Grey Sister Page 22

  Nona turned slowly from the doorway. The wind came laced with a cold rain. A graveyard lay before her, scores of headstones black in the moonless night. Her mother was dead. Her bones buried, waiting for the Hope. They would never speak again. Nona would never ask whether her mother truly sent her child away to save her from Sherzal’s revenge. She felt nothing, only an emptiness that reached up from her chest to constrict her throat. She stumbled between the headstones, dazed, trembling with a hurt that had no centre to it.

  Where are we going? You said you’d kill someone. That was the deal when I helped you win your game with the tree and the box.

  Nona straightened. The headstones were thinning out now, the ground overgrown with bramble. A few buildings lay ahead, lights at their windows, more behind them, their number building rapidly towards the town. The hurt and loss that had taken her breath contracted into a tight ball of rage. “I am going to kill someone.” She spoke it to the night and to the dead. “Perhaps a lot of people.”

  Yisht? Is she first? How will you find her?

  “I’m going to Sherzal’s palace and when I leave the emperor will only have one sister living.”

  Something punched Nona in the shoulder. She turned and stared back into the darkness of the graveyard, trying to find her opponent. Her fingers discovered something like a narrow stick standing proud from her coat and she yanked it clear. A black shaft similar to Giljohn’s, but thinner. Another hit her just below the collarbone. Too late Nona dived for cover behind the nearest headstone. She could feel a stiffness in her muscles already, lock-up, the same toxin that Clera had jabbed her with on the day they parted company.

  Did you see them? Keot asked.

  No. The attacker had to be close: the darts couldn’t be fired more than thirty yards with any accuracy, but Nona hadn’t seen anything save blackness and hints of the graveyard. I can’t stay here. I need to kill them while I can still move. Was it the preacher? Or had Giljohn followed her for a second bite at the hundred sovereigns? If she were properly prepared she would have a dozen antidotes in her habit, but she had fled the convent empty-handed. Help me see!

  Keot needed no encouragement. He poured into her eyes and when the burning sensation dulled enough for her to unscrew them Nona saw a world on fire. She gathered herself, ready to spring. Belatedly she pulled out the second dart and stared at the yellow line of it for a moment, trying to focus her thoughts. They refused to order themselves.

  Something . . . different . . . on this one . . . groton? Was it really Giljohn again, after she had spared him?

  With an oath Nona flung herself from cover, the graveyard revealing itself in shades of orange. She could see no attacker, only a clot of darkness beside one of the larger tombs sporting a winged Hope.

  Darkness? Keot saw through darkness . . .

  A third dart came hissing towards her out of that impenetrable inkiness. This one at least she could see. She reached for it with the remnants of her quickness, muscles screaming in protest. Darla had once described her father coming home drunk from a military banquet. Nona felt as if she were re-enacting Darla’s mimicry of her father’s uncoordinated stagger. The dart slipped past her grasping fingers and sunk into her flesh just above her left hipbone.

  “Oh.” And she pitched forward into her own midnight.

  25

  ABBESS GLASS

  WITH SISTER KETTLE gone from the convent Abbess Glass had to rely more heavily on Mistress Shade’s network of Grey novices for information on the inquisitors’ activities. Apple used her most trusted and promising candidates for the Grey to observe Brother Pelter and his watchers. However well trained the inquisitors might be nobody knew the convent better than the novices who grew up there, and it was easy enough to keep an open ear in most corners.

  “Here comes trouble.” Glass watched Sister Spire cross the square, habit flapping around her legs, her walk close enough to a run that it might be called either. The abbess’s window comprised a dozen panes of puddle-glass, their unevenness lending a flowing quality to the nun’s approach. Sister Spire vanished around the corner of the building and Glass went to her desk to wait.

  The knock came a minute later, evidence of Spire’s urgency.

  “Come.”

  The mistress of Mystic Class hurried in, her blunt face flushed, headdress tugged down across her forehead almost hiding the puckered burn there. Glass had discovered that the young nun had earned her scars carrying children clear of a house fire. The information had arrived the previous week in Archon Kratton’s report on the mission to the Meelar territory. Spire had spoken of the blaze when asked, but made no mention of returning for children.

