Holy Sister

‘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—’