Grey Sister Page 10

  At last! Keot pushed Nona’s flaw-blades into being. Someone you can kill.

  No. But Nona made no effort to dispel her blades.

  “Get out of my way, Mai.” Safira advanced on the door.

  Mai?

  Must be Kettle’s real name. Shut up.

  “You’re coming to the convent. There are questions to be answered.” Kettle settled into a blade-fist stance, soft-form, arms raised.

  “I’m not.” Safira echoed the stance.

  “She knows about Yisht and the shipheart!” Nona leapt onto the table, her concern for the crockery forgotten. Jump on her! Shred her flesh. Open her body! Keot spread, shading crimson along her limbs.

  “And she stabbed Kettle!” Ara hissed.

  Safira shook her head, a narrow smile on her lips. “It wasn’t like that. You don’t know anything. You’re children.”

  “It was a bit like that.” Kettle kept her eyes on Safira’s.

  “Apple poisoned her against me, Nona.”

  Nona blinked, surprised to find herself addressed.

  Safira continued. “Apple does that. You’ll find out but it will be too late by then. Sherzal is our only hope. Crucical lacks the imagination. Velera is a blunt weapon. We can sink together with the emperor or some of us can swim.”

  “Sherzal—”

  “Sherzal didn’t order your friend’s death, Nona. Yisht is dangerous but you use the tools you have.” Safira glanced towards her. “I’m not your enemy. The Noi-Guin haven’t forgotten you. That’s a warning from a friend.”

  Nona shook her head. “If you’re a friend you can come and tell your stories to the abbess. She’ll know what to make of them.” She moved to the table’s edge, feet careful, avoiding the plates. Ara and Regol advanced too.

  “No! Just me.” Kettle’s command was iron. Surprise at such authority from the nun held Nona in her place. Kettle was always smiles and fun. Nona didn’t recognize this Kettle.

  In the next moment the two women closed to fight, Safira sweeping her leg to topple Kettle. Both employed the strain of blade-fist favoured by Sisters of Discretion, their combat fluid. Where Sister Tallow concentrated on blocking and on blows aimed to inflict as much damage in as short a time as possible the grey-fist centred on evasion and on unbalancing the opponent, often seeming more of a dance. The two moved in a flowing contest of position and stability, flurries of blows finding nothing but air. It might be a dance, and a beautiful one at that, but Nona knew the form held scores of moves for disabling or killing a less skilled opponent in a quiet and efficient manner, any of which could be used in a heartbeat if either woman gained sufficient advantage.

  A quick clash, hands finding purchase, a rapid adjustment of feet, grips broken. Kettle and Safira spun apart, both unbalanced. A moment later they closed again, punches ducked, kicks evaded with the minimum twist necessary, Kettle a blur of swirling habit. Without warning Kettle managed to seize Safira’s trailing plait and, yanking her head back, drove an elbow into her face.

  Safira stepped back, panting, wiping the blood from her nose. “As much as I love to play with you, Mai, I don’t have time for this.” She opened her hand to reveal a small leather tube, pitch-sealed. “Grey mustard. Not really the ideal condiment for social gatherings. Perhaps I should just go?”

  Kettle stepped back from the door, eyes hard.

  Throw yourself on her! You could cut her hand off before she—

  No. Nona didn’t know much about grey mustard but she knew it was a poison that Sister Apple didn’t let any novice work with until they reached Holy Class, and then only if they were marked for the Grey.

  Safira opened the door and turned in the doorway, finding Nona again. “Tell Zole what I said. Sherzal is bound for greatness and there is a place for both of you at her side.”

  A moment later she was gone.

  9

  ON SEVEN-DAY THEY heated the pool water. With the shipheart gone it now required that coal be burned in a chamber beneath the laundry where the pipes lay exposed. Black smoke belched from the new chimney and the Corridor wind stripped it away. Come evening, after four hours, the water steamed. On some six-days during the freeze Nona had to break a film of ice in the bathhouse, so the seven-day was a blessing. After four hours burning coal the pool was as hot as it would get and almost as hot as in the year she had joined Sweet Mercy.

