Holy Sister
Holy Sister
Mark Lawrence
Nona Grey’s story reaches its shattering conclusion in the third instalment of Book of the Ancestor.THEY CAME AGAINST HER AS A CHILD. NOW THEY FACE THE WOMAN.The ice is advancing, the Corridor narrowing, and the empire is under siege from the Scithrowl in the east and the Durns in the west. Everywhere, the emperor’s armies are in retreat.Nona faces the final challenges that must be overcome if she is to become a full sister in the order of her choice. But it seems unlikely that Nona and her friends will have time to earn a nun’s habit before war is on their doorstep.Even a warrior like Nona cannot hope to turn the tide of war.The shiphearts offer strength that she might use to protect those she loves, but it’s a power that corrupts. A final battle is coming in which she will be torn between friends, unable to save them all. A battle in which her own demons will try to unmake her.A battle in which hearts will be broken, lovers lost, thrones burned.HOLY SISTER completes the Book of the Ancestor trilogy that began with RED SISTER and GREY SISTER. A ground-breaking series, it has established Mark Lawrence as one of the most exciting new voices in modern speculative fiction.
Copyright (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
HarperVoyager
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2019
Cover © Tomasz Jeduszek 2019
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Mark Lawrence asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008152390
Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008152413
Version: 2019-04-04
Dedication (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
For my grandfather, ‘Bill’ William George Cook, who lived most of his first decade under the reign of Queen Victoria and who with great patience helped me make my first treasure box
Contents
Cover (#ud7909d06-ddce-5339-b03b-397b17494aac)
Title Page (#u0da5596b-67ec-5c05-8a99-46b469af7dee)
Copyright
Dedication
The Story So Far
Prologue
Chapter 1. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 2. Three years earlier: The Escape
Chapter 3. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 4. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 5. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 6. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 7. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 8. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 9. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 10. Holy Class
Chapter 11. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 12. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 13. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 14. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 15. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 16. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 17. Holy Class
Chapter 18. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 19. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 20. Holy Class
Chapter 21. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 22. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 23. Holy Class
Chapter 24. Holy Class
Chapter 25. Holy Class
Chapter 26. Holy Class
Chapter 27. Holy Class
Chapter 28. Holy Class
Chapter 29. Holy Class
Chapter 30. Holy Class
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Also by Mark Lawrence
About the Publisher
The Story So Far (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
For those of you who have had to wait a while for this book I provide brief catch-up notes so that your memories may be refreshed and I can avoid the awkwardness of having to have characters tell each other things they already know for your benefit.
Here I carry forward only what is of importance to the tale that follows.
The people and places in the brief summary I start with are expanded on further down, so if it means nothing to you, skip the next paragraph then come back to it.
Grey Sister ended with Nona, around fifteen years old, escaping Sherzal’s palace with troops in pursuit. She had friends with her, including Zole, Ara, Regol, Abbess Glass and Sister Kettle, and assorted other survivors. Zole had the Noi-Guin’s shipheart, stolen from the assassins’ headquarters beneath the palace. Clera helped Nona escape but went back to Sherzal’s service. Nona’s enemy from the convent, the novice Joeli Namsis, was still in the palace and her actions led to the death of Nona’s friend Darla during the escape. Nona and her companions are in the mountains on the border with Scithrowl and a long way from the convent. The story does not begin with this scene but will return to it presently.
Abeth is a planet orbiting a dying red sun. It is sheathed in ice and the vast majority of its people live in a fifty-mile-wide ice-walled corridor around the equator.
An artificial moon, a great orbiting mirror, keeps the Corridor free of ice by focusing the sun’s rays into it each night.
When, thousands of years ago, the four original tribes of men came to Abeth from the stars they found the ruins of a vanished people they called the Missing.
The empire is bounded by the lands of the Scithrowl to the east and by the Sea of Marn to the west. Across the sea the Durns rule. At the end of Grey Sister Scithrowl hordes under their Battle-Queen, Adoma, were amassing on their side of the mountain range that borders the battle lines.
The emperor’s sister, Sherzal, commands the defence against Scithrowl from her palace in the mountains. She was going to betray the empire and let Queen Adoma’s forces through the Grand Pass. The deal included combining the shipheart held by the Noi-Guin assassins and the shipheart stolen from Sweet Mercy Convent by the ice-triber Yisht, with the two shiphearts Queen Adoma has, thereby making the quartet of shiphearts believed necessary to open the Ark. The Ark lies beneath the emperor’s palace and was built either by the Missing or the first humans and is said to allow control of the moon.
Shiphearts are objects of disputed origin that may have powered the ships that brought the tribes of men to Abeth. The closer a person gets to one the more enhanced their natural talent for magic is. Get too close, though, and the shipheart’s power begins to break your mind apart. Undesirable pieces of your personality like anger or greed or malice split into sentient fragments called devils and exert greater influence over you.
As the sun weakens, the ice continues a slow advance despite the warmth of the moon’s nightly focus. As the Corridor is squeezed, nations look to their neighbours for new territory.
The empire’s nobility are the Sis. The suffix is attached to the names of ennobled families (e.g. Tacsis, Jotsis etc).
The four original tribes that came to Abeth were the gerant, hunska, marjal, and quantal. Their blood sometimes shows in the current population, conferring unique powers. The gerant grow very large, the hunska are fantastically swift, the marjal can manifest all manner of minor to medium magics, including shadow-weaving, sigil-writing, and mastery of elements. The quantal can access the raw power of the Path and manipulate the threads that are woven to create reality.
The Missing left behind structures called Arks. Three exist within the Corridor. The emperor’s palace is built on one. There are no reliable records of anyone being able to open the Ark, but a faked prophecy predicts the coming of a Chosen One who will be able to. Others believe that four shiphearts used together can open an Ark.
Nona Grey was a peasant child from a nameless village. She was given to the child-taker Giljohn who sold her to the Caltess where ring-fighters are trained and pitted against each other. She ended up at the Convent of Sweet Mercy where novices are trained in service to the Ancestor. Novices take orders as one of four classes of nun. Holy Sister (entirely religious duties), Grey Sister/Sister of Discretion (trained in assassination and stealth), Red Sister/Martial Sister (trained in combat), Holy Witch/Mystic Sister (trained to walk the Path).
Nona has proven to be a triple-blood, an incredibly rare occurrence. She has hunska, marjal, and quantal skills. Nona has wholly black eyes, a side effect of taking a dangerous antidote. She has no shadow, having cut it free while fighting Yisht.
Yisht is a woman of the ice-tribes and is in the employ of the emperor’s sister Sherzal. Yisht stole the Sweet Mercy shipheart and killed Nona’s friend Hessa.
Nona is hated by Lano Tacsis because she killed his brother and also left his father, Lord Thuran Tacsis, bound to his own torture device.
Joeli Namsis is the daughter of a lord with close ties to the Tacsis family. She is skilled at quantal thread-work and poisoning. She became Nona’s enemy at the convent.
During the theft of the shipheart Nona was betrayed by her friend and fellow novice Clera Ghomal. Among Nona’s remaining friends are novices Ara, Zole, Ruli, and Jula. Arabella Jotsis is from a powerful family and a rare two-blood, having both hunska and quantal skills. Ruli has minor marjal skills. Jula is very studious and hopes to become a Holy Sister.
Zole is a significant novice. She is from the ice-tribes and came to the convent at Sherzal’s insistence, used as an unwitting distraction to help in the theft of the shipheart. She is the only known four-blood with access to all the skills of the original tribes. Many consider her to be the Chosen One from prophecy. Under the prophecy Zole is the Argatha, and Nona is her Shield.
The Convent of Sweet Mercy has been led by Abbess Glass, a woman whose connections in the Church and beyond reach further than expected.
Most senior among the nuns are the Sisters Superior, Wheel and Rose. Sister Wheel teaches Spirit classes. Sister Rose runs the sanatorium. Other important figures are Sister Tallow, who teaches Blade, Sister Pan, who teaches Path, and Sister Apple who teaches Shade. Sister Kettle is a Grey Sister based at the convent. She and Apple are lovers.
There are four classes/stages that novices move through as they train to take holy orders as nuns. Red Class, Grey Class, Mystic Class, and Holy Class. Grey Sister ended with Nona in Mystic Class.
Novices take new names when they become nuns. Nona will become Sister Cage. Ara will be Sister Thorn.
Prologue (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
The roar of a crowd invades you like a living thing, reverberating in your chest, taking its answer from your lips without permission. The press of bodies overwhelms barriers and unknowingly the many become something singular, the same emotion bleeding from the skins of different people, the same thought echoing in a hundred skulls, or a thousand. For a marjal empath it can be a thing at once both terrifying and glorious, expanding their control, making it easier to reach into the minds around them, but also allowing the possibility that in such a storm of humanity they may lose themselves, may be lifted out of their flesh, never to find it again.
Markus watched the defeated fighter being helped from the ring beneath the jeers and complaint of the crowd. The victor still stalked the perimeter of his raised battleground, arms lifted, sweat running down his ribs. But already the crowd were losing interest in him, turning to their neighbours with speculation, observation, or jest, turning to the odds-mongers to lay new wagers, turning to the counter in the far corner to fill their cups with wine. And some, seeking new thrills, now faced the second ring at the far end of the hall.
The gerant fighter waiting behind the ropes threatened nine foot in height and Markus didn’t believe that he had seen a larger man. The fighter was still young, in his early twenties perhaps, and his muscles crowded along his bones, the battle for space heaping them up in great, veined mounds. He watched the world from pale eyes beneath a thicket of short red hair.
At the Caltess the gerant contests were the most popular. The sight of enormous fighters pitting their strength against each other never failed to draw the masses, and on nights with an open ring the folk of Verity loved to see that strength turned upon hapless challengers. Bouts between hunska ring-fighters had a strong following among the more experienced watchers but the speed of the combatants often left the common crowd bewildered. Mixed matches were a rarity but the contest of speed against strength was always interesting.
From the baying press of humanity around the base of the giant’s ring a challenger emerged. A powerfully built man who stood head and shoulders above those pressing him on all sides. In normal circumstances Markus would have been impressed by the fellow’s physique and backed him against any three bar-room brawlers.
An undercurrent of whispers and speculation flowed around the hall. The man was a refugee from the port of Ren, which now lay within the Durnish incursion. He had some reputation from pit-fights in the frost towns along the north margins.
‘Five says he doesn’t last the round against Denam.’ Someone behind Markus seeking a private wager.
The roar as the newcomer climbed into the ring drowned out further conversation. Markus hadn’t ever been inside the great hall of the Caltess, though years ago he had spent hours waiting in the compound with the other children from Giljohn’s cage. The child-taker had never intended to sell Markus to Partnis Reeve though. He’d suspected Markus of marjal blood and had taken him on to be offered where such talents would fetch a richer price. The great hall had stood silent and dark on that midnight long ago, and as the night had shaded into morning young Markus had shivered and clutched himself and never suspected that he would one day stand within, part of a sweating, heaving mass baying for blood.
Even though it was Markus’s first time before the rings he knew Denam’s name. Despite his tender years the young man was the new champion among the gerant ring-fighters, famed for his brutality. For Denam open-ring night often proved to involve nothing more than glowering at the sea of resentful faces before him. Finding no one to answer his challenge he would cede his place to another fighter and once more the crowd would discover its courage.
‘Milos of Ren!’ the fight-master called out.
Milos raised his arm in acknowledgement and walked to his corner to await the bell.
Markus didn’t hear the chime above the roar but the two men closed, Milos dwarfed by Denam. The gerant full-blood kept his hands down and let Milos take a punch. It was as if he had swung at a tree. Denam’s head moved slightly to the left with the blow. Milos clubbed him two-handed across the other side of his face and Denam’s head lurched to the right. Denam returned his gaze to his opponent and grinned, his teeth bloody. Milos didn’t appear to understand. He looked down at his fists as if there might be something wrong with them.
Denam slapped the man, brushing his arms away. Blood sprayed from Milos’s mouth and he staggered as if drunk. Denam caught him in two great hands, one wrapped around his neck, the other encompassing his thigh, and lifted him four yards above the boards before slamming him down, full-bodied, face first.
Milos did not rise. An apprentice scrambled in to scatter sand across the crimson smear left behind when they dragged him out beneath the lowest rope.
Markus wasn’t alone in thinking that Denam was finished for the night, but the flow of the crowd indicated another challenger coming to the fore. The newcomer appeared, climbing clear of the throng. From behind, Markus saw only a dark cloak and black hair. This challenger stood even shorter than Milos, little more than six foot and of considerably lighter build. The audience hushed in surprise.
‘Hunska?’ the whisper went round.
‘Fool!’ came the reply.
The challenger might not be a giant but even so hunskas were never this tall or broad-shouldered. Denam fixed the newcomer with a stare so murderous that Markus felt the need to run boiling up inside him. As an empath he was used to swimming in the currents of others’ emotions but the ring-fighter’s anger ran swifter and more deep than anything he’d felt before and at each moment threatened to overwhelm his senses.
The challenger ducked beneath the top rope.
‘Drunk,’ someone speculated.
Markus tried to imagine how drunk a person would have to be to think this a good idea. Too drunk to stand, probably. This one didn’t move as if inebriated though.
The hush fell to silence as the challenger’s cloak fluttered from the ring. The woman wore the same as the ring-fighters, just a white loin-cloth and a white band of cloth bound tight around her chest, her pale skin accentuating the redness of Denam’s complexion.
The fight-master didn’t approach to learn the challenger’s name. Instead he raised his voice, ‘Nona of the convent.’
Nona didn’t lift her arm to acknowledge the crowd’s roar but she did make a slow turn, and when the black orbs of her eyes swept across him Markus knew that he had been seen.
‘Fight!’
Denam came slowly to meet the novice, fists raised to protect his throat and eyes, his stance closed to defend his groin. Markus watched Nona intently, trying to see anything of the girl he’d known over those weeks in Giljohn’s cage. She was two years his junior so she would be around seventeen, but she looked every inch a woman. Long-limbed, lean, an athlete’s body, each muscle chiselled in hard relief, flat belly above the jut of her hipbones. Even frightened for her as he was, Markus couldn’t deny she drew his eye in ways unbecoming to a Holy Brother.
Nona stepped in with a swift confidence, striking Denam just below the ribs on his left side, five or six blows landing with the rapidity of a woodpecker hammering at a tree. She punched with her whole body, swivelling at the waist. Denam laughed the blows off and swept a hand at the novice. She evaded him with ease, landing three or four more punches in the same spot. Hard as she must be hitting the man, Markus couldn’t see what hope Nona had of victory. The muscle covering Denam’s bones lay inches thick and the bones beneath must be like those of a draught horse. She might as well try to punch a bear into submission.
Denam squared up against Nona, his hatred for her obvious even as he tried to laugh at her efforts. Nona stood her ground and the crowd drew in its breath. Denam swung with an arm that looked as thick around as Markus’s chest. The fist he drove at Nona was the size of her skull.
She took the punch in the face, her head snapping to the right. The follow-up came from the left, snapping her head back the other way. Markus imagined those fists would shatter a skull, leave cheekbones in fragments, break a neck …
Nona looked up at the fighter towering above her and smiled, her teeth unbloodied. Denam seemed astonished, the crowd roared in wonder. Magic? But Markus had sensed no enchantment, not the slightest crackle of it. He could only imagine that she had moved her head at the same speed as the fists seeking it, allowing only a gentle contact.
Again Nona peppered the same spot below Denam’s ribs with half a dozen blows in the space of a heartbeat or two. She leapt back, rolling under a sweeping hand, rising in the same motion, kicking at her target, evading a second questing hand and spinning to land another kick in the same spot.
Denam came towards her, his own roar louder than the mob. As he advanced he favoured his left side. A small thing that could easily pass unnoticed. Nona twisted clear, bounced off two sets of ropes and landed a flying kick, just below his ribs.
For long minutes the fight continued, Denam’s attacks almost brushing Nona’s pale skin but never quite finding it. Nona landing a score of punches and kicks on her target, perhaps two score. Denam’s rage grew, his face crimson, spitting and foaming, howling threats and promises. But he crouched over the injured side now, the bruised lower ribs, covering them with his elbow. He leaned against the corner post, hitching in a breath.
‘Come on, big boy.’ Nona’s first words in the fight.
They worked like a spark to flash-powder. Denam threw himself forward with a scream. Nona dived beneath his outstretched arms, rolled head over heels between his legs, through the opening left as fury overcame caution, and drove her heel into his groin with all the speed and strength she possessed.
Denam made it two more strides before he realized that Nona was no longer in front of him, and a further stride before the pain hit home. The gerant’s legs forgot whatever orders they had and dropped him to the planks where he curled around his agony, blind to the world.
Nona sprang to her feet, the fight still in her face, teeth bared. With the awful gale of Denam’s hatred subsumed into his wordless agony, Markus could now feel Nona’s emotions and found himself rocked back upon his heels by the raw animal aggression bleeding off her. He had experienced something similar when a wrong turn had taken him to the dog-pits beyond the walls of Old Town. A bloodied mastiff with its jaws locked around the throat of another hound had given off the same explosive violence that the novice did. Markus fully expected Nona to fall upon her prey, gouging Denam’s eyes from their sockets or stamping his face to pulp. But instead, in the space of five deep breaths, she drew it all back in, every piece, until there was nothing he could read above the mixed sea of emotion all around him. Of all that he’d seen that night it was this quenching of fury that was the most remarkable to him.
Ignoring the cheers, and the fight-master coming to question or reward her, Nona vaulted the ropes and dropped into the crowd. Within moments she was at Markus’s side, vibrant, sweat-soaked, alive, the alien blackness of her eyes level with his.
‘You came,’ she said.
Markus shrugged. ‘You asked me to.’
1 (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
Holy Class (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
Present Day (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
Markus had grown beyond Nona’s expectations. She remembered a fierce spiky-haired farm-boy who had welcomed her to Giljohn’s cage by demanding her age and had appeared to find comfort in establishing his seniority over her. A bad beginning, but his affection for the child-taker’s mule had softened her opinion of him by the end of their journey. Now he stood a solid six foot two, handsome in a friendly way, a face that would laugh with you. The black hair had been tamed with oil and lay flat to his skull in the way of monks. The only sign of the boy from the cage was a sharpness to his features and a quickness in the dark eyes that studied her.
Nona had wrapped her cloak around her once more. Sweat stuck the material to her back, making her uncomfortable, or perhaps that was just the frankness of Markus’s regard. She offered a smile in return for his and hugged her hands under her arms. Her knuckles ached from repeatedly punching Denam. Nona was sure she’d punched practice timbers that were softer than the gerant’s side. She felt good though, her body glowing, her step so light that with a little effort she might just shrug off gravity entirely.
She leaned in. ‘Let’s talk outside.’
Markus nodded. They pushed a path towards the main doors. Already the Caltess’s patrons were flocking back to the second ring. A couple of hulking apprentices were helping Denam over the ropes of the first.
‘I’m surprised the convent lets novices come down here to fight,’ Markus said behind her.
‘They don’t.’ Nona slipped between the doors as they opened to admit more thrill-seekers.
‘Why did you—’ Markus broke off to draw his robes around him, the black habit of a Holy Brother. He followed her out into rain-laced wind, a loud brrr escaping at the cold shock of it.
‘An old dispute that needed settling,’ Nona said. It was partly true. Mostly she had wanted to hit someone, hard, again and again. Markus probably knew that already; classified Church reports named him as one of the most effective marjal empaths currently in the Ancestor’s service.
Nona led Markus around the corner of the great hall where they would be sheltered from the gale. The walls loomed dark above them, the sky crossed with tatters of cloud beneath the crimson spread of a thousand dying stars.
‘Why did you want me? Send the message, I mean?’ Markus seemed less sure of himself than she had expected. Someone who could read her like a book should be more confident? She certainly wished her own empath skills would tell her more of his mood than she could glean from the intensity of his stare or the tight line of his lips.
‘That day at the Academy.’ The words blurted from her. ‘Did you make that girl attack me?’ Nona forced her mouth closed. She had had it all planned out, what she would say, how, when. And now her idiot tongue had cut through all of it.
‘She … she was already attacking you.’ Guilt came from him in waves.
‘She was using the darkness to scare me. Or trying to. But then she went mad.’ Nona remembered how an animal fury had risen across the girl’s face. ‘You did that!’
‘I did.’ A frown now, his brow pale and beaded with rain.
‘She tried to shadow-rend me. I could have been torn apart!’
Markus raised his hands. ‘I made her angry. I didn’t know she could do that.’
‘Well, she could!’ Nona felt her own anger rising from the well she thought emptied in the ring.
‘I’m sorry.’ He looked down.
‘But …’ It felt like honesty, but Nona supposed he could fake that better than anyone she’d ever known. ‘Why?’
‘Abbot Jacob told me to.’
‘Jacob?’ A chill ran through Nona. ‘High Priest Jacob? I mean the one who used to be?’
Markus nodded, still looking down.
‘But … he’s not … you don’t have to …’
‘He was appointed to St Croyus as abbot a year after Abbess Glass had Nevis replace him as high priest.’
‘St Croyus? But Jacob’s a monster!’ Nona couldn’t see how the former high priest could have risen from disgrace so swiftly.
‘A monster with friends in high places. Including the Tacsis.’ Markus shrugged. ‘And he’s not a stupid man, just a cruel and greedy one.’
‘So he bought you from Giljohn, sent you to St Croyus, and followed you there to take over?’ Nona had seen the high priest beat Giljon’s mule to death and leave Markus broken. And that was just on the day he’d purchased him as a frightened boy of ten. How must it have been to grow up under that man’s command?
‘I’m sorry.’ Markus looked up and met her eyes. She gave him points for not using his power to try to influence her. She would know. At least she hoped she would know. He couldn’t be that good, could he? Markus coughed. ‘So, did you ask me down here to beat me senseless? Kick me in the groin? Or is my apology enough?’
A man hurried around the corner before Nona could answer. He approached them, hunched against the rain.
‘Regol?’ Nona asked. She’d looked for the ring-fighter in the crowd before she took on Denam but not spotted him.
‘At your service, my lady!’ He made a sweeping bow, managing to keep both eyes on Markus.
Nona couldn’t help but smile. ‘I’m not your lady, or anyone else’s.’
‘A remarkable victory, novice.’ Regol straightened. ‘Our ginger friend can be a stubborn fellow.’ His eyes held a certain distance, a reassessment perhaps.
‘You saw?’ She had wanted him to.
‘The whole thing. And did you hear the newest recruits cheering in the attic?’
Nona flexed her hands, grimacing. ‘I thought he wasn’t ever going to go down.’
Regol winced. ‘The real question is whether he’s going to get up again, and what he’ll sound like.’ He squeaked the last part then turned his gaze on Markus as if noticing him for the first time. ‘I would ask if this monk is bothering you, but I guess if he was he’d be on the ground looking for his teeth.’ Again that look, as if he saw a different person before him tonight.
‘I’m sure Nona can have a disagreement without punching anyone in the face.’ Markus returned Regol’s stare. ‘Not everyone who climbs out of the ring just steps into a bigger one.’
Regol shrugged, that mocking smile of his firmly in place. ‘The whole Corridor is a ring around Abeth, brother. And when the ice squeezes, everyone fights.’
‘Go away,’ Markus said.
Regol opened his mouth with some reply but a puzzled look overtook him. He turned to go, then spun back as if he had forgotten something.
‘You would rather be watching the fights.’ Markus spoke without emphasis but the waves of power bleeding from him shocked Nona with their intensity. It was as if someone had opened a furnace door and an unexpected wall of heat had broken across her.
Regol turned back and walked off without comment.
‘He won’t be pleased when that wears off,’ Nona said.
‘No.’ Markus nodded. ‘But it would have been worse if he’d stayed longer. He didn’t like me at all, and we both know why.’
‘Oh.’ Nona laughed, though it came out wrong. ‘Regol’s not like that. He flirts with all the girls. The ladies of the Sis practically worship—’
‘It’s you he wants, Nona. You don’t have to be an empath to know that.’
‘No, he’s just …’ She trailed off as Markus shook his head, his smile half-sad. ‘Anyway, you got rid of him easily enough.’ A twinge of disappointment had run through her at that.
‘Easily?’ Markus leaned back against the wall. ‘He put up a hell of a fight. I would never have suspected it of a Caltess brawler.’ He put his fingers to his temples. ‘I’ll probably have a headache all night …’
Nona said nothing, only glanced towards the corner. After Joeli had made Regol abandon Darla mid-fight at Sherzal’s palace the ring-fighter had asked Nona to help him. He hadn’t wanted to be manipulated like that ever again. Nona had spent hours training him to erect barriers against that kind of thread-work. He would take this defeat badly.
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 (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
Three years earlier (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
The Escape (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
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 wound in her thigh.
‘We shouldn’t be doing this, Abbess.’ Nona looked back. ‘The Sweet Mercy shipheart did terrible things to Yisht.’
‘And yet Zole is untouched.’ The abbess and the others were black shapes now, with just edges picked out here and there by the deep purple light of the shipheart.
But Zole was not untouched …
‘Find your serenity.’ Zole’s voice resonated through the night. ‘Serenity will preserve you.’
Nona didn’t feel serene. She felt scared and in pain, but she reached for her trance, running the lines of the old song through her head, imagining the slow descent of the moon and the children of her village chanting in a circle around the fire. And with the moon’s fall a blanket of serenity settled upon her, setting the world apart, her pain not gone but no longer personal, more a curio, an object for study.
Zole held the shipheart out towards them, a sphere the size of a child’s head, resting on both palms, dark purple, almost black, but somehow glowing with a violet light that seemed to shade beyond vision. Nona advanced. She felt the pressure of the thing, as if she had fallen into deep water. She had plunged into the black depths of the Glasswater sinkhole before, and this was no less terrifying. The need to breathe built in her and threatened her serenity, before, with a gasp, she remembered that there was no reason not to draw breath.
With just a yard between them Nona’s skin began to prickle then burn, as if the devils were there already just waiting for their true colours to be made known. Nona had shared her skin with a devil before, Keot, not one of her own making but one that had infected her when she killed Raymel Tacsis. The rocks around the man’s corpse had been stained black beneath the crimson.
‘Hold to yourself.’ Zole closed the remaining distance that Nona’s feet proved unwilling to cross. Zole had seen Nona’s old devil and kept the secret. Zole said they called them klaulathu on the ice. Things of the Missing.
Without preamble, Zole pressed the heart’s orb to the wound above Nona’s knee. Nona had expected her flesh to sizzle, the blood in her veins to boil like the water in Sweet Mercy’s pipes, but instead icy fingers wrapped around her bones and a black-violet light stole her vision. For a moment she saw strange spires silhouetted against an indigo sky, swept away in the next beat of her heart as if by a great wind. The Path opened before her; not the narrow and treacherous line that had to be hunted, but broad, blazing, so wide that its direction became uncertain, a place one might wander, drunk on power until the end of days. Voices began to sound within Nona’s head, all of them hers but speaking from different places, some raging, some jealous, some whispering secret fears or wants, a babble at first but each taking on a separate identity, becoming clearer, more distinct.
‘Done.’ Zole pushed Nona back, the base of her palm against Nona’s sternum.
Nona staggered and Ara kept her from falling with help from Kettle. The heart-light caught their faces, making something alien of them both.
‘Are you all right?’ Kettle asked.
‘I …’ Nona stood straight, stamped her leg. It still ached but the flesh had been made whole, a white line of scar tissue marking the passage of Yisht’s blade. ‘Yes.’ The voices that had filled her mind became jumbled together once more, fading back into the shadows.
‘Go on.’ Kettle sent Nona back towards the abbess and the rest of the group, giving her shoulder a small shove to get her going.
