Red Sister

Copyright

HarperVoyager an imprint of

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperVoyager 2017

Copyright © Mark Lawrence 2017

Cover design © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2018 Cover images: © Tomasz Jedruszek (girl), Shutterstock.com (background images)

Mark Lawrence asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008152291

Ebook Edition © April 2017 ISBN: 9780008152314

Version: 2018-10-26

Dedication

To Celyn, who needs no words for eloquence.

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Author’s Note

Red Class

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Grey Class

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Also by Mark Lawrence

About the Publisher

Author’s Note

Rather than place this background information in an appendix at the back where you might not notice it until you’ve finished the book (I’ve done that before) I’m putting it here at the front. However, it is best to skip it and return only if you find you need it. All the information here is given to you in the text and unfolds naturally with the story.

The people of Abeth descend from four ‘tribes’. These tribes were:

Gerant – distinguished by their great size

Hunska – distinguished by their speed. A dark-haired, dark-eyed people

Marjal – distinguished by their ability to tap into the lesser magics

Quantal – distinguished by their ability to walk the Path and work greater magics

The great families of empire adopt the suffix -sis when the head of the family is named a lord by the emperor. The emperor’s own family are the Lansis. Other families of note include the Tacsis, Jotsis, Memsis, Galamsis, Leensis, Gersis, Rolsis, and Chemsis.

In the Convent of Sweet Mercy novices move through four classes on their way to taking holy orders. A novice must graduate from each class. The classes are named after the four orders of nun:

Red Class – typical novice age 9-12

Grey Class – typical novice age 13-14

Mystic Class – typical novice age 15-16

Holy Class – typical novice age 17-19

On taking holy orders novices become nuns. They follow one of the following paths:

Bride of the Ancestor (Holy Sister) – a nun concerned with honouring the Ancestor and maintaining the faith. The most common calling

Martial Sister (Red Sister) – a nun skilled in armed and unarmed combat, usually showing hunska blood

Sister of Discretion (Grey Sister) – a nun skilled in espionage, stealth, and poisons. Often showing marjal blood and a talent for shadow-work

Mystic Sister (Holy Witch) – a nun able to walk the Path and manipulate threads. Always showing quantal blood

Dramatis Personae

Nuns (in order of superiority)

Glass: Abbess of Sweet Mercy Convent, also known as Shella Yammal

Rose: Sister Superior, Holy Sister, runs the sanatorium

Wheel: Sister Superior, Mistress Spirit, Holy Sister, teaches Spirit classes

Apple: Mistress Shade, Grey Sister, also known as the Poisoner, teaches Shade classes

Pan: Mistress Path, Holy Witch, teaches Path classes

Rule: Mistress Academia, Holy Sister, teaches Academia classes

Tallow: Mistress Blade, Red Sister, teaches Blade classes

Chrysanthemum: Holy Sister, mostly known as Sister Mop

Flint: Red Sister, Grey Class mistress

Kettle: Grey Sister

Oak: Holy Sister, Red Class mistress

Rock: Red Sister

Novices

Alata: junior novice

Arabella Jotsis: junior novice, quantal and hunska blood

Clera Ghomal: junior novice, Nona’s friend, hunska blood

Croy: junior novice

Darla: junior novice, gerant blood

Ghena: junior novice, hunska blood

Hessa: junior novice, Nona’s friend from Giljohn’s cage, quantal blood

Jula: junior novice, Nona’s friend, studious

Kariss: junior novice

Katcha: junior novice

Ketti: junior novice, hunska blood

Leeni: junior novice

Mally: junior novice, Grey Class head-girl

Ruli: Nona’s friend, marjal blood

Sarma: junior novice

Sharlot: junior novice

Sheelar: junior novice

Suleri: senior novice

Others

Emperor Crucical: his palace is in the city of Verity

Sherzal: the emperor’s sister. Her palace is close to the Scithrowl border

Velera: the emperor’s sister. Her palace is on the coast

High Priest Jacob: head of the Church of the Ancestor

Archon Nevis: high-ranking priest

Archon Anasta: high-ranking priestess

Archon Philo: high-ranking priest

Archon Kratton: high-ranking priest

Thuran Tacsis: lord, head of the Tacsis family

Raymel Tacsis: heir to Thuran Tacsis, Caltess ring-fighter, gerant blood

Lano Tacsis: Thuran Tacsis’s second son, hunska blood

Academic Rexxus Degon: senior Academy man

Markus: child from Giljohn’s cage, marjal blood

Saida: child from Giljohn’s cage, gerant blood

Willum: child from Giljohn’s cage, marjal blood

Chara: child from Giljohn’s cage, marjal blood

Partnis Reeve: owner of the Caltess fight-hall

Gretcha: Caltess ring-fighter, gerant blood

Maya: Caltess apprentice, gerant blood

Regol: Caltess trainee, hunska blood

Denam: Caltess trainee, gerant blood

Tarkax: known as ‘the Ice-Spear’, renowned warrior from the ice-tribes

Yisht: warrior from the ice tribes, serves Sherzal

Zole: girl from the ice tribes, Sherzal’s ward

Irvone Galamsis: high court judge

Sister Owl: legendary Red Sister (dead)