  Nona and Ara had returned from lunch with Terra Mensis in Verity in good time to bathe but Nona left the dormitories late, deep in her considerations. She hadn’t spoken to Zole and remained undecided about what to do with Safira’s message. Probably she should let the abbess decide.

  Kettle had been quiet on the journey back, locked in her thoughts. The best thing to come out of the visit had been when, as they were leaving, Ara had asked Terra to let Nona borrow some clothes the next time she was in town.

  “It’s a convent thing,” she had said. “A sort of fancy dress. I don’t know what she’ll want.”

  “Of course . . .” Terra had seemed uncertain, perhaps imagining her finest dress walking out the door along with borrowed jewellery.

  “Servant’s uniform perhaps. Or a wig if you still have some?” Ara had said.

  Terra brightened considerably at that. “Arabella! I have so many wigs! Velera wore that silver one three years ago and . . . well, you know . . . but now? Nobody wears them. You can have six if you want, Nona!”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE OTHER NOVICES had rushed off to enjoy the heat, Ara with them, as soon as the message went out that Sister Mop had opened the bathhouse doors. Nona had lain on her bed staring at the ceiling, ignoring Keot’s urgings. He loved the pool.

  The holothour filled her thoughts. The memory of that consuming fear. The anger she felt at the shame of it. The creature’s mark on her friends. Of all the novices who came with Nona from the caves that day only Ara would even acknowledge they existed. The others grew irritated if she talked about them and would try to change the subject, and failing that just walk away. Even Ara, though she agreed there were caves, and that a hidden entrance existed, was vague and evasive when it came to talking about what might be down there and whether they had ever explored together.

  Take me to the bathhouse!

  You just want to see the novices naked.

  I am older than your civilization and find your bodies no more attractive than those of spiders.

  It’s no big thing to be centuries old if you can’t remember anything further back than a few years ago.

  Keot seemed to know very little. He didn’t even know what he was or where he came from. Or if he did he wasn’t telling. He claimed to enjoy the heat of the water, but every time Nona’s attention wandered she would find him trying to creep into one of her eyes to see better.

  At last Nona rolled off her bed and left the dormitory. She needed to be free of the day’s grime, not least the sweat of that remembered fear. She also wanted an end to Keot’s moaning. The dorms lay silent. Her feet echoed on the stairs. Nobody stayed long when the pool was steaming.

  “I thought you were never coming.” Joeli Namsis stepped into her path in the entrance hall, emerging from the Red dorm. Nona had been too deep in thought to see her until the last moment. Apart from her air of cruelty her appearance—tall, with golden hair cascading around her shoulders—was very similar to Ara’s. “I suppose it must be true. Peasants do like being dirty.”

  Two girls, so alike they might be true sisters, came out behind her: Elani and Crocey, Joeli’s constant companions, both hunska half-bloods. Two more exited from Grey dorm. These two, on her right, were from Holy Class, both of them marked for Red Sisters. Elani and Crocey stepped past Joeli, both holding quarterstaffs. Not from the Blade Hall stores but rough pieces of timber that looked to have been looted from the cooper’s yard.

  Joeli smiled. “I don’t think you’ll report us however badly we beat you. But I’m quite eager to get into the world and put my skills to use, so being thrown o
ut would be a price I’m willing to pay to see you crawl, Nona.”

  “My price is higher.” Keot got into Nona’s tongue. “But holding your guts in my hands will cover it.”

  Nona bit down on further threats and the air around her fingers shimmered as flaw-blades sprang into being. She wouldn’t cut a novice except to save her life—but the quarterstaffs would get no mercy and dicing them would put fear into Joeli’s friends. The convent knew her secret now, but knowing and seeing were different things. Nona let the planet spin to a near halt and stepped forward, offering no defence. She snapped out an arm at the nearest staff. The half-bloods were fast by normal standards but her speed made them seem slow. Her hand swung past the staff close to where the girl gripped it. The wood, that should have been sliced into sections, remained untouched.

  Nona glanced down at her fingers. The flaw-shimmer had gone from them. Just the tingling in her bones remained as it so often did when she withdrew their sharpness from the world.

  Nona stepped away quickly. A look up revealed both the older hunska novices coming at her around the sides of the other two. Joeli was falling back behind the staff-bearers, her hands still raised in a plucking motion.

