Mark Lawrence - Holy Sister

Here and there as she climbed Nona spotted patches where the rock-face looked different, the stone somehow rippled, like butter melted then returned to solid before it could flow away. Zole was digging herself handholds and allowing them to reseal as she moved on. It would buy them time. The soldiers would need to find a true mountaineer among their number to lay them a rope, or they would have to discover a longer path.

After sixty or seventy yards of climbing, Nona joined Zole on a ledge of fractured stone that led across the gradient, with another cliff rising above it. She hauled herself onto the flat space between the two rock-faces and lay bonelessly, drawing a deep lungful into her aching chest. Clera would have moaned, ‘Carry me.’ The thought made Nona cough out a painful laugh.

‘Are you well?’ Zole frowned at her from a perch several yards off.

Nona rolled to her front. ‘No.’

Below them the first soldiers had arrived at the base of the cliff and were starting to puzzle over how their prey had scaled it.

‘What now?’ Nona asked.

‘We wait.’

Nona didn’t argue. She lay as if dead until the coldness of the stone forced her to sit, huddled against the cliff for any shelter on offer. Seventy yards down, the soldiers gathered until they ran out of space. With a queue stretching behind them they began to argue, loud enough for the edges of their conversation to reach the novices.

‘They can’t fit any more down there,’ Nona said. ‘You should do whatever it is you’re going to do.’

‘Wait.’

‘What for?’

‘The leaders. And the Noi-Guin.’

‘How will you know when they’re here?’ Nona squinted at the helmed heads far below.

‘Once they start climbing, that will be the Noi-Guin. To see the officers watch where the troops face.’

‘There!’ Nona pointed to where one soldier, looking no different to the others, started to scale the unclimbable rock-face. ‘And there.’ Two more had started up a little further along.

‘We are never more vulnerable than when giving chase,’ Zole said.

‘Is that what they say on the ice?’ Nona snorted. ‘The wisdom of the tribes?’ There might be half a thousand soldiers on the mountain and they looked far from vulnerable.

‘Abbess Glass said it.’ Zole shrugged off her pack. She took the shipheart out, holding it in one hand. It looked too big for her to grip securely. ‘Hold on.’ She voiced Nona’s thought.

Zole brought her hand round in an overhead swing and smacked the shipheart into the top of the rock-face just below her. The impact was a strange one, no fragments of stone flew off, there was no great crash, just a deep pulse that seemed to spread out through the mountain. Nona felt it through her back where it pressed against the stone. All three climbers froze. A moment passed. Another. Then a lurch that sent Nona flying towards the drop. It seemed the whole mountain twitched. Only hunska reflexes combined with stone-piercing flaw-blades saved her from falling.

Everything below the two novices, except for the top dozen feet of the cliff, broke away and began to fall, a descending curtain of rock, fracturing as it slid over the deeper parts of the mountain that remained fixed. The scene below them vanished beneath a rising cloud of dust.

Zole stood and returned the shipheart to her pack. ‘Follow me.’ She began to walk away along the ledge.

‘If we keep climbing we could lose the survivors,’ Nona said, still staring at the dust in horrified fascination.

‘We do not want them to lose us,’ Zole called back, not looking around. ‘Just that they not catch us.’

Nona hesitated for one more moment, then hurried after the ice-triber before the wind-driven dust could take her from view. She didn’t feel like a shield, or anything else useful. Spare baggage at best. Her head felt fuzzy from the shipheart’s constant pressure, her thoughts unorganized and slow.

Zole led them back to the north for a way then began to climb on a south-leading ridge. She called a halt where a spire of rock offered some shelter from the wind, and marvellously produced both food and water.

‘How …?’ Nona accepted a strip of dried meat and a near-full waterskin.

‘I prepared for my journey.’ Zole crammed a strip of the blackened trail-beef into her mouth and began to chew methodically.

‘You came after me,’ Nona said. After so long surviving on cell slops the leathery meat seemed to explode with flavour, her mouth flooding.

‘I followed Sister Kettle.’ Zole spoke around the rhythm of her jaws.

‘But you knew she was looking for me.’

‘Yes.’

‘Why did you come?’ Nona wanted to hear it from Zole’s lips.

‘You are the Shield. I need your protection.’ If the ice-triber was mocking her she let no sign of it show.

‘You don’t believe that stuff. It’s all made up.’ Nona forced herself not to drink too deeply from the skin.

‘Everything ever said was made up. The Ancestor, the Hope, all the small green gods of the Corridor who will die when the ice closes.’

Nona wiped her mouth. ‘And on the ice. Don’t you make gods of the wind?’

Zole shrugged. ‘Some do.’

‘And you tell stories about the future.’

‘Perhaps we have a prophecy about a black-eyed goddess who will save us all, and the four-blood child of the ice whose job it is to lead her home.’ The smallest smile quirked the corner of Zole’s mouth. She stood and shouldered her pack. ‘Time to go.’

‘Up?’ Nona’s heart fell.

‘Up.’ Zole nodded. ‘They will try to get ahead of us. The Noi-Guin will try to come at us from several different directions at once.’

‘Can’t you just drop rocks on their heads?’

‘It is … tiring.’ Zole rubbed at her wrist, where Nona had seen the devil. ‘It would be better if we do not find out whether I can or not.’

It was true. For the first time ever Nona saw lines of exhaustion in Zole’s face. The shock of it surprised her. Before she started to work wonders Zole had never seemed quite human.