Grey Sister Read online

  “Nona?” she asked again. Nothing. But she felt the girl’s presence. “Be strong, Nona. I’m coming for you.”

  Kettle glanced upstream. The river had been narrowing all morning and the first hint of rapids foamed white in the distance. The boat she’d hired wouldn’t get much further. Part of her regretted not disembarking at Feverton that morning, but with the Corridor wind filling the sail the skiff could eat up the miles faster than the alternatives, even heading upstream.

  “Here! Stop here.” The River Ganymede fed the Swirl which in turn emptied into White Lake. Kettle had learned nothing in the town that she had not already seen when the sharpness of Nona’s fear had torn open the bond between them, channelling her experience into Kettle’s mind. It had been a revelation, far more intimate a connection than the shadow-bond.

  Kettle pressed her lips together and hoped that details of her own private life had not been slipping back along the bond into Nona’s mind without her knowledge. She pointed to a shingle beach at the outer curve of the river. The Ganymede had been angling away from the route she needed to take for some miles now.

  “Right you are, sister.” The fisherman and his girl set to grounding their craft.

  “Ancestor’s blessings on your journey.” The girl brought a loaf and cheese bound with cloth out of a wooden box at the stern.

  “And upon your family.” Kettle took the food with a smile and vaulted out onto the stones. “Safe return!” A wave and she was hurrying up towards the track that paralleled the river.

  Kettle hunched her coat around her, not the range-coat of a nun, just the weathered garb of a traveller. As she walked, her fingers counted through the vials in their straps against the coat’s inner lining, poisons on one side, antidotes on the other. She checked her weapons from sword and throwing stars to the smallest knife and envenomed pin. Her eyes stayed on what lay ahead. She kept her mind empty of worry and of speculation. She had already considered who might have taken the girl and reached no firm conclusion. To dwell on things, to circle them over and over on the road as she might at the convent, was to invite death. The Grey Sister lives in the now. Thinking ahead was something to make space for, to do in as safe a space as possible, not something that would push you away from the moment. Whoever had taken Nona could easily have covered their back trail, left a friend or two watching from the boughs of a tree, or beside the road, or standing behind the counter of a pastry stall in some market town, just waiting for someone to kill.

  * * *

  • • •

  KETTLE WALKED FROM before noon until late into the night, pushing her body to maintain a fierce pace.

  “I’ll find you, Nona. I swear it to the Ancestor. I’ll find you and make an end of anyone who seeks to stop me.” Images of cut flesh swarmed forward from a score of memories, quickly pushed back into their places as Kettle focused on the road ahead. A moment’s lapse and she centred herself in the now once again, watchful, taut, ready.

  The nun slept that night in a farmhouse not far from Honour. A clipped halfpenny proved adequate compensation for rousing the tenants and bought her a room, a bed with fresh linen, plus a meal with meat and mead into the bargain. With her body fuelled, Kettle took to her chamber and set her traps. Finally she arranged the bolster under the sheets, then curled beneath her grey cloak, settling to sleep in the corner the door would obscure if opened.

  A little later when the focus moon turned the blackness of her shutters into narrow bars of blazing crimson Kettle felt Apple’s pulse along their shadow-bond. Kettle sent her own pulse beating back to Sweet Mercy, letting Mistress Shade know that she was safe.

  Nona stayed watching, even when Kettle closed her eyes. She didn’t want to retreat into her own darkness, to the confusion and nausea, the blindness and the pain, and yet, as the stuff of Kettle’s dreams began to rise around her, Nona released her hold on the nun’s mind. For though we may share some dreams, others we don’t speak of, even to ourselves, and no one should look that deeply into another person without permission. Maybe not even then.

  Kettle’s dream rose, red, curling around her, and Nona fell, loosening her grip, dropping away into the chaos of her own mind.

  27

  NONA ROLLED ACROSS rough planks and fetched up against a wooden wall. Everything swayed, everything heaved.

  A box. I’m in a box.