Sister Cloud: legendary Red Sister (dead)

Safira: former senior novice, works for Sherzal

Malkin: Abbess Glass’s cat

Argus: prison guard at Harriton

Dava: prison guard at Harriton

John Fallon: prison guard at Harriton

Herber: graveman

Jame Lender: prisoner executed at Harriton

Red Class

Prologue

It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient size. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy Convent Lano Tacsis brought two hundred men.

From the front of the convent you can see both the northern ice and the southern, but the finer view is out across the plateau and over the narrow lands. On a clear day the coast may be glimpsed, the Sea of Marn a suggestion in blue.

At some point in an achingly long history a people, now lost to knowledge, had built one thousand and twenty-four pillars out on the plateau: Corinthian giants thicker than a thousand-year oak, taller than a long-pine. A forest of stone without order or pattern, covering the level ground from flank to flank so that no spot upon it lay more than twenty yards from a pillar. Sister Thorn waited amid this forest, alone and seeking her centre.

Lano’s men began to spread out between the columns. Thorn could neither see nor hear her foe approach, but she knew their disposition. She had watched earlier as they snaked up the west trail from Styx Valley, three and four abreast: Pelarthi mercenaries from the ice-margins, furs of the white bear and the snow-wolf over their leathers, some with scraps of chainmail about them, ancient and dark or bright as new, depending on their luck. Many carried spears, some swords; one man in five carried a short-bow of recurved horn. Tall men in the main, fair-haired, their beards short or plaited, the women with lines of blue paint across their cheeks and foreheads like the rays of a cold sun.

Here’s a moment.

All the world and more has rushed eternity’s length to reach this beat of your heart, screaming down the years. And if you let it, the universe, without drawing breath, will press itself through this fractured second and race to the next, on into a new eternity. Everything that is, the echoes of everything that ever was, the roots of all that will ever be, must pass through this moment that you own. Your only task is to give it pause – to make it notice.

Thorn stood without motion, for only when you are truly still can you be the centre. She stood without sound, for only silent can you listen. She stood without fear, for only the fearless can understand their peril.

Hers the stillness of the forest, rooted restlessness, oak-slow, pine-quick, a seething patience. Hers the stillness of ice walls that face the sea, clear and deep, blue secrets held cold against the truth of the world, a patience of aeons stacked against a sudden fall. Hers the stillness of a sorrow-born babe unmoving in its crib. And of the mother, frozen in her discovery, fleeting and forever.

Thorn held a silence that had grown old before first she saw the world’s light. A quietude passed down generations, the peace that bids us watch the dawn, an unspoken alliance with wave and flame that lets both take all speech from tongues and sets us standing before the water’s surge and swell, or waiting to bear witness to fire’s consuming dance of joy. Hers the silence of rejection, of a child’s hurt: mute, unknowing, a scar upon the years to come. Hers the unvoiced everything of first love, tongue-tied, ineloquent, the refusal to sully so sharp and golden a feeling with anything as blunt as words.

Thorn waited. Fearless as flowers, bright, fragile, open to the sky. Brave as only those who’ve already lost can be.

Voices reached her, the Pelarthi calling out to each other as they lost sight of their numbers in the broken spaces of the plateau. Cries rang across the level ground, echoing from the pillars, flashes of torchlight, a multitude of footfalls, growing closer. Thorn rolled her shoulders beneath black skin armour. She tightened the fingers of each hand around the sharp weight of a throwing star, her breathing calm, heart racing.

‘In this place the dead watch me,’ she breathed. A shout broke out close at hand, figures glimpsed between two pillars, flitting across the gap. Many figures. ‘I am a weapon in service to the Ark. Those who come against me will know despair.’ Her voice rose along with the tension that always presaged a fight, a buzzing tingle across her cheekbones, a tightness in her throat, a sense of being both deep within her own body, and above and around it at the same time.

