‘Hurry up!’ Jula beckoned at them from down the rock passage, a black shape behind her lantern.
‘Breathe out. I’ll pull.’ Nona grabbed Darla’s wrist and heaved as the girl exhaled. Behind Darla the outside world intruded as a line of brightness, glimpsed through the cliff-face.
Darla lurched forward, gasping for air, free of the crevice. Further down the passage Ruli gave a brief round of sarcastic applause. ‘I still have that grease if we need it!’
‘I’ll give her grease,’ Darla growled, and followed as Nona hurried to catch the others. The Seren Way was not as well travelled as the Vinery Stair and the chances of discovery were small, but the longer it took Darla to squeeze through into the caverns the greater that chance grew.
Nobody had ever told the novices that they weren’t to explore the caves and passages that riddled the plateau but Nona always had the strong impression that this was because they hadn’t asked, and also because all the entrances known to the nuns were barred and gated, the locks inscribed with sigils to defeat any form of picking. When Jula had first discovered the caves a year earlier Nona had moved their weekly meeting underground where the chances of detection shrank to zero. Nominally the objective of the group was to recover the shipheart but for Nona it had always been about killing Yisht.
‘Hold up!’ Nona and Darla closed the last few yards on the others. Jula and Ara carried the only two lanterns and the footing was treacherous. ‘If we break our ankles back here it’s you lot who’ll have to carry us out!’
‘We’ll just leave you here and say you ran away with city boys.’ Ketti, the last of their number, grinned and made kiss-mouths. The hunska girl was just a few inches shorter than Darla now, though thin as a rail. She talked about city boys a lot and it was a wonder to Nona that she preferred to spend her seven-day exploring the darkness beneath the Rock of Faith rather than going into Verity to giggle at the opposite sex across Thaybur Square.
‘Come on!’ Ara led off, eager to reach new ground.
At the first fork, where a smaller passage led steeply down, Ketti took her block of chalk and reinforced the letter on the wall that indicated the path to take. The moisture tended to blur the marks. They moved on in single file, Darla at the rear, demonstrating her impressive range of oaths as she repeatedly grazed her head on the rock above.
Nona called a halt at Round Cave a hundred yards from the entrance. Darla had come up with the name, and whilst unimaginative it was at least accurate.
‘Who’s got something to report?’ Nona looked to Ruli first. Ruli was on gossip duty, gathering any snippet of information that leaked into the convent through its connections with the outside world. Ruli had a talent for both creating and gathering gossip.
‘I do! I really do!’ Jula stepped forward, half raising her hand before remembering that she wasn’t in class. ‘I was reading the appendices in Levinin’s older works. Everyone always quotes from the Seven Histories of Marn but—’
‘What did you find?’ Darla had even less patience for Jula’s booklore than the others.
‘More about shiphearts in one page than I’ve discovered in all the books I’ve searched through since we started looking!’ Jula grinned. ‘According to Levinin there were four shiphearts within the empire’s boundaries: the one at Sweet Mercy which is most closely tuned to quantals, another we knew about in the Noi-Guin’s keeping at the Tetragode, which is attuned to marjals, one he says is rumoured in the city of Tru, and one from a gerant ship in the keeping of the mage Atoan.’
Ara frowned. ‘I’ve never heard of a city called Tru or a mage called Atoan. And if a shipheart were in a city someone would own it or it would get taken.’
Jula nodded. ‘Levinin was writing two hundred years ago. Tru is under the ice now. The black ice! And it was ruins before the ice took it. Tru’s a city the Missing left. And Atoan died years ago but he had a son Jaltone who was also a mage and somehow is still alive!’
‘Him I’ve heard of,’ Darla said. ‘He lives on the coast and helped General Hillan when the Durnish tried to land at Port Treen two years ago. My father was the general’s second-in-command.’
‘It’s interesting and everything …’ Ruli said. ‘But I don’t see how it helps us. We’re not going to walk up to the Tetragode and—’
‘It helps us because we know where Sherzal will have to look next,’ said Ara.
‘And we are going to the ice …’ Everyone went on the ice-ranging in Mystic Class. Over the ice though, not under it. Nona remembered her father’s tales about hunting in the ice tunnels. The worst of them, the scariest stories, were from the time he ventured into the grey ice. The trip he never came back from was the one to the black.
‘The ice is a big place. And Tallow is never going to take us up to the black ice. Even if it wasn’t on the Scithrowl side of the mountains.’ Darla shivered. ‘Let’s go explore some caves!’
Nona looked around the circle of lantern-lit faces. ‘Any more contributions? No?’
Jula bit her lip. ‘Well I thought it was interesting.’ She shrugged and led off.
It took less than half an hour’s walk to reach the furthest limit of their explorations, but to expand their territory initially had taken the best part of a year, following dead ends or routes that grew too narrow or too dangerous. In several places they had fixed knotted ropes to aid in difficult climbs. It was Nona’s private hope that they would find an alternative route into the convent undercaves but there were no guarantees that the two systems connected.
‘I love it down here.’ Jula fell in beside Nona as they trekked the Gullet, a long water-smoothed passage wide enough to walk shoulder to shoulder. ‘It’s so quiet. Just the drip of water. And footsteps. And Darla swearing.’
They passed a stand of stalagmites, blunt and glistening in the lantern light. Ketti said nothing. Even she had grown tired of her innuendo after the tenth or twelfth time. A little further along a veil of dripping water crossed the passage. Nona hunched and pressed on through the icy deluge. Five tight, winding twists rising steeply took them past the niche where two skeletons lay, limed over with rock-scale. One grown and one a child, locked together. A rusty stain between them may once have been a knife. They always made Nona sad, huddled there in the dark, watching with empty sockets as the centuries scurried by.
After the rising turns came a scramble up a rock fall, with the cavern roof slanting just three feet above. Finally a cliff some twenty yards high, perhaps once a waterfall, the wet stone offering few handholds. Fortunately the old watercourse had allowed room to swing and throw a grapple. The locating and pilfering of both rope and hook had taken a week but the hours spent trying to catch some edge far above them had seemed much longer. On perhaps the seventieth throw Darla had snagged the hook and Ruli, the lightest of them, had scrambled up. The rope was now secure and knotted at intervals. Climbing it brought them to the limits of their exploration, a roundish chamber, mud-floored, from which three new passages led.
Nona stood with Ara, Jula, and Ruli, catching their breath, staring at the exits, Ketti and Darla still climbing behind them.
‘I want to get under the convent,’ Nona said. She blinked. She hadn’t been intending to speak, but now the words had left her mouth she realized it was better that the truth was out. For three years she had seen the only route to revenge on Yisht to be training. To make herself into a weapon suited to the task of finding then destroying the woman. Neither would be easy. The empire was large, and Yisht expert at hiding, deadly when found. Nona had been very lucky in their first encounter and had still only just survived. But Joeli’s