By the time Nona reached the ruins of the carriage that they had escaped the palace in she was calm again, her serenity intact.
‘How do you feel?’ The abbess watched Nona’s eyes with an uncomfortable intensity.
‘I don’t know,’ Nona said. ‘Tired. But full of energy. If that makes sense.’ She looked back down at her leg, the scar visible through the tattered smock. The cold no longer touched her. ‘I don’t know how Zole can stand it.’ Part of her wanted to tell the abbess about the devil she had seen at Zole’s wrist when she first arrived with the shipheart. She bit down on the impulse. She had lived with Keot for years and Zole hadn’t informed on her. Zole would have to deal with her own demons. The abbess probably couldn’t help in any case. And the inquisitors with her would want to burn the devil out of Zole.
Abbess Glass took Nona’s hand and led her back to the main group. ‘You’re mended? You can walk the distance now?’
‘I could run it!’ Ara caught them up, her hair rising around her head as if backcombed, a blonde confusion defying the wind. She had a wild look in her eye. Nona met her gaze and a grin broke across both their faces, a shared understanding, and something more complex that perhaps neither understood. Nona wanted to run with her, to chase her. Wanted her friend.
The three of them turned to see Kettle silhouetted against the shipheart’s glow, Zole on one knee, applying the heart to the nun’s inner thigh. Kettle broke away with a cry after just a moment’s contact. She came hurrying down the road, not glancing back. She moved quickly, though still with a slight limp.
‘Sister Kettle?’ The abbess stepped forward to meet her.
‘Mother …’ Kettle’s wide eyes sought the abbess as though she were night-blind.
‘Here.’ Abbess Glass took the nun’s hands. ‘You’re safe.’
Nona raised her brows at the enormity of that lie but said nothing.
‘I can’t go near it again. I can’t.’ Kettle shot a glance over her shoulder as if Zole might be approaching with the shipheart even now.
‘It’s all right, sister.’ The abbess led them further away. ‘I need you to protect us as we journey west. Even if all Sherzal’s forces follow the shipheart towards the ice the empire roads are no longer a safe place for the vulnerable. And unguarded Sis lords are likely to be a tempting prize to any bandits we might pass.’
‘But Zole …’
‘Zole will have her Shield.’
3 (#ulink_6a13c895-ce2b-5573-8e19-1aa7a4c732ff)
Holy Class (#ulink_6a13c895-ce2b-5573-8e19-1aa7a4c732ff)
Present Day (#ulink_6a13c895-ce2b-5573-8e19-1aa7a4c732ff)
After leaving Markus at the Caltess Nona ran to the city gates. She covered the five miles from Verity’s walls to the foot of the Rock of Faith at a near sprint. The burning of her muscles and the hot thrill of her blood battled the night wind’s chill.
Doubt dogged her footsteps, each mile and each yard. The voices of her suspicion were almost as real, almost as disembodied as Keot’s voice had been when he lived beneath her skin. Will he be true? Can he be trusted? Questions Nona had no answer for, just the feeling in her gut. Clera betrayed you, the voices whispered, and she was a friend.
‘She saved me too.’ Panted out between breaths as Nona picked up her pace, trying to outrun her doubts.
Nona shook her head, sweat flying in the wind. She was to be a nun. She would choose from the disciplines offered to her. Just a handful of final tests stood between her and the vows. She was to stand her life upon a foundation of faith. Faith that the branches of the Ancestor’s tree would hold her, and that those branches would carry all of humanity into a future less dark than they feared. If a nun could not have faith then who could? The bonds of friendship had always borne her more firmly than those of blood. Markus had ridden with her in the cage and that bond would suffice. She had faith that it would. Also she had a back-up plan. With a gasp of effort she ran faster still, until any that she might have passed on the road that night would have stood amazed and watched her fly.
At last she came to a halt, breathing heavily. The base of a great limestone cliff rose above her. From its heights the southern windows of Blade Hall offered a view of the city and, twenty miles beyond, the ice glimmering red beneath the moon. Those walls were closer now than they had been when Abbess Glass had first brought Nona to the convent. North and south the ice squeezed and all the nations of the Corridor bled.
The start of the Seren Way lay close at hand, just a few minutes’ walk around the Rock, but Wheel had taken to watching it of late. The old woman spent whole nights seated at the narrowest part, wrapped in a great blanket and staring at the night with watery eyes, just waiting to catch any errant novice. Why she didn’t just check the dormitories was unclear but Ruli claimed Wheel had been made to vow never to enter the building under the tenure of the previous abbess following an unspecified ‘incident’. Ruli claimed a novice had been killed, but when pressed she had to admit making that part up.
Nona craned her neck and looked up at the dark acreage of stone. Here and there moonlight picked out a line where it caught upon an edge of rock. She took a deep breath, swung her arms, and began to climb. She followed an old fault line, digging her leather-clad toes into the crack, reaching up for fingerholds. Her flaw-blades would make a quicker, easier job of it but Nona had learned the danger in relying too much on something that might not always be there. Besides, the pattern of regular slots driven into the rock might be spotted one day, and it would be hard to deny her own signature.
As she gained height Nona’s arms began to join her legs in complaint. Her hands ached from punching Denam over and over. The thought of him falling gave her fresh energy, though. She had wanted to fight him for years. She could say it was to take him down a peg or three, punishment for being a bully, or that it was payment for his attempt to break her in the ring on the instructions of Raymel Tacsis. The truth though was something less laudable, and came in two parts, both now settling into her mind as truths often do when a head is empty of all things save the demands of hard labour.
Nona had fought Denam because even with Keot gone a hunger for violence burned in her and if left unfed too long it would break out in dangerous ways. Much of what she had blamed on Raymel’s devil seemed instead to be some fundamental part of who she had grown into. Denam represented that rare someone, a person she could hit over and over without the danger of killing them, or any need for remorse over pain inflicted.
The other reasons for the contest had been Markus and Regol. She had asked Markus to break holy law. She owed it to him to show him who he was breaking those rules for. And Regol … Regol needed to see it too. Regol who spoke foolishness into the pillows when she joined him beneath the roof that Partnis Reeve put over his head. Regol who thought her something precious, as holy as the vows she broke. He needed to see what really lay behind the eyes he claimed to lose himself in. Something sharp-angled and vicious – not the princess he sometimes let himself pretend she was. Nona knew better than to allow him to build his hopes upon a lie. Regol fulfilled a need, as Denam had, one in the ring, one in the furs. She and Regol were friends whose bodies were pleasing to each other. She couldn’t let a friend build their hopes upon such a flawed foundation as her. She hadn’t saved Saida, or Hessa, or Darla. Even as an agent of vengeance she had failed. Sherzal, the architect behind so many deaths, still walked the world, as did others who had served her will.
Nona hauled herself over the edge of the cliff and lay on her back on the cold stone, just inches from the fall. Her arms trembled, her body knew the bone-deep exhaustion of prolonged mistreatment, but her mind still raced, images rising from the darkness, one after the next. Denam’s anger, Regol’s surprise, Markus’s caution, a hundred other scenes, drawn by threads of memory.
In time she rolled onto her side and levered herself up. She passed around the far end of Blade Hall, slipping along the perimeter of the courtyard before Heart Hall. Moving between moonshadows she skirted the buildings, placing each foot with the caution of one born to the Grey.
‘Novice Nona.’ A soft voice at her shoulder. ‘You smell of man-sweat.’
Nona turned, unable to see anyone in the darkness behind her. ‘And you smell of apples, sister. One red Apple, to be more precise.’
‘Then our sins are evenly matched.’ The shadows melted from Sister Kettle and she stepped forward with a half-smile.
‘Perhaps.’ Nona grinned. ‘But I earned mine in front of an audience—’
‘Well, that’s novel.’ Kettle widened both eyes and her smile.
‘In a ring at the Caltess.’
‘No Regol tonight?’ Kettle frowned.
‘That’s a habit I should discard,’ Nona said. ‘This one, I should keep on.’ She patted her garment. ‘I’ll be taking a nun’s vows soon. If they don’t mean more to me than the promises novices make then I shouldn’t say them.’
‘There are other ways to serve.’ Kettle pursed her lips. ‘You don’t have to stay. Nor do you have to be perfect. But … you do have to go to bed.’ She pointed.
Nona nodded. ‘Bed sounds good. A bath would be good too. But I would probably fall asleep and drown.’ She shrugged and turned to go.
‘Watch out for Joeli.’ Hissed at her back.
Nona approached the dormitories. She examined the main door before opening it and entering the hall beyond. A sleepy novice emerged from the Red dorm, lantern in hand, and passed her without looking up, bound for the Necessary. Nona moved on, climbing the stairs to the Holy floor at the top of the building.
She studied the door to her dorm more closely than she had the main one. Defocusing her sight, she picked out a glowing thread laid across the floor just in front of the door, another looping the handle, both veering off at strange angles to the world. They were trip-threads most likely, set to warn Joeli of her comings and goings, but there could be more to them. Some threads could cut you, others could just make it hurt as much as if they had cut you, others could wreak more complex damage, or adhere and trail out behind you, providing information to anyone holding them closer to where they joined the Path. How many of those tricks Joeli had mastered, Nona couldn’t say, except that she had definitely used both trip-threads and pain-threads in the past. Nona’s own talents still lagged behind, but not so far as they once had.
Nona removed the threads, pushing them temporarily out of alignment with the world. They would return shortly and appear untouched. She saw the third thread just as she reached for the door handle, gossamer thin, turning virulent green as she brought it into focus. Something new and unfriendly. Fortunately it too gave way when she worked to remove it from her path, though it scalded her fingertips before it vanished.
A moment later Nona entered the dorm. Almost half the top floor was given over to individual study rooms. The Holy Class novices slept in a long hall not much bigger than the one given over to the novices in Red Class. The girls were not yet trusted with the privacy of a nun’s cell, but the class code was to overlook each other’s indiscretions, and Wheel would undoubtedly have apoplexy were she to watch a typical evening unfold.
Nona moved silently down the row of beds, her eyes returning several times to the long curves beneath Joeli’s blankets. The abbess had been forced to accept the girl’s return a year earlier as part of the emperor’s efforts at reconciliation and unity after the events at Sherzal’s palace. Lord Namsis had secured his daughter’s re-entry by having her submit to the Inquisition. The interrogator had been armed with one of Sister Apple’s bitter little truth pills. To the astonishment of everyone who knew her Joeli had affirmed her innocence with a black tongue. She had used her thread-work against Darla and Regol only with the intention of scaring them into retreat, hoping to end the bloodshed that way.
Nona slipped into her bed, still watching Joeli in the dim glow of the night-lantern. Her own thought was that Lord Namsis had paid an Academy man, a quantal thread-worker, to undertake the delicate task of altering Joeli’s memories. The girl now believed her own story and hadn’t lied, even though what she said was not true.
In the warmth of her blankets Nona released the breath she had been holding and surrendered to exhaustion. The next day would be a long one. Not only would she undergo her final Blade-test, she needed to steal the convent’s seal of office from the abbess. Neither task would be easy.
4 (#ulink_f3100078-d815-5396-8f6f-721998911935)
Three Years Earlier (#ulink_f3100078-d815-5396-8f6f-721998911935)
The Escape (#ulink_f3100078-d815-5396-8f6f-721998911935)
‘Nona’s not going alone!’
‘Correct, she is not going alone. She’s going with Zole.’ The abbess turned from dispensing brief advice to Nona and set a hand to Ara’s shoulder. ‘We have a long road ahead of us, novice, charged with the protection of the emperor’s subjects, including many of his most powerful supporters, your own uncle among them. Would you leave us with a lone Grey Sister and a single Inquisition guard for protection? We will likely need someone among our number who can call on the power of the Path …’
Nona saw the anguish in Ara’s expression and tried to ease her mind. ‘We have to bring two things back to Sweet Mercy to make it right again. Zole and I will bring the shipheart. You’ll bring the abbess.’
‘But …’ Ara glanced up the curve of the road towards Zole, painted in violet light amid the darkness. ‘Sherzal will send an army after you!’
‘When we make it to the ice armies won’t matter,’ Nona said.
‘Because the ice will kill you!’ Ara shook the abbess’s hand from her shoulder, anguish on her face.
‘Zole was raised on the ice.’ Nona smiled. ‘You’ll be in more danger down on the plains than we will up there.’
‘Also,’ Abbess Glass interjected. ‘Consider that if Sherzal doesn’t get the shipheart back she will very definitely find her alliance with the Scithrowl in tatters. And likely the Noi-Guin turned against her. As soon as the odds shift against recovering the heart Sherzal would be sensible to recall her forces to defend the Grand Pass against the Battle-Queen’s hordes. It’s certainly what any sane person would do. My guess is that if you reach the ice she won’t dare risk mounting further pursuit in any significant numbers.’
There were no preparations to be made, no rations to be apportioned, no equipment save clothing to be dispersed. Nona stood ready, wrapped in Kettle’s coat. She was armed with a Noi-Guin sword, a knife, and eighteen throwing stars.
Kettle embraced her next. ‘It’s a hug, Nona, not spiders running down your back. Relax.’
Nona tried to unstiffen, and smiled. ‘Get the abbess home.’
Ara hugged Nona next, her hunska quickness allowing her friend no escape. ‘Come back to us,’ she breathed into Nona’s ear. ‘To me.’ She pressed some coins into her hand. ‘This may help.’
Kettle and Ara retreated, leaving Regol standing before her, looking almost nervous.
‘Careful on the ice.’ His old smile covered up any uncertainty.
‘I should watch for hoolas and ice-bears?’
‘If you like. I just meant that it’s slippery.’ He turned to go. ‘You should visit us at the Caltess when you get back.’ And walked off to rejoin the group. ‘I know Denam misses you.’
Nona watched as Abbess Glass, flanked on the drop-side by the Inquisition guard, Melkir, led the way down towards the main road and the long descent from the mountains. Ara brought up the rear, Regol by her side. Nona knew a moment’s jealousy. A day earlier she would have blamed it on Keot. She turned back towards Zole further up the track. In the distance the flames from Sherzal’s palace lit the slopes but seemed less vigorous than they had been.
‘Time to go,’ she said to nobody in particular: now that she had lost her devil, she lacked both an audience for her passing thoughts and a scapegoat for unworthy emotions. The peaks loomed somewhere above her in the darkness and an arduous journey lay ahead with only Zole for company.
‘Do not fall behind.’ Zole led the way, her gaze fixed upon the fractured rock before her.
‘I’ll try to avoid falling in any direction.’ Nona snatched a cold breath and hauled herself up.
Kettle’s coat blunted the wind’s teeth. Other items of warm clothing had been recovered from two guests who made it into the carriage but thanks to arrows from Sherzal’s soldiers did not make it out again. She wore a dead man’s shoes, a poor fit but better than bare feet on icy rock. Back on the road Nona had considered herself well wrapped. On the slopes, despite the strenuous climb, she found herself shivering each time they rested.
Nona kept a distance of no less than two to three yards while following Zole. If she came closer the beat of the shipheart started to vibrate through her bones and each thought threatened to coalesce into its own creature that would then run roughshod through her mind. Any further away and she lost the light.
The shipheart’s glow served both to draw any pursuit and to illuminate the girls’ progress across the mountains’ slant. Nona quickly began to learn how to interpret the confusion of night-black shadows and dull violet surfaces revealed by Zole’s strange lantern. Gravity and rocks provide a harsh but swift education.
Navigating the raw flanks of the Grampains proved a worryingly slow affair. Nona had no experience of mountains and Zole had little more. The ice was, as she said, mostly flat. The first shock had been in discovering how quickly a sharp incline could sap your strength. Nona knew herself to be fit, but within half an hour her breath came in ragged gasps and her newly healed leg ached almost as badly as it had when the wound lay open. The strength and coldness of the wind was an unwelcome revelation too. The Grampains forced the gale to climb just as the novices must, and the wind seemed displeased by the task, dumping any warmth it might have held back on the plains as if to lighten the load. Above them the rocks glistened with frost, and ice collected in every crevice.
‘They’re catching up.’ Nona’s glance back showed a serpent of fireflies weaving its way along the ridge she’d toiled up not long before. Distance reduced each lantern in the pursuit to a glowing point. Slowly but surely Nona and Zole were losing ground. The soldiers giving chase knew these slopes and patrolled across them regularly. The advantage was theirs. ‘Close now.’
Zole grunted.
‘We’re not going to be able to outrun them.’ Nona felt as if she were whining but the truth was that she was frozen and exhausted. Also terrified of the invisible drops beyond those jagged edges picked out in violet light on either side. The unseen falls held more fear than the empty yards below the blade-path ever had. ‘Zole!’
Zole paused, not looking back. ‘We are not trying to outrun them.’
‘What then?’ Nona furrowed her brow.
‘I am looking for the best place to kill them.’
‘Kill …’ Nona turned to face the pursuit. ‘But there are hundreds …’
‘Hundreds foolish enough to follow into the heights someone who has already shown them a landslide.’
Nona watched the points of light twinkle, their advance almost imperceptible. A warm hand held each of those lanterns, other soldiers clambered up between them.
‘Can’t we hide instead?’ Killing came easy when an enemy raised their weapon against her, but to end so many lives, soldiers of the empire following the orders of their commander … it felt wrong. She pictured Zole’s face when she had first hauled herself up onto the road, lit from beneath by the heart-light, something demonic in the play of shadows. Did devils own her now? Their claws around her heart?
Zole turned and the light flooded across Nona’s shoulders, the pressure building, an almost physical push. ‘It is harder to hide ourselves in the rock than to bring it down upon them. And if we hid we would not be able to travel. They would surround us. There will be Noi-Guin among their number and some may be able to sense the proximity of the shipheart just as you and I can. We might not stay hidden long.’
Nona hugged herself and said nothing. There seemed to be nothing to say. For once Zole had said it all.
Dawn broke over the peaks, a grey wave spilling pale light across the slopes. The black serpent, its head now only a few hundred yards behind them, began to resolve into individual figures.
Zole set to scaling a rock-face so close to vertical that ‘cliff’ seemed a reasonable description. Nona, staring at the smooth stone, could see no way it could be climbed, and yet the Chosen One made relentless progress, the shipheart in her backpack now, its illumination no longer required.
‘How …?’ Nona shrugged, gathered her strength, and started to follow, stabbing her flaw-blades into the rock.
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.
5 (#ulink_aaa32811-169e-5100-9fd2-36d2e1769309)
Holy Class (#ulink_aaa32811-169e-5100-9fd2-36d2e1769309)
Present Day (#ulink_aaa32811-169e-5100-9fd2-36d2e1769309)
Nona rose with the bell, rolled from her bed, and hurried into her habit oblivious to the room around her. The rest of the novices were still dressing when she left, Ruli only just poking her head from beneath the blankets at Jula’s urging, hair in a tangle of amazing proportions.
‘Good luck today!’ Alata, flashing a grin as she plaited Leeni’s hair into a single red rope.
Nona paused only to check the doorway for malicious threads, then took the stairs four at a time. She was first into the refectory and was reaching for the bread as she slid her legs beneath Holy Class’s table. By the time Ketti joined her Nona had heaped her plate for the second time and was attacking a pile of bacon with purpose.
‘I wouldn’t be able to eat. Not with the Blade final in front of me.’ Ketti started to help herself to eggs.
Nona grunted around a mouthful. Meals at Sweet Mercy were not as large or varied as they had been when she had arrived as a starveling child. The Durns held much of the Marn coast and the Scithrowl had crossed the Grampains. With both advances slow but seemingly as inexorable as the ice, good and plentiful food wasn’t something that could be depended on, even within sight of the capital’s wall. ‘Eat while you can.’ Nona reached for her water. It was a point of regret to her that she’d proved unable to pack on any reserves. She would be the first to go in any famine, where someone like Sister Rose could lose half her body weight and still survive. Even so, she didn’t plan to give up on trying.
‘Good luck today!’ Jula sat herself opposite, eyes tracking across the various steaming bowls lined along the centre of the table. She always spent five minutes in careful consideration of her options. Then chose porridge.
‘Here.’ Ketti leaned forward and pushed the porridge bowl towards Jula.
‘I thought I might try something different today.’ Jula frowned at the mushrooms.
Ketti and Nona exchanged a quick ‘no, you won’t’ glance.
Joeli seated herself at the far end of the table, hair gleaming as if the sun had found a way through the clouds just for her. Somehow her habit looked as if it had been tailored to her personal requirements, as flattering as any ballgown. ‘Blade final! Why, Nona, you’re quite pink with excitement.’ She smiled brightly. ‘Pray Ancestor it will be a good one.’
They all ignored her. Joeli had been relentlessly nice since her return, as if they were all best of friends. Nona could almost imagine that Lord Namsis’s Academy man had rearranged Joeli’s opinions where she was concerned in addition to her memories regarding the events at Sherzal’s palace. The thread-traps scattered around the convent gave the lie to all those pretty smiles though.
Ghena came to the table, raindrops beading the tight frizz of her hair. ‘Good lu—’
‘It’s not about luck!’ Nona bit back a snarl and forced herself to lower her voice. ‘My thanks. I will try to acquit myself well.’ She regretted ever telling anyone that the test date had been set. She manufactured a smile, pushed her chair back from the table and stood to go, aware now of the tension in her limbs. Today she would face Mistress Blade, without armour, sword in hand, and her performance would decide whether she could take the Red.
A downpour greeted her exit from the refectory. She ran to Blade Hall, head bowed, crashing through the main entrance to stand dripping in the foyer. Ara waited in the shadows by the doors, a practice blade in each hand.
‘Thought you might want some help warming up.’ She offered one sword, hilt first.
‘Thanks.’ Nona slipped off her shoes and moved across the sand towards the changing room, skirting the area marked off for the test to come.
She emerged a short while later, wearing a white exercise habit to match Ara’s. The pair of them began the blade kata side by side, the slow version first, stringing together all the core movements of the form in a way that gradually warmed and stretched the muscles. Nona watched Ara move as she made her own forms. Although Nona knew her own kata met Sister Tallow’s exacting standards, somehow there was a beauty to Ara’s that made her heart ache.
‘You’ll be fine.’ Ara grinned, her breath now quickened following the double kata.
They crossed blades. Normally they would both be wearing the heavy blade-habit with a wire facemask. Today wasn’t going to be normal. Nona hadn’t any real concern that she would fail to meet the required performance. The question in significant doubt concerned her sword. She would receive her blade on taking orders, just like any other Red Sister. It should be an Ark-steel sword like Sister Tallow’s, a weapon that in the right hands could shatter a lesser blade and cleave a block from a castle wall in two. But Nona knew that none of the most recent novices to graduate to the Red had been given Ark-steel. Over the years swords had been lost and the Red Sisters’ ranks had grown. These days sisters new to their names were most often given a fresh blade. The steel for these came from the forges of the Barrons witches. As fine a steel as could be made within the Corridor, but nothing compared to that of the ancients.
‘Ready?’ Nona asked.
Ara attacked by way of answer and Nona barely turned the thrust from her face. She replied with an immediate counter-cut.
If Nona made a sufficiently good impression today she might have one of the few Ark-steel swords awarded to her on her first day in the Red rather than having to wait for an older sister to die or to set down her weapon and retire to prayer as a Holy Sister. New Reds without Ark-steel were known as ‘pinks’ in certain quarters.
Ara’s blade crashed against Nona’s, flickered away, sliced in, parried, cut. A stillness always settled on much of Nona’s mind when she sparred, and in that stillness a realization reached her.
‘Pink.’
‘What?’ Ara paused, and Nona attacked with renewed vigour.
No matter how tightly she held herself against threadwork Joeli could still pull her strings, in the way that required no magic. Just dropping the word ‘pink’ into the conversation around the breakfast table earlier had nearly made Nona bite Ghena’s head off for daring to wish her good luck …
Nona rocked back to avoid Ara’s slash and spun in behind the swing. She drew on her anger at the Namsis girl, feeding the fire that already burned there. Joeli thought to spoil her concentration, to put her out of the cold centre of her serenity where a Red Sister was supposed to dwell in the heat of battle. What Joeli failed to appreciate was that Nona had never followed that part of Mistress Blade’s instructions. When she fought in earnest she fought angry, and her rage seldom wanted for fuel.
Nona kicked out at Ara’s knee and leapt in as the girl jumped back. At the very limit of her speed Nona got her offhand to block Ara’s wrist, deflecting the downward blow that should have felled her, and brought her own blade up, into Ara’s side, managing to turn the iron flat just before it hammered into her ribs.
‘Good … one.’ Ara stumbled back, clutching her side, sword dropped to indicate surrender. ‘Ah.’ She hugged her ribs. A black line would show there tomorrow. ‘Did anyone ever tell you you look scary as hell when you fight for real?’
‘Never.’ Nona stuck her tongue out. ‘Are you all right?’ She moved forward to check Ara’s side, suddenly concerned. She set a gentle hand to Ara’s ribs.
‘Fine.’ Ara pushed her off. ‘I hope you don’t make faces that scary in other kinds of … battles.’
‘What do you—’
‘The late-night sort you might get into with Regol …’ Their eyes met, and for a moment Nona wondered if she saw something hidden there … something hurt? The look vanished as quickly as it had appeared, replaced with Ara’s impression of Nona’s worried expression.
Nona shoved Ara who fell, laughing, until she hit the sand and jolted her injured ribs. Nona was helping her up, still apologizing, when Sister Tallow entered the hall.
The abbess and sister superiors followed Sister Tallow out into the hall, turning to take their seats in the stands. Tallow approached Nona and Ara, her weathered face inscrutable. A nun Nona had never seen before dogged Mistress Blade’s heels. She looked a good twenty years younger than Tallow, tall, slim, skin the colour of old leather though smooth save for the scars on both her cheeks. The twin wounds might be ritual markings or perhaps their curious symmetry had arisen by chance. The newcomer fixed Nona with a piercing gaze. She had a beauty to her, but there was nothing soft about it, her cheekbones almost sharp enough to cut you if you slapped her.
‘Novice Arabella, you may leave.’ Sister Tallow nodded to the doors. The final blade-test never had any audience but the abbess and her sister superiors. Novices who attempted to watch through the windows had been whipped in the past, even expelled from the convent. Ara gave up her practice blade and ran off with a last encouraging glance.
Tallow waited between Nona and the unknown nun until the doors closed. Nona stood a hand taller than both women and was of heavier build. Some said she had gerant in her but if so it wasn’t more than a touch. There had been no blood-war as there had been when her marjal traits started to show.
Tallow lifted a hand to indicate the other nun. ‘This is Sister Iron, Nona. She is to be the new Mistress Blade. She takes over today.’
‘No—’
‘I am getting old, child. We hunska do that fast too. I will join the Holy Sisters and give the Ancestor my full attention as the abbess instructs.’
Nona shot a glance towards the stands. The sister superiors flanked the abbess. Sister Rose sat to Wheel’s left. Wheel, the older-looking of the two, though they were of an age, glared at Nona with those pale, watery eyes just as always.
‘You will fight Sister Iron for the Red, novice.’ Tallow drew a sword from a second scabbard at her left hip. A Red Sister’s blade, Barrons-forged. She handed it to Nona. ‘Control. Restraint. Respect.’ Tallow folded Nona’s fingers around the hilt. ‘You’ll be judged on these. But in the Corridor … winning is also quite important.’
‘I’ll win then.’ Nona stepped back, circling away from Sister Iron. She didn’t want a new Mistress Blade, though she couldn’t quite suppress the relief that she wouldn’t have to face Sister Tallow with sharp iron in hand in an earnest fight.
Sister Iron drew her blade, a sword identical to Nona’s since pitting Ark-steel against Barrons-steel would damage the latter and likely ruin it. The nun made no move, only cocked her head to the side and watched how Nona positioned her feet. Her gaze slid up the length of Nona’s body, coming to rest on her wrist and the fingers around the sword hilt. Nona felt as if she were being judged and found wanting.