  She pulled your claws back in.

  Why didn’t you stop her? You stopped the holothour drawing my threads!

  Then she would know I exist. But if you want to kill her . . .

  Nona snarled and twisted into the first of the empty-handed novices, a lean girl named Meera, a prime with several years’ advantage. Nona’s anger pushed her speed towards its limits. She hammered her forearm into Meera’s throat and caught the girl’s shoulder to vault over her reaching arm, bringing both feet into the middle of the staff held by Elani behind her. The half-blood stood mired in the moment, her face contorted in a roar. The staff splintered and Nona’s momentum carried her through Meera’s grasp, both heels thudding into Elani’s stomach, bringing her down.

  Nona came out of her roll beside Joeli. Kicking the girl’s knee resulted in a satisfying crunch but she should have focused on Hellan, the other hunska, a full-blood, taller and more heavily built than Meera. Hellan thundered into Nona, barrelling her to the ground even as Joeli began to scream.

  They fought as they fell, battling for holds. Hellan had the weight and strength advantage, Nona an edge on speed. Nona’s struggle to free her arms from where Hellan had pinned them to her sides only succeeded in moving the girl further up her body so they fell face to face. Unable to break free, Nona settled for bending her leg and turning her heel to the ground so the impact with the floor would power her knee into Hellan’s thigh. In addition, to prevent the back of her head crashing against the flagstones Nona drove forward at the last instant, hammering her forehead into Hellan’s nose.

  The ground knocked the wind from Nona’s lungs and she lay for a moment, her vision full of strange lights, and Hellan’s blood. A large, fast something drove through the confusion of flashes. The heel of a quarterstaff hammering down towards her face. Nona turned her head and the wood grazed her ear before cracking against the stone beside her.

  With a roar Nona forced Hellan off her and rolled clear, a slow and ungainly move with Hellan still clutching at her. The swing of the quarterstaff couldn’t be avoided. Nona took the blow on the triceps of her left arm. Better a bruise than a fracture. She swept Crocey’s legs from beneath her as she rose. Elani came at her now, swinging half her broken staff in each hand. Behind her Meera staggered towards the fray, clutching her throat, blood on her chin.

  Nona caught one of the shortened staffs in her hand, using it as a lever to twist Elani’s arm while she blocked the other on her forearm. Without hesitation, and still holding the trapped staff, she threw her body weight down on Elani’s twisted elbow. It snapped beneath her.

  On the ground Hellan caught at Nona’s ankle. Meera brought her to the floor with a grappling lunge and tried to pin her, and at the same time Crocey rose to her feet, swinging her quarterstaff with renewed fury at the parts of Nona still exposed.

  Nona’s rage grew. She felt the blows of the staff as distant thuds against her legs and sides. Blinded with blood, she saw the Path coiling bright before her mind’s eye. With one hand Nona sought Hellan’s eyes, stiff-fingered. With the other she shielded her head while seeking to fasten her teeth in the flesh and standing tendons of Meera’s neck. She might go down but any she left standing would be insufficient to carry the dead away.

  “No!”

  Before her jaws could snap shut, before she touched the awful power of the Path, Meera was hauled away from her, her body sailing through the doorway into Grey dorm. Something big loomed over Nona and Hellan. Nona blinked the blood away. A hulking figure. A quarterstaff hammered into the figure’s shoulder, wood splintering.

  “Really?” Darla’s voice.

  Darla turned and flattened the surprised Crocey with a punch. She kicked Hellan away and scooped Nona up with one arm. “Come on, you.” She strode through the main door into the rain-laced wind, Nona over her shoulder. Behind them someone was screaming in pain. Joeli probably. Or Elani. Or both.

  After two corners and a hundred yards Darla set Nona down against the back wall of the scriptorium. “Let’s have a look.”

  “I’m all right.” Nona didn’t feel all right. Her arm wouldn’t talk to her and her mind was red with Keot howling for murder.

  “You don’t look all right. You’re covered in blood.” Darla poked at Nona’s face, blunt-fingered. “I should take you to Rosie.”

  “No.” Once in the sanatorium it took forever to get out. “It’s not my blood.”

