Holy Sister Page 3

  “And how,” Lord Jotsis asked, “can we make her think we haven’t taken the shipheart with us?”

  Abbess Glass turned to stare at the darkness of the slopes rising above them. “By making them think it has gone south, towards the ice.”

  “How can we make them think it’s been sent south?” Lord Glosis asked, leaning on the arm of a young relative.

  “By actually sending it south, to the ice,” the abbess said. “Zole will take it and let them see the glow upon the slopes.”

  “But that’s madness.” Lord Jotsis drew himself to his full height. “You can’t entrust a treasure like that to a lone novice!”

  “I can when it’s the lone novice who somehow stole that treasure from the heart of the Noi-Guin’s stronghold in the first place,” Abbess Glass replied.

  “She won’t be alone.” Nona limped forward.

  Ara hobbled to stand beside Nona. Kettle put her hands on their shoulders. “In our state we’re going to be slowing the abbess down on the road. None of us will be any use to Zole trying to outdistance soldiers across the mountains.”

  Kettle was right. Nona gritted her teeth against the pain in her thigh and refused to let the admission out.

  The abbess advanced on them, wind-swept grey hair straggled across her face. “The Noi-Guin’s shipheart is a marjal one. It’s said that in the hands of a marjal healer it can mend any wound but that it can also bring harm.”

  “Well, I don’t want to go near it.” Nona shuddered. She knew what harm the shipheart could bring. It had even squeezed a devil out of Zole, the most tightly bound person she had ever met. “And we don’t have a marjal healer.”

  “We have Zole,” the abbess said, and raising her voice she called to the ice-triber. “Zole, time to show us what Sister Rose has been teaching you.”

  * * *

  • • •

  ZOLE BECKONED THEM rather than approach and bring with her the awful pressure of the shipheart’s presence. Nona took a few uncertain steps towards the girl, Ara behind her, then Kettle, all of them limping, the novice because of the arrow wound in her calf, the nun because of a knife wound in her thigh.

  “We shouldn’t be doing this, abbess.” Nona looked back. “The Sweet Mercy shipheart did terrible things to Yisht.”

  “And yet Zole is untouched.” The abbess and the others were black shapes now, with just edges picked out here and there by the deep purple light of the shipheart.

  But Zole was not untouched . . .

  “Find your serenity.” Zole’s voice resonated through the night. “Serenity will preserve you.”

  Nona didn’t feel serene. She felt scared and in pain, but she reached for her trance, running the lines of the old song through her head, imagining the slow descent of the moon and the children of her village chanting in a circle around the fire. And with the moon’s fall a blanket of serenity settled upon her, setting the world apart, her pain not gone but no longer personal, more a curio, an object for study.

  Zole held the shipheart out towards them, a sphere the size of a child’s head, resting on both palms, dark purple, almost black, but somehow glowing with a violet light that seemed to shade beyond vision. Nona advanced. She felt the pressure of the thing, as if she had fallen into deep water. She had plunged into the black depths of the Glasswater sinkhole before, and this was no less terrifying. The need to breathe built in her and threatened her serenity, before, with a gasp, she remembered that there was no reason not to draw breath.

  With just a yard between them Nona’s skin began to prickle and then burn, as if the devils were there already just waiting for their true colours to be made known. Nona had shared her skin with a devil before, Keot, not one of her own making but one that had infected her when she killed Raymel Tacsis. The rocks around the man’s corpse had been stained black beneath the crimson.

  “Hold to yourself.” Zole closed the remaining distance that Nona’s feet proved unwilling to cross. Zole had seen Nona’s old devil and kept the secret. Zole said they called them klaulathu on the ice. Things of the Missing.