‘You’re ready?’ Nona asked, unsettled by the woman’s stillness.
Back against the wall Sister Tallow rolled her eyes.
Nona came forward, sword extended before her. She didn’t reach for her speed but instead waited to react, a lesson she had learned from Zole. Sister Iron did nothing, only watched her move, her own blade loose in her hand, the point in the sand.
Nona came closer. Closer still. The point of her sword just two feet from the nun’s chest. She could lunge and run the woman through. She glanced towards Sister Tallow, uncertain.
The moment Nona’s eyes moved from her Sister Iron pushed Nona’s sword away, the back of her hand flat against the side of the blade. The nun released her own sword and slapped Nona across the face, hard enough to rattle her teeth. Nona leapt away and by the time she was clear Sister Iron had kicked her falling sword back into the air and snatched hold of it once again.
‘You think this one is ready?’ Sister Iron asked Sister Tallow.
Nona spat blood into the sand. A dozen sentences wanted to escape her tongue, some bitter, some angry, but she swallowed them all. The fault was hers. There were no rules. ‘Try me again.’
Sister Iron came forward, blade extended as Nona’s had been. Nona let her get just as close. The nun’s gaze never faltered. She lunged, showing no reservation about skewering a novice. Nona sank into the moment and made to push the sword away as Iron had, only to find the cutting edge angled towards her hand. She pushed it anyway, sparks flying as Barrons steel scraped over flaw-blades. She made to slap the woman but Iron proved swift, Nona’s fingertips missing her cheek by a hair’s breadth.
Nona kicked her falling blade back into the air and caught it as Iron had but with far less grace. The pair of them finished two yards apart, gazes locked, one on the other.
‘No claws today, novice.’ The abbess’s voice from the stands. ‘Just the blade you hope to earn.’
Nona nodded her acknowledgement. She moved smoothly into attacking. No more playing, no more games. She told herself that Zole stood before her. With the exception of Yisht and Sister Tallow, Zole had been her most lethal opponent, faster than thinking, merciless, efficient.
Sister Iron replied with a storm of blows, feints, and counterattacks every bit as swift and ruthless as Zole’s had ever been. She had more than that, though. Something in her touch, a kind of mastery that let her tame a blow on her blade, guide it, twist it. At every exchange Nona felt on the edge of having her sword torn from her grasp. Sister Iron used combinations that Nona hadn’t seen before, series of moves that drove Nona step by inexorable step into the wrong place, her balance lost, her momentum stolen, sword unready.
Sister Iron ended a lengthy combination attack with a rising slice. An extravagance of speed saved Nona from being struck, though she would not have been surprised to find a thin line of blood across her front had she the time to look down. She spun away, sliding to a halt on one foot, spraying sand.
‘Ah!’ Nona staggered, her heel felt as if a hot wire had sliced partway through it.
Sister Iron came forward, pressing her attack. Nona defended with desperation, hobbling back before launching sideways on her good foot to win space. She rolled across the sand, biting down a scream as something cut into her just above the elbow. Coming to her feet she expected to find blood sheeting down her arm but the skin lay unmarked despite the agony.
Nona got to her feet, wincing, sword raised, injured arm held close to her body. As Iron came in Nona saw it. Where the sand had been scuffed away almost to the stone she glimpsed something, a nearly invisible distortion running over the slab beneath. If she had time to defocus she knew her Path-sight would show a thread, lurid green no doubt, as so many of Joeli’s curse-threads were.
As Sister Iron drew close Nona swept away the sand in front of her with one foot. It proved a useless endeavour: pressed to defend, she had no time to clear more ground or study the area exposed. Their swords met and met again, beating out a high-tempo tattoo. Sweat flew from the ends of Nona’s hair, sparkling droplets mired in the moment, unable to fall in the space between half a dozen strikes.
Another pain-thread caught Nona’s foot and she fell backwards with a cry, turning a thrust and a swing as she dropped. Nona rolled through three more pain-threads evading Sister Iron stamping at her. Finally the nun backed off, perhaps remembering that the exercise was a test rather than murder.
Nona stood slowly, meeting Sister Tallow’s puzzled frown.
‘It’s only pain.’ She muttered the words, forcing her hunched body to straighten, relaxing the tight muscles of her arms and legs. She had suffered worse. Thuran Tacsis had pressed his sigil-marked toy called the Harm against her. It had hurt more than a thousand pain-threads. Later she had glued it to his flesh. He hadn’t been found for over a day. They said he sat drooling upon his lord’s chair now, ruler of the Tacsis in name only. Why his remaining son, Lano, didn’t have him quietly killed nobody could say.
‘Only pain.’ Spoken loud enough for Sister Iron to take note. Nona thought of Joeli creeping out in the dead of night to lay her threads in the Blade Hall sands, each full of malice and carefully attuned just to Nona. It was a work of art really. Nona doubted there were six thread-workers in all the empire who could match it. Maybe not so many. A red anger rose through her, its heat burning through the agony that lanced from her invisible wounds. Lips curled back from teeth, a savage grin.
Nona threw herself back across ground already trodden, the potency of the thread-traps there now spent. She attacked Sister Iron not with the calm efficiency Sister Tallow taught but with the honest and savage desire to do her opponent harm, acknowledging the beast that dwelt within her, the hot core of her that Tarkax Ice-Spear had seen. Passion lent her a strength that Sister Iron had to grit her own teeth to turn. Rage put an edge on a quickness that was already blinding, and Sister Iron was forced back for the first time, weaving her defence within the depth of her own serenity.
Perhaps no battle so ugly had ever played out across the Blade Hall sands before. But the simple fact was that Sister Iron, the presumptive Mistress Blade, retreated before the sword of Nona Grey, her own hair wet with sweat now. Sister Iron’s own swordwork was now stretched to extravagant lengths, all within a packed handful of seconds that few possessed the vision to follow.
Another thread snagged Nona’s foot. She hardly winced but in the missed quarter-beat Sister Iron parried her wide, kicked the inside of her left knee, and punched her square in the face before following up with the hilt of her sword to the side of her neck. Nona fell hard, and trying to rise found the point of Sister Iron’s sword inches from her face.
‘Enough, novice.’ The woman stood, apparently calm but with her chest heaving.
Nona repressed a snarl and let her head fall back against the sand.
‘Sister Tallow taught me to fight,’ Sister Iron said. ‘She did not teach me to fight like that.’ She stepped back, allowing Nona to sit.
Sister Tallow stepped forward, offering Nona her hand then pulling her to her feet. ‘You seemed to be in pain while fighting, novice. Did you sustain some injury sparring with Arabella?’
‘No, Mistress Blade. Just an old injury returned to haunt me.’ Nona sealed her lips. Joeli’s reinstatement was a matter of palace politics. Even if the abbess could be convinced of her guilt a Namsis would not be punished or sent from the convent. Not with the Scithrowl in the east advancing mile after mile and the Durns raiding from captured ports on the shores of the Marn.
Sister Iron studied Nona with evident displeasure. ‘The question is whether the Ancestor would be properly represented by such a warrior. Where was your serenity? You fight like a wild animal. I cannot recommend you be given an ancient blade. Would it even be proper for you to wear the Red?’
Nona ground her teeth. Revealing Joeli’s tricks might change the judgment but she wanted nothing of the Namsis girl in her trial. Others would say Joeli’s actions earned her the Red then stand between her and her revenge.
‘She is to be denied the Red then. Sister Iron has said so!’ Wheel called down from the stands, her cracked voice reverberating with long-sought triumph.
‘When we leave this hall Sister Iron will be Mistress Blade.’ Sister Tallow raised her voice, a thing Nona had heard on maybe three occasions in the half of her life spent at Sweet Mercy. ‘But she is not yet.’ Tallow set her hand on Nona’s shoulder. She had to reach upwards. Once she had seemed so tall. She had no recollection of the woman touching anyone except to adjust a fighting stance or deliver a stinging reprimand. The hand remained on her shoulder. ‘Nona has passed the Blade-test. If she accepts ordination and takes on her new name then when I take up the devotions of a Holy Sister she shall have my sword.’ Tallow turned towards Iron, her voice low now, conciliatory. ‘Many of the lessons I tried to teach this girl have not stuck. But the important ones have. And when the ice presses we need sisters in the Red who can win, however ugly that victory may be.’
What followed passed in a blur. The bows given to, and reciprocated by, the sister superiors, the required formal embrace with the abbess, the long march from the hall. Before she knew it Nona found herself hurrying from the building, the Blade-test behind her. With her arms raised against the sharp burden of ice carried on the wind she set off to find her friends.
Nona came dripping and shivering to the well-head. It lay in a seldom-used back chamber to the rear of the laundry wing, a structure that formed one arm of the novice cloister. She defocused her sight to check for any traps Joeli might have placed. She didn’t think the girl knew of the oubliette beneath the centre oak, but then again there were clues if one paid attention, and in past weeks she had seen Joeli gazing at the laundry wing, her brow furrowed.
Nona went down the rope hand over hand, not using her legs. The Blade-test had left her muscles tired and aching but not so weak she couldn’t climb a rope. At the bottom she swung, released her hold, and landed on the rocky edge of the subterranean pool. Jula, Ruli, Ara, and Ketti waited to one side of the chamber, hunched around a single candle. Glimmers of their light picked out the descending, stone-clad forest of the centre oak’s roots.
‘Nona! Sister Tallow didn’t cut your head off!’ Ruli jumped to her feet as Nona approached.
‘It was Sister Iron, our new Mistress Blade.’ Nona wasn’t supposed to speak about the test but she felt she could share this much.
‘New what?’
‘But Sister Tallow—’
‘Did you pass?’ Ara cut across the others.
‘Yes, I passed.’ Nona raised a hand to forestall Ara’s next question. ‘And I got a sword.’
‘We’re not to call you Nona Pink then?’ Jula grinned.
‘No.’ Nona sat down with Ruli. ‘If they let me take my orders I’ll be a proper Red.’
‘So how did—’
‘We’re not here to talk about my blade-test,’ Nona said. ‘We’re here to talk about Jula’s book.’
‘Hey, it’s not my book,’ Jula protested.
‘A pity. If it was your book we wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble to steal it.’ Ketti frowned, then brightened as if finding new resolve.
‘We’ve been talking through it again, Nona. We’re agreed. We need two things to pull this off, and we’re going to have to steal both of them, and I’ve no idea how.’ Ara held up two fingers to count them off.
‘We have to steal before we can steal,’ Ruli interrupted, showing no sign of remorse at the proposed criminality. ‘And we’re meeting underground with one candle. It’s like we’re Noi-Guin!’
Ara scowled at Ruli’s enthusiasm. ‘One, we need The Book of Lost Cities from Sister Pan’s secret stash. That’s got to be in the Third Room. Unless we have a forbidden book to take back we’re not going to have a reason to be anywhere near the high priest’s vault.’ She pulled her second finger back. ‘Two, we need the abbess’s seal of office. Without her seal on our message they’ll never let us in.’
Nona raised one of her fingers. ‘We also need the eye drops the Poisoner was working on.’
Jula looked shocked. ‘She stashed those away for good reason, Nona. They’re dangerous. She said you could go blind using them.’
‘They’re the only way I’ll get in there unrecognized,’ Nona said.
‘Plus they make you look good,’ Ketti added.
‘It doesn’t have to be you, Nona,’ Ara said. ‘Any of us could do it.’
‘It has to be me. And it doesn’t matter about looking good, Ketti.’ Nona shot her a narrow glance. Though it was true that she had loved those few days when her eyes had looked like any other person’s. Regol had said he liked her the way she was normally. Unique. But whatever he said he had spent a long time looking into her newly cleared eyes and part of her wanted that again. ‘Four!’ Nona said before Ara and Jula could object. ‘We need a brilliant marjal empath or this just won’t work.’
‘So, four impossible things then.’ Ara swirled darkness around the candle flame, making shadow birds take flight.
‘No.’ Nona shook her head. ‘Just two. Like you said.’
‘But—’
‘I found us an empath at the fight rings last night. The strongest I’ve ever met.’ Four mouths opened. Nona spoke first. ‘And I have this.’ She drew from her habit a disc of amber, carved in deep relief on one side, its edge guarded by a hoop of gold, the whole thing making slow revolutions on its golden chain.
‘The abbess’s seal …’ Jula stared at it, wide-eyed. ‘How …?’
‘I stole it from her when she embraced me after the blade-test.’
6 (#ulink_71eafe8c-1dbe-5d96-9885-11d8e2dbd456)
Holy Class (#ulink_71eafe8c-1dbe-5d96-9885-11d8e2dbd456)
Present Day (#ulink_71eafe8c-1dbe-5d96-9885-11d8e2dbd456)
Kettle moved through the town wrapped in a cocoon of shadow. In an hour the great red eye of the sun would see the carnage for itself but no other witness remained to watch it roll back the night. The fires had burned out, the smoke stripped away by the wind, but the stink of burning remained. The stink and the dead and the ruins of their homes.
The Scithrowl had spared none. They left the corpses of their own scattered infrequently here and there among the bodies of farmers, weavers, shepherds, and of children who might one day have taken up those trades. A small blonde girl lay broken in the doorway to an unburned hut, her hair straw and mud. A woman nearby curled around the wound that had killed her. The mud showed how far she had dragged herself to reach her daughter but she had died three yards short of touching her child that last time.
In the harbour a single boat still burned amid the blackened and half-sunken wrecks. From behind Kettle’s eyes Nona wondered what its cargo was that it should sustain a flame when all else had long since guttered into darkness. She knew that Kettle had drawn her sleeping mind along their thread-bond to show her something. Too often lately Nona had rolled yawning from her bed after first waking in the small hours to find herself inhabiting Kettle as the Grey Sister stalked her prey. Last time it had been a Scithrowl commander amid his army of five hundred soldiers. Kettle had ghosted among the lesser tents and cut her way into the grand pavilion in which the officer slept beneath hoola furs. Nona could make no sense of it: signposting their leaders with such luxury. The empire generals slept in tents identical to the common soldiers to foil just such assassination attempts.
Kettle turned from the dark lake and moved on through the town towards its margins. She had something to show Nona. She rarely spoke on these tutorials, needing all her focus to keep her alive. Even here Scithrowl softmen might be lurking, ready to kill or capture scouts, or Noi-Guin assassins, loyal to neither side, only to the coin that paid their fee.
Ahead of them loomed a larger building, no detail hidden from Kettle’s dark-sight. A stone construction, the roof gone, presumably taken by flames, though the stink of burning hung less heavily here. Kettle closed the distance. Gravemarkers stood behind the building. Dozens of them. A church then. Kettle glanced skywards to where the Hope burned white amid the crimson scattered heavens. A Hope church then, roofless by design so that the white light could reach in and wash away all sin.
And suddenly, as Kettle approached the shattered doors, Nona knew where she was. White Lake, not eighty miles from the walls of Verity. White Lake, where her mother lay beneath the ground and doubtless now Preacher Mickel lay sprawled upon it. Adoma had splinter armies pillaging just five days’ march from the capital. Swift horses could bring them to the foot of the Rock of Faith in less than half that time.
Something caught Kettle’s eye. Something Nona had missed. Kettle pressed herself to the church wall, pulling darkness to herself as if drawing a breath. The night entered her as ink soaks into blotting paper. There, out across the graveyard, a pale, questing tentacle, almost flat to the ground, insubstantial as mist. Another, yards long, snaking out between the graves. A pain spider, some creature of the softmen in service to the Scithrowl Battle-Queen Adoma. Rumour had it that they bred such monstrosities, releasing demons from the black ice into unholy alliance with flesh.
More tentacles insinuated themselves across the barren ground, one thin as leather and broad as a hand sliding noiselessly over the top of the church wall just yards from Kettle’s head. Even at that distance her skin sang with echoes of the agony its touch would bring.
Nona woke sweat-soaked and alone, her body hunched, arms tight around her. She lay in the darkness of the Holy Class dormitory trying to still a racing heart. Kettle had kicked her out, requiring her whole concentration.
Sleep did not return that night. They were coming to the sharp end of things. The peace of the convent, seemingly eternal, would not last. Idle days, bickering among friends, the rivalries of children, all of it was passing into memory. A black tide was coming from the east and all the empire hadn’t the strength to stand before it.
‘We don’t even know the book exists. It’s not as if the high priest posts a list of forbidden books on his door.’ Ara stood with Jula and Nona in the lee of the Dome of the Ancestor, watching Path Tower, a dark finger of stone.
‘The Inquisition burned my History of Saint Devid,’ Nona said.
‘It wasn’t yours, and Kettle shouldn’t have allowed it in the scriptorium library,’ Jula said primly. ‘And that was a banned book, not a forbidden one. Banned books are burned, forbidden ones are just … forbidden.’
‘So how come Sister Pan has one, if it even exists?’ Ara asked.
‘We know it exists because there are references to it that they forgot to remove from other books by Aquinas. And we know that Sister Pan has a copy because she quotes from it when talking about the lost cities.’
‘You haven’t read it! How do you know she’s quoting from it?’ Ara rolled her eyes.
‘Aquinas has a very distinctive prose style.’ Jula folded her arms.
‘That’s it? We’re breaking into Sister Pan’s secret room based on distinctive prose style?’ Ara asked.
‘How do you know she hasn’t memorized the quotes?’ Nona demanded.
‘She still calls you Nina sometimes.’ Jula grinned.
‘Fair point.’ Nona nodded slowly. ‘So I just have to get into the Third Room …’
‘Or I do,’ Ara said.
‘Do you know how?’ Nona asked.
‘No, but you don’t either.’
Nona started towards the tower. ‘We’ll both try, then.’
Nona narrowed her eyes at Path Tower, black against the wash of the sky. Sister Rule taught that it was the oldest building on the Rock of Faith, predating the convent by centuries. Given that all save the top and bottommost rooms lacked doors or windows, Nona supposed it had been built for a powerful Path-mage though no records remained to name the first occupant. She approached the east entrance, apprehension rising. It wasn’t as if they were about to attempt the impossible. Every novice with ambitions to be a Mystic Sister had to enter the Third Room unaided. It was part of the Path-test. Maybe all of it. Nona would choose the red habit, not the sky colours of the Mystics, but she wanted to pass the Path-test even so.
Ruli followed Nona in through the east door, Ara entered by the north. They met at the bottom of the stairs in the room of portraits. Two dozen or more Mystic Sisters regarded them from wooden frames. Each woman was pictured amid abstract representations of their magic, the variety remarkable. Nona’s favourite was a young red-headed Holy Witch whose hair became flames. When you looked closer at her you could see that in the darkness of each pupil a tiny star burned crimson.
‘We know two things,’ Nona said as Ara joined them.
‘What?’
‘Firstly it’s all about Path. Otherwise Joeli would have cracked it months ago.’ Ara and Nona had been waiting an age for the individual training Sister Pan gave candidates for the Path-test. The old woman liked to instruct one novice at a time and whatever lessons she had been trying to teach hadn’t been getting through Joeli’s skull. ‘Joeli Namsis couldn’t take two steps on the Path if you threw her at it.’
‘True …’ Ara nodded.
‘And secondly we know that it must be different for each person, otherwise Pan would just have trained the three of us together.’
Ara began to climb the stairs, Jula and Nona on her heels. They went up in silence, stopping just below the classroom.
‘Should we really be doing this?’ Jula asked for the tenth time that morning.
‘No,’ said Ara.
‘We’re not doing this. At least you aren’t, Jula. And it was your idea! Forget whether we should be doing it. Will the book get us into the high priest’s library? Will the library have Aquinas’s Book of the Moon? And will the moon save the empire?’ Nona watched the girl’s face, pale in the daylight that filtered down from the trapdoor to the classroom.
‘The moon’s the only hope,’ Jula said, her voice small.
Nona nodded. Jula had real faith in Aquinas and his book. Kettle had shown Nona the conflict’s horrors through their thread-bond. The empire was losing on both fronts. It would not be long before those horrors arrived at Verity’s walls, and if the emperor fell then the empire was lost, the Ark taken. Kettle had said the end would come in months rather than years. The Grey Sister scouted for the emperor’s armies both east and west. Adoma’s hordes seemed to be endlessly replaced, ready to spend their lives for the Battle-Queen, and she ready to spend them. Sherzal had all but filled the Grand Pass with Scithrowl corpses and still they had flooded over the Grampains.
The ferocity of Sherzal’s defence and the cleverness of her stepped retreat had been what forced the emperor to overlook reports of her planned treason. Sherzal had organized and directed the ongoing attacks in the mountains to continually disrupt Adoma’s supply lines. That and a scorched earth withdrawal had slowed Adoma’s advance from a charge that would have reached Verity in weeks to a crawl that had taken almost two years to get just over half way, but like with thin ice, a slow creaking could become a sudden plunge into freezing death, and the empire’s defence had started to fracture weeks ago. Emperor Crucical needed his sister.
The Durns to the west were a different breed, not fanatics these, and given to quarrelling among themselves, but blood-hungry and backed by the magics of their priests. They had crossed the Marn Sea in their barges, coming in force once news of the Scithrowl victories reached them. Their holy men came to war wielding sick-wood staves and wreaking havoc with both marjal fire-work and water-work. Nona had seen too many towns aflame, too many families strewn across the fields from which they tried to feed themselves.
The emperor kept the Red and the Grey close, and the Mystics as a last reserve, but soon he would unleash them all. Whether that would turn the tide of war, push the Scithrowl back beyond the mountains, drown the Durns in a red sea, Nona didn’t know. She only knew that in the land left behind such a conflict the dead would outnumber the living.
Sister Pan always led the way when she took novices to the sealed rooms. She had taken Nona and Ara to the first two rooms. The third they knew to exist only because the tower held space for it and because every novice knew that the Path-test required you to reach the Third Room unaided. Nona turned and walked down the spiral stair, squeezing past Ara and Jula. She defocused her vision as she always did when she followed Sister Pan to the sealed rooms. Normally that gaze would be fixed between the ancient’s shoulder blades. She focused her thoughts on the Third Room, the place where it should lie, the shape of it, the wall where a door would likely be set.
Nona was so deep in her search it was a shock to find someone on the stairs blocking her way as she followed the spiral down. ‘Abbess …’ The abbess rarely came to Path Tower.
‘Where’s Pan?’ the abbess snapped, eyeing the girl before her with evident distaste.
‘Mistress Path is in the scriptorium, Abbess.’ Nona met the hostility of the old woman’s stare.
‘Hmmph.’ The abbess turned away, evidently unable to find fault with Nona’s reply, her bad temper further inflamed by this failure. She glanced over her shoulder, new suspicion in her pale eyes. ‘What are you doing here, girl? Stealing?’
‘No, abbess.’ Nona had stolen from the abbess that morning, and she would be stealing from Path Tower this afternoon with any luck. But right now she wasn’t stealing.
‘Praying, in the dome, that’s where you should be.’ Shaking her head, the abbess stamped off back down the stairs, thumping her crozier on every step.
Ara came into view behind Nona, smoothing her palms over the stonework. ‘Was that Abbess Wheel?’
‘Yes.’ Nona returned to her own search.
‘Ancestor’s blood!’ From behind Ara. As close as Jula got to an oath. ‘We really shouldn’t be doing this.’
Nona searched more quickly than her friends, leaving them behind her. About halfway down her vision shook for a moment. After that, nothing. Not even a tingle. She returned to the spot and studied it with thread-sight. Nothing. She visualized the Path and tried to see past it into the wall. Nothing. She placed both hands upon the stone and exerted her will, pressing as hard as she could. ‘Open, damn you!’ At the same time she set one foot upon the glowing glory of Path, the river of power that joins and defines all things. Nona felt something give, a lurch within her as if she had fallen through thin ice. The cry of victory died on her lips though. She was still standing on the stairs, her hands against the cold stone. Feeling foolish, she reached for her serenity and tried again. Nothing, not even a twinge. She wiped her palms on her habit and continued down the stairs, calling on her clarity trance to reveal any faint trace that might indicate a place to exert her magics.
One of the others stumbled behind her. ‘Keep it quiet,’ Nona hissed without looking back. ‘Abbess Wheel might still be lurking downstairs.’
Nona reached the bottom step without finding any further hint of an entrance. The abbess seemed to have decided against waiting for Pan and to have taken her leave of the tower. Nona sighed and turned to climb the steps again. Something caught her eye. A new portrait hanging amid the others. Just to the right of the door that the abbess must have left by. She walked across to the painting, marvelling that she had never seen it before. It seemed impossible that she had simply missed it in the past given that she had visited the tower almost every day for the best part of a decade. Perhaps Sister Pan had hung it recently. There was something familiar about the woman, her face pinched but friendly, high cheekbones, blue eyes. She had pale hair, curling close to her skull but with wisp after wisp trailing off into the air to create a faint haze of threads that filled the space all around her.
Nona cocked her head. The nun looked thirty at least. And yet …
‘Hessa?’ Nona’s eyes blurred with tears. ‘How—’ She bowed her head, wiping at her face. Hessa had died as a child and Nona had missed her friend every day since. Her death at Yisht’s hands had taught Nona many of the bitter lessons that stand as milestones along the road between girl and woman. Her own fallibility wasn’t the least of those lessons. How many times had a friend died because she lacked what had been necessary to save them? How often had her own faults tripped her up? Her pride, her anger … Losing Hessa taught her the hollow lie of vengeance, a conceit to distract oneself with, an addiction that offered no cure.
‘I miss you.’ But as she looked up again the world lurched, a new layer of ice breaking, and somehow the room was a different room and she was on her knees beside a bed.
‘Nona?’ Abbess Glass lay in the bed, grey-faced, the comfortable weight wasted from her, leaving skin on bones. ‘Don’t cry, child.’
Nona snapped her head up, looking wildly around. The abbess’s bedroom in the big house. This was where she had died. This was how she died. Taken by disease, something that ate her from within and that neither Sister Rose nor Sister Apple could touch with all their pills and potions.
‘I don’t understand …’
‘Meaning is overrated, Nona.’ A cough convulsed the abbess for a moment, rattling in her chest. She had said exactly that, meaning is overrated, Nona remembered it, but not the question she had asked to prompt it. ‘There might not be a meaning to the world, or in it, but that does not mean that what we do has no meaning.’ Glass fell silent and for the longest minute Nona thought she would not speak again. When she did it was weak, faltering. ‘The Ancestor’s tree is something humanity planted and that we have watered with our deeds, our cares, with each act of love, even with our cruelty. Cling to it, Nona. Cling …’ And then she did stop, as Nona remembered, and the gleam had gone from her eyes.
Nona stood, an old sob shuddering through her. Sister Rose had been sleeping in the chair by the window when the abbess died, the sleep that crept in behind too many nights without rest. She had woken at Nona’s sob and sucked in a huge breath of her own. Now though, the chair lay empty and at the door it was Sister Pan who stood, her eyes bright and wet.
The old nun spoke, her voice strangely distant. ‘You’re getting further from the door, Nona.’
‘What?’
Sister Pan turned towards the window. Out beyond the rooftops of the refectory Path Tower rose like the line of darkness offered by a door beginning to open, or almost closed.
Nona frowned, torn between confusion and grief. She knew this for a memory of that awful day but it seemed more real than all those days that had queued between her and it. Glass had been taken by a foe Nona couldn’t stand against and the heart of Sweet Mercy had broken. She had thought when the shipheart was stolen and the convent left cold, its magic gone, that no greater blow could be struck against it. But the abbess had always been the true heart of Sweet Mercy and the emptiness she left behind was more profound than any Nona had known.