  “Ancestor’s blessings, abbess.”

  “And to you, sister.”

  “Novice Zole is missing!” Spire blurted out the words as if it were her failing.

  “I see.” Glass folded her hands, elbows on the desk. “Do we know where she might have gone?”

  Spire shook her head. “She’s taken her ranging equipment. Nobody saw her leave. One of the watchers asked me where she was this morning.”

  “Well, if the Inquisition didn’t manage to watch her I doubt there was much you could have done, sister.”

  Spire pursed her lips. “You don’t seem very surprised, abbess.”

  “I’m surprised that she stayed this long.”

  “You . . . expected this? You think she’s safe then?”

  “Safe? I doubt that very much. But she’s a dangerous young woman. I’m sure she’ll make a good account of herself when trouble gets in her way.”

  “Well I’m surprised. Zole was making such fine progress with all the mistresses. Even Sister Wheel! And she seemed very happy to have your permission for the ice-trial. Well, happy for Zole. She even smiled when I told her!”

  “That I would like to have seen!” Glass picked up the papers before her, then looked up. “Is there anything else, sister?”

  Spire looked surprised. “Well. Aren’t we going to do something? We could send someone after her. Bhetna, I mean Sister Needle, has just taken the Grey. She could . . .” Spire hugged her arms across her chest. “I just hate to think of her out there all alone. I know they say she’s the Chosen One, but she’s still just a girl.”

  “There are many girls out there all alone, Spire. The empire is awash with children, lost, abandoned, orphaned. We will tell Brother Pelter. I’m sure he’ll know soon enough either way. Doubtless he’ll be keen to send agents of the Inquisition after Novice Zole.”

  Spire nodded, turned to go, paused and opened her mouth as if to speak, then closed it and left.

  * * *

  • • •

  NIGHT FELL BEFORE they came. Sister Tallow preceded them, bursting into the abbess’s office without knocking. “Pelter’s at the door, he has his guards with him!”

  “You’re to allow him to go about his business, Tallow.”

  Tallow’s eyes darkened at that. “They can only take you if you let them.” She looked old, too thin, her habit loose around her, iron in the black of her hair now, but Glass knew what she was capable of. “Just speak the word.”

  “To set any nun in this convent against the Church, in my own defence, would confirm the worst suspicions whispered into the emperor’s ear. If I were to use the Red and the Grey as my personal army it would only encourage Crucical to take them for his own.”

  Glass remained in her seat, watching the door. She knew how the Inquisition worked. Once it had been hers. Old Devis, the man who had recruited her as a watcher, had been ten years a watcher himself. Then fifteen as an inquisitor. After Shella Yammal came to work for him Devis’s star rose swiftly. He rode her shoulders to the deputy’s chair before she jumped him to become high inquisitor with Devis as her second. Had Able not died she would still be there, watching the world from the highest room in the Tower of Inquiry. But the loss of a child tears something from any parent. Often what is ripped from a mother’s chest leaves her broken, a husk waiting to b
e gathered to the Ancestor. Always it will change her. But sometimes the person who sets aside their mourning blacks is a better one.

  Three knocks at the door. Sharp, precise.

  “Come.” Glass knew a moment of fear. She had seen the horrors of the Inquisition up close. Nothing is as cruel as a righteous man. She had been righteous in her time.

  Brother Pelter strode in, two Inquisition guards clattering at his shoulders, three more behind them, all gleaming in their armour, polished steel plates overlapping from neck to elbow.

  “Brother Pelter, how may I help you today?” Glass returned her quill to its holder and stoppered her ink.

  “Abbess Glass, I’m placing you under Church-arrest on the charge of heresy. You’re to be taken to the Tower of Inquiry for interrogation.”

  “Heresy?” Glass pursed her lips. “Am I allowed a little more detail?”

  “I’ve told you the charge.” Pelter waved his guards on and they advanced around him.

  “I would like to hear more.” Sister Tallow stepped into their path. At her hip she wore her sword, a cruel strip of Ark-steel.