The first of the Pelarthi jogged into view, and seeing her, stumbled to a halt. A young man, beardless though hard-eyed beneath the iron of his helm. More crowded in behind him, spilling out into the killing ground.

The Red Sister tilted her head to acknowledge them.

Then it began.

1

No child truly believes they will be hanged. Even on the gallows platform with the rope scratching at their wrists and the shadow of the noose upon their face they know that someone will step forward, a mother, a father returned from some long absence, a king dispensing justice … someone. Few children have lived long enough to understand the world into which they were born. Perhaps few adults have either, but they at least have learned some bitter lessons.

Saida climbed the scaffold steps as she had climbed the wooden rungs to the Caltess attic so many times. They all slept there together, the youngest workers, bedding down among the sacks and dust and spiders. They would all climb those rungs tonight and whisper about her in the darkness. Tomorrow night the whispers would be spent and a new boy or girl would fill the empty space she left beneath the eaves.

‘I didn’t do anything.’ Saida said it without hope, her tears dry now. The wind sliced cold from the west, a Corridor wind, and the sun burned red, filling half the sky yet offering little heat. Her last day?

The guard prodded her on, indifferent rather than unkind. She looked back at him, tall, old, flesh tight as if the wind had worn it down to the bone. Another step, the noose dangling, dark against the sun. The prison yard lay near-deserted, a handful watching from the black shadows where the outer wall offered shelter, old women, grey hair trailing. Saida wondered what drew them. Perhaps being so old they worried about dying and wanted to see how it was done.

‘I didn’t do it. It was Nona. She even said so.’ She had spoken the words so many times that meaning had leached away leaving them just pale noise. But it was true. All of it. Even Nona said so.

The hangman offered Saida the thinnest of smiles and bent to check the rope confining her wrists. It itched and it was too tight, her arm hurt where Raymel had cracked it, but Saida said nothing, only scanned the yard, the doors to the cell blocks, the outer buildings, even the great gates to the world outside. Someone would come.

A door clanged open from the Pivot, a squat tower where the warden was said to live in luxury to rival any lord’s. A guardsman emerged, squinting against the sun. Just a guardsman: the hope, that had leapt so easily in Saida’s breast, crashed once more.

Stepping from behind the guardsman a smaller, wider figure. Saida looked again, hoping again. A woman in the long habit of a nun came walking into the yard. Only the staff in her hand, its end curled and golden, marked her office.

The hangman glanced across, his narrow smile replaced by a broad frown. ‘The abbess …’

‘I ain’t seen her down here before.’ The old guardsman tightened his fingers on Saida’s shoulder.

Saida opened her mouth but found it too dry for her thoughts. The abbess had come for her. Come to take her to the Ancestor’s convent. Come to give her a new name and a new place. Saida wasn’t even surprised. She had never truly thought she would be hanged.

2

The stench of a prison is an honest one. The guards’ euphemisms, the public smile of the chief warden, even the building’s façade, may lie and lie again, but the stink is the unvarnished truth: sewage and rot, infection and despair. Even so, Harriton prison smelled sweeter than many. A hanging prison like Harriton doesn’t give its inmates the chance to rot. A brief stay, a long drop on a short rope, and they could feed the worms at their leisure in a convict ditch-grave up at the paupers’ cemetery in Winscon.

The smell bothered Argus when he first joined the guard. They say that after a while your mind steps around any smell without noticing. It’s true, but it’s also true of pretty much every other bad thing in life. After ten years Argus’s mind stepped around the business of stretching people’s necks just as easily as it had acclimatized to Harriton’s stink.

‘When you leaving?’ Dava’s obsession with everyone else’s schedule used to annoy Argus, but now he just answered without thought or memory. ‘Seventh bell.’

‘Seventh!’ The little woman rattled out her usual outrage at the inequities of the work rota. They ambled towards the main holding block, the private scaffold at their back. Behind them Jame Lender dangled out of sight beneath the trapdoor, still twitching. Jame was the graveman’s problem now. Old Man Herber would be along soon enough with his cart and donkey for the day’s take. The short distance to Winscon Hill might prove a long trip for Old Herber, his five passengers, and the donkey, near as geriatric as its master. The fact that Jame had no meat on him to speak of would lighten the load. That, and the fact two of the other four were small girls.

Herber would wind his way through the Cutter Streets and up to the Academy first, selling off whatever body parts might have a value today. What he added to the grave-ditch up on the Hill would likely be much diminished – a collection of wet ruins if the day’s business had been good.