‘You’re getting further from the door.’ Sister Pan stood in the doorway but her single hand pointed at Path Tower. And in an instant the tower raced into the distance, becoming tiny, almost lost to sight. The room had gone, Abbess Glass and Sister Pan with it, and instead Nona stood in sunshine gazing out across a formal garden. She staggered, seized by vertigo, but prevented herself from falling.
She took a step forward, focused on a ficus tree in full bloom. The sound of a heavy blow hitting flesh arrested her. A second blow and an agonized cry turned her around.
Standing before the grand colonnade of his mansion High Priest Jacob swung his staff again. The wood thunked into Four-Foot’s side, a dull sound like a hammer hitting meat, and the mule grunted his pain.
‘No!’ The horror of the moment pinned Nona to the spot. Another blow descended and her flaw-blades shimmered into being around both hands. ‘No!’
Nona tensed as the high priest raised his staff, Four-Foot snorting bloody foam about his muzzle. She knew it was memory or dream but it seemed more real than her life, more solid, more important. Losses like Hessa and Abbess Glass, horrors like Four-Foot’s death, were nails struck into her life, pinning those moments to her forever, the punctuation of sorrow. She could no more tear herself from the scene before her than rip the skin from her body.
Markus, impossibly young, struggled at the limit of his strength to escape the grip of the high priest’s guard, wild in his passion. Giljohn stood at the cart, held by bonds of the sort that no child can see, the kind made of debt and of a bitter understanding of the world’s truths, the kind that tear at a life as you struggle against them and leave wounds that won’t heal.
Nona thanked the Ancestor that here in this strange dream the chains of duty and service had no purchase on her. Every muscle gathered itself as she prepared to leap at High Priest Jacob, ready to rend him into pieces.
It was raining that day. The heavens wept to see such cruelty.
At the back of Nona’s mind a small voice asked why it wasn’t raining.
Her leap never happened. Unbalanced, she fell to her knees, hands upon the dry stones of the path. It had been raining. It had. The water had run from Giljohn’s empty socket like the tears he should have shed. Nona looked up. She knew it to be memory. She knew there was nothing she could do for the mule straining against his rope, or Markus twisting in the grasp of Jacob’s guard. Even so, her mind clamoured for revenge, for the joy of bloody retribution. She stood, blades ready, intent on attack.
Some distant glint caught her eye. Over the wall of the garden. Over the roofs of nearby mansions, out across the five miles of farmland to the Rock of Faith. Her gaze drawn to the tiny bumps that at this distance were all the Convent of Sweet Mercy had to offer. Again the glint. The sun reflecting on a window, perhaps. A stained-glass window high in Path Tower? Something told her she needed to be there. A path seemed to stretch out before her in that direction.
You’re getting further from the door.
Gritting her jaw against the sound of blows raining down on Four-Foot, Nona ran. She refused to look away from the Rock and from the convent’s faint outline. She climbed the wall with a great leap and a lunge.
As Nona dropped into the next garden the convent vanished behind the chimneys of the neighbouring mansion. She made to rise but the wall’s shadow deepened into night, miring her like the thickest mud. ‘No!’ She struggled, desperate to return to the convent, but the darkness took her into some other place and a night filled with screaming and with fire.
Nona stood between two dark buildings. She looked slowly around, less worried by any danger than by what new tragedy might unfold, by what black milestone of her life this nightmare had brought her to.
Across an open space in front of her another building burned, the flames so bright that even the dying focus of the moon seemed pale. And although the night gave her nothing but angles and the ferocity of fire, Nona knew exactly where she stood. To her right, the home of James and Martha Baker. To her left, the stone walls of Grey Stephen’s house, he who had fought the Pelarthi in his youth. Rellam Village burned around her. The shapes moving across the background of blazing huts were those of children she had grown up with, of their parents, and of the soldiers the emperor’s sister had sent to cut them down.
Nona knew it for illusion or forgery or memory or all three woven together. Somehow she had fallen into a trap. Perhaps it had happened when she touched the Path. Sister Pan had endless stories of the dire ends to which it could lead the unwary, and used them regularly to scare any quantal novice in her care. Nona had to get back to Path Tower but the chance was gone and every shift of scene took her further from the convent, putting mile upon mile in her way and allowing no time to cross them. Whatever had gone wrong it must have happened when she had tried to walk through the wall to the Third Room. She had wandered into some realm of nightmare manufactured out of her past.
Nona ran through the darkness and smoke and confusion, ready to meet any challenge. Though she told herself that a lie surrounded her the truth of it seduced her senses. There was nothing counterfeit here. Beneath the stink of burning this place smelled of home, of a childhood now wrapped about her bones. This was hers, like it or not, her foundation though it stood in mud and ignorance.
Somehow no soldier came near her. Within moments she stood at the door to her mother’s cottage. The two rooms where she had spent so many years, growing from mewling infant to the girl who had taken half a dozen lives in the forest upon her doorstep. It was the price of one of those lives in particular that the whole village was now paying for her.
The thatch above had begun to smoulder, sparks from the Bluestones’ house starting to land among the straw. The interior lay dark. ‘It’s not real.’ Nona approached the entrance. Something would be different. Something would be wrong. Every scene so far had someone out of place, some detail changed. It was a clue, a riddle. Somehow. She stepped in, steeling herself, pulling her serenity around her like a shawl. ‘It’s not real.’
It took a moment for Nona’s eyes to adjust to the gloom. A single candle burned, spilling wax where it had fallen at the doorway to her mother’s workroom, the place where she wove the reeds. Nona’s mother lay sprawled, one arm reaching for the exit, her fingers nearly touching the toes of Nona’s shoes. A ruinous wound had opened her back, the blood pooling around her, the candle’s flame dancing across it in reflection. And despite all her protestations a hurt noise broke from Nona’s chest, a wet splutter, a numbness in her cheeks as she fell to her knees, hot tears jolted from her eyes by the impact with the hard-packed earth. Nona’s serenity shattered. She stayed on all fours, heaving in broken breaths. Her mother lay dead. Her mother. No matter what had passed between them there had always been a bond of love buried beneath the denials. Gentle times remembered, shared smiles, laughter, hugs. The bonds that formed a branch of the great tree of the Ancestor, a chain of humanity reaching back through aeons to the singular taproot of the arborat.
Nona panted away the hurt and rose to her knees. This was the test. This was the trap. She wiped her eyes, sought her centre.
‘Somewhere, it must be somewhere.’ She stood and cast around her. Something must be wrong. Something out of place? The serenity trance insulated her against grief but her eyes kept returning to her mother’s body, small and broken. ‘There’s nothing …’ Nona fell back to her knees, drawn down despite her trance by a weight she couldn’t understand. Tears returned to fill her eyes, blurring her vision as she gathered the woman who had been her everything into her lap.
‘… tired …’
‘Mother?’ Nona blinked away the tears. But the brown eyes she found herself looking down into were not her mother’s, the hand that enfolded hers was huge.
‘Darla?’ Nona choked out her friend’s name.
Darla’s brown eyes clouded with confusion, a kind of wonder, staring at some distant place above Nona’s head. The smoke and fire around them wasn’t that of Rellam Village. It was Sherzal’s stables starting to burn. The eighty miles to Path Tower had become hundreds.
‘She’s gone, Nona.’ Kettle put her hand on Nona’s shoulder.
‘Darla …’ Another raw wound. Nona ground her teeth. Darla’s hand still held hers, warm, solid, real. Maybe she could still be saved … Maybe this time it would be different.
To drag her eyes from Darla’s almost broke Nona. To turn her face from a friend who needed her, a dying friend. ‘It’s not real.’ Nona swung her head around, trying to call the clarity trance though her heart ached and pounded. ‘None of it’s real.’
‘Nona …’ Kettle shook her head slowly as if the sorrow had made it too heavy. ‘We have to go.’
‘There!’ Amid the swirls of smoke and the red tongues of fire a door that had not been present when all this happened, a door with no place in Sherzal’s stables and no place to lead.
‘Nona!’ Cries from the great carriage before the main exit. ‘We need you.’
Letting Darla’s head fall felt like the ultimate betrayal. Every part of her wanted to stay. Every part of her wanted to face the danger with her friends. To save them. To do it better this time.
But she sprang to her feet and threw herself across the burning hall even as the door upon which her eyes were fixed started to fade from view.
‘No!’ She reached it just as the last lines melted away. ‘No!’ Flaw-blades dug deep and in a frenzy of hacking and a storm of splinters … Nona staggered through.
Curved, sigil-crowded walls surrounded her, the inlaid silver gleaming in a light that seemed to be dying swiftly. Nona turned in time to see a doorway fading, and beyond it the spiral steps of Path Tower. A person’s shadow, Ruli’s or Ara’s, lay across stone steps lit by the coloured whispers of the day that shone in the classroom above, streaming in through stained-glass windows.
A moment later the doorway had gone and Nona stood blind and alone.
‘It wasn’t true. Any of it.’ Whispered to the darkness.
Some of it was true though. Abbess Glass had died and Sweet Mercy would never be the same again.
7 (#ulink_0abc6248-7e05-544e-8c3b-01b2fd9f0128)
Three Years Earlier (#ulink_0abc6248-7e05-544e-8c3b-01b2fd9f0128)
The Escape (#ulink_0abc6248-7e05-544e-8c3b-01b2fd9f0128)
‘They’re catching up again.’ Nona hunched against the hard-packed snow, too cold to shiver now. The wind stole her words and ran away with them, howling. Sherzal’s soldiers knew the mountains and had found better routes to gain the heights. Nona could see black figures to the south, little more than dots, almost at the shoulder between two peaks where she and Zole would have to cross if they were to make further progress towards the ice sheet.
‘We have to go down.’ Zole pointed to an icy defile where the east side of the ridge had fractured along some hidden fault line.
‘Down?’ Nona tried to imagine any way she could achieve that other than falling. ‘That’s Scithrowl.’ She stared at the foothills, hazy in the distance and partly obscured by wisps of cloud around the waist of the mountains.
‘They will be unlikely to follow us there.’ Zole shrugged and continued along the ridge. Their path proved to be a serrated blade of stone coated with two feet of icy snow on the southern face and with black ice on the northern side.
The descent proved as hard as the ascent, though in different ways. It found a whole new set of muscles to stress. Nona’s legs began to feel as if they belonged to someone else, paying scant regard to her instructions but letting her have full share of the hurting. Several times she started to fall and saved herself only by digging her flaw-blades through ice into rock. They climbed down for an hour and the world below seemed to grow no closer, though the expanse of black rock towering behind them assured her that they were making progress.
The wind blew less fiercely on the slopes that faced Queen Adoma’s lands but it was far from calm. The clouds surged below them, lapping the slopes like a grey sea. Nona heard shouts before they reached the swirling layer of mist, and looking back she saw that those leading the pursuit were less than a hundred yards away. A spear rattled past her.
‘We will lose them in the clouds,’ Zole said. She hopped down from rock to rock making it seem that her legs were as fresh as if she’d just got out of bed. Coming to the spear, jammed against an outcrop, she picked it up.
Nona followed, frowning at the clouds. ‘We’ll lose ourselves in there too.’ But she supposed ‘down’ to be an easy direction to follow whatever the visibility.
The mist rose to meet their descent, a cold white sea wrapping them, beading Zole’s hair with jewels of dew that froze into tiny pearls. Nona stumbled on in exhaustion, the shipheart’s fire filling her mind with unfocused energy but doing nothing for the muscles in her thighs.
‘Have you been into Scithrowl before?’ Nona asked, sliding down onto a ledge as Zole led off.
‘No.’
‘Their armies are at the border …’
‘If we need to kill soldiers to get to the ice, would it not be better that they were Scithrowl?’
‘I suppose so …’ Nona had a fear of the Scithrowl, a heritage of endless stories told across the Grey. She expected that every part of the empire had its tales of Scithrowl horrors. Told no doubt by old ladies like Nana Even who hadn’t ever been sufficiently far east to glimpse the Grampain peaks, let alone an actual heretic. Did they burn prisoners, eat babies, and practise peculiar tortures? Best not to get captured and find out.
The wind began to shred the cloud layer around them, tearing the whiteness across the flanks of the mountain and affording glimpses of Scithrowl stretching east. It looked remarkably like the empire had from the other side. In the north the ice was a glimmering white line, to the south it lay less than five miles away, a vaulting wall, all in shadow now.
‘The ice.’ Nona stopped. She had seen the Corridor’s great wall before, shorn off by the focus moon, but for the first time ever she had the elevation to look down upon what lay beyond. Zole stopped too. Even a life on the shelf itself didn’t offer an overview. Mile upon mile of merciless ice, bloody with the touch of the morning sun. Here and there internal pressures rucked the sheet up into ridges or split it with chasms that looked like wrinkles at this distance but must be large enough to swallow any tower built by man. The roots of the Grampains cut across the ice every few miles, grey ribs of stone stretching from the main ridge, becoming frost-wrapped and at last drowned beneath the glacial flow.
‘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.’
‘Perhaps the people will not be so different either, for all that Sister Wheel calls them eaters of children and deviants.’ Zole veered up towards the crest of the valley.
‘Maybe.’ Nona felt it hard to shake off the expectations built by a hundred fireside tales so easily. She fixed her eyes on Zole’s back and forced unwilling legs to match the girl’s pace down the slope. Sherzal’s soldiers appeared to have given up the chase, not prepared to venture onto Scithrowl territory. Of the Noi-Guin there was no sign, but Nona doubted that they would relent so easily. Even if their shipheart weren’t at stake.
‘This devil of yours …’ Nona returned to the conversation abandoned on the rock-faces far above them.
‘A raulathu.’
‘It’s some part of you that the shipheart has … broken off?’
‘An impurity of the spirit. In this state it can be purged, leaving a person closer to the divine.’
‘And.’ Nona paused to clamber over a shoulder of rock. ‘And you’ve touched a shipheart before? On the ice?’
‘My tribe calls them klauklar affac, “the footsteps of the Missing”. Most on the ice know them more simply as “Old Stones”. And yes, I have touched such a thing before. Two such things, in fact. When the ice-speakers find a child that can approach the Old Stones they test them. Each new raulathu takes longer to split from a person than the one before and is more difficult to purge. I gave twelve to the fire. It was hard to do. Neither of the tribe’s stones could find more.’
‘How old were you?’ Nona knew that when Zole described a thing as ‘hard’ it meant that anyone else would have been killed by it.
‘Nine. The ice-speaker banished me to the Corridor. He did not say why. My uncle took me to the empire margins. I was sold to Sherzal’s agent in a village called Shard.’
‘Do you … do you think that’s why you have no threads?
Zole made no answer. She had reached the ridge from where she could look down into the next valley and away towards the fortress to the north, the closest in the chain. ‘It seems that the Battle-Queen has ears in Sherzal’s palace, and swift access to them.’
Nona scrambled up to join Zole on the ridge. She straightened, wiping the grit from her palms. ‘Oh.’
A column of riders was spilling down the far side of the valley, a skirmish band on the shaggy ponies that dwelt wild in the region and could run all day over such terrain.
‘Sixty.’ Zole turned and dropped back below the ridge.
‘We can’t outrun them.’ Nona wasn’t sure she could outrun a three-legged mule right then.
Zole narrowed her eyes. A momentary frown and she was moving, back down into the valley again, angling towards their original path tracking the stream. On this side of the Grampains the rivers ran their course a while before vanishing beneath the ice sheets. On Sister Rule’s globe you could reverse the glaciers’ advance and set your fingers to ancient oceans picked out in blue enamel. Nona imagined they still lay there under miles of ice and that the sun-warmed waters of the Corridor must eventually reach those hidden seas.
‘If we’re going to fight we should do it here,’ Nona called after Zole.
‘Sixty is too many,’ Zole called back. ‘And more will come. I would rather rest.’
Nona shrugged and followed. Sixty was too many, and rest sounded good.
8 (#ulink_9833ed93-803b-5f12-bcf3-a0a325255963)
Holy Class (#ulink_9833ed93-803b-5f12-bcf3-a0a325255963)
Present Day (#ulink_9833ed93-803b-5f12-bcf3-a0a325255963)
Total darkness. An enduring silence wrapped Path Tower’s Third Room.
‘Dead dog’s bollocks!’ Nona broke the silence, banging her shin into something hard. The curse was one of Regol’s favourites, though he only used it when he thought she wasn’t there. One day Nona hoped to delight Clera with it.
She bent to rub her leg then reached out to examine the obstacle. A barrel-lidded casket. She wasn’t sure if she’d seen it in the moment before the light died or imagined it after. Her fingers explored the metal banding and found a heavy lock. Would there be more troublesome protections? Thread-traps? Sigil marks? Or did Sister Pan consider the fact that it rested in the third chamber of Path Tower sufficient defence?
Nona sat on the cold stone floor. She could put a foot to the Path and summon light but how that might end, so soon after the strange paths she had just pursued, Nona didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.
The lock was a big piece of cold iron. Nona defocused her sight to bring the thread-scape into view. The lock blazed with them. Threads for the metal itself, leading back through the journey from the locksmith’s, through the workshop, splitting through the smithies where various parts were beaten into shape, re-joining in the white heat of the forge, tracking back along rivers to the distant quarry that the ore had been dug from. All of them tangled with the lives of those who laboured to make the lock, and tangled with the old song of the earth where the iron’s constituents had lain for years uncounted.
A sudden light lanced through it all, washing out the detail and causing Nona to shield her eyes.
‘Thought you might appreciate a lantern,’ Ara said in a shaky voice. She held it up and glanced back at the wall she had come through. ‘Well, that was … unnerving.’ She drew a deep, centring breath and gazed around at the sigil-covered walls in appreciation. ‘These are more complex than in the other rooms. There are sentences written here …’
‘How did you get in?’ Nona demanded as she stood.
‘The same way you did, I expect.’ Ara blinked.
Nona doubted that very much. ‘Tell me, exactly.’
‘Well. I went up and down a few times, and I noticed you had vanished. I found a spot where I thought there might be a door and tried everything I knew to open it. It didn’t seem to work but when I got back down to the portrait room it was different … there was a new picture there that … Well, anyway, I didn’t stop to examine it. I just turned straight round and ran back up the stairs. And all along the stairwell were doorways into scenes from my life, as if I could just step back into them. Passing them by was hard. I mean really hard. And I think if I had hesitated they might have just sucked me through. But I didn’t stop. And halfway up was an archway showing you in front of that box. I stepped through and here I am.’ She smiled. ‘Same for you?’
‘My way was a bit more complicated.’ Nona shrugged. ‘The book’s in here if it’s anywhere.’ She nudged the casket with her foot.
‘And we really want to steal? From Sister Pan?’ Ara asked.
‘None of us wants to. I can’t see another way.’ Nona knelt before the casket again and checked it over. No sigil marks. She brought the lock’s threads back into view, hunting for traps or alarms.
‘Won’t she notice it’s gone?’ Ara asked.
‘What’s she going to say? “Which one of you took the forbidden book I wasn’t allowed to have on pain of banishment?”’ Nona identified the threads that would undo the mechanism’s riddle. Three of them. The key must be a complex piece of ironwork. ‘Besides, how often do you think she looks at it? It might be a year before she notices it’s gone. It might be ten years!’
‘So we steal a book to help us steal a different book, which also might not exist.’ Ara sat down, her eyes taking on that ‘witchy’ look as she joined the hunt for any protective thread-work on the casket.
‘It exists,’ Nona said. ‘Abbess Glass wouldn’t have lied to me.’
‘That woman lied whenever it suited her, Nona. There was nothing personal in it.’ Ara’s fingers twitched as she sorted threads, plucking one, examining it, setting it aside for the next. ‘Besides, she was very ill, she could have been confused. She kept calling me Darla the last time I was allowed to visit her.’
‘Jula knew about the book already. She tried to tell me about it years before,’ Nona said.
‘It still doesn’t make sense to me. Sherzal was going to take the Ark and use four shiphearts to control the moon. She didn’t need a book.’
‘The four ingredients of yellow cake are butter, flour, eggs, and sugar. If I gave you those four necessary things you still couldn’t make a cake that Sister Spoon wouldn’t laugh at.’
‘Neither could you.’ Ara took on the nasal tones of Sister Spoon. Ruli was the better mimic but Spoon was easy to do. ‘Novice Nona, that is an excellent cake, perhaps the best yellow cake I have ever seen …’
‘… if the goal in making such a cake were to produce something suitable for hand-to-hand combat,’ Nona continued, holding her nose. ‘However, if I were to wish to eat a cake rather than bludgeon someone to death with it—’
‘Then I would do better to scrape something together from the convent pigsties,’ Ara finished.
‘Not the point.’ Nona tried to look serious. ‘Sherzal wanted the Ark, the palace, the throne. The rest she was just hoping would sort itself out. The Ark was something she needed to get Adoma as an ally. The shiphearts are the necessary ingredients. What we’re after is the cookbook.’
‘It looks clean to me.’ Ara ran her hands over the casket. ‘Try the lock.’
Nona took hold of the three key threads. She didn’t need her hands but it helped her focus. Any lock is a riddle. The threads made that riddle simple, or at least less difficult, and allowed the answer to become clear through suitable manipulation. It took Nona seven tries. Ara had just opened her mouth, her lips shaping the ‘l’ of ‘let me try’ when the required click sounded.
It wasn’t until she opened the lid and gazed upon the contents that Nona first felt guilty. Seeing the bundled letters, a carefully folded scarf of Hrenamon silk covered with a child’s embroidery, the small figures of a horse and a baby carved from dark pearwood, a dozen other personal effects, Nona knew herself for an intruder of the worst kind, trampling a garden of memories.
‘It must be at the bottom …’ Nona could see no sign of a book.
‘We should go.’ Everything Nona had just felt resonated in Ara’s voice.
‘We have to do this.’
‘It’s nonsense anyway.’ Ara stood up to go. ‘If the moon’s secrets were written down in a book they would have been used at the time it was written. Or at least a hundred years later Emperor Charlc wouldn’t have been forbidding the subject and hiding all the books in a vault! He would have used the secret himself. He wouldn’t have left it to two novices in his grandson’s reign!’
Nona looked up at her friend. She wished they could go. She wished they could just shut the box and walk away. ‘If I swore to you that the Ancestor had told me the true alchemy was written in a book … that all we had to do was follow the recipe and base metals would transmute to gold before us … would we be rich?’
‘Well, yes. We’d take the book and—’
‘Which book?’
‘You just said the secret was written in a book. Wait, doesn’t the Ancestor tell you the title?’
‘Just that it’s in a book on alchemy.’
‘Well, no then, we’d be poor because there are a thousand books and scrolls promising the true alchemy.’
‘And there are a thousand books promising all the secrets of the moon. But Abbess Glass, who forgot more things than you or I will ever know, and Jula, who would rather read the dustiest book than eat, and who is sharper than any Mistress Academia I’ve met, both said that this book was different. Jula said it might have something real to say. Abbess Glass promised that it did.’ Nona reached in with infinite care and began to remove items from the casket, committing their positions to memory. ‘And if Abbess Glass said it, sick or not, that’s good enough for me.’
Ara frowned as she had frowned so often over these past weeks. ‘So, if the book in the forbidden library is really what the abbess said it was, how do we use it? How do we prove it? We don’t have four shiphearts. Nobody does! We don’t have access to the Ark. We don’t have anyone to tell who would believe us, Wheel least of all. It seemed like a bad plan when we were just talking about it. Now that we’re actually doing it …’
Nona reached for the bundled letters with a sigh. Abbess Glass had taught her many things. She had taught Nona that you can often find an angle where any right looks like a wrong, and any wrong a right. She taught her the song of the Ancestor, the power of the long game, and the need for determination. Above all Abbess Glass had taught Nona the value of lies. The one thing she had never managed to teach her was not to feel bad for telling them.
‘It’s the right thing to do. The key to everything. I need you to have faith in this, Ara. I need you make the others believe too. We’re going to be taking holy orders soon so we should be good at believing, no?’
‘In the Ancestor, surely, not in any old—’
‘This comes from the highest authority I know.’
Ara looked up suddenly, incredulous, eyes bright. ‘You’ve had a vision? From the Ancestor?’ Awe and need mingled in her voice.
Nona bowed her head. ‘I have.’
Nona found three books at the very bottom of the casket, wrapped together in a length of black velvet. Aquinas’s Book of Lost Cities was the smallest of the three, looking less old and less impressive than The Mystic’s Path or The Lives of Lestal Crow. It looked more like a travel journal than some weighty tome worthy of forbidding. Nona took the leather-bound volume and hid it in an inner pocket of her habit before returning the other two to their wrapping and starting to replace Sister Pan’s other treasures.
A moment of panic came as she reached for the figurine of the baby and discovered on the floor behind it an ancient daisy, dried and pressed, that must have fallen from between the pages of one of the books. She carefully extracted everything, unwrapped the books, and placed the flower behind the cover of The Lives of Lestal Crow, hoping she had guessed correctly.
At last, sweating lightly, Nona closed the lid. ‘Done.’
‘Lock it.’ Ara nodded towards the keyhole.
‘Right.’ Nona found and manipulated the necessary threads. An easier task this time.
Ara went to the wall and set her hands on it. ‘Now we find that getting in was the easy part.’ Her smile was a nervous one.
‘I’ll follow you,’ Nona said. ‘You’re better at it than me.’
‘But you got in first!’ Ara pushed her lips into a pout.
‘You wouldn’t want to go back my way. Trust me.’
Nona stumbled out onto the Path Tower stairway, catching hold of Ara’s shoulders to keep from falling.
‘At last!’ Jula hurried down towards them. ‘I thought you’d died in there! Got stuck in the wall or something!’
‘Relax.’ Ara smiled, holding up the lantern. ‘We got it.’
‘We have to go!’ Jula pushed past them. ‘Bray’s about to sound sixth bell. There’ll be little Red Classers lining up outside any minute.’
‘Sixth bell?’ Nona shook her head. ‘I didn’t think we were that long!’
‘Well, you were!’ Jula all but stamped her foot. ‘Come on.’ And she set off.
‘I’m surprised Pan’s not here already if it’s so close to fourth,’ Ara said, grinning her disbelief.
‘She is.’ Jula didn’t stop, just hissed back up at them around the stairs’ twist.
That got both novices moving. They caught Jula as she hurried out into the portrait chamber.
‘She’s here?’
‘I was on the stairs when she started up them! I had to go up into the classroom, hide behind the trapdoor lid, and slip out while she was arranging the chairs. It’s a miracle she didn’t see me!’ Jula looked pale.
Ara slapped her on the back. ‘The Poisoner will make a Grey Sister of you yet!’
‘Then I hung around on the stairs again, expecting her next class any minute and wondering how long to leave it before declaring you both lost and confessing everything.’ Jula led them to the north door, opened it with caution, then threw it wide. The three of them spilled out into the day.
After the unreality of the past hour, strange and emotional treks through memory, walking through walls, stealing from Sister Pan in a cause that was larger than any of them … it came as a surprise to find themselves in the cold light of the same day and subject to the same old timetable that had ruled their lives for so many years.
The friends stood a moment, shivering and blinking in the lee of the tower.
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Mark Lawrence
Nona Grey’s story reaches its shattering conclusion in the third instalment of Book of the Ancestor.THEY CAME AGAINST HER AS A CHILD. NOW THEY FACE THE WOMAN.The ice is advancing, the Corridor narrowing, and the empire is under siege from the Scithrowl in the east and the Durns in the west. Everywhere, the emperor’s armies are in retreat.Nona faces the final challenges that must be overcome if she is to become a full sister in the order of her choice. But it seems unlikely that Nona and her friends will have time to earn a nun’s habit before war is on their doorstep.Even a warrior like Nona cannot hope to turn the tide of war.The shiphearts offer strength that she might use to protect those she loves, but it’s a power that corrupts. A final battle is coming in which she will be torn between friends, unable to save them all. A battle in which her own demons will try to unmake her.A battle in which hearts will be broken, lovers lost, thrones burned.HOLY SISTER completes the Book of the Ancestor trilogy that began with RED SISTER and GREY SISTER. A ground-breaking series, it has established Mark Lawrence as one of the most exciting new voices in modern speculative fiction.