  Pelter’s guards stopped. They might be hard-bitten and well-used to violence—the woman on the right had a gerant touch and stood well over six foot, broad-shouldered with it—but all of them had heard of Mistress Blade at Sweet Mercy.

  “There are questions to be asked and answered, Sister Tallow. Asked and answered in the Tower of Inquiry, a place that admits no lies.” Brother Pelter stepped back to open the door. “A novice under sentence of death ran from the convent within minutes of that decision being reached at the convent table.”

  “That’s hardly heresy!” Tallow spat.

  “Holding any law above that of the Ancestor is heretical. And the novice had been encouraged to write in praise of past heretics whose histories have no place in any convent library.” Pelter waved the matter away. “More importantly Abbess Glass placed her authority over that of the parent. Zole Lansis was to be sent to the ice against her parent’s express instruction—expressed, I may say, through a judge of Verity’s highest court.” He turned his gaze from Tallow towards Glass. “And now the child has gone missing, an absence I suspect you to have arranged in order to keep your heretical control over someone you consider politically important at this time of heightened tension. The bonds of family form the branches of the Ancestor’s tree. No cleric can take to themselves the authority to overrule a parent. Such practice is an abomination before the Ancestor, a crime worthy of the Scithrowl.”

  “Step aside, Tallow.” The abbess stood. “You’re to let Brother Pelter carry out his duty and arrest me.” She raised her wrists.

  The guards stepped forward, the oldest of them taking a symbolic silver chain from his belt and using it to bind the abbess’s wrists.

  “Abbess Glass.” Pelter stepped forward now with his warrant scroll. “You are a prisoner of the Inquisition. Come with me.”

  “Let the sisters know, Tallow.” Glass came around her desk, dwarfed by the guards around her. “And of course the Martial Sisters and Sisters of Discretion will need to take action if I am questioned in the Tower of Inquiry.”

  Sister Tallow frowned. “But you just said—”

  “Ignore that, sister,” Pelter cut across her. “Clerics of the rank of abbess, abbot, or above are entitled to refuse questioning in Inquisition outposts and indeed in most other locations, but the Tower of Inquiry is sanctified and sanctioned to put any cleric to question, even the high priest himself. Abbess Glass needs to improve her research.”

  Abbess Glass shook her head. “A high inquisitor, former or current, may not be put to question on Inquisition property. It’s an old ruling passed after a succession of high inquisitors were removed from office following interrogation by their deputies. It appeared to be being used as a form of self-promotion. Fortunately the ‘former’ was added to the ruling in order to defend past office holders such as myself from having the Inquisition used against them to settle old debts. And as an abbess I am of course subject to Church law rather than secular law, so the judges’ courts are not a fit place either.”

  Pelter, wrong-footed, began to bluster. “Where, pray tell, can an individual such as yourself be made to answer to heresy? You don’t expect me to believe there’s no place fit to host so eminent a person!”

  “Of course not.” The abbess smiled. “Take me to the emperor’s palace.”

  “I’m taking you off this rock, that’s for sure,” Pelter snarled. He waved the guards forward.

  “Have the sisters watch from a discreet distance, Tallow dear,” Glass called over her shoulder as they led her out.

  The inquisitor and his guards ushered the abbess down the stairs and along her own entrance hall to her front door. Glass drew a deep breath, preparing to face the day. Many at the convent had seen her paraded in an iron yoke by their own high priest. As humiliations went the silver chains of the Inquisition were not the worst.

  She stood while the guards tied her outdoor robes around her shoulders. If Pelter took her to the emperor’s palace it wouldn’t guarantee Glass’s safety but there was no place within those walls that rumour would not spread from. Rather than have Sherzal hand him both a confession and control of the convent, along with an excuse perhaps to seize any monastery he liked, Crucical would have the whole business unfold under his own roof before the disapproval of the high priest and the archons, before the Sis and the Academy. To Glass’s knowledge Crucical wasn’t even aware what was happening. It was one thing to grumble about not having the Red and the Grey answer your every whim, quite a different thing to wield the Inquisition as a political knife to carve out what you wanted. The latter required a stomach for blood. Lots of blood.