  The darkness stank of her own waste; her mouth tasted vomit-sour. Light leaked in between the planks, razors against her eyes. Without instruction her body rolled the other way, one rotation before another wall stopped her. Someone had bound her hands behind her back.

  I’m at sea.

  You’re being carried. Keot sounded deeply annoyed.

  “What?” Nona tried to sit up and banged her forehead against the planking just inches above her face.

  You’re being carried in a small box. You’ve been in it for two days.

  Nona screwed her eyes shut and tried to see the Path. Nothing. She flexed her arms and gasped at the agony flooding up them. She couldn’t feel her hands, though everything else from her shoulders down screamed in protest. Her wrists seemed to be chained together. She tried to will her flaw-blades into existence, but whether anything happened she couldn’t tell.

  The light dimmed and Nona heard footsteps on stone, the sound of the people carrying her box, several of them. The noise had an echoing quality. Nona felt herself slipping away into the darkness again. She ground her teeth against the drugs, their poison rising through her like nausea. “I’ll kill them. Every last one.”

  That’s the first reasonable thing you’ve said. Keot’s voice followed her into the muffling blackness. Perhaps ever.

  * * *

  • • •

  NONA CRACKED OPEN her eyes an unknown length of time later. They had her on her belly, two of them at least, in a dimly lit room. One was clasping some kind of collar around her neck, the other putting restraints on her ankles. Nona twisted her head as fast as she could, lunging to take a bite of the nearest wrist, but her teeth snapped shut on nothing, the hand withdrawn too swiftly. Another hand pressed her head to the hard floor with awful pressure and the first person returned to fixing the collar.

  “It is done.” A soft voice without urgency.

  Someone knelt on Nona’s back, struggling with something. A sudden snap and a rattle of chain. Nona’s arms slid to her sides, lifeless but no longer bound together at the wrists.

  The three of them retreated a few paces. Nona tried to rise but her arms hung limp, the pain of returning circulation just beginning as pins and needles, running down her veins.

  The first bucket of water took her by surprise, ice-cold and sudden. She hauled breath back into her near-paralysed lungs and had begun to curse when the second bucket hit her with the third a fraction behind it. Somewhere in the middle of it all it occurred to her that she was naked.

  “Roll over.” The same soft voice, empty of mockery or compassion.

  Nona lay where she was, shivering around her pain. She didn’t think she could roll even if she wanted to.

  One of the shadowy figures approached, bending low. Nona willed her blades into being to lash at the person’s leg, but all that happened was that her arm flopped out from her side. Her captor stepped over it and, seizing her opposite shoulder, rolled Nona onto her back.

  The figure stepped away again and several more buckets of icy water followed. When the last one had been thrown and Nona’s spluttering had calmed she could hear the water gurgling away down a nearby drain.

  “Stand.”

  Nona tried. With minimal help from her arms and unbalanced by waves of nausea and confusion she ended up pitching to one side whilst still on her knees and lay there shivering uncontrollably. Two of her captors pulled her to her feet. Both were dressed in grey robes with long sleeves, their hair shaved to a finger’s width. Nona found it hard to guess their age or sex. Perhaps the one to the left was a woman, perhaps the one to the right a man, neither of them young
, but neither old yet.

  The third approached with a white linen smock that they worked to get Nona into. She noticed as they did it that she had metal bands around her wrists, her ankles too, presumably matching the collar at her throat.

  Nona shook her arms, trying to get more life into them. She couldn’t see much of the chamber. The only light filtered in through a barred window in the door. From what hints the gloom offered, the room seemed to be fairly small and bare, maybe a washroom.

  For people who had gone to great lengths to abduct her and keep her incapacitated Nona’s captors didn’t seem to be particularly wary. She puzzled. They must know of her Path-walking, and likely they would know of her blades too. If they had taken the trouble to find her they would have taken the trouble to find out about her first.

  “Come.” The tallest of the three walked to the door, knocked, and led through when it opened.