  Without preamble, Zole pressed the heart’s orb to the wound above Nona’s knee. Nona had expected her flesh to sizzle, the blood in her veins to boil like the water in Sweet Mercy’s pipes, but instead icy fingers wrapped around her bones and a black-violet light stole her vision. For a moment she saw strange spires silhouetted against an indigo sky, swept away in the next beat of her heart as if by a great wind. The Path opened before her, not the narrow and treacherous line that had to be hunted, but broad, blazing, so wide that its direction became uncertain, a place one might wander, drunk on power until the end of days. Voices began to sound within Nona’s head, all of them hers but speaking from different places, some raging, some jealous, some whispering secret fears or wants, a babble at first but each taking on a separate identity, becoming clearer, more distinct.

  “Done.” Zole pushed Nona back, the base of her palm against Nona’s sternum.

  Nona staggered and Ara kept her from falling with help from Kettle. The heart-light caught their faces, making something alien of them both.

  “Are you all right?” Kettle asked.

  “I . . .” Nona stood straight, stamped her leg. It still ached but the flesh had been made whole, a white line of scar tissue marking the passage of Yisht’s blade. “Yes.” The voices that had filled her mind became jumbled together once more, fading back into the shadows.

  “Go on.” Kettle sent Nona back towards the abbess and the rest of the group, giving her shoulder a small shove to get her going.

  By the time Nona reached the ruins of the wagon that they had escaped the palace in she was calm again, her serenity intact.

  “How do you feel?” The abbess watched Nona’s eyes with an uncomfortable intensity.

  “I don’t know,” Nona said. “Tired. But full of energy. If that makes sense.” She looked back down at her leg, the scar visible through the tattered smock. The cold no longer touched her. “I don’t know how Zole can stand it.” Part of her wanted to tell the abbess about the devil she had seen at Zole’s wrist when she first arrived with the shipheart. She bit down on the impulse. She had lived with Keot for years and Zole hadn’t informed on her. Zole would have to deal with her own demons. The abbess probably couldn’t help in any case. And the inquisitors with her would want to burn the devil out of Zole.

  Abbess Glass took Nona’s hand and led her back to the main group. “You’re mended? You can walk the distance now?”

  “I could run it!” Ara caught them up, her hair rising around her head as if backcombed, a blond confusion defying the wind. She had a wild look in her eye. Nona met her gaze and a grin broke across both their faces, a shared understanding, and something more complex that perhaps neither understood. Nona wanted to run with her, to chase her. Wanted her friend.

  The three of them turned to see Kettle silhouetted against the shipheart’s glow, Zole on one knee, applying the heart to the nun’s inner thigh. Kettle broke away with a cry after just a moment’s contact. She came hurrying down the road, not glancing back. She moved quickly, though still with a slight limp.

  “Sister Kettle?” The abbess stepped forward to meet her.

  “Mother . . .” Kettle’s wide eyes sought the abbess as though she were night-blind.

  “Here.” Abbess Glass took the nun’s hands. “You’re safe.”

  Nona raised her brows at the enormity of that lie but said nothing.

  “I can’t go near it again. I can’t.” Kettle shot a glance over her shoulder as if Zole might be approaching with the shipheart even now.

  “It’s all right, sister.” The abbess led them farther away. “I need you to protect us as we journey west. Even if all Sherzal’s forces follow the shipheart towards the ice, the empire roads are no longer a safe place for the vulnerable. And unguarded Sis lords are likely to be a tempting prize
to any bandits we might pass.”

  “But Zole . . .”

  “Zole will have her Shield.”

  3

  HOLY CLASS

  Present Day

  AFTER LEAVING MARKUS at the Caltess, Nona ran to the city gates. She covered the five miles from Verity’s walls to the foot of the Rock of Faith at a near sprint. The burning of her muscles and the hot thrill of her blood battled the night wind’s chill.

  Doubt dogged her footsteps, each mile and each yard. The voices of her suspicion were almost as real, almost as disembodied as Keot’s voice had been when he lived beneath her skin. Will he be true? Can he be trusted? Questions Nona had no answer for, just the feeling in her gut. Clera betrayed you, the voices whispered, and she was a friend.

  “She saved me too.” Panted out between breaths as Nona picked up her pace, trying to outrun her doubts.