  “This stuff is.” Darla pulled splinters from Nona’s calf. “They jumped you, huh?”

  Nona let her head flop to her chest. Her ribs hurt at each breath. “Don’t think any of them will be jumping anyone again in a hurry.”

  “What should we do?” Darla glanced to the corners for approaching trouble.

  “Nothing.” Nona tried to rise and failed. “Get me to the bathhouse. I’ll see what will wash off.”

  “But . . . Joeli and the others? You made a mess in there.”

  Nona laid her head back against the wall, smelling only blood rather than the usual sharpness of hides from the scriptorium’s back room where they cured them for book binding.

  Darla tried again. “If I hadn’t—”

  “If you hadn’t come back I’d have killed at least one of them.” Nona spoke the words slowly. “And they probably would have killed me to stop me getting a second.” She drew another painful breath and stood with the help of the wall. “They’ll go to the sanatorium with tales of falling down steps. Joeli doesn’t want to go up before the convent table again. She thought her lot would give me a beating—not so bad as this one—and escape without a scratch. She’s too used to people rolling over for her.”

  With an arm over Darla’s shoulder Nona limped to the bathhouse.

  Tonight we will slice their throats as they sleep.

  We won’t.

  You said you were born of war!

  You said that with my tongue. And war is a longer game than battle. For now we wait.

  Nona realized she was using “we” and shuddered. Keot might be under her skin but she wanted him no deeper than that.

  Two novices were leaving as they arrived, their hair steaming. Both offered wondering looks but said nothing. In the hot moistness of the changing room the warmth enfolded them, shot through with the shouts, splashes, and laughter of girls crowding the pool. Darla sat Nona on a bench and stripped her own habit with a few quick motions. Every inch of her lay thick with muscle, as if it wanted to burst free.

  “Don’t drown.” And Darla walked off towards the water.

  Nona sighed and began the slow process of disrobing. The fingers of her left hand were too clumsy for her ties, and she winced at every stretch or lift. At last she stepped from her smallclothes and limped after Darla into the mist, too tired to weave it around her.

  10


  ABBESS GLASS

  “COME IN, SISTER.” Abbess Glass motioned Sister Kettle from the doorway and pointed to the chair before her desk.

  The nun flashed a nervous smile and hurried across. Glass had never truly fathomed the girl. Even if she hadn’t summoned her she would have known it was Kettle at the door by the tentative knock, the hesitation. Was this the disguise she wore at convent, or the real girl? It was the Kettle she remembered from classes, a lithe girl, sharp-featured, with an impish smile, Novice Mai Tanner, middle daughter of a cobbler who plied his trade on the steps of Leather Street in Verity. Given over to the convent when her mother was taken. Mai had told the other novices it was the weeping sickness, but in truth a sailor had taken her mother: new love and new horizons. Abandonment of one’s sons and daughters was perhaps a sadder tale than the random cruelty of disease. Little wonder the child tied herself so tightly to the Ancestor in whom all bonds of blood are bound and drawn tight.

  “Sit.”

  Sister Kettle took her seat, hands folded in her lap, shoulders hunched although a fire burned in the hearth. Outside the convent Kettle’s deeds had earned her a reputation for deadly efficiency that few Sisters of Discretion could surpass. Inside she appeared the same friendly, awkward girl Glass had watched grow. Was one an act and the other truth, or were both masks she chose to wear? Glass’s instincts rarely failed her but here they gave her nothing.

  “I’m sorry that this is the first chance for us to speak properly since your return from the ice,” Glass said. “The last few weeks have been busy. You’ve seen some of it yourself at the convent table, and in Verity . . .” She wondered how deeply Kettle had been affected by meeting Safira at the Mensis house. To Glass’s mind a knife was a very effective way to cut off any relationship but the bonds of affection Kettle formed were resilient ones and she had been very close to Safira for years. In that respect she shared much with Nona. Whilst the novice condemned the actions of her friend Clera Ghomal, actions that included personal treachery, she would still not condemn the girl herself. Loyalty of that degree seemed like a way to get yourself killed . . . but then what was the Ancestor’s creed if not about bonds? The importance of them and the strength that outlasted years and deeds.