  Nona followed, flanked, and occasionally supported, by the other two. A fourth person, similarly shaven-headed and robed, waited in the corridor and joined the escort. Nona supposed they knew how the drugs must still be affecting her and thus felt safe enough from any display of violence on her part.

  Single candles burned at irregular intervals in niches along the corridor, just bright enough so that at the darkest spots a hint of the surroundings could still be seen. The doors that they passed looked like cell doors, heavy, each set with a small barred window and a large iron lock. Nona gave silent thanks to Hessa for showing her how to deal with those. Mistress Shade taught classes on overcoming the various mechanisms with a dozen curiously shaped picks, or a vial of acid, but Nona had never fared too well at these, perhaps lacking the motivation of those who can’t open a lock by pulling its thread.

  A sewer-stench hung around the corridor. Nona knew that she had smelled worse before they sluiced her. The stink put her in mind of Harriton gaol, whose bars she hadn’t thought of in an age. Smells will do that for you, reach out and pull you back across the years. She remembered being walked along to the cells with Saida, two little girls, only one of whom would come out again with her neck unbroken.

  “Here.” The woman at the front—Nona was sure she was female now—stopped at a door no different to the previous half dozen. A key appeared from the woman’s robes and once the door stood open she led the way inside. In the blackness against the back wall somehow the woman found a chain and locked the clasp at its end into the cuff around Nona’s ankle. Nona considered kicking her in the head and making a break for it but she still felt weak and ill. Better to escape in private later.

  Her four captives left without further words, locking the door behind them. Nona supposed that at least one of them must be a marjal touch with some shadow-weaving skill in order to perform their task in such gloom.

  You’re in trouble. Keot moved across her collarbones, stinging like an old scald.

  “First I need to get this chain off.” Nona tried to force her flaw-blades into being but nothing happened. “Bleed me! I’ll try later. Unless you can do something to clean this muck out of my blood.”

  It won’t make any difference. The collar and the bands are sigil-worked. I can’t move under them. They must be to disrupt your abilities . . . such as they are.

  “Hells.” Nona felt the metal cuffs around her wrists. The sensation in her fingers had returned. The cuffs were heavy pieces of metal, hinged, locked, smooth except for where the sigils had been engraved in deep, swirling lines. Sister Pan had told her that to permanently imprint power into a sigil was an act that required far more than just marking the correct symbol. A marjal full-blood would have to train at the task for half a lifetime and even after such training the setting of a single sigil could take anything from hours to days, months for the most potent sigils. Sigil-marked armour and swords lay beyond the pockets of even many of the Sis. Such things were passed from lord to heir as treasures of the house. “If I get out of here wearing these I’ll be richer than Joeli Namsis.”

  Nona leaned back against the wall, finding it cold and uncomfortable. Her body appeared to be made entirely from aches connected by pains. She retched then gathered her will and tried to find the Path. Her eyes saw nothing but darkness. She tried to defocus her vision, to look past the world to the network of threads that underlie all things, including darkness. Again nothing.

  “I’m going to have to do this the hard way.”

  The bravado was for any ears that might be listening. It was also a lie.

  * * *

  • • •

  “A LONELY TRAIL, sister. Are you lost?” The man stepped into the path from the treeline and Kettle’s heartrate doubled from one beat to the next.

  In a dark cell miles from the forested foothills of the Artinas Ridge Nona’s head snapped back and what Kettle saw replaced her blindness.

  “I’m neither lost nor your sister.” Kettle ignored the woodsman, though her eyes continued to point in his direction. She drew in the halo of peripheral vision that surrounds what we see, searching for any hint of motion. Her ears opened to every whisper of the trees, every creak, rustle, or scrape, hungry for the telltale crack of a twig.

  The one that allows you to see them is the distraction. The one that will kill you is hidden, waiting their moment. That was how Apple always opened the first lesson on ambush. It wouldn’t take long for a novice to ask why they both didn’t stay hidden and attack together. “Because in conversation you may reveal information that they are interested in. But mainly because you will be more vulnerable with your attention on the one before you,” Apple would say, and she would lift her hand, wriggling her fingers in a puzzling motion. At that moment her assistant, Bhetna for the last few years, would rise behind the curious novice and lay a blunt knife across her throat. “As we have demonstrated,” Apple would conclude.

