LITMIR.BIZ

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      Nona defocused her vision and looked at Markus amid the glory of the threads, the Path’s halo. Marjal empathy was essentially thread-work that concentrated only on living threads and manipulated them more intuitively, based around emotional clusters. It was, in many senses, a tool designed for a specific job. Whereas a quantal thread-worker had ultimately more potential and flexibility, the task was always more fiddly and harder work. The threads around Markus formed a glowing aura, brighter and more dynamic than any she had seen before. The host of threads that joined him to her – some years old, some freshly formed – ran taut, shivering with possibility, unvoiced emotions vibrating along their length. Markus would read it better than she could, but he would feel the answer rather than seeing it before him in the complexity that filled the space between them.

      In fact, Sister Pan had revealed that all marjal enchantment was simply the power of the Path and the control of thread-work, but collected together into useful tools in the same way that iron and wood may be turned into many different implements, and many of those are of more immediate use than a log and a bar of iron and the option to shape both.

      ‘Nona?’

      Nona realized that Markus had said something she missed. She looked back.

      ‘You asked me here …’

      ‘I did.’ She stepped closer and he pressed his shoulders to the wall, every thread he had bent towards her, like the reflex of a river-anemone to touch. ‘I need your help.’

      Markus frowned. ‘I can help you?’

      ‘I need to do something dangerous and illegal.’

      Markus’s frown deepened. ‘Why would you trust me? Because we rode together for a few weeks in a cage when I was ten and you were eight? I nearly got you killed two years later.’

      ‘I trust you because you didn’t ask me why I thought you would help, just why I would trust that help. And also because you didn’t lie about what happened at the Academy.’

      ‘All right.’ He met her eyes. ‘Why would I help you? It’s dangerous and against the law.’

      ‘You’ll help me because when they put us in that cage we never really came out of it again. And because your Abbot Jacob is still tied to the Tacsis name and so are his plans for further advancement. Doing this will help make sure that never happens. Hessa told me what happened to Four-Foot when Giljohn took you to Jacob’s house.’

      ‘I suppose you think me weak, serving a man who did something like that? I suppose you would have beaten him to death?’ Markus didn’t try to hide the mix of anger and shame bubbling through him.

      ‘Maybe I would have killed him, but you’re a better person than I am. I’m not proud of my temper.’

      Markus twisted his lips into half of a doubtful smile. ‘So, you need me, and you trust me. What is it that you need me for, and trust me not to betray you over?’

      Nona glanced over her shoulder into the night. From inside the Caltess the crowd’s roar swelled. Another bout coming to a bloody end, no doubt. ‘I have to break into the Cathedral of St Allam and steal something from High Priest Nevis’s vault of forbidden books.’

       2

       Three years earlier

       The Escape

      In the dark of the moon by the side of the Grand Pass two dozen citizens of the empire huddled away from the wind. Dawn would show them an unparalleled view of that empire, spread out before them to the west, marching between the ice towards the Sea of Marn.

      Nona stood close to the rock wall, pressed between Ara and Kettle. Her leg ached where the stump of Yisht’s sword had driven in, pain shooting up and down as she shifted her weight, the whole limb stiffening.

      Abbess Glass had gathered the survivors in a bend where the folds of the cliff offered some shelter. There were among their number men and women who owned substantial swathes of the Corridor, who had been born to privilege and to command. But here in their bloodstained finery, with flames from the palace of the emperor’s sister licking up into the night behind them, it was to Abbess Glass they turned for direction.

      ‘It will take Sherzal’s soldiers a while to navigate around Zole’s landslide but they’ll come. It won’t take long then to alert the garrisons and send riders down the road to Verity. There’s no chance of making the capital that way.’

      ‘We don’t need to reach Verity.’ Lord Jotsis spoke up. ‘My estates are closer.’

      ‘Castle Jotsis is formidable,’ Ara said, looking between her uncle and the abbess.

      Abbess Glass shook her head. ‘Sherzal will bottle us up anywhere but the capital. She might not be insane enough to lay siege to your castle, my lord, but she would likely encircle your holdings to prevent word reaching the emperor. And besides, I fear that closer is not close enough.’

      ‘So we’ve escaped only to be hunted down on the road?’ One side of old Lord Glosis’s face had swollen into a single bruise but she still had enough energy to be temperamental. ‘Unacceptable.’

      ‘It’s the shipheart that Sherzal wants above anything else.’ The abbess nodded to where Zole waited, some thirty yards closer to the landslide, her hands dark around the glowing purple sphere she had recovered from the Tetragode. ‘If we give her good reason to think that it has gone in another direction she won’t spare many soldiers for chasing us. Maybe none.’

      ‘And how,’ Lord Jotsis asked, ‘can we make her think we haven’t taken the shipheart with us?’

      Abbess Glass turned to stare at the darkness of the slopes rising above them. ‘By making them think it has gone south, towards the ice.’

      ‘How can we make them think it’s been sent south?’ Lord Glosis asked, leaning on the arm of a young relative.

      ‘By actually sending it south, to the ice,’ the abbess said. ‘Zole will take it and let them see the glow upon the slopes.’

      ‘But that’s madness.’ Lord Jotsis drew himself to his full height. ‘You can’t entrust a treasure like that to a lone novice!’

      ‘I can when it’s the lone novice who somehow stole that treasure from the heart of the Noi-Guin’s stronghold in the first place,’ Abbess Glass replied.

      ‘She won’t be alone.’ Nona limped forward.

      Ara hobbled to stand beside Nona. Kettle put her hands on their shoulders. ‘In our state we’re going to be slowing the abbess down on the road. None of us will be any use to Zole trying to outdistance soldiers across the mountains.’

      Kettle was right. Nona gritted her teeth against the pain in her thigh and refused to let the admission out.

      The abbess advanced on them, windswept, grey hair straggled across her face. ‘The Noi-Guin’s shipheart is a marjal one. It’s said that in the hands of a marjal healer it can mend any wound but that it can also bring harm.’

      ‘Well, I don’t want to go near it.’ Nona shuddered. She knew what harm the shipheart could bring. It had even squeezed a devil out of Zole, the most tightly bound person she had ever met. ‘And we don’t have a marjal healer.’

      ‘We have Zole,’ the abbess said, and raising her voice she called to the ice-triber. ‘Zole, time to show us what Sister Rose has been teaching you.’

      Zole beckoned them rather than approach and bring with her the awful pressure of the shipheart’s presence. Nona took a few uncertain steps towards the girl, Ara behind her, then Kettle, all of them limping, the novice because of the arrow wound in her calf, the nun because of a knife

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