  Nona shook her head, sweat flying in the wind. She was to be a nun. She would choose from the disciplines offered to her. Just a handful of final tests stood between her and the vows. She was to stand her life upon a foundation of faith. Faith that the branches of the Ancestor’s tree would hold her, and that those branches would carry all of humanity into a future less dark than they feared. If a nun could not have faith, then who could? The bonds of friendship had always borne her more firmly than those of blood. Markus had ridden with her in the cage and that bond would suffice. She had faith that it would. Also she had a backup plan. With a gasp of effort she ran faster still, until any that she might have passed on the road that night would have stood amazed and watched her fly.

  At last she came to a halt, breathing heavily. The base of a great limestone cliff rose above her. From its heights the southern windows of Blade Hall offered a view of the city and, twenty miles beyond, the ice glimmering red beneath the moon. Those walls were closer now than they had been when Abbess Glass had first brought Nona to the convent. North and south the ice squeezed and all the nations of the Corridor bled.

  The start of the Seren Way lay close at hand, just a few minutes’ walk around the Rock, but Wheel had taken to watching it of late. The old woman spent whole nights seated at the narrowest part, wrapped in a great blanket and staring at the night with watery eyes, just waiting to catch any errant novice. Why she didn’t just check the dormitories was unclear, but Ruli claimed Wheel had been made to vow never to enter the building under the tenure of the previous abbess following an unspecified “incident.” Ruli claimed a novice had been killed, but when pressed she had to admit making that part up.

  Nona craned her neck and looked up at the dark acreage of stone. Here and there moonlight picked out a line where it caught upon an edge of rock. She took a deep breath, swung her arms, and began to climb. She followed an old fault-line, digging her leather-clad toes into the crack, reaching up for fingerholds. Her flaw-blades would make a quicker, easier job of it but Nona had learned the danger in relying too much on something that might not always be there. Besides, the pattern of regular slots driven into the rock might be spotted one day, and it would be hard to deny her own signature.

  As she gained height Nona’s arms began to join her legs in complaint. Her hands ached from punching Denam over and over. The thought of him falling gave her fresh energy, though. She had wanted to fight him for years. She could say it was to take him down a peg or three, punishment for being a bully, or that it was payment for his attempt to break her in the ring on the instructions of Raymel Tacsis. The truth though was something less laudable, and came in two parts, both now settling into her mind as truths often do when a head is empty of all things save the demands of hard labour.

  Nona had fought Denam because even with Keot gone a hunger for violence burned in her and if left unfed too long it would break out in dangerous ways. Much of what she had blamed on Raymel’s devil seemed instead to be some fundamental part of who she had grown into. Denam represented that rare someone, a person she could hit over and over without the danger of killing them, or any need for remorse over pain inflicted.

  The other reasons for the contest had been Markus and Regol. She had asked Markus to break holy law. She owed it to him to show him who he was breaking those laws for. And Regol . . . Regol needed to see it too. Regol who spoke foolishness into the pillows when she joined him beneath the roof that Partnis Reeves put over his head. Regol who thought her something precious, as holy as the vows she broke. He needed to see what really lay behind the eyes he claimed to lose himself in. Something sharp-angled and vicious—not the princess he sometimes let himself pretend she was. Nona knew better than to allow him to build his hopes upon a lie. Regol fulfilled a need, as Denam had: one in the ring, one in the furs. She and Regol were friends whose bodies were pleasing to each other. She couldn’t let a friend build their hopes upon such a flawed foundation as her. She hadn’t saved Saida, or Hessa, or Darla. Even as an agent of vengeance she had failed. Sherzal, the architect behind so many deaths, still walked the world, as did others who had served her will.

  Nona hauled herself over the edge of the cliff and lay on her back on the cold stone, just inches from the fall. Her arms trembled, her body knew the bone-deep exhaustion of prolonged mistreatment, but her mind still raced, images rising from the darkness, one after the next. Denam’s anger, Regol’s surprise, Markus’s caution, a hundred other scenes, drawn by threads of memory.