  “So, where would you be heading?” The trail behind the man lay thick with evening shadow.

  Kettle spared him a moment’s attention. He had pallid skin, short brown hair, pale eyes. His garb was convincing enough, but it didn’t suit him. The hand-axe at his hip gleamed as if sharp enough to shave with.

  Sometimes you need to wait for an enemy to reveal himself, sometimes you need to take the initiative. Knowing which to do, and when, makes the difference between those who live and those who die.

  “I could give you directions?” The man seemed relaxed enough but his questions were too pointed.

  “I’ve been invited to dance naked for the battle-queen,” Kettle said. A nonsensical statement can create a moment of confusion in which the Grey Sister acts. A flexing of her wrist dropped an envenomed throwing star into her cupped fingers, the edges slightly dulled to avoid poisoning herself. Kettle was already turning as she released the star. She dived between the nearest trees, closing off as many angles as possible, scanning the confusion of undergrowth, the lines of the trunks, the branches interlocking against a purple-grey sky.

  Kettle heard the thunk of her star hitting home: she’d aimed for his upper arm. There was always the chance he was simply a woodsman, and if not, she would want someone to question. Either way she didn’t want him dead.

  Two bolts hissed above her as she dived. Heavy bolts, not the knitting needles Nona had been hit with. The killing kind. Poor shots though. Hunskas could move with great speed but they couldn’t fall faster than anyone else: the shots should have been on target and required Kettle to deflect them both.

  Crashing among the undergrowth, Kettle saw flickers of motion between the trees, and not in the direction the bolts had come from. At least five attackers then!

  Under the canopy the light was so poor that it would leave most blundering, but pushed into darkness as she was Kettle had no problem seeing. She scurried around the bole of the thickest tree on knees and elbows, a throwing star in each hand.

  They came fast, silent, knives in both hands, weaving between the pines with hunska-speed. Kettle was faster. She rose, launching herself to her feet from her knees, spinning
both her stars towards the nearest two attackers, waiting for them to get almost close enough for blades. At a separation of three yards and driven with the speed of a hunska full-blood Kettle’s throwing stars allowed no opportunity for evasion. The left one would hit the closest woman somewhere in the neck; the right one would take the other woman in the right eye. Kettle was more accurate with her right arm.

  Kettle fell backward, ripping two of her knives from their hidden sheaths over her upper arms—not her best pair for close work but the easiest to reach. She let herself drop since it was likely to be the last thing her opponents expected. Unseen attacks could be coming her way and the only defence was not to be in the place they expected her to be.

  The first of Kettle’s remaining attackers came at a flat sprint, daggers bared, showing some skill and remarkable night vision by avoiding tripping on any root or briar. Kettle could see the confusion in the man’s eyes as she fell away from him. Her outstretched foot hit his knee. He toppled forward, blades stretched out towards her, the pain from his shattered joint not yet having reached his brain.

  Kettle, her back thumping into the forest floor, extended her knives, points reaching for the falling man. She thrust between his arms, pushing them wider with her elbows so that his daggers drove hilt deep into the soil, missing her shoulders by an inch on each side. Her own blades punched into his neck, grating over each other as they met in his spine.

  Both knives came free with a spray of blood and Kettle rolled aside. She was clear before her victim had dropped half the remaining distance to the ground. She saw the last two attackers closing as she twisted onto her front, facing them. Both were fast, and both had abandoned their crossbows in favour of swords. If they weren’t hunska Kettle could have got to her feet and brought them down with throwing stars, but their speed promised they would hack her to death on her knees if she tried that. Hunskas would very rarely be shadow-weavers, though. They would see little but confusion in the forest gloom. Kettle banked on their blindness and rolled to use the nearest tree as cover.