‘… sixth bell yesterday, fifth the day before.’ Dava paused the rant that had sustained her for years, an enduring sense of injustice that gave her the backbone to handle condemned men twice her size.

‘Who’s that?’ A tall figure was knocking at the door to the new arrivals’ block with a heavy cane.

‘Fellow from the Caltess? You know.’ Dava snapped her fingers before her face as if trying to surprise the answer out. ‘Runs fighters.’

‘Partnis Reeve!’ Argus called the name as he remembered it and the big man turned. ‘Been a while.’

Partnis visited the day-gaol often enough to get his fighters out of trouble. You don’t run a stable of angry and violent men without them breaking a few faces off the payroll from time to time, but generally they didn’t end up at Harriton. Professional fighters usually keep a calm enough head to stop short of killing during their bar fights. It’s the amateurs who lose their minds and keep stamping on a fallen opponent until there’s nothing left but mush.

‘My friend!’ Partnis turned with arms wide, a broad smile, and no attempt at Argus’s name. ‘I’m here for my girl.’

‘Your girl?’ Argus frowned. ‘Didn’t know you were a family man.’

‘Indentured. A worker.’ Partnis waved the matter aside. ‘Open the door, will you, good fellow. She’s down to drop today and I’m late enough as it is.’ He frowned, as if remembering some sequence of irritating delays.

Argus lifted the key from his pocket, a heavy piece of ironwork. ‘Probably missed her already, Partnis. Sun’s a-setting. Old Herber and his cart will be creaking down the alleys, ready for his take.’

‘Both of them creaking, eh? Herber and his cart,’ Dava put in. Always quick with a joke, never funny.

‘I sent a runner,’ Partnis said, ‘with instructions that the Caltess girls shouldn’t be dropped before—’

‘Instructions?’ Argus paused, key in the lock.

‘Suggestions, then. Suggestions wrapped around a silver coin.’

‘Ah.’ Argus turned the key and led him inside. He took his visitor by the quickest route, through the guard station, along the short corridor where the day’s arrivals watched from the narrow windows in their cell doors, and out into the courtyard where the public scaffold sat below the warden’s window.

The main gates had already opened, ready to admit the graveman’s cart. A small figure waited close to the scaffold steps, a single guardsman beside her, John Fallon by the look of it.

‘Just in time!’ Argus said.

‘Good.’ Partnis started forward, then faltered. ‘Isn’t that …’ he trailed off, lips curling into a snarl of frustration.

Following the tall man’s gaze, Argus spotted the source of his distress. The Abbess of Sweet Mercy came striding through the small crowd of onlookers before the warden’s steps. At this distance she could be anyone’s mother, a shortish, plumpish figure swathed in black cloth, but her crozier announced her.

‘Dear heavens, that awful old witch has come to steal from me yet again.’ Partnis both lengthened and quickened his stride, forcing Argus into an undignified jog to keep pace. Dava, on the man’s other side, had to run.

Despite Partnis’s haste, he beat the abbess to the girl by only a fraction. ‘Where’s the other one?’ He looked around as if the guardsman might be hiding another prisoner behind him.

‘Other what?’ John Fallon’s gaze flickered past Partnis to the advancing nun, her habit swirling as she marched.

‘Girl! There were two. I gave orders to— I sent a request that they be held back.’

‘Over with the dropped.’ Fallon tilted his head towards a mound beside the main gates, several feet high. Stones pinned a stained, grey sheet across the heap. The graveman’s cart came into view as they watched.

‘Damnation!’ The word burst from Partnis loud enough to turn heads all across the yard. He raised both hands, fingers spread, then trembling with effort, lowered them to his sides. ‘I wanted them both.’

‘Have to argue with the graveman over the big one,’ Fallon observed. ‘This’un.’ He reached for the girl at his side. ‘You’ll have to argue with me over. Then those two.’ He nodded at Dava and Argus. ‘Then the warden.’

‘There’ll be no arguing.’ The abbess stepped between Fallon and Partnis, dwarfed by both, her crozier reaching up to break their eye contact. ‘I shall be taking the child.’

‘No you won’t!’ Partnis looked down at her, brow furrowed. ‘All due respect to the Ancestor and all that, but she’s mine, bought and paid for.’ He glanced back at the gates where Herber had now halted his cart beside the covered mound. ‘Besides … how do you know she’s the one you want?’

The abbess snorted and favoured Partnis with a motherly smile. ‘Of course she is. You can tell by looking at her, Partnis Reeve. This child has the fire in her eyes.’ She frowned. ‘I saw the other. Scared. Lost. She should never have been here.’