Copyright (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
HarperVoyager
an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/)
First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019
Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2019
Cover © Tomasz Jeduszek 2019
Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019
Mark Lawrence asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008152390
Ebook Edition © April 2019 ISBN: 9780008152413
Version: 2019-04-04
Dedication (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
For my grandfather, ‘Bill’ William George Cook, who lived most of his first decade under the reign of Queen Victoria and who with great patience helped me make my first treasure box
Contents
Cover (#ud7909d06-ddce-5339-b03b-397b17494aac)
Title Page (#u0da5596b-67ec-5c05-8a99-46b469af7dee)
Copyright
Dedication
The Story So Far
Prologue
Chapter 1. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 2. Three years earlier: The Escape
Chapter 3. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 4. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 5. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 6. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 7. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 8. Holy Class: Present Day
Chapter 9. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 10. Holy Class
Chapter 11. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 12. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 13. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 14. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 15. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 16. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 17. Holy Class
Chapter 18. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 19. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 20. Holy Class
Chapter 21. Three Years Earlier: The Escape
Chapter 22. Present: Holy Class
Chapter 23. Holy Class
Chapter 24. Holy Class
Chapter 25. Holy Class
Chapter 26. Holy Class
Chapter 27. Holy Class
Chapter 28. Holy Class
Chapter 29. Holy Class
Chapter 30. Holy Class
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Also by Mark Lawrence
About the Publisher
The Story So Far (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
For those of you who have had to wait a while for this book I provide brief catch-up notes so that your memories may be refreshed and I can avoid the awkwardness of having to have characters tell each other things they already know for your benefit.
Here I carry forward only what is of importance to the tale that follows.
The people and places in the brief summary I start with are expanded on further down, so if it means nothing to you, skip the next paragraph then come back to it.
Grey Sister ended with Nona, around fifteen years old, escaping Sherzal’s palace with troops in pursuit. She had friends with her, including Zole, Ara, Regol, Abbess Glass and Sister Kettle, and assorted other survivors. Zole had the Noi-Guin’s shipheart, stolen from the assassins’ headquarters beneath the palace. Clera helped Nona escape but went back to Sherzal’s service. Nona’s enemy from the convent, the novice Joeli Namsis, was still in the palace and her actions led to the death of Nona’s friend Darla during the escape. Nona and her companions are in the mountains on the border with Scithrowl and a long way from the convent. The story does not begin with this scene but will return to it presently.
Abeth is a planet orbiting a dying red sun. It is sheathed in ice and the vast majority of its people live in a fifty-mile-wide ice-walled corridor around the equator.
An artificial moon, a great orbiting mirror, keeps the Corridor free of ice by focusing the sun’s rays into it each night.
When, thousands of years ago, the four original tribes of men came to Abeth from the stars they found the ruins of a vanished people they called the Missing.
The empire is bounded by the lands of the Scithrowl to the east and by the Sea of Marn to the west. Across the sea the Durns rule. At the end of Grey Sister Scithrowl hordes under their Battle-Queen, Adoma, were amassing on their side of the mountain range that borders the battle lines.
The emperor’s sister, Sherzal, commands the defence against Scithrowl from her palace in the mountains. She was going to betray the empire and let Queen Adoma’s forces through the Grand Pass. The deal included combining the shipheart held by the Noi-Guin assassins and the shipheart stolen from Sweet Mercy Convent by the ice-triber Yisht, with the two shiphearts Queen Adoma has, thereby making the quartet of shiphearts believed necessary to open the Ark. The Ark lies beneath the emperor’s palace and was built either by the Missing or the first humans and is said to allow control of the moon.
Shiphearts are objects of disputed origin that may have powered the ships that brought the tribes of men to Abeth. The closer a person gets to one the more enhanced their natural talent for magic is. Get too close, though, and the shipheart’s power begins to break your mind apart. Undesirable pieces of your personality like anger or greed or malice split into sentient fragments called devils and exert greater influence over you.
As the sun weakens, the ice continues a slow advance despite the warmth of the moon’s nightly focus. As the Corridor is squeezed, nations look to their neighbours for new territory.
The empire’s nobility are the Sis. The suffix is attached to the names of ennobled families (e.g. Tacsis, Jotsis etc).
The four original tribes that came to Abeth were the gerant, hunska, marjal, and quantal. Their blood sometimes shows in the current population, conferring unique powers. The gerant grow very large, the hunska are fantastically swift, the marjal can manifest all manner of minor to medium magics, including shadow-weaving, sigil-writing, and mastery of elements. The quantal can access the raw power of the Path and manipulate the threads that are woven to create reality.
The Missing left behind structures called Arks. Three exist within the Corridor. The emperor’s palace is built on one. There are no reliable records of anyone being able to open the Ark, but a faked prophecy predicts the coming of a Chosen One who will be able to. Others believe that four shiphearts used together can open an Ark.
Nona Grey was a peasant child from a nameless village. She was given to the child-taker Giljohn who sold her to the Caltess where ring-fighters are trained and pitted against each other. She ended up at the Convent of Sweet Mercy where novices are trained in service to the Ancestor. Novices take orders as one of four classes of nun. Holy Sister (entirely religious duties), Grey Sister/Sister of Discretion (trained in assassination and stealth), Red Sister/Martial Sister (trained in combat), Holy Witch/Mystic Sister (trained to walk the Path).
Nona has proven to be a triple-blood, an incredibly rare occurrence. She has hunska, marjal, and quantal skills. Nona has wholly black eyes, a side effect of taking a dangerous antidote. She has no shadow, having cut it free while fighting Yisht.
Yisht is a woman of the ice-tribes and is in the employ of the emperor’s sister Sherzal. Yisht stole the Sweet Mercy shipheart and killed Nona’s friend Hessa.
Nona is hated by Lano Tacsis because she killed his brother and also left his father, Lord Thuran Tacsis, bound to his own torture device.
Joeli Namsis is the daughter of a lord with close ties to the Tacsis family. She is skilled at quantal thread-work and poisoning. She became Nona’s enemy at the convent.
During the theft of the shipheart Nona was betrayed by her friend and fellow novice Clera Ghomal. Among Nona’s remaining friends are novices Ara, Zole, Ruli, and Jula. Arabella Jotsis is from a powerful family and a rare two-blood, having both hunska and quantal skills. Ruli has minor marjal skills. Jula is very studious and hopes to become a Holy Sister.
Zole is a significant novice. She is from the ice-tribes and came to the convent at Sherzal’s insistence, used as an unwitting distraction to help in the theft of the shipheart. She is the only known four-blood with access to all the skills of the original tribes. Many consider her to be the Chosen One from prophecy. Under the prophecy Zole is the Argatha, and Nona is her Shield.
The Convent of Sweet Mercy has been led by Abbess Glass, a woman whose connections in the Church and beyond reach further than expected.
Most senior among the nuns are the Sisters Superior, Wheel and Rose. Sister Wheel teaches Spirit classes. Sister Rose runs the sanatorium. Other important figures are Sister Tallow, who teaches Blade, Sister Pan, who teaches Path, and Sister Apple who teaches Shade. Sister Kettle is a Grey Sister based at the convent. She and Apple are lovers.
There are four classes/stages that novices move through as they train to take holy orders as nuns. Red Class, Grey Class, Mystic Class, and Holy Class. Grey Sister ended with Nona in Mystic Class.
Novices take new names when they become nuns. Nona will become Sister Cage. Ara will be Sister Thorn.
Prologue (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
The roar of a crowd invades you like a living thing, reverberating in your chest, taking its answer from your lips without permission. The press of bodies overwhelms barriers and unknowingly the many become something singular, the same emotion bleeding from the skins of different people, the same thought echoing in a hundred skulls, or a thousand. For a marjal empath it can be a thing at once both terrifying and glorious, expanding their control, making it easier to reach into the minds around them, but also allowing the possibility that in such a storm of humanity they may lose themselves, may be lifted out of their flesh, never to find it again.
Markus watched the defeated fighter being helped from the ring beneath the jeers and complaint of the crowd. The victor still stalked the perimeter of his raised battleground, arms lifted, sweat running down his ribs. But already the crowd were losing interest in him, turning to their neighbours with speculation, observation, or jest, turning to the odds-mongers to lay new wagers, turning to the counter in the far corner to fill their cups with wine. And some, seeking new thrills, now faced the second ring at the far end of the hall.
The gerant fighter waiting behind the ropes threatened nine foot in height and Markus didn’t believe that he had seen a larger man. The fighter was still young, in his early twenties perhaps, and his muscles crowded along his bones, the battle for space heaping them up in great, veined mounds. He watched the world from pale eyes beneath a thicket of short red hair.
At the Caltess the gerant contests were the most popular. The sight of enormous fighters pitting their strength against each other never failed to draw the masses, and on nights with an open ring the folk of Verity loved to see that strength turned upon hapless challengers. Bouts between hunska ring-fighters had a strong following among the more experienced watchers but the speed of the combatants often left the common crowd bewildered. Mixed matches were a rarity but the contest of speed against strength was always interesting.
From the baying press of humanity around the base of the giant’s ring a challenger emerged. A powerfully built man who stood head and shoulders above those pressing him on all sides. In normal circumstances Markus would have been impressed by the fellow’s physique and backed him against any three bar-room brawlers.
An undercurrent of whispers and speculation flowed around the hall. The man was a refugee from the port of Ren, which now lay within the Durnish incursion. He had some reputation from pit-fights in the frost towns along the north margins.
‘Five says he doesn’t last the round against Denam.’ Someone behind Markus seeking a private wager.
The roar as the newcomer climbed into the ring drowned out further conversation. Markus hadn’t ever been inside the great hall of the Caltess, though years ago he had spent hours waiting in the compound with the other children from Giljohn’s cage. The child-taker had never intended to sell Markus to Partnis Reeve though. He’d suspected Markus of marjal blood and had taken him on to be offered where such talents would fetch a richer price. The great hall had stood silent and dark on that midnight long ago, and as the night had shaded into morning young Markus had shivered and clutched himself and never suspected that he would one day stand within, part of a sweating, heaving mass baying for blood.
Even though it was Markus’s first time before the rings he knew Denam’s name. Despite his tender years the young man was the new champion among the gerant ring-fighters, famed for his brutality. For Denam open-ring night often proved to involve nothing more than glowering at the sea of resentful faces before him. Finding no one to answer his challenge he would cede his place to another fighter and once more the crowd would discover its courage.
‘Milos of Ren!’ the fight-master called out.
Milos raised his arm in acknowledgement and walked to his corner to await the bell.
Markus didn’t hear the chime above the roar but the two men closed, Milos dwarfed by Denam. The gerant full-blood kept his hands down and let Milos take a punch. It was as if he had swung at a tree. Denam’s head moved slightly to the left with the blow. Milos clubbed him two-handed across the other side of his face and Denam’s head lurched to the right. Denam returned his gaze to his opponent and grinned, his teeth bloody. Milos didn’t appear to understand. He looked down at his fists as if there might be something wrong with them.
Denam slapped the man, brushing his arms away. Blood sprayed from Milos’s mouth and he staggered as if drunk. Denam caught him in two great hands, one wrapped around his neck, the other encompassing his thigh, and lifted him four yards above the boards before slamming him down, full-bodied, face first.
Milos did not rise. An apprentice scrambled in to scatter sand across the crimson smear left behind when they dragged him out beneath the lowest rope.
Markus wasn’t alone in thinking that Denam was finished for the night, but the flow of the crowd indicated another challenger coming to the fore. The newcomer appeared, climbing clear of the throng. From behind, Markus saw only a dark cloak and black hair. This challenger stood even shorter than Milos, little more than six foot and of considerably lighter build. The audience hushed in surprise.
‘Hunska?’ the whisper went round.
‘Fool!’ came the reply.
The challenger might not be a giant but even so hunskas were never this tall or broad-shouldered. Denam fixed the newcomer with a stare so murderous that Markus felt the need to run boiling up inside him. As an empath he was used to swimming in the currents of others’ emotions but the ring-fighter’s anger ran swifter and more deep than anything he’d felt before and at each moment threatened to overwhelm his senses.
The challenger ducked beneath the top rope.
‘Drunk,’ someone speculated.
Markus tried to imagine how drunk a person would have to be to think this a good idea. Too drunk to stand, probably. This one didn’t move as if inebriated though.
The hush fell to silence as the challenger’s cloak fluttered from the ring. The woman wore the same as the ring-fighters, just a white loin-cloth and a white band of cloth bound tight around her chest, her pale skin accentuating the redness of Denam’s complexion.
The fight-master didn’t approach to learn the challenger’s name. Instead he raised his voice, ‘Nona of the convent.’
Nona didn’t lift her arm to acknowledge the crowd’s roar but she did make a slow turn, and when the black orbs of her eyes swept across him Markus knew that he had been seen.
‘Fight!’
Denam came slowly to meet the novice, fists raised to protect his throat and eyes, his stance closed to defend his groin. Markus watched Nona intently, trying to see anything of the girl he’d known over those weeks in Giljohn’s cage. She was two years his junior so she would be around seventeen, but she looked every inch a woman. Long-limbed, lean, an athlete’s body, each muscle chiselled in hard relief, flat belly above the jut of her hipbones. Even frightened for her as he was, Markus couldn’t deny she drew his eye in ways unbecoming to a Holy Brother.
Nona stepped in with a swift confidence, striking Denam just below the ribs on his left side, five or six blows landing with the rapidity of a woodpecker hammering at a tree. She punched with her whole body, swivelling at the waist. Denam laughed the blows off and swept a hand at the novice. She evaded him with ease, landing three or four more punches in the same spot. Hard as she must be hitting the man, Markus couldn’t see what hope Nona had of victory. The muscle covering Denam’s bones lay inches thick and the bones beneath must be like those of a draught horse. She might as well try to punch a bear into submission.
Denam squared up against Nona, his hatred for her obvious even as he tried to laugh at her efforts. Nona stood her ground and the crowd drew in its breath. Denam swung with an arm that looked as thick around as Markus’s chest. The fist he drove at Nona was the size of her skull.
She took the punch in the face, her head snapping to the right. The follow-up came from the left, snapping her head back the other way. Markus imagined those fists would shatter a skull, leave cheekbones in fragments, break a neck …
Nona looked up at the fighter towering above her and smiled, her teeth unbloodied. Denam seemed astonished, the crowd roared in wonder. Magic? But Markus had sensed no enchantment, not the slightest crackle of it. He could only imagine that she had moved her head at the same speed as the fists seeking it, allowing only a gentle contact.
Again Nona peppered the same spot below Denam’s ribs with half a dozen blows in the space of a heartbeat or two. She leapt back, rolling under a sweeping hand, rising in the same motion, kicking at her target, evading a second questing hand and spinning to land another kick in the same spot.
Denam came towards her, his own roar louder than the mob. As he advanced he favoured his left side. A small thing that could easily pass unnoticed. Nona twisted clear, bounced off two sets of ropes and landed a flying kick, just below his ribs.
For long minutes the fight continued, Denam’s attacks almost brushing Nona’s pale skin but never quite finding it. Nona landing a score of punches and kicks on her target, perhaps two score. Denam’s rage grew, his face crimson, spitting and foaming, howling threats and promises. But he crouched over the injured side now, the bruised lower ribs, covering them with his elbow. He leaned against the corner post, hitching in a breath.
‘Come on, big boy.’ Nona’s first words in the fight.
They worked like a spark to flash-powder. Denam threw himself forward with a scream. Nona dived beneath his outstretched arms, rolled head over heels between his legs, through the opening left as fury overcame caution, and drove her heel into his groin with all the speed and strength she possessed.
Denam made it two more strides before he realized that Nona was no longer in front of him, and a further stride before the pain hit home. The gerant’s legs forgot whatever orders they had and dropped him to the planks where he curled around his agony, blind to the world.
Nona sprang to her feet, the fight still in her face, teeth bared. With the awful gale of Denam’s hatred subsumed into his wordless agony, Markus could now feel Nona’s emotions and found himself rocked back upon his heels by the raw animal aggression bleeding off her. He had experienced something similar when a wrong turn had taken him to the dog-pits beyond the walls of Old Town. A bloodied mastiff with its jaws locked around the throat of another hound had given off the same explosive violence that the novice did. Markus fully expected Nona to fall upon her prey, gouging Denam’s eyes from their sockets or stamping his face to pulp. But instead, in the space of five deep breaths, she drew it all back in, every piece, until there was nothing he could read above the mixed sea of emotion all around him. Of all that he’d seen that night it was this quenching of fury that was the most remarkable to him.
Ignoring the cheers, and the fight-master coming to question or reward her, Nona vaulted the ropes and dropped into the crowd. Within moments she was at Markus’s side, vibrant, sweat-soaked, alive, the alien blackness of her eyes level with his.
‘You came,’ she said.
Markus shrugged. ‘You asked me to.’
1 (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
Holy Class (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
Present Day (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
Markus had grown beyond Nona’s expectations. She remembered a fierce spiky-haired farm-boy who had welcomed her to Giljohn’s cage by demanding her age and had appeared to find comfort in establishing his seniority over her. A bad beginning, but his affection for the child-taker’s mule had softened her opinion of him by the end of their journey. Now he stood a solid six foot two, handsome in a friendly way, a face that would laugh with you. The black hair had been tamed with oil and lay flat to his skull in the way of monks. The only sign of the boy from the cage was a sharpness to his features and a quickness in the dark eyes that studied her.
Nona had wrapped her cloak around her once more. Sweat stuck the material to her back, making her uncomfortable, or perhaps that was just the frankness of Markus’s regard. She offered a smile in return for his and hugged her hands under her arms. Her knuckles ached from repeatedly punching Denam. Nona was sure she’d punched practice timbers that were softer than the gerant’s side. She felt good though, her body glowing, her step so light that with a little effort she might just shrug off gravity entirely.
She leaned in. ‘Let’s talk outside.’
Markus nodded. They pushed a path towards the main doors. Already the Caltess’s patrons were flocking back to the second ring. A couple of hulking apprentices were helping Denam over the ropes of the first.
‘I’m surprised the convent lets novices come down here to fight,’ Markus said behind her.
‘They don’t.’ Nona slipped between the doors as they opened to admit more thrill-seekers.
‘Why did you—’ Markus broke off to draw his robes around him, the black habit of a Holy Brother. He followed her out into rain-laced wind, a loud brrr escaping at the cold shock of it.
‘An old dispute that needed settling,’ Nona said. It was partly true. Mostly she had wanted to hit someone, hard, again and again. Markus probably knew that already; classified Church reports named him as one of the most effective marjal empaths currently in the Ancestor’s service.
Nona led Markus around the corner of the great hall where they would be sheltered from the gale. The walls loomed dark above them, the sky crossed with tatters of cloud beneath the crimson spread of a thousand dying stars.
‘Why did you want me? Send the message, I mean?’ Markus seemed less sure of himself than she had expected. Someone who could read her like a book should be more confident? She certainly wished her own empath skills would tell her more of his mood than she could glean from the intensity of his stare or the tight line of his lips.
‘That day at the Academy.’ The words blurted from her. ‘Did you make that girl attack me?’ Nona forced her mouth closed. She had had it all planned out, what she would say, how, when. And now her idiot tongue had cut through all of it.
‘She … she was already attacking you.’ Guilt came from him in waves.
‘She was using the darkness to scare me. Or trying to. But then she went mad.’ Nona remembered how an animal fury had risen across the girl’s face. ‘You did that!’
‘I did.’ A frown now, his brow pale and beaded with rain.
‘She tried to shadow-rend me. I could have been torn apart!’
Markus raised his hands. ‘I made her angry. I didn’t know she could do that.’
‘Well, she could!’ Nona felt her own anger rising from the well she thought emptied in the ring.
‘I’m sorry.’ He looked down.
‘But …’ It felt like honesty, but Nona supposed he could fake that better than anyone she’d ever known. ‘Why?’
‘Abbot Jacob told me to.’
‘Jacob?’ A chill ran through Nona. ‘High Priest Jacob? I mean the one who used to be?’
Markus nodded, still looking down.
‘But … he’s not … you don’t have to …’
‘He was appointed to St Croyus as abbot a year after Abbess Glass had Nevis replace him as high priest.’
‘St Croyus? But Jacob’s a monster!’ Nona couldn’t see how the former high priest could have risen from disgrace so swiftly.
‘A monster with friends in high places. Including the Tacsis.’ Markus shrugged. ‘And he’s not a stupid man, just a cruel and greedy one.’
‘So he bought you from Giljohn, sent you to St Croyus, and followed you there to take over?’ Nona had seen the high priest beat Giljon’s mule to death and leave Markus broken. And that was just on the day he’d purchased him as a frightened boy of ten. How must it have been to grow up under that man’s command?
‘I’m sorry.’ Markus looked up and met her eyes. She gave him points for not using his power to try to influence her. She would know. At least she hoped she would know. He couldn’t be that good, could he? Markus coughed. ‘So, did you ask me down here to beat me senseless? Kick me in the groin? Or is my apology enough?’
A man hurried around the corner before Nona could answer. He approached them, hunched against the rain.
‘Regol?’ Nona asked. She’d looked for the ring-fighter in the crowd before she took on Denam but not spotted him.
‘At your service, my lady!’ He made a sweeping bow, managing to keep both eyes on Markus.
Nona couldn’t help but smile. ‘I’m not your lady, or anyone else’s.’
‘A remarkable victory, novice.’ Regol straightened. ‘Our ginger friend can be a stubborn fellow.’ His eyes held a certain distance, a reassessment perhaps.
‘You saw?’ She had wanted him to.
‘The whole thing. And did you hear the newest recruits cheering in the attic?’
Nona flexed her hands, grimacing. ‘I thought he wasn’t ever going to go down.’
Regol winced. ‘The real question is whether he’s going to get up again, and what he’ll sound like.’ He squeaked the last part then turned his gaze on Markus as if noticing him for the first time. ‘I would ask if this monk is bothering you, but I guess if he was he’d be on the ground looking for his teeth.’ Again that look, as if he saw a different person before him tonight.
‘I’m sure Nona can have a disagreement without punching anyone in the face.’ Markus returned Regol’s stare. ‘Not everyone who climbs out of the ring just steps into a bigger one.’
Regol shrugged, that mocking smile of his firmly in place. ‘The whole Corridor is a ring around Abeth, brother. And when the ice squeezes, everyone fights.’
‘Go away,’ Markus said.
Regol opened his mouth with some reply but a puzzled look overtook him. He turned to go, then spun back as if he had forgotten something.
‘You would rather be watching the fights.’ Markus spoke without emphasis but the waves of power bleeding from him shocked Nona with their intensity. It was as if someone had opened a furnace door and an unexpected wall of heat had broken across her.
Regol turned back and walked off without comment.
‘He won’t be pleased when that wears off,’ Nona said.
‘No.’ Markus nodded. ‘But it would have been worse if he’d stayed longer. He didn’t like me at all, and we both know why.’
‘Oh.’ Nona laughed, though it came out wrong. ‘Regol’s not like that. He flirts with all the girls. The ladies of the Sis practically worship—’
‘It’s you he wants, Nona. You don’t have to be an empath to know that.’
‘No, he’s just …’ She trailed off as Markus shook his head, his smile half-sad. ‘Anyway, you got rid of him easily enough.’ A twinge of disappointment had run through her at that.
‘Easily?’ Markus leaned back against the wall. ‘He put up a hell of a fight. I would never have suspected it of a Caltess brawler.’ He put his fingers to his temples. ‘I’ll probably have a headache all night …’
Nona said nothing, only glanced towards the corner. After Joeli had made Regol abandon Darla mid-fight at Sherzal’s palace the ring-fighter had asked Nona to help him. He hadn’t wanted to be manipulated like that ever again. Nona had spent hours training him to erect barriers against that kind of thread-work. He would take this defeat badly.
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 (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
Three years earlier (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
The Escape (#u8e59d898-69d7-5f7b-84c1-0b1038d28f8c)
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 wound in her thigh.
‘We shouldn’t be doing this, Abbess.’ Nona looked back. ‘The Sweet Mercy shipheart did terrible things to Yisht.’
‘And yet Zole is untouched.’ The abbess and the others were black shapes now, with just edges picked out here and there by the deep purple light of the shipheart.
But Zole was not untouched …
‘Find your serenity.’ Zole’s voice resonated through the night. ‘Serenity will preserve you.’
Nona didn’t feel serene. She felt scared and in pain, but she reached for her trance, running the lines of the old song through her head, imagining the slow descent of the moon and the children of her village chanting in a circle around the fire. And with the moon’s fall a blanket of serenity settled upon her, setting the world apart, her pain not gone but no longer personal, more a curio, an object for study.
Zole held the shipheart out towards them, a sphere the size of a child’s head, resting on both palms, dark purple, almost black, but somehow glowing with a violet light that seemed to shade beyond vision. Nona advanced. She felt the pressure of the thing, as if she had fallen into deep water. She had plunged into the black depths of the Glasswater sinkhole before, and this was no less terrifying. The need to breathe built in her and threatened her serenity, before, with a gasp, she remembered that there was no reason not to draw breath.
With just a yard between them Nona’s skin began to prickle then burn, as if the devils were there already just waiting for their true colours to be made known. Nona had shared her skin with a devil before, Keot, not one of her own making but one that had infected her when she killed Raymel Tacsis. The rocks around the man’s corpse had been stained black beneath the crimson.
‘Hold to yourself.’ Zole closed the remaining distance that Nona’s feet proved unwilling to cross. Zole had seen Nona’s old devil and kept the secret. Zole said they called them klaulathu on the ice. Things of the Missing.
Without preamble, Zole pressed the heart’s orb to the wound above Nona’s knee. Nona had expected her flesh to sizzle, the blood in her veins to boil like the water in Sweet Mercy’s pipes, but instead icy fingers wrapped around her bones and a black-violet light stole her vision. For a moment she saw strange spires silhouetted against an indigo sky, swept away in the next beat of her heart as if by a great wind. The Path opened before her; not the narrow and treacherous line that had to be hunted, but broad, blazing, so wide that its direction became uncertain, a place one might wander, drunk on power until the end of days. Voices began to sound within Nona’s head, all of them hers but speaking from different places, some raging, some jealous, some whispering secret fears or wants, a babble at first but each taking on a separate identity, becoming clearer, more distinct.
‘Done.’ Zole pushed Nona back, the base of her palm against Nona’s sternum.
Nona staggered and Ara kept her from falling with help from Kettle. The heart-light caught their faces, making something alien of them both.
‘Are you all right?’ Kettle asked.
‘I …’ Nona stood straight, stamped her leg. It still ached but the flesh had been made whole, a white line of scar tissue marking the passage of Yisht’s blade. ‘Yes.’ The voices that had filled her mind became jumbled together once more, fading back into the shadows.
‘Go on.’ Kettle sent Nona back towards the abbess and the rest of the group, giving her shoulder a small shove to get her going.
By the time Nona reached the ruins of the carriage that they had escaped the palace in she was calm again, her serenity intact.
‘How do you feel?’ The abbess watched Nona’s eyes with an uncomfortable intensity.
