Mark Lawrence - Holy Sister

‘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 allowed a moment to rest. Nona collapsed into the lee of an outcrop. She huddled there, shivering, and stared at Scithrowl, stretching endlessly to the east. The land lay green and grey, shadowed by scudding cloud, and further coloured by the rumoured cruelties of its people. If the stories were to be believed their queen was a monster, darker by far than Sherzal.

Sister Kettle had told Nona the story of her mission years earlier to learn Queen Adoma’s secrets, passing images of that time along the thread-bond that bound them. Memories shared in such a manner strike hard and often burn as bright as the recipient’s own until it becomes hard to tell them from genuine recollection.

Kettle was not the first or the last Grey Sister to be sent to Adoma’s capital, but she had come closer to the queen than any other of the order had managed in a long time. Close enough to stand within her court in the guise of a Noi-Guin and listen to the queen hold forth to her nobles.

Among the glittering crowds beneath the palace’s gilt roof Kettle had seen half a dozen of the Scithrowls’ most feared Path-mages standing shoulder to shoulder with the nobility. Each of these full-blood quantals wore a golden medallion marking them as members of Adoma’s Fist, a band of quantal and marjal mages whose reputation was known far beyond the borders of both Scithrowl and the empire. It was said that when Adoma’s Fist struck even the ice shook.

Their leader, Yom Rala, had stood before the throne on the first step of the dais, a place of high honour. Kettle described him as a chewed stick of a man with a predilection for scarlet finery.

‘He may look weak and foolish,’ Kettle had said, ‘but when he turns his gaze your way it’s as if he’s uncoiling every secret you own, and where he steps the ground is left smoking. Pray the Scithrowls’ wars in the east keep the Fist on Ald’s borders rather than our own!’

Adoma had spoken on the subject of the west and of Scithrowl’s destiny to claim the coast of Marn.

Nona had seen the queen through Kettle’s eyes. A tall woman, blunt-faced, solid, conveying a sense of physical power, of barely suppressed energies. Black-haired, a frothing mass of curls contained by hoops of gold, her pale skin stained and streaked as if rubbed with fresh ink. This, the Scithrowl said, was Adoma’s sacrifice. In order to secure the strength to lead her people to victory she had dared the black ice and been marked by it.

Adoma’s enemies called her mad, blood-drunk, cruel beyond measure, ready to inflict any torture that imagination could frame. Her people called her ruthless, relentless, born to deliver the full length of the Corridor into their keeping.

When she spoke though, addressing her court in the fluid Scithrowl tongue, Kettle found her articulate and entirely reasonable.

‘If I were a Scithrowl I would follow her,’ Kettle had said. ‘She’s right. The ice is closing on us and how else are we to live but to forge east or west? The world is cruel, our choices harsh, and every alternative leads to someone’s death. The only objection I have is that it’s us that she plans to forge a path through.’

However inspiring her speeches might be, the truth of the Battle-Queen lay in the black ice, that place of horror where even Kettle had lost her way, and from where Adoma was said to gain her power. Kettle would share no memories of that darkness, only the conviction that nothing save evil could come from it.

Zole glanced at the cloud base billowing just a hundred feet above them and made to move on. ‘Come.’

‘I saw it. The devil.’ Nona hadn’t meant to speak. Maybe the sight of the black ice put it in her mind. ‘I saw it at your wrist when you climbed onto the road.’

Zole hesitated, just missing a beat, then continued her descent. ‘I did not think that I had any more left in me.’

‘Any more?’ Nona hurried after her, gritting her teeth against the shipheart’s pressure.

‘It seems that it might take a shipheart from each of the bloods to wholly purify us. Or perhaps it is just me who needs that.’

‘Purify? What are you talking—’ Nona slipped, one tired foot tangled the other, and she was falling. She clung to the moment but although she fell through treacle she still fell, her hands too far from any surface to save her.

‘Careful.’ Zole closed the gap with hunska speed and caught her wrist.

Nona shook free and wordlessly scrambled away from the shipheart, its fire burning in her blood.

‘Do you think that in all the vastness of the ice there are no more of these?’ Zole jerked her head back towards her pack. ‘None of your “shiphearts”? You think they exist only in this narrow strip of Abeth where green things still grow?’

‘Well …’ Nona hadn’t really thought about it. ‘But the ice covers …’

‘There are ways down. And the ice-tribes are the descendants of those who refused to run before its advance, peoples who walked the green face of Abeth thousands of years ago. They took their treasures up onto the ice with them.’

Zole moved on and for what seemed an age it was all Nona could do to keep up with her. The ice-triber stopped where a trickle of freezing water spilled from a crack in the rocks. ‘Drink.’ She began to fill her waterskin.

Nona found a still smaller trickle spilling from an overhang and stood with her mouth open to receive it. After a few gulps she stepped away. ‘You have a devil in you, one of those … did you call them klaulathu ?’

‘You had a klaulathu under your skin, Nona Grey, an echo of the Missing. This,’ she opened her hand and the palm lay scarlet, ‘is a raulathu , it is not of the Missing. It is an echo of me.’

‘I don’t understand.’

Zole narrowed her eyes, looking past Nona, up at the slopes above her. ‘The clouds did not slow them as much as I had hoped. They have found us again.’ She turned and dropped away, landing on a huge boulder twenty feet below the ledge that Nona’s stream trickled over.

Nona peered over the drop. ‘Damn.’ She glanced up at the dark spots moving on the higher slopes. With a shrug she gathered her aching body into a focused knot, stepped out into space, and let the fall have her.

They left the clouds behind them, clinging to the mountains’ shoulders, and early sunshine welcomed the two novices into the eastern foothills. Nothing dared the rugged terrain save a few varieties of wire-grass and the goats that pursued them up from the plains. Zole led the way although she had no better idea of the geography than Nona, both of them relying on memories of Sister Rule’s endless maps. They moved quickly, following streams down into the valleys, alert for any herders checking on their flocks.

‘It could be the empire,’ Zole said. ‘It looks no different from the other side.’

‘A couple of centuries ago it was the empire.’