to slip off the first. There wasn’t enough pin exposed to wrap one turn next to the other, and no point to that anyway. She needed to build out.
Slowly and with enormous care she managed to wrap three turns around the pin, each layer of chain resting on the one below, but inevitably the whole lot began to slide, then collapsed and fell off the pin.
She knelt, the gritty stone hurting her knees, racking her brain for other ideas. How many prisoners had done the same before? How long had it taken before they resigned themselves to failure and sat helpless, shivering in the dark, waiting on the mercy of the Noi-Guin?
“I was in that convent five years . . . They must have taught me something useful.”
They taught you to reach the Path. That’s the only true power.
Nona frowned. “Actually they didn’t. They told me to go slow, serene, approach it gently. I didn’t have any success until I learned to use my anger. To run at it. Use my speed . . .”
She wrapped the chain around the pin again, slow, thoughtful. It slipped off.
I need to use my speed.
Nona threw herself into the space between heartbeats. In the darkness of the cell nothing changed save that the chain went from flexible to stiff, resisting motion at
