The shipheart’s presence reached her as the acid spoiled the sigils’ deep-cut perfection. Not the full measure of it, but some of that old pressure she remembered from the convent, fingering in past the fractured wards. Familiar but different: this wasn’t the Sweet Mercy shipheart but another, beating with its own rhythm.
Nona tried to see the Path but the collar’s damaged sigils still blocked her way like a thicket of thorns. She felt the poison closing her throat, driving her heart into a frenzy.
Find the cure!
She looked down at the vials. Too many of them. She wasn’t sure what had been on the blade. Fevercut would race the heart to destruction, bitterwode would strangle, redwort would paralyse with pain. It could be any of those, all of them, or something else, and to identify the antidotes by smell and taste alone . . .
Nona? Another voice in her skull, not Keot’s. Come to me!
And as the pain from Nona’s broken ribs turned from unbearable to incandescent, magnified by the venom in her blood, Nona leapt from her flesh to Kettle’s.
35
NONA FOUND HERSELF running. Awkwardly, careening from one side of the uneven natural passage to the other. She understood that she was in Kettle’s mind once again, but not why Kettle was staggering as if drunk, nor why she couldn’t hear even a whisper of Kettle’s thoughts.
The unlit passage hid no secrets from Kettle’s eyes and yet she still managed to stub her toe against a ridge of rock and go sprawling clumsily onto all fours. The pain from Kettle’s foot was small compared to what Nona had left behind but she still swore at the shock.
“Bleed on it!”
Kettle remained on all fours, looking from one splayed hand to the other.
She wiggled the fingers of the left hand.
“I’m doing this!” She raised her head. “Me. Nona, Nona, Nona.” Her voice echoed.
The sound of distant running reached down the tunnel into the silence that followed. People were coming.
“Oh hells.” Nona stood Kettle up, finding the length of her somehow disorienting even though they were of a similar height now. She ran her hands . . . Kettle’s hands . . . over Kettle’s body. “Where are you?”
The sounds of pursuit grew louder, closer. Nona patted her unfamiliar body once more then set it running again, concentrating on the task of not tripping over “her own” feet, a task that had somehow become very taxing. Ten steps later on she tangled her legs on Kettle’s scabbarded sword and fell again.
“Help?” Nona got to all fours again. Her legs felt too long, her top unbalanced. She spotted a sinkhole, a stone gullet just wide enough to take her. Kettle’s dark-sight revealed no bottom, just a near-vertical shaft plummeting away.
Nona hesitated. Shouts rang out. Not far away, she thought, though the echoes could play tricks. “They’re hunting me . . . where are you, Kettle?”
She could jump down and risk being trapped in a narrowing rock throat, a gift for the Lightless, who could either winkle her out or leave her to die. Or run on, slow and falling, to be overtaken and killed within minutes.
There’s a paralysis in choice, especially when what’s at stake is more precious to a person than what they own. Nona risked her own life with frightening regularity and without hesitation, but tasked with deciding how to save Kettle, from the inside, she found herself frozen. “Kettle?”
• • •
KETTLE’S WHOLE WORLD was pain, a white sea of hurt. With enormous effort she uncoiled and forced her eyelids to part. She blinked. The world looked wholly alien, the colours strange, stone alive with fire. Her eyes burned too, as if rubbed with pepper. She lay in a corridor, the floor awash with blood, the Noi-Guin who seemed to have supplied it close enough to touch. The assassin’s flesh looked black, her black-skin mask dark but with glints of gold as if something brilliant swam beneath its surface.
Kettle struggled up and sucked a breath through a throat that felt narrower than a straw. The hands she used weren’t hers. One wrist bore a metal cuff. The tatters of a smock hung around her nakedness. Her ribs screamed at her.
I’m in Nona. Somehow I’m in Nona as she was in me. Kettle raised a hand to her face. I lifted her hand. I did that.
A spasm clenched her stomach into a knot of pain, curling her around it, and her throat sealed completely.
Kettle clutched at her neck—Nona’s neck—frantic. A moment later she felt something like a scalding hand that clenched her throat beneath her own useless fingers and somehow opened it again.
Get up. Do something. You are as useless as she was. A harsh voice, like that of an ancient, neither male nor female.
Nona . . . ? It wasn’t Nona.
You are dying. Move!
Kettle drew a throttled breath and crawled to the Noi-Guin. Her jacket had been cut open, exposing the antidotes and poisons she carried. Pain, weakness, strangulation. What poison? Think. Kettle’s memories surged, carried with her into Nona’s empty mind. She heard Apple’s voice, the lecturing tone she reserved for class. “You have close on a hundred of choices for blade-venom. Unless, of course, you want it to stay potent for more than a day. Then you have only a score. If you also want it to have a chance of disabling your opponent before the fight would have ended naturally then you have only a dozen. If you want it to be something people can’t build up resistance against too, then you have fewer still. If you want to source the ingredients locally rather than bring them halfway around the Corridor . . . there are five.”
Five choices. Pain. Strangulation. It has to be blue scorpion . . . but weakness? Varnish of boneless? You can build resistance . . . maybe that’s why Nona can still move?
Kettle began opening vials in an ecstasy of fumbling, stoppers popping off, contents spilling.