  26

  IN THE BLACK and rolling confusion into which Nona woke she found nothing to hold on to. Her limbs refused to obey. Her eyes found nothing to see. Keot’s words were distant, muted beyond understanding. The world moved and creaked and jolted and swayed around her. Something contained her. A box? And she was in motion. Captive and being taken somewhere?

  Nona discovered herself unable to form sentences or coherent thoughts. Everything swirled around in her mind with nothing constant. When, in all that shifting chaos, she stumbled upon a way out, she took it.

  Nona left the maelstrom of her poisoned thoughts to sit mute and watchful in the quiet place into which she had fallen. The eyes through which she gazed were not hers and looked where they wanted to, but they were sharp enough.

  I’ve done this before.

  Nobody answered, though she could feel another’s thoughts all around her, pulsing back and forth between memories. Some thoughts spiralled towards action, others were discarded and began to fade.

  I’m inside Kettle. We’re thread-bound.

  Nona watched a disjointed series of images roll past. Scenes from the Seren Way, nightfall in a forest, roads thick with travellers, wagons and carts queuing at a bridge. Sunrise over a river, watched from the prow of a boat.

  While she tried to make sense of it Nona reached for the memories closest at hand, letting them run through her. It seemed that the memories around her were . . . about her. Reading lessons in the scriptorium; the day she arrived and Sister Apple made her wash in the bathhouse, how small and skinny she’d been; the sight of herself jumping from one loop of the blade-path to the next—scores of others . . .

  Nona took another memory, this one feeling fresher, still buzzing with energy. It jolted into her, filling her mind with sound and light.

  * * *

  • • •

  “KETTLE? KETTLE, ARE you even listening to me?”

  Kettle sat up, holding the sheet to her against the cold of the undercaves. Apple stood above her, a pewter cup in one hand, salt-glazed flask of the convent red in the other.

  “What?”

  “Did you want any more wine?”

  Kettle glanced up at Apple, in her nightdress, red hair unbound and coiled around her shoulders. A
moment later it was all gone, Apple, the bed, the cave, and Kettle was reliving Nona’s fight in the graveyard at White Lake. The shock of the attack had drawn Kettle along their thread-bond to experience it with Nona.

  Nona discarded Kettle’s memory of the attack before the third dart that had brought her down. She worried that, if she let it, the memory would drag her back into the darkness and confusion she had so recently escaped.

  * * *

  • • •

  NONA LEFT KETTLE’S memories alone, feeling guilty for trespassing, both nervous and intrigued about what she might accidentally happen upon. Instead she concentrated on what the nun was looking at now. Concentrating inside Kettle’s mind was easy, as if somehow Nona had left behind the poisons that kept her prisoner wherever her body was.

  A boat. Kettle was on a boat, watching the bank pass by, bushes, stunted trees, fields beyond, low hills rising, the line of the ice in the distance, a white underscore beneath the clouds, so faint it could be imagination and nothing more.

  “Nona?” Kettle’s voice but Nona could “hear” the thought too, directed at her where she lurked in the darkness behind Kettle’s eyes.

  Nona tried to answer but found herself mute, perhaps not as free of the poisons as she thought, allowed to watch through Kettle, a passive passenger, but unable to take any action, or speak with a voice of her own.

  Kettle frowned. She knew something had changed. The bond that Nona had made between them was not something she understood but it was something she could follow. Kettle had been trying to shadow-bond when Nona had taken over and thread-bound them. Some element of the shadow-bond had become woven in and shadow-bonds were something Kettle could follow. She had shadow-bonds with Apple, with Bhetna—whom she must learn to call Sister Needle—and with Sister Frost. Kettle’s bond with Safira had been cut years ago, the severing more painful than the knife that Safira had stuck her with. But no shadow-bond is ever truly broken. Since Apple had pushed her into the dark Kettle had started to hear whispers along that old bond with her former bedmate, hints of emotion, tugs of wanting.