said. ‘He lives on the coast and helped General Hillan when the Durnish tried to land at Port Treen two years ago. My father was the general’s second-in-command.’
‘It’s interesting and everything …’ Ruli said. ‘But I don’t see how it helps us. We’re not going to walk up to the Tetragode and—’
‘It helps us because we know where Sherzal will have to look next,’ said Ara.
‘And we are going to the ice …’ Everyone went on the ice-ranging in Mystic Class. Over the ice though, not under it. Nona remembered her father’s tales about hunting in the ice tunnels. The worst of them, the scariest stories, were from the time he ventured into the grey ice. The trip he never came back from was the one to the black.
‘The ice is a big place. And Tallow is never going to take us up to the black ice. Even if it wasn’t on the Scithrowl side of the mountains.’ Darla shivered. ‘Let’s go explore some caves!’
Nona looked around the circle of lantern-lit faces. ‘Any more contributions? No?’
Jula bit her lip. ‘Well I thought it was interesting.’ She shrugged and led off.
It took less than half an hour’s walk to reach the furthest limit of their explorations, but to expand their territory initially had taken the best part of a year, following dead ends or routes that grew too narrow or too dangerous. In several places they had fixed knotted ropes to aid in difficult climbs. It was Nona’s private hope that they would find an alternative route into the convent undercaves but there were no guarantees that the two systems connected.
‘I love it down here.’ Jula fell in beside Nona as they trekked the Gullet, a long water-smoothed passage wide enough to walk shoulder to shoulder. ‘It’s so quiet. Just the drip of water. And footsteps. And Darla swearing.’
They passed a stand of stalagmites, blunt and glistening in the lantern light. Ketti said nothing. Even she had grown tired of her innuendo after the tenth or twelfth time. A little further along a veil of dripping water crossed the passage. Nona hunched and pressed on through the icy deluge. Five tight, winding twists rising steeply took them past the niche where two skeletons lay, limed over with rock-scale. One grown and one a child, locked together. A rusty stain between them may once have been a knife. They always made Nona sad, huddled there in the dark, watching with empty sockets as the centuries scurried by.
After the rising turns came a scramble up a rock fall, with the cavern roof slanting just three feet above. Finally a cliff some twenty yards high, perhaps once a waterfall, the wet stone offering few handholds. Fortunately the old watercourse had allowed room to swing and throw a grapple. The locating and pilfering of both rope and hook had taken a week but the hours spent trying to catch some edge far above them had seemed much longer. On perhaps the seventieth throw Darla had snagged the hook and Ruli, the lightest of them, had scrambled up. The rope was now secure and knotted at intervals. Climbing it brought them to the limits of their exploration, a roundish chamber, mud-floored, from which three new passages led.
Nona stood with Ara, Jula, and Ruli, catching their breath, staring at the exits, Ketti and Darla still climbing behind them.
‘I want to get under the convent,’ Nona said. She blinked. She hadn’t been intending to speak, but now the words had left her mouth she realized it was better that the truth was out. For three years she had seen the only route to revenge on Yisht to be training. To make herself into a weapon suited to the task of finding then destroying the woman. Neither would be easy. The empire was large, and Yisht expert at hiding, deadly when found. Nona had been very lucky in their first encounter and had still only just survived. But Joeli’s taunting had put into Nona’s mind the idea that there might be some clue at the spot where Hessa died. Something the nuns overlooked. Something her friend left for her alone. It was a very faint hope. Too faint perhaps to justify exposing her companions to such dangers … but Joeli’s words were an itch that refused to be scratched. ‘Hessa’s name is so important to you? And yet you’ve never even visited the spot where she died.’ The accusation repeated in her mind, an echo that grew rather than died away.
‘I need to visit the shipheart vault.’ Nona spoke the words into the silence that had followed her first statement.
‘Because we won’t be in enough trouble just for being in the tunnels,’ Ruli said. ‘We should go where we’re more likely to be caught and will have broken more rules.’
Jula frowned. Despite her cleverness sarcasm always seemed to go over her head. ‘But—’
‘I’m banned from leaving the convent until next seven-day in any case,’ Nona said. ‘So if I’m right under it I’ll be breaking fewer rules.’
‘Go back to the vault?’ Ara asked, raising her lantern to inspect Nona’s face. ‘That’s madness. Abbess Glass will throw us out. You know what she said about the undercaves!’
‘I have to.’ Nona had to see it for herself. She had to set her hands to the spot where Hessa had died. Perhaps some clue remained that would help her find Yisht. ‘I have to. For Hessa. I felt her die. The rocks. Yisht’s knife. I felt all of it. If there’s justice to be had, or revenge, it starts there, where it happened.’
‘I don’t want to go near the convent. The sinkhole’s too close.’ Ketti got to her feet behind them after finishing the climb. ‘There could be tunnel-floods.’ She shuddered.
‘I still say they’ll have the undercaves blocked off.’ Darla followed Ketti into the chamber, brushing grit from her habit.
‘Maybe. But it’s as good a direction to explore as any other,’ Ara said. Nona thanked her silently.
‘I don’t know …’ Darla shook her head. ‘The abbess wasn’t joking when she put the undercaves off-limits. She wrote it in the book and everything …’
‘That was over two years ago.’ Ara came to Nona’s defence. ‘Plus, if they didn’t know Yisht was there for all those weeks and she was going to and fro from her room, they won’t know we’re there if we come from underneath for a quick look. Right, Nona?’
Nona nodded. She owed it to Hessa. She had let years slide by and done nothing to avenge her. Her friend had died and Nona had hidden in the convent, well fed, cared for, whilst Yisht walked the world with Hessa’s blood on her hands. But though the Corridor might be a narrow girdle to the globe it was still too wide for a lone child to find a woman like that who didn’t want to be found. And Yisht was an ice-triber. She might be anywhere in the vastness of the ice. ‘I can’t do this alone.’ The gate to Shade class had a sigil-scribed lock now: the thing would have to be blown off its hinges to gain access without the key. Coming at the Dome of the Ancestor and the shipheart chamber from below was the best option.
‘I’ll help.’ Jula spoke up, her voice thin in the cavern’s void.
Nona offered her a smile. Jula put an arm around her shoulders for the briefest hug.
‘So …’ Nona, even less at ease with physical affection than Jula, waved a hand at the tunnel mouths.
‘That one.’ Jula pointed to the leftmost tunnel, boulder- choked and leading down. She had an instinct for direction below ground that had proved uncanny. ‘Though it doesn’t look very safe.’
Ara led on and they followed, stepping over fallen rock, some of it still jagged. After a hundred yards or so the passage broadened and became a cavern so wide it swallowed their light