  In time she rolled onto her side and levered herself up. She passed around the far end of Blade Hall, slipping along the perimeter of the courtyard before Heart Hall. Moving between moonshadows she skirted the buildings, placing each foot with the caution of one born to the Grey.

  “Novice Nona.” A soft voice at her shoulder. “You smell of man-sweat.”

  Nona turned, unable to see anyone in the darkness behind her. “And you smell of apples, sister. One red Apple, to be more precise.”

  “Then our sins are evenly matched.” The shadows melted from Sister Kettle and she stepped forward with a half-smile.

  “Perhaps.” Nona grinned. “But I earned mine in front of an audience—”

  “Well, that’s novel.” Kettle widened both eyes and her smile.

  “In a ring at the Caltess.”

  “No Regol tonight?” Kettle frowned.

  “That’s a habit I should discard,” Nona said. “This one, I should keep on.” She patted her garment. “I’ll be taking a nun’s vows soon. If they don’t mean more to me than the promises novices make, then I shouldn’t say them.”

  “There are other ways to serve.” Kettle pursed her lips. “You don’t have to stay. Nor do you have to be perfect. But . . . you do have to go to bed.” She pointed.

  Nona nodded. “Bed sounds good. A bath would be good too. But I would probably fall asleep and drown.” She shrugged and turned to go.

  “Watch out for Joeli.” Hissed at her back.

  * * *

  • • •

  NONA APPROACHED THE dormitories. She examined the main door before opening it and entering the hall beyond. A sleepy novice emerged from the Red dorm, lantern in hand, and passed her without looking up, bound for the Necessary. Nona moved on, climbing the stairs to the Holy floor at the top of the building.

  She studied the door to her dorm more closely than she had the main one. Defocusing her sight, she picked out a glowing thread laid across the floor just in front of the door, another looping the handle, both veering off at strange angles to the world. They were trip-threads most likely, set to warn Joeli of her comings and goings, but there could be more to them. Some threads could cut you; others could just make it hurt as much as if they had cut you; others could wreak more complex damage, or adhere and trail out behind you, providing information to anyone holding them closer to where they joined the Path. How many of those tricks Joeli had mastered, Nona couldn’t say, except that she had definitely used both trip-threads and pain-threads in the past. Nona’s own talents still lagged b
ehind, but not so far as they once had.

  Nona removed the threads, pushing them temporarily out of alignment with the world. They would return shortly and appear untouched. She saw the third thread just as she reached for the door handle, gossamer thin, turning virulent green as she brought it into focus. Something new and unfriendly. Fortunately it too gave way when she worked to remove it from her path, though it scalded her fingertips before it vanished.

  A moment later Nona entered the dorm. Almost half the top floor was given over to individual study rooms. The Holy Class novices slept in a long hall not much bigger than the one given over to the novices in Red Class. The girls were not yet trusted with the privacy of a nun’s cell, but the class code was to overlook each other’s indiscretions, and Wheel would undoubtedly have apoplexy were she to watch a typical evening unfold.

  Nona moved silently down the row of beds, her eyes returning several times to the long curves beneath Joeli’s blankets. The abbess had been forced to accept the girl’s return a year earlier as part of the emperor’s efforts at reconciliation and unity after the events at Sherzal’s palace. Lord Namsis had secured his daughter’s re-entry by having her submit to the Inquisition. The interrogator had been armed with one of Sister Apple’s bitter little truth pills. To the astonishment of everyone who knew her Joeli had affirmed her innocence with a black tongue. She had used her thread-work against Darla and Regol only with the intention of scaring them into retreat, hoping to end the bloodshed that way.

  Nona slipped into her bed, still watching Joeli in the dim glow of the night-lantern. Her own thought was that Lord Namsis had paid an Academy man, a quantal thread-worker, to undertake the delicate task of altering Joeli’s memories. The girl now believed her own story and hadn’t lied, even though what she said was not true.

  In the warmth of her blankets Nona released the breath she had been holding and surrendered to exhaustion. The next day would be a long one. Not only would she undergo her final Blade-test, she needed to steal the convent’s seal of office from the abbess. Neither task would be easy.