‘I don’t know,’ Nona said. ‘Tired. But full of energy. If that makes sense.’ She looked back down at her leg, the scar visible through the tattered smock. The cold no longer touched her. ‘I don’t know how Zole can stand it.’ Part of her wanted to tell the abbess about the devil she had seen at Zole’s wrist when she first arrived with the shipheart. She bit down on the impulse. She had lived with Keot for years and Zole hadn’t informed on her. Zole would have to deal with her own demons. The abbess probably couldn’t help in any case. And the inquisitors with her would want to burn the devil out of Zole.
Abbess Glass took Nona’s hand and led her back to the main group. ‘You’re mended? You can walk the distance now?’
‘I could run it!’ Ara caught them up, her hair rising around her head as if backcombed, a blonde confusion defying the wind. She had a wild look in her eye. Nona met her gaze and a grin broke across both their faces, a shared understanding, and something more complex that perhaps neither understood. Nona wanted to run with her, to chase her. Wanted her friend.
The three of them turned to see Kettle silhouetted against the shipheart’s glow, Zole on one knee, applying the heart to the nun’s inner thigh. Kettle broke away with a cry after just a moment’s contact. She came hurrying down the road, not glancing back. She moved quickly, though still with a slight limp.
‘Sister Kettle?’ The abbess stepped forward to meet her.
‘Mother …’ Kettle’s wide eyes sought the abbess as though she were night-blind.
‘Here.’ Abbess Glass took the nun’s hands. ‘You’re safe.’
Nona raised her brows at the enormity of that lie but said nothing.
‘I can’t go near it again. I can’t.’ Kettle shot a glance over her shoulder as if Zole might be approaching with the shipheart even now.
‘It’s all right, sister.’ The abbess led them further away. ‘I need you to protect us as we journey west. Even if all Sherzal’s forces follow the shipheart towards the ice the empire roads are no longer a safe place for the vulnerable. And unguarded Sis lords are likely to be a tempting prize to any bandits we might pass.’
‘But Zole …’
‘Zole will have her Shield.’
3 (#ulink_6a13c895-ce2b-5573-8e19-1aa7a4c732ff)
Holy Class (#ulink_6a13c895-ce2b-5573-8e19-1aa7a4c732ff)
Present Day (#ulink_6a13c895-ce2b-5573-8e19-1aa7a4c732ff)
After leaving Markus at the Caltess Nona ran to the city gates. She covered the five miles from Verity’s walls to the foot of the Rock of Faith at a near sprint. The burning of her muscles and the hot thrill of her blood battled the night wind’s chill.
Doubt dogged her footsteps, each mile and each yard. The voices of her suspicion were almost as real, almost as disembodied as Keot’s voice had been when he lived beneath her skin. Will he be true? Can he be trusted? Questions Nona had no answer for, just the feeling in her gut. Clera betrayed you, the voices whispered, and she was a friend.
‘She saved me too.’ Panted out between breaths as Nona picked up her pace, trying to outrun her doubts.
Nona shook her head, sweat flying in the wind. She was to be a nun. She would choose from the disciplines offered to her. Just a handful of final tests stood between her and the vows. She was to stand her life upon a foundation of faith. Faith that the branches of the Ancestor’s tree would hold her, and that those branches would carry all of humanity into a future less dark than they feared. If a nun could not have faith then who could? The bonds of friendship had always borne her more firmly than those of blood. Markus had ridden with her in the cage and that bond would suffice. She had faith that it would. Also she had a back-up plan. With a gasp of effort she ran faster still, until any that she might have passed on the road that night would have stood amazed and watched her fly.
At last she came to a halt, breathing heavily. The base of a great limestone cliff rose above her. From its heights the southern windows of Blade Hall offered a view of the city and, twenty miles beyond, the ice glimmering red beneath the moon. Those walls were closer now than they had been when Abbess Glass had first brought Nona to the convent. North and south the ice squeezed and all the nations of the Corridor bled.
The start of the Seren Way lay close at hand, just a few minutes’ walk around the Rock, but Wheel had taken to watching it of late. The old woman spent whole nights seated at the narrowest part, wrapped in a great blanket and staring at the night with watery eyes, just waiting to catch any errant novice. Why she didn’t just check the dormitories was unclear but Ruli claimed Wheel had been made to vow never to enter the building under the tenure of the previous abbess following an unspecified ‘incident’. Ruli claimed a novice had been killed, but when pressed she had to admit making that part up.
Nona craned her neck and looked up at the dark acreage of stone. Here and there moonlight picked out a line where it caught upon an edge of rock. She took a deep breath, swung her arms, and began to climb. She followed an old fault line, digging her leather-clad toes into the crack, reaching up for fingerholds. Her flaw-blades would make a quicker, easier job of it but Nona had learned the danger in relying too much on something that might not always be there. Besides, the pattern of regular slots driven into the rock might be spotted one day, and it would be hard to deny her own signature.
As she gained height Nona’s arms began to join her legs in complaint. Her hands ached from punching Denam over and over. The thought of him falling gave her fresh energy, though. She had wanted to fight him for years. She could say it was to take him down a peg or three, punishment for being a bully, or that it was payment for his attempt to break her in the ring on the instructions of Raymel Tacsis. The truth though was something less laudable, and came in two parts, both now settling into her mind as truths often do when a head is empty of all things save the demands of hard labour.
Nona had fought Denam because even with Keot gone a hunger for violence burned in her and if left unfed too long it would break out in dangerous ways. Much of what she had blamed on Raymel’s devil seemed instead to be some fundamental part of who she had grown into. Denam represented that rare someone, a person she could hit over and over without the danger of killing them, or any need for remorse over pain inflicted.
The other reasons for the contest had been Markus and Regol. She had asked Markus to break holy law. She owed it to him to show him who he was breaking those rules for. And Regol … Regol needed to see it too. Regol who spoke foolishness into the pillows when she joined him beneath the roof that Partnis Reeve put over his head. Regol who thought her something precious, as holy as the vows she broke. He needed to see what really lay behind the eyes he claimed to lose himself in. Something sharp-angled and vicious – not the princess he sometimes let himself pretend she was. Nona knew better than to allow him to build his hopes upon a lie. Regol fulfilled a need, as Denam had, one in the ring, one in the furs. She and Regol were friends whose bodies were pleasing to each other. She couldn’t let a friend build their hopes upon such a flawed foundation as her. She hadn’t saved Saida, or Hessa, or Darla. Even as an agent of vengeance she had failed. Sherzal, the architect behind so many deaths, still walked the world, as did others who had served her will.
Nona hauled herself over the edge of the cliff and lay on her back on the cold stone, just inches from the fall. Her arms trembled, her body knew the bone-deep exhaustion of prolonged mistreatment, but her mind still raced, images rising from the darkness, one after the next. Denam’s anger, Regol’s surprise, Markus’s caution, a hundred other scenes, drawn by threads of memory.
In time she rolled onto her side and levered herself up. She passed around the far end of Blade Hall, slipping along the perimeter of the courtyard before Heart Hall. Moving between moonshadows she skirted the buildings, placing each foot with the caution of one born to the Grey.
‘Novice Nona.’ A soft voice at her shoulder. ‘You smell of man-sweat.’
Nona turned, unable to see anyone in the darkness behind her. ‘And you smell of apples, sister. One red Apple, to be more precise.’
‘Then our sins are evenly matched.’ The shadows melted from Sister Kettle and she stepped forward with a half-smile.
‘Perhaps.’ Nona grinned. ‘But I earned mine in front of an audience—’
‘Well, that’s novel.’ Kettle widened both eyes and her smile.
‘In a ring at the Caltess.’
‘No Regol tonight?’ Kettle frowned.
‘That’s a habit I should discard,’ Nona said. ‘This one, I should keep on.’ She patted her garment. ‘I’ll be taking a nun’s vows soon. If they don’t mean more to me than the promises novices make then I shouldn’t say them.’
‘There are other ways to serve.’ Kettle pursed her lips. ‘You don’t have to stay. Nor do you have to be perfect. But … you do have to go to bed.’ She pointed.
Nona nodded. ‘Bed sounds good. A bath would be good too. But I would probably fall asleep and drown.’ She shrugged and turned to go.
‘Watch out for Joeli.’ Hissed at her back.
Nona approached the dormitories. She examined the main door before opening it and entering the hall beyond. A sleepy novice emerged from the Red dorm, lantern in hand, and passed her without looking up, bound for the Necessary. Nona moved on, climbing the stairs to the Holy floor at the top of the building.
She studied the door to her dorm more closely than she had the main one. Defocusing her sight, she picked out a glowing thread laid across the floor just in front of the door, another looping the handle, both veering off at strange angles to the world. They were trip-threads most likely, set to warn Joeli of her comings and goings, but there could be more to them. Some threads could cut you, others could just make it hurt as much as if they had cut you, others could wreak more complex damage, or adhere and trail out behind you, providing information to anyone holding them closer to where they joined the Path. How many of those tricks Joeli had mastered, Nona couldn’t say, except that she had definitely used both trip-threads and pain-threads in the past. Nona’s own talents still lagged behind, but not so far as they once had.
Nona removed the threads, pushing them temporarily out of alignment with the world. They would return shortly and appear untouched. She saw the third thread just as she reached for the door handle, gossamer thin, turning virulent green as she brought it into focus. Something new and unfriendly. Fortunately it too gave way when she worked to remove it from her path, though it scalded her fingertips before it vanished.
A moment later Nona entered the dorm. Almost half the top floor was given over to individual study rooms. The Holy Class novices slept in a long hall not much bigger than the one given over to the novices in Red Class. The girls were not yet trusted with the privacy of a nun’s cell, but the class code was to overlook each other’s indiscretions, and Wheel would undoubtedly have apoplexy were she to watch a typical evening unfold.
Nona moved silently down the row of beds, her eyes returning several times to the long curves beneath Joeli’s blankets. The abbess had been forced to accept the girl’s return a year earlier as part of the emperor’s efforts at reconciliation and unity after the events at Sherzal’s palace. Lord Namsis had secured his daughter’s re-entry by having her submit to the Inquisition. The interrogator had been armed with one of Sister Apple’s bitter little truth pills. To the astonishment of everyone who knew her Joeli had affirmed her innocence with a black tongue. She had used her thread-work against Darla and Regol only with the intention of scaring them into retreat, hoping to end the bloodshed that way.
Nona slipped into her bed, still watching Joeli in the dim glow of the night-lantern. Her own thought was that Lord Namsis had paid an Academy man, a quantal thread-worker, to undertake the delicate task of altering Joeli’s memories. The girl now believed her own story and hadn’t lied, even though what she said was not true.
In the warmth of her blankets Nona released the breath she had been holding and surrendered to exhaustion. The next day would be a long one. Not only would she undergo her final Blade-test, she needed to steal the convent’s seal of office from the abbess. Neither task would be easy.
4 (#ulink_f3100078-d815-5396-8f6f-721998911935)
Three Years Earlier (#ulink_f3100078-d815-5396-8f6f-721998911935)
The Escape (#ulink_f3100078-d815-5396-8f6f-721998911935)
‘Nona’s not going alone!’
‘Correct, she is not going alone. She’s going with Zole.’ The abbess turned from dispensing brief advice to Nona and set a hand to Ara’s shoulder. ‘We have a long road ahead of us, novice, charged with the protection of the emperor’s subjects, including many of his most powerful supporters, your own uncle among them. Would you leave us with a lone Grey Sister and a single Inquisition guard for protection? We will likely need someone among our number who can call on the power of the Path …’
Nona saw the anguish in Ara’s expression and tried to ease her mind. ‘We have to bring two things back to Sweet Mercy to make it right again. Zole and I will bring the shipheart. You’ll bring the abbess.’
‘But …’ Ara glanced up the curve of the road towards Zole, painted in violet light amid the darkness. ‘Sherzal will send an army after you!’
‘When we make it to the ice armies won’t matter,’ Nona said.
‘Because the ice will kill you!’ Ara shook the abbess’s hand from her shoulder, anguish on her face.
‘Zole was raised on the ice.’ Nona smiled. ‘You’ll be in more danger down on the plains than we will up there.’
‘Also,’ Abbess Glass interjected. ‘Consider that if Sherzal doesn’t get the shipheart back she will very definitely find her alliance with the Scithrowl in tatters. And likely the Noi-Guin turned against her. As soon as the odds shift against recovering the heart Sherzal would be sensible to recall her forces to defend the Grand Pass against the Battle-Queen’s hordes. It’s certainly what any sane person would do. My guess is that if you reach the ice she won’t dare risk mounting further pursuit in any significant numbers.’
There were no preparations to be made, no rations to be apportioned, no equipment save clothing to be dispersed. Nona stood ready, wrapped in Kettle’s coat. She was armed with a Noi-Guin sword, a knife, and eighteen throwing stars.
Kettle embraced her next. ‘It’s a hug, Nona, not spiders running down your back. Relax.’
Nona tried to unstiffen, and smiled. ‘Get the abbess home.’
Ara hugged Nona next, her hunska quickness allowing her friend no escape. ‘Come back to us,’ she breathed into Nona’s ear. ‘To me.’ She pressed some coins into her hand. ‘This may help.’
Kettle and Ara retreated, leaving Regol standing before her, looking almost nervous.
‘Careful on the ice.’ His old smile covered up any uncertainty.
‘I should watch for hoolas and ice-bears?’
‘If you like. I just meant that it’s slippery.’ He turned to go. ‘You should visit us at the Caltess when you get back.’ And walked off to rejoin the group. ‘I know Denam misses you.’
Nona watched as Abbess Glass, flanked on the drop-side by the Inquisition guard, Melkir, led the way down towards the main road and the long descent from the mountains. Ara brought up the rear, Regol by her side. Nona knew a moment’s jealousy. A day earlier she would have blamed it on Keot. She turned back towards Zole further up the track. In the distance the flames from Sherzal’s palace lit the slopes but seemed less vigorous than they had been.
‘Time to go,’ she said to nobody in particular: now that she had lost her devil, she lacked both an audience for her passing thoughts and a scapegoat for unworthy emotions. The peaks loomed somewhere above her in the darkness and an arduous journey lay ahead with only Zole for company.
‘Do not fall behind.’ Zole led the way, her gaze fixed upon the fractured rock before her.
‘I’ll try to avoid falling in any direction.’ Nona snatched a cold breath and hauled herself up.
Kettle’s coat blunted the wind’s teeth. Other items of warm clothing had been recovered from two guests who made it into the carriage but thanks to arrows from Sherzal’s soldiers did not make it out again. She wore a dead man’s shoes, a poor fit but better than bare feet on icy rock. Back on the road Nona had considered herself well wrapped. On the slopes, despite the strenuous climb, she found herself shivering each time they rested.
Nona kept a distance of no less than two to three yards while following Zole. If she came closer the beat of the shipheart started to vibrate through her bones and each thought threatened to coalesce into its own creature that would then run roughshod through her mind. Any further away and she lost the light.
The shipheart’s glow served both to draw any pursuit and to illuminate the girls’ progress across the mountains’ slant. Nona quickly began to learn how to interpret the confusion of night-black shadows and dull violet surfaces revealed by Zole’s strange lantern. Gravity and rocks provide a harsh but swift education.
Navigating the raw flanks of the Grampains proved a worryingly slow affair. Nona had no experience of mountains and Zole had little more. The ice was, as she said, mostly flat. The first shock had been in discovering how quickly a sharp incline could sap your strength. Nona knew herself to be fit, but within half an hour her breath came in ragged gasps and her newly healed leg ached almost as badly as it had when the wound lay open. The strength and coldness of the wind was an unwelcome revelation too. The Grampains forced the gale to climb just as the novices must, and the wind seemed displeased by the task, dumping any warmth it might have held back on the plains as if to lighten the load. Above them the rocks glistened with frost, and ice collected in every crevice.
‘They’re catching up.’ Nona’s glance back showed a serpent of fireflies weaving its way along the ridge she’d toiled up not long before. Distance reduced each lantern in the pursuit to a glowing point. Slowly but surely Nona and Zole were losing ground. The soldiers giving chase knew these slopes and patrolled across them regularly. The advantage was theirs. ‘Close now.’
Zole grunted.
‘We’re not going to be able to outrun them.’ Nona felt as if she were whining but the truth was that she was frozen and exhausted. Also terrified of the invisible drops beyond those jagged edges picked out in violet light on either side. The unseen falls held more fear than the empty yards below the blade-path ever had. ‘Zole!’
Zole paused, not looking back. ‘We are not trying to outrun them.’
‘What then?’ Nona furrowed her brow.
‘I am looking for the best place to kill them.’
‘Kill …’ Nona turned to face the pursuit. ‘But there are hundreds …’
‘Hundreds foolish enough to follow into the heights someone who has already shown them a landslide.’
Nona watched the points of light twinkle, their advance almost imperceptible. A warm hand held each of those lanterns, other soldiers clambered up between them.
‘Can’t we hide instead?’ Killing came easy when an enemy raised their weapon against her, but to end so many lives, soldiers of the empire following the orders of their commander … it felt wrong. She pictured Zole’s face when she had first hauled herself up onto the road, lit from beneath by the heart-light, something demonic in the play of shadows. Did devils own her now? Their claws around her heart?
Zole turned and the light flooded across Nona’s shoulders, the pressure building, an almost physical push. ‘It is harder to hide ourselves in the rock than to bring it down upon them. And if we hid we would not be able to travel. They would surround us. There will be Noi-Guin among their number and some may be able to sense the proximity of the shipheart just as you and I can. We might not stay hidden long.’
Nona hugged herself and said nothing. There seemed to be nothing to say. For once Zole had said it all.
Dawn broke over the peaks, a grey wave spilling pale light across the slopes. The black serpent, its head now only a few hundred yards behind them, began to resolve into individual figures.
Zole set to scaling a rock-face so close to vertical that ‘cliff’ seemed a reasonable description. Nona, staring at the smooth stone, could see no way it could be climbed, and yet the Chosen One made relentless progress, the shipheart in her backpack now, its illumination no longer required.
‘How …?’ Nona shrugged, gathered her strength, and started to follow, stabbing her flaw-blades into the rock.
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.
5 (#ulink_aaa32811-169e-5100-9fd2-36d2e1769309)
Holy Class (#ulink_aaa32811-169e-5100-9fd2-36d2e1769309)
Present Day (#ulink_aaa32811-169e-5100-9fd2-36d2e1769309)
Nona rose with the bell, rolled from her bed, and hurried into her habit oblivious to the room around her. The rest of the novices were still dressing when she left, Ruli only just poking her head from beneath the blankets at Jula’s urging, hair in a tangle of amazing proportions.
‘Good luck today!’ Alata, flashing a grin as she plaited Leeni’s hair into a single red rope.
Nona paused only to check the doorway for malicious threads, then took the stairs four at a time. She was first into the refectory and was reaching for the bread as she slid her legs beneath Holy Class’s table. By the time Ketti joined her Nona had heaped her plate for the second time and was attacking a pile of bacon with purpose.
‘I wouldn’t be able to eat. Not with the Blade final in front of me.’ Ketti started to help herself to eggs.
Nona grunted around a mouthful. Meals at Sweet Mercy were not as large or varied as they had been when she had arrived as a starveling child. The Durns held much of the Marn coast and the Scithrowl had crossed the Grampains. With both advances slow but seemingly as inexorable as the ice, good and plentiful food wasn’t something that could be depended on, even within sight of the capital’s wall. ‘Eat while you can.’ Nona reached for her water. It was a point of regret to her that she’d proved unable to pack on any reserves. She would be the first to go in any famine, where someone like Sister Rose could lose half her body weight and still survive. Even so, she didn’t plan to give up on trying.
‘Good luck today!’ Jula sat herself opposite, eyes tracking across the various steaming bowls lined along the centre of the table. She always spent five minutes in careful consideration of her options. Then chose porridge.
‘Here.’ Ketti leaned forward and pushed the porridge bowl towards Jula.
‘I thought I might try something different today.’ Jula frowned at the mushrooms.
Ketti and Nona exchanged a quick ‘no, you won’t’ glance.
Joeli seated herself at the far end of the table, hair gleaming as if the sun had found a way through the clouds just for her. Somehow her habit looked as if it had been tailored to her personal requirements, as flattering as any ballgown. ‘Blade final! Why, Nona, you’re quite pink with excitement.’ She smiled brightly. ‘Pray Ancestor it will be a good one.’
They all ignored her. Joeli had been relentlessly nice since her return, as if they were all best of friends. Nona could almost imagine that Lord Namsis’s Academy man had rearranged Joeli’s opinions where she was concerned in addition to her memories regarding the events at Sherzal’s palace. The thread-traps scattered around the convent gave the lie to all those pretty smiles though.
Ghena came to the table, raindrops beading the tight frizz of her hair. ‘Good lu—’
‘It’s not about luck!’ Nona bit back a snarl and forced herself to lower her voice. ‘My thanks. I will try to acquit myself well.’ She regretted ever telling anyone that the test date had been set. She manufactured a smile, pushed her chair back from the table and stood to go, aware now of the tension in her limbs. Today she would face Mistress Blade, without armour, sword in hand, and her performance would decide whether she could take the Red.
A downpour greeted her exit from the refectory. She ran to Blade Hall, head bowed, crashing through the main entrance to stand dripping in the foyer. Ara waited in the shadows by the doors, a practice blade in each hand.
‘Thought you might want some help warming up.’ She offered one sword, hilt first.
‘Thanks.’ Nona slipped off her shoes and moved across the sand towards the changing room, skirting the area marked off for the test to come.
She emerged a short while later, wearing a white exercise habit to match Ara’s. The pair of them began the blade kata side by side, the slow version first, stringing together all the core movements of the form in a way that gradually warmed and stretched the muscles. Nona watched Ara move as she made her own forms. Although Nona knew her own kata met Sister Tallow’s exacting standards, somehow there was a beauty to Ara’s that made her heart ache.
‘You’ll be fine.’ Ara grinned, her breath now quickened following the double kata.
They crossed blades. Normally they would both be wearing the heavy blade-habit with a wire facemask. Today wasn’t going to be normal. Nona hadn’t any real concern that she would fail to meet the required performance. The question in significant doubt concerned her sword. She would receive her blade on taking orders, just like any other Red Sister. It should be an Ark-steel sword like Sister Tallow’s, a weapon that in the right hands could shatter a lesser blade and cleave a block from a castle wall in two. But Nona knew that none of the most recent novices to graduate to the Red had been given Ark-steel. Over the years swords had been lost and the Red Sisters’ ranks had grown. These days sisters new to their names were most often given a fresh blade. The steel for these came from the forges of the Barrons witches. As fine a steel as could be made within the Corridor, but nothing compared to that of the ancients.
‘Ready?’ Nona asked.
Ara attacked by way of answer and Nona barely turned the thrust from her face. She replied with an immediate counter-cut.
If Nona made a sufficiently good impression today she might have one of the few Ark-steel swords awarded to her on her first day in the Red rather than having to wait for an older sister to die or to set down her weapon and retire to prayer as a Holy Sister. New Reds without Ark-steel were known as ‘pinks’ in certain quarters.
Ara’s blade crashed against Nona’s, flickered away, sliced in, parried, cut. A stillness always settled on much of Nona’s mind when she sparred, and in that stillness a realization reached her.
‘Pink.’
‘What?’ Ara paused, and Nona attacked with renewed vigour.
No matter how tightly she held herself against threadwork Joeli could still pull her strings, in the way that required no magic. Just dropping the word ‘pink’ into the conversation around the breakfast table earlier had nearly made Nona bite Ghena’s head off for daring to wish her good luck …
Nona rocked back to avoid Ara’s slash and spun in behind the swing. She drew on her anger at the Namsis girl, feeding the fire that already burned there. Joeli thought to spoil her concentration, to put her out of the cold centre of her serenity where a Red Sister was supposed to dwell in the heat of battle. What Joeli failed to appreciate was that Nona had never followed that part of Mistress Blade’s instructions. When she fought in earnest she fought angry, and her rage seldom wanted for fuel.
Nona kicked out at Ara’s knee and leapt in as the girl jumped back. At the very limit of her speed Nona got her offhand to block Ara’s wrist, deflecting the downward blow that should have felled her, and brought her own blade up, into Ara’s side, managing to turn the iron flat just before it hammered into her ribs.
‘Good … one.’ Ara stumbled back, clutching her side, sword dropped to indicate surrender. ‘Ah.’ She hugged her ribs. A black line would show there tomorrow. ‘Did anyone ever tell you you look scary as hell when you fight for real?’
‘Never.’ Nona stuck her tongue out. ‘Are you all right?’ She moved forward to check Ara’s side, suddenly concerned. She set a gentle hand to Ara’s ribs.
‘Fine.’ Ara pushed her off. ‘I hope you don’t make faces that scary in other kinds of … battles.’
‘What do you—’
‘The late-night sort you might get into with Regol …’ Their eyes met, and for a moment Nona wondered if she saw something hidden there … something hurt? The look vanished as quickly as it had appeared, replaced with Ara’s impression of Nona’s worried expression.
Nona shoved Ara who fell, laughing, until she hit the sand and jolted her injured ribs. Nona was helping her up, still apologizing, when Sister Tallow entered the hall.
The abbess and sister superiors followed Sister Tallow out into the hall, turning to take their seats in the stands. Tallow approached Nona and Ara, her weathered face inscrutable. A nun Nona had never seen before dogged Mistress Blade’s heels. She looked a good twenty years younger than Tallow, tall, slim, skin the colour of old leather though smooth save for the scars on both her cheeks. The twin wounds might be ritual markings or perhaps their curious symmetry had arisen by chance. The newcomer fixed Nona with a piercing gaze. She had a beauty to her, but there was nothing soft about it, her cheekbones almost sharp enough to cut you if you slapped her.
‘Novice Arabella, you may leave.’ Sister Tallow nodded to the doors. The final blade-test never had any audience but the abbess and her sister superiors. Novices who attempted to watch through the windows had been whipped in the past, even expelled from the convent. Ara gave up her practice blade and ran off with a last encouraging glance.
Tallow waited between Nona and the unknown nun until the doors closed. Nona stood a hand taller than both women and was of heavier build. Some said she had gerant in her but if so it wasn’t more than a touch. There had been no blood-war as there had been when her marjal traits started to show.
Tallow lifted a hand to indicate the other nun. ‘This is Sister Iron, Nona. She is to be the new Mistress Blade. She takes over today.’
‘No—’
‘I am getting old, child. We hunska do that fast too. I will join the Holy Sisters and give the Ancestor my full attention as the abbess instructs.’
Nona shot a glance towards the stands. The sister superiors flanked the abbess. Sister Rose sat to Wheel’s left. Wheel, the older-looking of the two, though they were of an age, glared at Nona with those pale, watery eyes just as always.
‘You will fight Sister Iron for the Red, novice.’ Tallow drew a sword from a second scabbard at her left hip. A Red Sister’s blade, Barrons-forged. She handed it to Nona. ‘Control. Restraint. Respect.’ Tallow folded Nona’s fingers around the hilt. ‘You’ll be judged on these. But in the Corridor … winning is also quite important.’
‘I’ll win then.’ Nona stepped back, circling away from Sister Iron. She didn’t want a new Mistress Blade, though she couldn’t quite suppress the relief that she wouldn’t have to face Sister Tallow with sharp iron in hand in an earnest fight.
Sister Iron drew her blade, a sword identical to Nona’s since pitting Ark-steel against Barrons-steel would damage the latter and likely ruin it. The nun made no move, only cocked her head to the side and watched how Nona positioned her feet. Her gaze slid up the length of Nona’s body, coming to rest on her wrist and the fingers around the sword hilt. Nona felt as if she were being judged and found wanting.
‘You’re ready?’ Nona asked, unsettled by the woman’s stillness.
Back against the wall Sister Tallow rolled her eyes.
Nona came forward, sword extended before her. She didn’t reach for her speed but instead waited to react, a lesson she had learned from Zole. Sister Iron did nothing, only watched her move, her own blade loose in her hand, the point in the sand.
