Others
Emperor Crucical: his palace is in the city of Verity
Sherzal: the emperor’s sister. Her palace is close to the Scithrowl border
Velera: the emperor’s sister. Her palace is on the coast
High Priest Jacob: head of the Church of the Ancestor
Archon Nevis: high-ranking priest
Archon Anasta: high-ranking priestess
Archon Philo: high-ranking priest
Archon Kratton: high-ranking priest
Thuran Tacsis: lord, head of the Tacsis family
Raymel Tacsis: heir to Thuran Tacsis, Caltess ring-fighter, gerant blood
Lano Tacsis: Thuran Tacsis’s second son, hunska blood
Academic Rexxus Degon: senior Academy man
Markus: child from Giljohn’s cage, marjal blood
Saida: child from Giljohn’s cage, gerant blood
Willum: child from Giljohn’s cage, marjal blood
Chara: child from Giljohn’s cage, marjal blood
Partnis Reeve: owner of the Caltess fight-hall
Gretcha: Caltess ring-fighter, gerant blood
Maya: Caltess apprentice, gerant blood
Regol: Caltess trainee, hunska blood
Denam: Caltess trainee, gerant blood
Tarkax: known as ‘the Ice-Spear’, renowned warrior from the ice-tribes
Yisht: warrior from the ice tribes, serves Sherzal
Zole: girl from the ice tribes, Sherzal’s ward
Irvone Galamsis: high court judge
Sister Owl: legendary Red Sister (dead)
Sister Cloud: legendary Red Sister (dead)
Safira: former senior novice, works for Sherzal
Malkin: Abbess Glass’s cat
Argus: prison guard at Harriton
Dava: prison guard at Harriton
John Fallon: prison guard at Harriton
Herber: graveman
Jame Lender: prisoner executed at Harriton
It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy Convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men.
From the front of the convent you can see both the northern ice and the southern, but the finer view is out across the plateau and over the narrow lands. On a clear day the coast may be glimpsed, the Sea of Marn a suggestion in blue.
At some point in an achingly long history a people, now lost to knowledge, had built one thousand and twenty-four pillars out on the plateau: Corinthian giants thicker than a thousand-year oak, taller than a long-pine. A forest of stone without order or pattern, covering the level ground from flank to flank so that no spot upon it lay more than twenty yards from a pillar. Sister Thorn waited amid this forest, alone and seeking her centre.
Lano’s men began to spread out between the columns. Thorn could neither see nor hear her foe approach, but she knew their disposition. She had watched earlier as they snaked up the west trail from Styx Valley, three and four abreast: Pelarthi mercenaries from the ice-margins, furs of the white bear and the snow-wolf over their leathers, some with scraps of chainmail about them, ancient and dark or bright as new, depending on their luck. Many carried spears, some swords; one man in five carried a short-bow of recurved horn. Tall men in the main, fair-haired, their beards short or plaited, the women with lines of blue paint across their cheeks and foreheads like the rays of a cold sun.
Here’s a moment.
All the world and more has rushed eternity’s length to reach this beat of your heart, screaming down the years. And if you let it, the universe, without drawing breath, will press itself through this fractured second and race to the next, on into a new eternity. Everything that is, the echoes of everything that ever was, the roots of all that will ever be, must pass through this moment that you own. Your only task is to give it pause – to make it notice.
Thorn stood without motion, for only when you are truly still can you be the centre. She stood without sound, for only silent can you listen. She stood without fear, for only the fearless can understand their peril.
Hers the stillness of the forest, rooted restlessness, oak-slow, pine-quick, a seething patience. Hers the stillness of ice walls that face the sea, clear and deep, blue secrets held cold against the truth of the world, a patience of aeons stacked against a sudden fall. Hers the stillness of a sorrow-born babe unmoving in its crib. And of the mother, frozen in her discovery, fleeting and forever.
Thorn held a silence that had grown old before first she saw the world’s light. A quietude passed down generations, the peace that bids us watch the dawn, an unspoken alliance with wave and flame that lets both take all speech from tongues and sets us standing before the water’s surge and swell, or waiting to bear witness to fire’s consuming dance of joy. Hers the silence of rejection, of a child’s hurt: mute, unknowing, a scar upon the years to come. Hers the unvoiced everything of first love, tongue-tied, ineloquent, the refusal to sully so sharp and golden a feeling with anything as blunt as words.
Thorn waited. Fearless as flowers, bright, fragile, open to the sky. Brave as only those who’ve already lost can be.
Voices reached her, the Pelarthi calling out to each other as they lost sight of their numbers in the broken spaces of the plateau. Cries rang across the level ground, echoing from the pillars, flashes of torchlight, a multitude of footfalls, growing closer. Thorn rolled her shoulders beneath black skin armour. She tightened the fingers of each hand around the sharp weight of a throwing star, her breathing calm, heart racing.
‘In this place the dead watch me,’ she breathed. A shout broke out close at hand, figures glimpsed between two pillars, flitting across the gap. Many figures. ‘I am a weapon in service to the Ark. Those who come against me will know despair.’ Her voice rose along with the tension that always presaged a fight, a buzzing tingle across her cheekbones, a tightness in her throat, a sense of being both deep within her own body, and above and around it at the same time.
The first of the Pelarthi jogged into view, and seeing her, stumbled to a halt. A young
