‘Darla?’ Nona choked out her friend’s name.
Darla’s brown eyes clouded with confusion, a kind of wonder, staring at some distant place above Nona’s head. The smoke and fire around them wasn’t that of Rellam Village. It was Sherzal’s stables starting to burn. The eighty miles to Path Tower had become hundreds.
‘She’s gone, Nona.’ Kettle put her hand on Nona’s shoulder.
‘Darla …’ Another raw wound. Nona ground her teeth. Darla’s hand still held hers, warm, solid, real. Maybe she could still be saved … Maybe this time it would be different.
To drag her eyes from Darla’s almost broke Nona. To turn her face from a friend who needed her, a dying friend. ‘It’s not real.’ Nona swung her head around, trying to call the clarity trance though her heart ached and pounded. ‘None of it’s real.’
‘Nona …’ Kettle shook her head slowly as if the sorrow had made it too heavy. ‘We have to go.’
‘There!’ Amid the swirls of smoke and the red tongues of fire a door that had not been present when all this happened, a door with no place in Sherzal’s stables and no place to lead.
‘Nona!’ Cries from the great carriage before the main exit. ‘We need you.’
Letting Darla’s head fall felt like the ultimate betrayal. Every part of her wanted to stay. Every part of her wanted to face the danger with her friends. To save them. To do it better this time.
But she sprang to her feet and threw herself across the burning hall even as the door upon which her eyes were fixed started to fade from view.
‘No!’ She reached it just as the last lines melted away. ‘No!’ Flaw-blades dug deep and in a frenzy of hacking and a storm of splinters … Nona staggered through.
Curved, sigil-crowded walls surrounded her, the inlaid silver gleaming in a light that seemed to be dying swiftly. Nona turned in time to see a doorway fading, and beyond it the spiral steps of Path Tower. A person’s shadow, Ruli’s or Ara’s, lay across stone steps lit by the coloured whispers of the day that shone in the classroom above, streaming in through stained-glass windows.
A moment later the doorway had gone and Nona stood blind and alone.
‘It wasn’t true. Any of it.’ Whispered to the darkness.
Some of it was true though. Abbess Glass had died and Sweet Mercy would never be the same again.
‘They’re catching up again.’ Nona hunched against the hard-packed snow, too cold to shiver now. The wind stole her words and ran away with them, howling. Sherzal’s soldiers knew the mountains and had found better routes to gain the heights. Nona could see black figures to the south, little more than dots, almost at the shoulder between two peaks where she and Zole would have to cross if they were to make further progress towards the ice sheet.
‘We have to go down.’ Zole pointed to an icy defile where the east side of the ridge had fractured along some hidden fault line.
‘Down?’ Nona tried to imagine any way she could achieve that other than falling. ‘That’s Scithrowl.’ She stared at the foothills, hazy in the distance and partly obscured by wisps of cloud around the waist of the mountains.
‘They will be unlikely to follow us there.’ Zole shrugged and continued along the ridge. Their path proved to be a serrated blade of stone coated with two feet of icy snow on the southern face and with black ice on the northern side.
The descent proved as hard as the ascent, though in different ways. It found a whole new set of muscles to stress. Nona’s legs began to feel as if they belonged to someone else, paying scant regard to her instructions but letting her have full share of the hurting. Several times she started to fall and saved herself only by digging her flaw-blades through ice into rock. They climbed down for an hour and the world below seemed to grow no closer, though the expanse of black rock towering behind them assured her that they were making progress.
The wind blew less fiercely on the slopes that faced Queen Adoma’s lands but it was far from calm. The clouds surged below them, lapping the slopes like a grey sea. Nona heard shouts before they reached the swirling layer of mist, and looking back she saw that those leading the pursuit were less than a hundred yards away. A spear rattled past her.
‘We will lose them in the clouds,’ Zole said. She hopped down from rock to rock making it seem that her legs were as fresh as if she’d just got out of bed. Coming to the spear, jammed against an outcrop, she picked it up.
Nona followed, frowning at the clouds. ‘We’ll lose ourselves in there too.’ But she supposed ‘down’ to be an easy direction to follow whatever the visibility.
The mist rose to meet their descent, a cold white sea wrapping them, beading Zole’s hair with jewels of dew that froze into tiny pearls. Nona stumbled on in exhaustion, the shipheart’s fire filling her mind with unfocused energy but doing nothing for the muscles in her thighs.
‘Have you been into Scithrowl before?’ Nona asked, sliding down onto a ledge as Zole led off.
‘No.’
‘Their armies are at the border …’
‘If we need to kill soldiers to get to the ice, would it not be better that they were Scithrowl?’
‘I suppose so …’ Nona had a fear of the Scithrowl, a heritage of endless stories told across the Grey. She expected that every part of the empire had its tales of Scithrowl horrors. Told no doubt by old ladies like Nana Even who hadn’t ever been sufficiently far east to glimpse the Grampain peaks, let alone an actual heretic. Did they burn prisoners, eat babies, and practise peculiar tortures? Best not to get captured and find out.
The wind began to shred the cloud layer around them, tearing the whiteness across the flanks of the mountain and affording glimpses of Scithrowl stretching east. It looked remarkably like the empire had from the other side. In the north the ice was a glimmering white line, to the south it lay less than five miles away, a vaulting wall, all in shadow now.
‘The ice.’ Nona stopped. She had seen the Corridor’s great wall before, shorn off by the focus moon, but for the first time ever she had the elevation to look down upon what lay beyond. Zole stopped too. Even a life on the shelf itself didn’t offer an overview. Mile upon mile of merciless ice, bloody with the touch of the morning sun. Here and there internal pressures rucked the sheet up into ridges or split it with chasms that looked like wrinkles at this distance but must be large enough to swallow any tower built by man. The roots of the Grampains cut across the ice every few miles, grey ribs of stone stretching from the main ridge, becoming frost-wrapped and at last drowned beneath the glacial flow.
‘It is … a sight to behold.’ Zole stood statue-still, the wind tugging at her cloak.
‘The black ice!’ Nona pointed at a wound in the ice sheet – you could almost imagine it a hole, its sides shadowed. A black teardrop, impossible not to see now that her eyes had found it, haloed in grey, shading through the surrounding ice and drawn away to the north with the ice’s flow in a broad path, dark grey at the centre. Where the grey streak across the surface reached the Corridor the ice wall also shaded grey and the land all around lay barren, a dead zone reaching out into the farmlands of the Scithrowl levels. The margins of this dead zone were edged in brown where the Corridor’s flora fought to endure. In the narrow gap between the tainted area and foothills of the Grampains to the west a chain of four fortresses stepped from one ridge to the next towards the clear ice.
Zole