Nona came closer. Closer still. The point of her sword just two feet from the nun’s chest. She could lunge and run the woman through. She glanced towards Sister Tallow, uncertain.
The moment Nona’s eyes moved from her Sister Iron pushed Nona’s sword away, the back of her hand flat against the side of the blade. The nun released her own sword and slapped Nona across the face, hard enough to rattle her teeth. Nona leapt away and by the time she was clear Sister Iron had kicked her falling sword back into the air and snatched hold of it once again.
‘You think this one is ready?’ Sister Iron asked Sister Tallow.
Nona spat blood into the sand. A dozen sentences wanted to escape her tongue, some bitter, some angry, but she swallowed them all. The fault was hers. There were no rules. ‘Try me again.’
Sister Iron came forward, blade extended as Nona’s had been. Nona let her get just as close. The nun’s gaze never faltered. She lunged, showing no reservation about skewering a novice. Nona sank into the moment and made to push the sword away as Iron had, only to find the cutting edge angled towards her hand. She pushed it anyway, sparks flying as Barrons steel scraped over flaw-blades. She made to slap the woman but Iron proved swift, Nona’s fingertips missing her cheek by a hair’s breadth.
Nona kicked her falling blade back into the air and caught it as Iron had but with far less grace. The pair of them finished two yards apart, gazes locked, one on the other.
‘No claws today, novice.’ The abbess’s voice from the stands. ‘Just the blade you hope to earn.’
Nona nodded her acknowledgement. She moved smoothly into attacking. No more playing, no more games. She told herself that Zole stood before her. With the exception of Yisht and Sister Tallow, Zole had been her most lethal opponent, faster than thinking, merciless, efficient.
Sister Iron replied with a storm of blows, feints, and counterattacks every bit as swift and ruthless as Zole’s had ever been. She had more than that, though. Something in her touch, a kind of mastery that let her tame a blow on her blade, guide it, twist it. At every exchange Nona felt on the edge of having her sword torn from her grasp. Sister Iron used combinations that Nona hadn’t seen before, series of moves that drove Nona step by inexorable step into the wrong place, her balance lost, her momentum stolen, sword unready.
Sister Iron ended a lengthy combination attack with a rising slice. An extravagance of speed saved Nona from being struck, though she would not have been surprised to find a thin line of blood across her front had she the time to look down. She spun away, sliding to a halt on one foot, spraying sand.
‘Ah!’ Nona staggered, her heel felt as if a hot wire had sliced partway through it.
Sister Iron came forward, pressing her attack. Nona defended with desperation, hobbling back before launching sideways on her good foot to win space. She rolled across the sand, biting down a scream as something cut into her just above the elbow. Coming to her feet she expected to find blood sheeting down her arm but the skin lay unmarked despite the agony.
Nona got to her feet, wincing, sword raised, injured arm held close to her body. As Iron came in Nona saw it. Where the sand had been scuffed away almost to the stone she glimpsed something, a nearly invisible distortion running over the slab beneath. If she had time to defocus she knew her Path-sight would show a thread, lurid green no doubt, as so many of Joeli’s curse-threads were.
As Sister Iron drew close Nona swept away the sand in front of her with one foot. It proved a useless endeavour: pressed to defend, she had no time to clear more ground or study the area exposed. Their swords met and met again, beating out a high-tempo tattoo. Sweat flew from the ends of Nona’s hair, sparkling droplets mired in the moment, unable to fall in the space between half a dozen strikes.
Another pain-thread caught Nona’s foot and she fell backwards with a cry, turning a thrust and a swing as she dropped. Nona rolled through three more pain-threads evading Sister Iron stamping at her. Finally the nun backed off, perhaps remembering that the exercise was a test rather than murder.
Nona stood slowly, meeting Sister Tallow’s puzzled frown.
‘It’s only pain.’ She muttered the words, forcing her hunched body to straighten, relaxing the tight muscles of her arms and legs. She had suffered worse. Thuran Tacsis had pressed his sigil-marked toy called the Harm against her. It had hurt more than a thousand pain-threads. Later she had glued it to his flesh. He hadn’t been found for over a day. They said he sat drooling upon his lord’s chair now, ruler of the Tacsis in name only. Why his remaining son, Lano, didn’t have him quietly killed nobody could say.
‘Only pain.’ Spoken loud enough for Sister Iron to take note. Nona thought of Joeli creeping out in the dead of night to lay her threads in the Blade Hall sands, each full of malice and carefully attuned just to Nona. It was a work of art really. Nona doubted there were six thread-workers in all the empire who could match it. Maybe not so many. A red anger rose through her, its heat burning through the agony that lanced from her invisible wounds. Lips curled back from teeth, a savage grin.
Nona threw herself back across ground already trodden, the potency of the thread-traps there now spent. She attacked Sister Iron not with the calm efficiency Sister Tallow taught but with the honest and savage desire to do her opponent harm, acknowledging the beast that dwelt within her, the hot core of her that Tarkax Ice-Spear had seen. Passion lent her a strength that Sister Iron had to grit her own teeth to turn. Rage put an edge on a quickness that was already blinding, and Sister Iron was forced back for the first time, weaving her defence within the depth of her own serenity.
Perhaps no battle so ugly had ever played out across the Blade Hall sands before. But the simple fact was that Sister Iron, the presumptive Mistress Blade, retreated before the sword of Nona Grey, her own hair wet with sweat now. Sister Iron’s own swordwork was now stretched to extravagant lengths, all within a packed handful of seconds that few possessed the vision to follow.
Another thread snagged Nona’s foot. She hardly winced but in the missed quarter-beat Sister Iron parried her wide, kicked the inside of her left knee, and punched her square in the face before following up with the hilt of her sword to the side of her neck. Nona fell hard, and trying to rise found the point of Sister Iron’s sword inches from her face.
‘Enough, novice.’ The woman stood, apparently calm but with her chest heaving.
Nona repressed a snarl and let her head fall back against the sand.
‘Sister Tallow taught me to fight,’ Sister Iron said. ‘She did not teach me to fight like that.’ She stepped back, allowing Nona to sit.
Sister Tallow stepped forward, offering Nona her hand then pulling her to her feet. ‘You seemed to be in pain while fighting, novice. Did you sustain some injury sparring with Arabella?’
‘No, Mistress Blade. Just an old injury returned to haunt me.’ Nona sealed her lips. Joeli’s reinstatement was a matter of palace politics. Even if the abbess could be convinced of her guilt a Namsis would not be punished or sent from the convent. Not with the Scithrowl in the east advancing mile after mile and the Durns raiding from captured ports on the shores of the Marn.
Sister Iron studied Nona with evident displeasure. ‘The question is whether the Ancestor would be properly represented by such a warrior. Where was your serenity? You fight like a wild animal. I cannot recommend you be given an ancient blade. Would it even be proper for you to wear the Red?’
Nona ground her teeth. Revealing Joeli’s tricks might change the judgment but she wanted nothing of the Namsis girl in her trial. Others would say Joeli’s actions earned her the Red then stand between her and her revenge.
‘She is to be denied the Red then. Sister Iron has said so!’ Wheel called down from the stands, her cracked voice reverberating with long-sought triumph.
‘When we leave this hall Sister Iron will be Mistress Blade.’ Sister Tallow raised her voice, a thing Nona had heard on maybe three occasions in the half of her life spent at Sweet Mercy. ‘But she is not yet.’ Tallow set her hand on Nona’s shoulder. She had to reach upwards. Once she had seemed so tall. She had no recollection of the woman touching anyone except to adjust a fighting stance or deliver a stinging reprimand. The hand remained on her shoulder. ‘Nona has passed the Blade-test. If she accepts ordination and takes on her new name then when I take up the devotions of a Holy Sister she shall have my sword.’ Tallow turned towards Iron, her voice low now, conciliatory. ‘Many of the lessons I tried to teach this girl have not stuck. But the important ones have. And when the ice presses we need sisters in the Red who can win, however ugly that victory may be.’
What followed passed in a blur. The bows given to, and reciprocated by, the sister superiors, the required formal embrace with the abbess, the long march from the hall. Before she knew it Nona found herself hurrying from the building, the Blade-test behind her. With her arms raised against the sharp burden of ice carried on the wind she set off to find her friends.
Nona came dripping and shivering to the well-head. It lay in a seldom-used back chamber to the rear of the laundry wing, a structure that formed one arm of the novice cloister. She defocused her sight to check for any traps Joeli might have placed. She didn’t think the girl knew of the oubliette beneath the centre oak, but then again there were clues if one paid attention, and in past weeks she had seen Joeli gazing at the laundry wing, her brow furrowed.
Nona went down the rope hand over hand, not using her legs. The Blade-test had left her muscles tired and aching but not so weak she couldn’t climb a rope. At the bottom she swung, released her hold, and landed on the rocky edge of the subterranean pool. Jula, Ruli, Ara, and Ketti waited to one side of the chamber, hunched around a single candle. Glimmers of their light picked out the descending, stone-clad forest of the centre oak’s roots.
‘Nona! Sister Tallow didn’t cut your head off!’ Ruli jumped to her feet as Nona approached.
‘It was Sister Iron, our new Mistress Blade.’ Nona wasn’t supposed to speak about the test but she felt she could share this much.
‘New what?’
‘But Sister Tallow—’
‘Did you pass?’ Ara cut across the others.
‘Yes, I passed.’ Nona raised a hand to forestall Ara’s next question. ‘And I got a sword.’
‘We’re not to call you Nona Pink then?’ Jula grinned.
‘No.’ Nona sat down with Ruli. ‘If they let me take my orders I’ll be a proper Red.’
‘So how did—’
‘We’re not here to talk about my blade-test,’ Nona said. ‘We’re here to talk about Jula’s book.’
‘Hey, it’s not my book,’ Jula protested.
‘A pity. If it was your book we wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble to steal it.’ Ketti frowned, then brightened as if finding new resolve.
‘We’ve been talking through it again, Nona. We’re agreed. We need two things to pull this off, and we’re going to have to steal both of them, and I’ve no idea how.’ Ara held up two fingers to count them off.
‘We have to steal before we can steal,’ Ruli interrupted, showing no sign of remorse at the proposed criminality. ‘And we’re meeting underground with one candle. It’s like we’re Noi-Guin!’
Ara scowled at Ruli’s enthusiasm. ‘One, we need The Book of Lost Cities from Sister Pan’s secret stash. That’s got to be in the Third Room. Unless we have a forbidden book to take back we’re not going to have a reason to be anywhere near the high priest’s vault.’ She pulled her second finger back. ‘Two, we need the abbess’s seal of office. Without her seal on our message they’ll never let us in.’
Nona raised one of her fingers. ‘We also need the eye drops the Poisoner was working on.’
Jula looked shocked. ‘She stashed those away for good reason, Nona. They’re dangerous. She said you could go blind using them.’
‘They’re the only way I’ll get in there unrecognized,’ Nona said.
‘Plus they make you look good,’ Ketti added.
‘It doesn’t have to be you, Nona,’ Ara said. ‘Any of us could do it.’
‘It has to be me. And it doesn’t matter about looking good, Ketti.’ Nona shot her a narrow glance. Though it was true that she had loved those few days when her eyes had looked like any other person’s. Regol had said he liked her the way she was normally. Unique. But whatever he said he had spent a long time looking into her newly cleared eyes and part of her wanted that again. ‘Four!’ Nona said before Ara and Jula could object. ‘We need a brilliant marjal empath or this just won’t work.’
‘So, four impossible things then.’ Ara swirled darkness around the candle flame, making shadow birds take flight.
‘No.’ Nona shook her head. ‘Just two. Like you said.’
‘But—’
‘I found us an empath at the fight rings last night. The strongest I’ve ever met.’ Four mouths opened. Nona spoke first. ‘And I have this.’ She drew from her habit a disc of amber, carved in deep relief on one side, its edge guarded by a hoop of gold, the whole thing making slow revolutions on its golden chain.
‘The abbess’s seal …’ Jula stared at it, wide-eyed. ‘How …?’
‘I stole it from her when she embraced me after the blade-test.’
6 (#ulink_71eafe8c-1dbe-5d96-9885-11d8e2dbd456)
Holy Class (#ulink_71eafe8c-1dbe-5d96-9885-11d8e2dbd456)
Present Day (#ulink_71eafe8c-1dbe-5d96-9885-11d8e2dbd456)
Kettle moved through the town wrapped in a cocoon of shadow. In an hour the great red eye of the sun would see the carnage for itself but no other witness remained to watch it roll back the night. The fires had burned out, the smoke stripped away by the wind, but the stink of burning remained. The stink and the dead and the ruins of their homes.
The Scithrowl had spared none. They left the corpses of their own scattered infrequently here and there among the bodies of farmers, weavers, shepherds, and of children who might one day have taken up those trades. A small blonde girl lay broken in the doorway to an unburned hut, her hair straw and mud. A woman nearby curled around the wound that had killed her. The mud showed how far she had dragged herself to reach her daughter but she had died three yards short of touching her child that last time.
In the harbour a single boat still burned amid the blackened and half-sunken wrecks. From behind Kettle’s eyes Nona wondered what its cargo was that it should sustain a flame when all else had long since guttered into darkness. She knew that Kettle had drawn her sleeping mind along their thread-bond to show her something. Too often lately Nona had rolled yawning from her bed after first waking in the small hours to find herself inhabiting Kettle as the Grey Sister stalked her prey. Last time it had been a Scithrowl commander amid his army of five hundred soldiers. Kettle had ghosted among the lesser tents and cut her way into the grand pavilion in which the officer slept beneath hoola furs. Nona could make no sense of it: signposting their leaders with such luxury. The empire generals slept in tents identical to the common soldiers to foil just such assassination attempts.
Kettle turned from the dark lake and moved on through the town towards its margins. She had something to show Nona. She rarely spoke on these tutorials, needing all her focus to keep her alive. Even here Scithrowl softmen might be lurking, ready to kill or capture scouts, or Noi-Guin assassins, loyal to neither side, only to the coin that paid their fee.
Ahead of them loomed a larger building, no detail hidden from Kettle’s dark-sight. A stone construction, the roof gone, presumably taken by flames, though the stink of burning hung less heavily here. Kettle closed the distance. Gravemarkers stood behind the building. Dozens of them. A church then. Kettle glanced skywards to where the Hope burned white amid the crimson scattered heavens. A Hope church then, roofless by design so that the white light could reach in and wash away all sin.
And suddenly, as Kettle approached the shattered doors, Nona knew where she was. White Lake, not eighty miles from the walls of Verity. White Lake, where her mother lay beneath the ground and doubtless now Preacher Mickel lay sprawled upon it. Adoma had splinter armies pillaging just five days’ march from the capital. Swift horses could bring them to the foot of the Rock of Faith in less than half that time.
Something caught Kettle’s eye. Something Nona had missed. Kettle pressed herself to the church wall, pulling darkness to herself as if drawing a breath. The night entered her as ink soaks into blotting paper. There, out across the graveyard, a pale, questing tentacle, almost flat to the ground, insubstantial as mist. Another, yards long, snaking out between the graves. A pain spider, some creature of the softmen in service to the Scithrowl Battle-Queen Adoma. Rumour had it that they bred such monstrosities, releasing demons from the black ice into unholy alliance with flesh.
More tentacles insinuated themselves across the barren ground, one thin as leather and broad as a hand sliding noiselessly over the top of the church wall just yards from Kettle’s head. Even at that distance her skin sang with echoes of the agony its touch would bring.
Nona woke sweat-soaked and alone, her body hunched, arms tight around her. She lay in the darkness of the Holy Class dormitory trying to still a racing heart. Kettle had kicked her out, requiring her whole concentration.
Sleep did not return that night. They were coming to the sharp end of things. The peace of the convent, seemingly eternal, would not last. Idle days, bickering among friends, the rivalries of children, all of it was passing into memory. A black tide was coming from the east and all the empire hadn’t the strength to stand before it.
‘We don’t even know the book exists. It’s not as if the high priest posts a list of forbidden books on his door.’ Ara stood with Jula and Nona in the lee of the Dome of the Ancestor, watching Path Tower, a dark finger of stone.
‘The Inquisition burned my History of Saint Devid,’ Nona said.
‘It wasn’t yours, and Kettle shouldn’t have allowed it in the scriptorium library,’ Jula said primly. ‘And that was a banned book, not a forbidden one. Banned books are burned, forbidden ones are just … forbidden.’
‘So how come Sister Pan has one, if it even exists?’ Ara asked.
‘We know it exists because there are references to it that they forgot to remove from other books by Aquinas. And we know that Sister Pan has a copy because she quotes from it when talking about the lost cities.’
‘You haven’t read it! How do you know she’s quoting from it?’ Ara rolled her eyes.
‘Aquinas has a very distinctive prose style.’ Jula folded her arms.
‘That’s it? We’re breaking into Sister Pan’s secret room based on distinctive prose style?’ Ara asked.
‘How do you know she hasn’t memorized the quotes?’ Nona demanded.
‘She still calls you Nina sometimes.’ Jula grinned.
‘Fair point.’ Nona nodded slowly. ‘So I just have to get into the Third Room …’
‘Or I do,’ Ara said.
‘Do you know how?’ Nona asked.
‘No, but you don’t either.’
Nona started towards the tower. ‘We’ll both try, then.’
Nona narrowed her eyes at Path Tower, black against the wash of the sky. Sister Rule taught that it was the oldest building on the Rock of Faith, predating the convent by centuries. Given that all save the top and bottommost rooms lacked doors or windows, Nona supposed it had been built for a powerful Path-mage though no records remained to name the first occupant. She approached the east entrance, apprehension rising. It wasn’t as if they were about to attempt the impossible. Every novice with ambitions to be a Mystic Sister had to enter the Third Room unaided. It was part of the Path-test. Maybe all of it. Nona would choose the red habit, not the sky colours of the Mystics, but she wanted to pass the Path-test even so.
Ruli followed Nona in through the east door, Ara entered by the north. They met at the bottom of the stairs in the room of portraits. Two dozen or more Mystic Sisters regarded them from wooden frames. Each woman was pictured amid abstract representations of their magic, the variety remarkable. Nona’s favourite was a young red-headed Holy Witch whose hair became flames. When you looked closer at her you could see that in the darkness of each pupil a tiny star burned crimson.
‘We know two things,’ Nona said as Ara joined them.
‘What?’
‘Firstly it’s all about Path. Otherwise Joeli would have cracked it months ago.’ Ara and Nona had been waiting an age for the individual training Sister Pan gave candidates for the Path-test. The old woman liked to instruct one novice at a time and whatever lessons she had been trying to teach hadn’t been getting through Joeli’s skull. ‘Joeli Namsis couldn’t take two steps on the Path if you threw her at it.’
‘True …’ Ara nodded.
‘And secondly we know that it must be different for each person, otherwise Pan would just have trained the three of us together.’
Ara began to climb the stairs, Jula and Nona on her heels. They went up in silence, stopping just below the classroom.
‘Should we really be doing this?’ Jula asked for the tenth time that morning.
‘No,’ said Ara.
‘We’re not doing this. At least you aren’t, Jula. And it was your idea! Forget whether we should be doing it. Will the book get us into the high priest’s library? Will the library have Aquinas’s Book of the Moon? And will the moon save the empire?’ Nona watched the girl’s face, pale in the daylight that filtered down from the trapdoor to the classroom.
‘The moon’s the only hope,’ Jula said, her voice small.
Nona nodded. Jula had real faith in Aquinas and his book. Kettle had shown Nona the conflict’s horrors through their thread-bond. The empire was losing on both fronts. It would not be long before those horrors arrived at Verity’s walls, and if the emperor fell then the empire was lost, the Ark taken. Kettle had said the end would come in months rather than years. The Grey Sister scouted for the emperor’s armies both east and west. Adoma’s hordes seemed to be endlessly replaced, ready to spend their lives for the Battle-Queen, and she ready to spend them. Sherzal had all but filled the Grand Pass with Scithrowl corpses and still they had flooded over the Grampains.
The ferocity of Sherzal’s defence and the cleverness of her stepped retreat had been what forced the emperor to overlook reports of her planned treason. Sherzal had organized and directed the ongoing attacks in the mountains to continually disrupt Adoma’s supply lines. That and a scorched earth withdrawal had slowed Adoma’s advance from a charge that would have reached Verity in weeks to a crawl that had taken almost two years to get just over half way, but like with thin ice, a slow creaking could become a sudden plunge into freezing death, and the empire’s defence had started to fracture weeks ago. Emperor Crucical needed his sister.
The Durns to the west were a different breed, not fanatics these, and given to quarrelling among themselves, but blood-hungry and backed by the magics of their priests. They had crossed the Marn Sea in their barges, coming in force once news of the Scithrowl victories reached them. Their holy men came to war wielding sick-wood staves and wreaking havoc with both marjal fire-work and water-work. Nona had seen too many towns aflame, too many families strewn across the fields from which they tried to feed themselves.
The emperor kept the Red and the Grey close, and the Mystics as a last reserve, but soon he would unleash them all. Whether that would turn the tide of war, push the Scithrowl back beyond the mountains, drown the Durns in a red sea, Nona didn’t know. She only knew that in the land left behind such a conflict the dead would outnumber the living.
Sister Pan always led the way when she took novices to the sealed rooms. She had taken Nona and Ara to the first two rooms. The third they knew to exist only because the tower held space for it and because every novice knew that the Path-test required you to reach the Third Room unaided. Nona turned and walked down the spiral stair, squeezing past Ara and Jula. She defocused her vision as she always did when she followed Sister Pan to the sealed rooms. Normally that gaze would be fixed between the ancient’s shoulder blades. She focused her thoughts on the Third Room, the place where it should lie, the shape of it, the wall where a door would likely be set.
Nona was so deep in her search it was a shock to find someone on the stairs blocking her way as she followed the spiral down. ‘Abbess …’ The abbess rarely came to Path Tower.
‘Where’s Pan?’ the abbess snapped, eyeing the girl before her with evident distaste.
‘Mistress Path is in the scriptorium, Abbess.’ Nona met the hostility of the old woman’s stare.
‘Hmmph.’ The abbess turned away, evidently unable to find fault with Nona’s reply, her bad temper further inflamed by this failure. She glanced over her shoulder, new suspicion in her pale eyes. ‘What are you doing here, girl? Stealing?’
‘No, abbess.’ Nona had stolen from the abbess that morning, and she would be stealing from Path Tower this afternoon with any luck. But right now she wasn’t stealing.
‘Praying, in the dome, that’s where you should be.’ Shaking her head, the abbess stamped off back down the stairs, thumping her crozier on every step.
Ara came into view behind Nona, smoothing her palms over the stonework. ‘Was that Abbess Wheel?’
‘Yes.’ Nona returned to her own search.
‘Ancestor’s blood!’ From behind Ara. As close as Jula got to an oath. ‘We really shouldn’t be doing this.’
Nona searched more quickly than her friends, leaving them behind her. About halfway down her vision shook for a moment. After that, nothing. Not even a tingle. She returned to the spot and studied it with thread-sight. Nothing. She visualized the Path and tried to see past it into the wall. Nothing. She placed both hands upon the stone and exerted her will, pressing as hard as she could. ‘Open, damn you!’ At the same time she set one foot upon the glowing glory of Path, the river of power that joins and defines all things. Nona felt something give, a lurch within her as if she had fallen through thin ice. The cry of victory died on her lips though. She was still standing on the stairs, her hands against the cold stone. Feeling foolish, she reached for her serenity and tried again. Nothing, not even a twinge. She wiped her palms on her habit and continued down the stairs, calling on her clarity trance to reveal any faint trace that might indicate a place to exert her magics.
One of the others stumbled behind her. ‘Keep it quiet,’ Nona hissed without looking back. ‘Abbess Wheel might still be lurking downstairs.’
Nona reached the bottom step without finding any further hint of an entrance. The abbess seemed to have decided against waiting for Pan and to have taken her leave of the tower. Nona sighed and turned to climb the steps again. Something caught her eye. A new portrait hanging amid the others. Just to the right of the door that the abbess must have left by. She walked across to the painting, marvelling that she had never seen it before. It seemed impossible that she had simply missed it in the past given that she had visited the tower almost every day for the best part of a decade. Perhaps Sister Pan had hung it recently. There was something familiar about the woman, her face pinched but friendly, high cheekbones, blue eyes. She had pale hair, curling close to her skull but with wisp after wisp trailing off into the air to create a faint haze of threads that filled the space all around her.
Nona cocked her head. The nun looked thirty at least. And yet …
‘Hessa?’ Nona’s eyes blurred with tears. ‘How—’ She bowed her head, wiping at her face. Hessa had died as a child and Nona had missed her friend every day since. Her death at Yisht’s hands had taught Nona many of the bitter lessons that stand as milestones along the road between girl and woman. Her own fallibility wasn’t the least of those lessons. How many times had a friend died because she lacked what had been necessary to save them? How often had her own faults tripped her up? Her pride, her anger … Losing Hessa taught her the hollow lie of vengeance, a conceit to distract oneself with, an addiction that offered no cure.
‘I miss you.’ But as she looked up again the world lurched, a new layer of ice breaking, and somehow the room was a different room and she was on her knees beside a bed.
‘Nona?’ Abbess Glass lay in the bed, grey-faced, the comfortable weight wasted from her, leaving skin on bones. ‘Don’t cry, child.’
Nona snapped her head up, looking wildly around. The abbess’s bedroom in the big house. This was where she had died. This was how she died. Taken by disease, something that ate her from within and that neither Sister Rose nor Sister Apple could touch with all their pills and potions.
‘I don’t understand …’
‘Meaning is overrated, Nona.’ A cough convulsed the abbess for a moment, rattling in her chest. She had said exactly that, meaning is overrated, Nona remembered it, but not the question she had asked to prompt it. ‘There might not be a meaning to the world, or in it, but that does not mean that what we do has no meaning.’ Glass fell silent and for the longest minute Nona thought she would not speak again. When she did it was weak, faltering. ‘The Ancestor’s tree is something humanity planted and that we have watered with our deeds, our cares, with each act of love, even with our cruelty. Cling to it, Nona. Cling …’ And then she did stop, as Nona remembered, and the gleam had gone from her eyes.
Nona stood, an old sob shuddering through her. Sister Rose had been sleeping in the chair by the window when the abbess died, the sleep that crept in behind too many nights without rest. She had woken at Nona’s sob and sucked in a huge breath of her own. Now though, the chair lay empty and at the door it was Sister Pan who stood, her eyes bright and wet.
The old nun spoke, her voice strangely distant. ‘You’re getting further from the door, Nona.’
‘What?’
Sister Pan turned towards the window. Out beyond the rooftops of the refectory Path Tower rose like the line of darkness offered by a door beginning to open, or almost closed.
Nona frowned, torn between confusion and grief. She knew this for a memory of that awful day but it seemed more real than all those days that had queued between her and it. Glass had been taken by a foe Nona couldn’t stand against and the heart of Sweet Mercy had broken. She had thought when the shipheart was stolen and the convent left cold, its magic gone, that no greater blow could be struck against it. But the abbess had always been the true heart of Sweet Mercy and the emptiness she left behind was more profound than any Nona had known.
‘You’re getting further from the door.’ Sister Pan stood in the doorway but her single hand pointed at Path Tower. And in an instant the tower raced into the distance, becoming tiny, almost lost to sight. The room had gone, Abbess Glass and Sister Pan with it, and instead Nona stood in sunshine gazing out across a formal garden. She staggered, seized by vertigo, but prevented herself from falling.
She took a step forward, focused on a ficus tree in full bloom. The sound of a heavy blow hitting flesh arrested her. A second blow and an agonized cry turned her around.
