Holy Sister

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.