Standing before the grand colonnade of his mansion High Priest Jacob swung his staff again. The wood thunked into Four-Foot’s side, a dull sound like a hammer hitting meat, and the mule grunted his pain.
‘No!’ The horror of the moment pinned Nona to the spot. Another blow descended and her flaw-blades shimmered into being around both hands. ‘No!’
Nona tensed as the high priest raised his staff, Four-Foot snorting bloody foam about his muzzle. She knew it was memory or dream but it seemed more real than her life, more solid, more important. Losses like Hessa and Abbess Glass, horrors like Four-Foot’s death, were nails struck into her life, pinning those moments to her forever, the punctuation of sorrow. She could no more tear herself from the scene before her than rip the skin from her body.
Markus, impossibly young, struggled at the limit of his strength to escape the grip of the high priest’s guard, wild in his passion. Giljohn stood at the cart, held by bonds of the sort that no child can see, the kind made of debt and of a bitter understanding of the world’s truths, the kind that tear at a life as you struggle against them and leave wounds that won’t heal.
Nona thanked the Ancestor that here in this strange dream the chains of duty and service had no purchase on her. Every muscle gathered itself as she prepared to leap at High Priest Jacob, ready to rend him into pieces.
It was raining that day. The heavens wept to see such cruelty.
At the back of Nona’s mind a small voice asked why it wasn’t raining.
Her leap never happened. Unbalanced, she fell to her knees, hands upon the dry stones of the path. It had been raining. It had. The water had run from Giljohn’s empty socket like the tears he should have shed. Nona looked up. She knew it to be memory. She knew there was nothing she could do for the mule straining against his rope, or Markus twisting in the grasp of Jacob’s guard. Even so, her mind clamoured for revenge, for the joy of bloody retribution. She stood, blades ready, intent on attack.
Some distant glint caught her eye. Over the wall of the garden. Over the roofs of nearby mansions, out across the five miles of farmland to the Rock of Faith. Her gaze drawn to the tiny bumps that at this distance were all the Convent of Sweet Mercy had to offer. Again the glint. The sun reflecting on a window, perhaps. A stained-glass window high in Path Tower? Something told her she needed to be there. A path seemed to stretch out before her in that direction.
You’re getting further from the door.
Gritting her jaw against the sound of blows raining down on Four-Foot, Nona ran. She refused to look away from the Rock and from the convent’s faint outline. She climbed the wall with a great leap and a lunge.
As Nona dropped into the next garden the convent vanished behind the chimneys of the neighbouring mansion. She made to rise but the wall’s shadow deepened into night, miring her like the thickest mud. ‘No!’ She struggled, desperate to return to the convent, but the darkness took her into some other place and a night filled with screaming and with fire.
Nona stood between two dark buildings. She looked slowly around, less worried by any danger than by what new tragedy might unfold, by what black milestone of her life this nightmare had brought her to.
Across an open space in front of her another building burned, the flames so bright that even the dying focus of the moon seemed pale. And although the night gave her nothing but angles and the ferocity of fire, Nona knew exactly where she stood. To her right, the home of James and Martha Baker. To her left, the stone walls of Grey Stephen’s house, he who had fought the Pelarthi in his youth. Rellam Village burned around her. The shapes moving across the background of blazing huts were those of children she had grown up with, of their parents, and of the soldiers the emperor’s sister had sent to cut them down.
Nona knew it for illusion or forgery or memory or all three woven together. Somehow she had fallen into a trap. Perhaps it had happened when she touched the Path. Sister Pan had endless stories of the dire ends to which it could lead the unwary, and used them regularly to scare any quantal novice in her care. Nona had to get back to Path Tower but the chance was gone and every shift of scene took her further from the convent, putting mile upon mile in her way and allowing no time to cross them. Whatever had gone wrong it must have happened when she had tried to walk through the wall to the Third Room. She had wandered into some realm of nightmare manufactured out of her past.
Nona ran through the darkness and smoke and confusion, ready to meet any challenge. Though she told herself that a lie surrounded her the truth of it seduced her senses. There was nothing counterfeit here. Beneath the stink of burning this place smelled of home, of a childhood now wrapped about her bones. This was hers, like it or not, her foundation though it stood in mud and ignorance.
Somehow no soldier came near her. Within moments she stood at the door to her mother’s cottage. The two rooms where she had spent so many years, growing from mewling infant to the girl who had taken half a dozen lives in the forest upon her doorstep. It was the price of one of those lives in particular that the whole village was now paying for her.
The thatch above had begun to smoulder, sparks from the Bluestones’ house starting to land among the straw. The interior lay dark. ‘It’s not real.’ Nona approached the entrance. Something would be different. Something would be wrong. Every scene so far had someone out of place, some detail changed. It was a clue, a riddle. Somehow. She stepped in, steeling herself, pulling her serenity around her like a shawl. ‘It’s not real.’
It took a moment for Nona’s eyes to adjust to the gloom. A single candle burned, spilling wax where it had fallen at the doorway to her mother’s workroom, the place where she wove the reeds. Nona’s mother lay sprawled, one arm reaching for the exit, her fingers nearly touching the toes of Nona’s shoes. A ruinous wound had opened her back, the blood pooling around her, the candle’s flame dancing across it in reflection. And despite all her protestations a hurt noise broke from Nona’s chest, a wet splutter, a numbness in her cheeks as she fell to her knees, hot tears jolted from her eyes by the impact with the hard-packed earth. Nona’s serenity shattered. She stayed on all fours, heaving in broken breaths. Her mother lay dead. Her mother. No matter what had passed between them there had always been a bond of love buried beneath the denials. Gentle times remembered, shared smiles, laughter, hugs. The bonds that formed a branch of the great tree of the Ancestor, a chain of humanity reaching back through aeons to the singular taproot of the arborat.
Nona panted away the hurt and rose to her knees. This was the test. This was the trap. She wiped her eyes, sought her centre.
‘Somewhere, it must be somewhere.’ She stood and cast around her. Something must be wrong. Something out of place? The serenity trance insulated her against grief but her eyes kept returning to her mother’s body, small and broken. ‘There’s nothing …’ Nona fell back to her knees, drawn down despite her trance by a weight she couldn’t understand. Tears returned to fill her eyes, blurring her vision as she gathered the woman who had been her everything into her lap.
‘… tired …’
‘Mother?’ Nona blinked away the tears. But the brown eyes she found herself looking down into were not her mother’s, the hand that enfolded hers was huge.
‘Darla?’ Nona choked out her friend’s name.
Darla’s brown eyes clouded with confusion, a kind of wonder, staring at some distant place above Nona’s head. The smoke and fire around them wasn’t that of Rellam Village. It was Sherzal’s stables starting to burn. The eighty miles to Path Tower had become hundreds.
‘She’s gone, Nona.’ Kettle put her hand on Nona’s shoulder.
‘Darla …’ Another raw wound. Nona ground her teeth. Darla’s hand still held hers, warm, solid, real. Maybe she could still be saved … Maybe this time it would be different.
To drag her eyes from Darla’s almost broke Nona. To turn her face from a friend who needed her, a dying friend. ‘It’s not real.’ Nona swung her head around, trying to call the clarity trance though her heart ached and pounded. ‘None of it’s real.’
‘Nona …’ Kettle shook her head slowly as if the sorrow had made it too heavy. ‘We have to go.’
‘There!’ Amid the swirls of smoke and the red tongues of fire a door that had not been present when all this happened, a door with no place in Sherzal’s stables and no place to lead.
‘Nona!’ Cries from the great carriage before the main exit. ‘We need you.’
Letting Darla’s head fall felt like the ultimate betrayal. Every part of her wanted to stay. Every part of her wanted to face the danger with her friends. To save them. To do it better this time.
But she sprang to her feet and threw herself across the burning hall even as the door upon which her eyes were fixed started to fade from view.
‘No!’ She reached it just as the last lines melted away. ‘No!’ Flaw-blades dug deep and in a frenzy of hacking and a storm of splinters … Nona staggered through.
Curved, sigil-crowded walls surrounded her, the inlaid silver gleaming in a light that seemed to be dying swiftly. Nona turned in time to see a doorway fading, and beyond it the spiral steps of Path Tower. A person’s shadow, Ruli’s or Ara’s, lay across stone steps lit by the coloured whispers of the day that shone in the classroom above, streaming in through stained-glass windows.
A moment later the doorway had gone and Nona stood blind and alone.
‘It wasn’t true. Any of it.’ Whispered to the darkness.
Some of it was true though. Abbess Glass had died and Sweet Mercy would never be the same again.
7 (#ulink_0abc6248-7e05-544e-8c3b-01b2fd9f0128)
Three Years Earlier (#ulink_0abc6248-7e05-544e-8c3b-01b2fd9f0128)
The Escape (#ulink_0abc6248-7e05-544e-8c3b-01b2fd9f0128)
‘They’re catching up again.’ Nona hunched against the hard-packed snow, too cold to shiver now. The wind stole her words and ran away with them, howling. Sherzal’s soldiers knew the mountains and had found better routes to gain the heights. Nona could see black figures to the south, little more than dots, almost at the shoulder between two peaks where she and Zole would have to cross if they were to make further progress towards the ice sheet.
‘We have to go down.’ Zole pointed to an icy defile where the east side of the ridge had fractured along some hidden fault line.
‘Down?’ Nona tried to imagine any way she could achieve that other than falling. ‘That’s Scithrowl.’ She stared at the foothills, hazy in the distance and partly obscured by wisps of cloud around the waist of the mountains.
‘They will be unlikely to follow us there.’ Zole shrugged and continued along the ridge. Their path proved to be a serrated blade of stone coated with two feet of icy snow on the southern face and with black ice on the northern side.
The descent proved as hard as the ascent, though in different ways. It found a whole new set of muscles to stress. Nona’s legs began to feel as if they belonged to someone else, paying scant regard to her instructions but letting her have full share of the hurting. Several times she started to fall and saved herself only by digging her flaw-blades through ice into rock. They climbed down for an hour and the world below seemed to grow no closer, though the expanse of black rock towering behind them assured her that they were making progress.
The wind blew less fiercely on the slopes that faced Queen Adoma’s lands but it was far from calm. The clouds surged below them, lapping the slopes like a grey sea. Nona heard shouts before they reached the swirling layer of mist, and looking back she saw that those leading the pursuit were less than a hundred yards away. A spear rattled past her.
‘We will lose them in the clouds,’ Zole said. She hopped down from rock to rock making it seem that her legs were as fresh as if she’d just got out of bed. Coming to the spear, jammed against an outcrop, she picked it up.
Nona followed, frowning at the clouds. ‘We’ll lose ourselves in there too.’ But she supposed ‘down’ to be an easy direction to follow whatever the visibility.
The mist rose to meet their descent, a cold white sea wrapping them, beading Zole’s hair with jewels of dew that froze into tiny pearls. Nona stumbled on in exhaustion, the shipheart’s fire filling her mind with unfocused energy but doing nothing for the muscles in her thighs.
‘Have you been into Scithrowl before?’ Nona asked, sliding down onto a ledge as Zole led off.
‘No.’
‘Their armies are at the border …’
‘If we need to kill soldiers to get to the ice, would it not be better that they were Scithrowl?’
‘I suppose so …’ Nona had a fear of the Scithrowl, a heritage of endless stories told across the Grey. She expected that every part of the empire had its tales of Scithrowl horrors. Told no doubt by old ladies like Nana Even who hadn’t ever been sufficiently far east to glimpse the Grampain peaks, let alone an actual heretic. Did they burn prisoners, eat babies, and practise peculiar tortures? Best not to get captured and find out.
The wind began to shred the cloud layer around them, tearing the whiteness across the flanks of the mountain and affording glimpses of Scithrowl stretching east. It looked remarkably like the empire had from the other side. In the north the ice was a glimmering white line, to the south it lay less than five miles away, a vaulting wall, all in shadow now.
‘The ice.’ Nona stopped. She had seen the Corridor’s great wall before, shorn off by the focus moon, but for the first time ever she had the elevation to look down upon what lay beyond. Zole stopped too. Even a life on the shelf itself didn’t offer an overview. Mile upon mile of merciless ice, bloody with the touch of the morning sun. Here and there internal pressures rucked the sheet up into ridges or split it with chasms that looked like wrinkles at this distance but must be large enough to swallow any tower built by man. The roots of the Grampains cut across the ice every few miles, grey ribs of stone stretching from the main ridge, becoming frost-wrapped and at last drowned beneath the glacial flow.
‘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.’
‘Perhaps the people will not be so different either, for all that Sister Wheel calls them eaters of children and deviants.’ Zole veered up towards the crest of the valley.
‘Maybe.’ Nona felt it hard to shake off the expectations built by a hundred fireside tales so easily. She fixed her eyes on Zole’s back and forced unwilling legs to match the girl’s pace down the slope. Sherzal’s soldiers appeared to have given up the chase, not prepared to venture onto Scithrowl territory. Of the Noi-Guin there was no sign, but Nona doubted that they would relent so easily. Even if their shipheart weren’t at stake.
‘This devil of yours …’ Nona returned to the conversation abandoned on the rock-faces far above them.
‘A raulathu.’
‘It’s some part of you that the shipheart has … broken off?’
‘An impurity of the spirit. In this state it can be purged, leaving a person closer to the divine.’
‘And.’ Nona paused to clamber over a shoulder of rock. ‘And you’ve touched a shipheart before? On the ice?’
‘My tribe calls them klauklar affac, “the footsteps of the Missing”. Most on the ice know them more simply as “Old Stones”. And yes, I have touched such a thing before. Two such things, in fact. When the ice-speakers find a child that can approach the Old Stones they test them. Each new raulathu takes longer to split from a person than the one before and is more difficult to purge. I gave twelve to the fire. It was hard to do. Neither of the tribe’s stones could find more.’
‘How old were you?’ Nona knew that when Zole described a thing as ‘hard’ it meant that anyone else would have been killed by it.
‘Nine. The ice-speaker banished me to the Corridor. He did not say why. My uncle took me to the empire margins. I was sold to Sherzal’s agent in a village called Shard.’
‘Do you … do you think that’s why you have no threads?
Zole made no answer. She had reached the ridge from where she could look down into the next valley and away towards the fortress to the north, the closest in the chain. ‘It seems that the Battle-Queen has ears in Sherzal’s palace, and swift access to them.’
Nona scrambled up to join Zole on the ridge. She straightened, wiping the grit from her palms. ‘Oh.’
A column of riders was spilling down the far side of the valley, a skirmish band on the shaggy ponies that dwelt wild in the region and could run all day over such terrain.
‘Sixty.’ Zole turned and dropped back below the ridge.
‘We can’t outrun them.’ Nona wasn’t sure she could outrun a three-legged mule right then.
Zole narrowed her eyes. A momentary frown and she was moving, back down into the valley again, angling towards their original path tracking the stream. On this side of the Grampains the rivers ran their course a while before vanishing beneath the ice sheets. On Sister Rule’s globe you could reverse the glaciers’ advance and set your fingers to ancient oceans picked out in blue enamel. Nona imagined they still lay there under miles of ice and that the sun-warmed waters of the Corridor must eventually reach those hidden seas.
‘If we’re going to fight we should do it here,’ Nona called after Zole.
‘Sixty is too many,’ Zole called back. ‘And more will come. I would rather rest.’
Nona shrugged and followed. Sixty was too many, and rest sounded good.
8 (#ulink_9833ed93-803b-5f12-bcf3-a0a325255963)
Holy Class (#ulink_9833ed93-803b-5f12-bcf3-a0a325255963)
Present Day (#ulink_9833ed93-803b-5f12-bcf3-a0a325255963)
Total darkness. An enduring silence wrapped Path Tower’s Third Room.
‘Dead dog’s bollocks!’ Nona broke the silence, banging her shin into something hard. The curse was one of Regol’s favourites, though he only used it when he thought she wasn’t there. One day Nona hoped to delight Clera with it.
She bent to rub her leg then reached out to examine the obstacle. A barrel-lidded casket. She wasn’t sure if she’d seen it in the moment before the light died or imagined it after. Her fingers explored the metal banding and found a heavy lock. Would there be more troublesome protections? Thread-traps? Sigil marks? Or did Sister Pan consider the fact that it rested in the third chamber of Path Tower sufficient defence?
Nona sat on the cold stone floor. She could put a foot to the Path and summon light but how that might end, so soon after the strange paths she had just pursued, Nona didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.
The lock was a big piece of cold iron. Nona defocused her sight to bring the thread-scape into view. The lock blazed with them. Threads for the metal itself, leading back through the journey from the locksmith’s, through the workshop, splitting through the smithies where various parts were beaten into shape, re-joining in the white heat of the forge, tracking back along rivers to the distant quarry that the ore had been dug from. All of them tangled with the lives of those who laboured to make the lock, and tangled with the old song of the earth where the iron’s constituents had lain for years uncounted.
A sudden light lanced through it all, washing out the detail and causing Nona to shield her eyes.
‘Thought you might appreciate a lantern,’ Ara said in a shaky voice. She held it up and glanced back at the wall she had come through. ‘Well, that was … unnerving.’ She drew a deep, centring breath and gazed around at the sigil-covered walls in appreciation. ‘These are more complex than in the other rooms. There are sentences written here …’
‘How did you get in?’ Nona demanded as she stood.
‘The same way you did, I expect.’ Ara blinked.
Nona doubted that very much. ‘Tell me, exactly.’
‘Well. I went up and down a few times, and I noticed you had vanished. I found a spot where I thought there might be a door and tried everything I knew to open it. It didn’t seem to work but when I got back down to the portrait room it was different … there was a new picture there that … Well, anyway, I didn’t stop to examine it. I just turned straight round and ran back up the stairs. And all along the stairwell were doorways into scenes from my life, as if I could just step back into them. Passing them by was hard. I mean really hard. And I think if I had hesitated they might have just sucked me through. But I didn’t stop. And halfway up was an archway showing you in front of that box. I stepped through and here I am.’ She smiled. ‘Same for you?’
‘My way was a bit more complicated.’ Nona shrugged. ‘The book’s in here if it’s anywhere.’ She nudged the casket with her foot.
‘And we really want to steal? From Sister Pan?’ Ara asked.
‘None of us wants to. I can’t see another way.’ Nona knelt before the casket again and checked it over. No sigil marks. She brought the lock’s threads back into view, hunting for traps or alarms.
‘Won’t she notice it’s gone?’ Ara asked.
‘What’s she going to say? “Which one of you took the forbidden book I wasn’t allowed to have on pain of banishment?”’ Nona identified the threads that would undo the mechanism’s riddle. Three of them. The key must be a complex piece of ironwork. ‘Besides, how often do you think she looks at it? It might be a year before she notices it’s gone. It might be ten years!’
‘So we steal a book to help us steal a different book, which also might not exist.’ Ara sat down, her eyes taking on that ‘witchy’ look as she joined the hunt for any protective thread-work on the casket.
‘It exists,’ Nona said. ‘Abbess Glass wouldn’t have lied to me.’
‘That woman lied whenever it suited her, Nona. There was nothing personal in it.’ Ara’s fingers twitched as she sorted threads, plucking one, examining it, setting it aside for the next. ‘Besides, she was very ill, she could have been confused. She kept calling me Darla the last time I was allowed to visit her.’
‘Jula knew about the book already. She tried to tell me about it years before,’ Nona said.
‘It still doesn’t make sense to me. Sherzal was going to take the Ark and use four shiphearts to control the moon. She didn’t need a book.’
‘The four ingredients of yellow cake are butter, flour, eggs, and sugar. If I gave you those four necessary things you still couldn’t make a cake that Sister Spoon wouldn’t laugh at.’
‘Neither could you.’ Ara took on the nasal tones of Sister Spoon. Ruli was the better mimic but Spoon was easy to do. ‘Novice Nona, that is an excellent cake, perhaps the best yellow cake I have ever seen …’
‘… if the goal in making such a cake were to produce something suitable for hand-to-hand combat,’ Nona continued, holding her nose. ‘However, if I were to wish to eat a cake rather than bludgeon someone to death with it—’
‘Then I would do better to scrape something together from the convent pigsties,’ Ara finished.
‘Not the point.’ Nona tried to look serious. ‘Sherzal wanted the Ark, the palace, the throne. The rest she was just hoping would sort itself out. The Ark was something she needed to get Adoma as an ally. The shiphearts are the necessary ingredients. What we’re after is the cookbook.’
‘It looks clean to me.’ Ara ran her hands over the casket. ‘Try the lock.’
Nona took hold of the three key threads. She didn’t need her hands but it helped her focus. Any lock is a riddle. The threads made that riddle simple, or at least less difficult, and allowed the answer to become clear through suitable manipulation. It took Nona seven tries. Ara had just opened her mouth, her lips shaping the ‘l’ of ‘let me try’ when the required click sounded.
It wasn’t until she opened the lid and gazed upon the contents that Nona first felt guilty. Seeing the bundled letters, a carefully folded scarf of Hrenamon silk covered with a child’s embroidery, the small figures of a horse and a baby carved from dark pearwood, a dozen other personal effects, Nona knew herself for an intruder of the worst kind, trampling a garden of memories.
‘It must be at the bottom …’ Nona could see no sign of a book.
‘We should go.’ Everything Nona had just felt resonated in Ara’s voice.
‘We have to do this.’
‘It’s nonsense anyway.’ Ara stood up to go. ‘If the moon’s secrets were written down in a book they would have been used at the time it was written. Or at least a hundred years later Emperor Charlc wouldn’t have been forbidding the subject and hiding all the books in a vault! He would have used the secret himself. He wouldn’t have left it to two novices in his grandson’s reign!’
Nona looked up at her friend. She wished they could go. She wished they could just shut the box and walk away. ‘If I swore to you that the Ancestor had told me the true alchemy was written in a book … that all we had to do was follow the recipe and base metals would transmute to gold before us … would we be rich?’
‘Well, yes. We’d take the book and—’
‘Which book?’
‘You just said the secret was written in a book. Wait, doesn’t the Ancestor tell you the title?’
‘Just that it’s in a book on alchemy.’
‘Well, no then, we’d be poor because there are a thousand books and scrolls promising the true alchemy.’
‘And there are a thousand books promising all the secrets of the moon. But Abbess Glass, who forgot more things than you or I will ever know, and Jula, who would rather read the dustiest book than eat, and who is sharper than any Mistress Academia I’ve met, both said that this book was different. Jula said it might have something real to say. Abbess Glass promised that it did.’ Nona reached in with infinite care and began to remove items from the casket, committing their positions to memory. ‘And if Abbess Glass said it, sick or not, that’s good enough for me.’
Ara frowned as she had frowned so often over these past weeks. ‘So, if the book in the forbidden library is really what the abbess said it was, how do we use it? How do we prove it? We don’t have four shiphearts. Nobody does! We don’t have access to the Ark. We don’t have anyone to tell who would believe us, Wheel least of all. It seemed like a bad plan when we were just talking about it. Now that we’re actually doing it …’
Nona reached for the bundled letters with a sigh. Abbess Glass had taught her many things. She had taught Nona that you can often find an angle where any right looks like a wrong, and any wrong a right. She taught her the song of the Ancestor, the power of the long game, and the need for determination. Above all Abbess Glass had taught Nona the value of lies. The one thing she had never managed to teach her was not to feel bad for telling them.
‘It’s the right thing to do. The key to everything. I need you to have faith in this, Ara. I need you make the others believe too. We’re going to be taking holy orders soon so we should be good at believing, no?’
‘In the Ancestor, surely, not in any old—’
‘This comes from the highest authority I know.’
Ara looked up suddenly, incredulous, eyes bright. ‘You’ve had a vision? From the Ancestor?’ Awe and need mingled in her voice.
Nona bowed her head. ‘I have.’
Nona found three books at the very bottom of the casket, wrapped together in a length of black velvet. Aquinas’s Book of Lost Cities was the smallest of the three, looking less old and less impressive than The Mystic’s Path or The Lives of Lestal Crow. It looked more like a travel journal than some weighty tome worthy of forbidding. Nona took the leather-bound volume and hid it in an inner pocket of her habit before returning the other two to their wrapping and starting to replace Sister Pan’s other treasures.
A moment of panic came as she reached for the figurine of the baby and discovered on the floor behind it an ancient daisy, dried and pressed, that must have fallen from between the pages of one of the books. She carefully extracted everything, unwrapped the books, and placed the flower behind the cover of The Lives of Lestal Crow, hoping she had guessed correctly.
At last, sweating lightly, Nona closed the lid. ‘Done.’
‘Lock it.’ Ara nodded towards the keyhole.
‘Right.’ Nona found and manipulated the necessary threads. An easier task this time.
Ara went to the wall and set her hands on it. ‘Now we find that getting in was the easy part.’ Her smile was a nervous one.
‘I’ll follow you,’ Nona said. ‘You’re better at it than me.’
‘But you got in first!’ Ara pushed her lips into a pout.
‘You wouldn’t want to go back my way. Trust me.’
Nona stumbled out onto the Path Tower stairway, catching hold of Ara’s shoulders to keep from falling.
‘At last!’ Jula hurried down towards them. ‘I thought you’d died in there! Got stuck in the wall or something!’
‘Relax.’ Ara smiled, holding up the lantern. ‘We got it.’
‘We have to go!’ Jula pushed past them. ‘Bray’s about to sound sixth bell. There’ll be little Red Classers lining up outside any minute.’
‘Sixth bell?’ Nona shook her head. ‘I didn’t think we were that long!’
‘Well, you were!’ Jula all but stamped her foot. ‘Come on.’ And she set off.
‘I’m surprised Pan’s not here already if it’s so close to fourth,’ Ara said, grinning her disbelief.
‘She is.’ Jula didn’t stop, just hissed back up at them around the stairs’ twist.
That got both novices moving. They caught Jula as she hurried out into the portrait chamber.
‘She’s here?’
‘I was on the stairs when she started up them! I had to go up into the classroom, hide behind the trapdoor lid, and slip out while she was arranging the chairs. It’s a miracle she didn’t see me!’ Jula looked pale.
Ara slapped her on the back. ‘The Poisoner will make a Grey Sister of you yet!’
‘Then I hung around on the stairs again, expecting her next class any minute and wondering how long to leave it before declaring you both lost and confessing everything.’ Jula led them to the north door, opened it with caution, then threw it wide. The three of them spilled out into the day.
After the unreality of the past hour, strange and emotional treks through memory, walking through walls, stealing from Sister Pan in a cause that was larger than any of them … it came as a surprise to find themselves in the cold light of the same day and subject to the same old timetable that had ruled their lives for so many years.
The friends stood a moment, shivering and blinking in the lee of the tower.
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Mark Lawrence
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Фэнтези про драконов
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: Nona Grey’s story reaches its shattering conclusion in the third instalment of Book of the Ancestor.THEY CAME AGAINST HER AS A CHILD. NOW THEY FACE THE WOMAN.The ice is advancing, the Corridor narrowing, and the empire is under siege from the Scithrowl in the east and the Durns in the west. Everywhere, the emperor’s armies are in retreat.Nona faces the final challenges that must be overcome if she is to become a full sister in the order of her choice. But it seems unlikely that Nona and her friends will have time to earn a nun’s habit before war is on their doorstep.Even a warrior like Nona cannot hope to turn the tide of war.The shiphearts offer strength that she might use to protect those she loves, but it’s a power that corrupts. A final battle is coming in which she will be torn between friends, unable to save them all. A battle in which her own demons will try to unmake her.A battle in which hearts will be broken, lovers lost, thrones burned.HOLY SISTER completes the Book of the Ancestor trilogy that began with RED SISTER and GREY SISTER. A ground-breaking series, it has established Mark Lawrence as one of the most exciting new voices in modern speculative fiction.