Something caught Kettle’s eye. Something Nona had missed. Kettle pressed herself to the church wall, pulling darkness to herself as if drawing a breath. The night entered her as ink soaks into blotting paper. There, out across the graveyard, a pale, questing tentacle, almost flat to the ground, insubstantial as mist. Another, yards long, snaking out between the graves. A pain spider, some creature of the softmen in service to the Scithrowl Battle-Queen Adoma. Rumour had it that they bred such monstrosities, releasing demons from the black ice into unholy alliance with flesh.
More tentacles insinuated themselves across the barren ground, one thin as leather and broad as a hand sliding noiselessly over the top of the church wall just yards from Kettle’s head. Even at that distance her skin sang with echoes of the agony its touch would bring.
Nona woke sweat-soaked and alone, her body hunched, arms tight around her. She lay in the darkness of the Holy Class dormitory trying to still a racing heart. Kettle had kicked her out, requiring her whole concentration.
Sleep did not return that night. They were coming to the sharp end of things. The peace of the convent, seemingly eternal, would not last. Idle days, bickering among friends, the rivalries of children, all of it was passing into memory. A black tide was coming from the east and all the empire hadn’t the strength to stand before it.
‘We don’t even know the book exists. It’s not as if the high priest posts a list of forbidden books on his door.’ Ara stood with Jula and Nona in the lee of the Dome of the Ancestor, watching Path Tower, a dark finger of stone.
‘The Inquisition burned my History of Saint Devid,’ Nona said.
‘It wasn’t yours, and Kettle shouldn’t have allowed it in the scriptorium library,’ Jula said primly. ‘And that was a banned book, not a forbidden one. Banned books are burned, forbidden ones are just … forbidden.’
‘So how come Sister Pan has one, if it even exists?’ Ara asked.
‘We know it exists because there are references to it that they forgot to remove from other books by Aquinas. And we know that Sister Pan has a copy because she quotes from it when talking about the lost cities.’
‘You haven’t read it! How do you know she’s quoting from it?’ Ara rolled her eyes.
‘Aquinas has a very distinctive prose style.’ Jula folded her arms.
‘That’s it? We’re breaking into Sister Pan’s secret room based on distinctive prose style?’ Ara asked.
‘How do you know she hasn’t memorized the quotes?’ Nona demanded.
‘She still calls you Nina sometimes.’ Jula grinned.
‘Fair point.’ Nona nodded slowly. ‘So I just have to get into the Third Room …’
‘Or I do,’ Ara said.
‘Do you know how?’ Nona asked.
‘No, but you don’t either.’
Nona started towards the tower. ‘We’ll both try, then.’
Nona narrowed her eyes at Path Tower, black against the wash of the sky. Sister Rule taught that it was the oldest building on the Rock of Faith, predating the convent by centuries. Given that all save the top and bottommost rooms lacked doors or windows, Nona supposed it had been built for a powerful Path-mage though no records remained to name the first occupant. She approached the east entrance, apprehension rising. It wasn’t as if they were about to attempt the impossible. Every novice with ambitions to be a Mystic Sister had to enter the Third Room unaided. It was part of the Path-test. Maybe all of it. Nona would choose the red habit, not the sky colours of the Mystics, but she wanted to pass the Path-test even so.
Ruli followed Nona in through the east door, Ara entered by the north. They met at the bottom of the stairs in the room of portraits. Two dozen or more Mystic Sisters regarded them from wooden frames. Each woman was pictured amid abstract representations of their magic, the variety remarkable. Nona’s favourite was a young red-headed Holy Witch whose hair became flames. When you looked closer at her you could see that in the darkness of each pupil a tiny star burned crimson.
‘We know two things,’ Nona said as Ara joined them.
‘What?’
‘Firstly it’s all about Path. Otherwise Joeli would have cracked it months ago.’ Ara and Nona had been waiting an age for the individual training Sister Pan gave candidates for the Path-test. The old woman liked to instruct one novice at a time and whatever lessons she had been trying to teach hadn’t been getting through Joeli’s skull. ‘Joeli Namsis couldn’t take two steps on the Path if you threw her at it.’
‘True …’ Ara nodded.
‘And secondly we know that it must be different for each person, otherwise Pan would just have trained the three of us together.’
Ara began to climb the stairs, Jula and Nona on her heels. They went up in silence, stopping just below the classroom.
‘Should we really be doing this?’ Jula asked for the tenth time that morning.
‘No,’ said Ara.
‘We’re not doing this. At least you aren’t, Jula. And it was your idea! Forget whether we should be doing it. Will the book get us into the high priest’s library? Will the library have Aquinas’s Book of the Moon? And will the moon save the empire?’ Nona watched the girl’s face, pale in the daylight that filtered down from the trapdoor to the classroom.
‘The moon’s the only hope,’ Jula said, her voice small.
Nona nodded. Jula had real faith in Aquinas and his book. Kettle had shown Nona the conflict’s horrors through their thread-bond. The empire was losing on both fronts. It would not be long before those horrors arrived at Verity’s walls, and if the emperor fell then the empire was lost, the Ark taken. Kettle had said the end would come in months rather than years. The Grey Sister scouted for the emperor’s armies both east and west. Adoma’s hordes seemed to be endlessly replaced, ready to spend their lives for the Battle-Queen, and she ready to spend them. Sherzal had all but filled the Grand Pass with Scithrowl corpses and still they had flooded over the Grampains.
The ferocity of Sherzal’s defence and the cleverness of her stepped retreat had been what forced the emperor to overlook reports of her planned treason. Sherzal had organized and directed the ongoing attacks in the mountains to continually disrupt Adoma’s supply lines. That and a scorched earth withdrawal had slowed Adoma’s advance from a charge that would have reached Verity in weeks to a crawl that had taken almost two years to get just over half way, but like with thin ice, a slow creaking could become a sudden plunge into freezing death, and the empire’s defence had started to fracture weeks ago. Emperor Crucical needed his sister.
The Durns to the west were a different breed, not fanatics these, and given to quarrelling among themselves, but blood-hungry and backed by the magics of their priests. They had crossed the Marn Sea in their barges, coming in force once news of the Scithrowl victories reached them. Their holy men came to war wielding sick-wood staves and wreaking havoc with both marjal fire-work and water-work. Nona had seen too many towns aflame, too many families strewn across the fields from which they tried to feed themselves.
The emperor kept the Red and the Grey close, and the Mystics as a last reserve, but soon he would unleash them all. Whether that would turn the tide of war, push the Scithrowl back beyond the mountains, drown the Durns in a red sea, Nona didn’t know. She only knew that in the land left behind such a conflict the dead would outnumber the living.
Sister Pan always led the way when she took novices to the sealed rooms. She had taken Nona and Ara to the first two rooms. The third they knew to exist only because the tower held space for it and because every novice knew that the Path-test required you to reach the Third Room unaided. Nona turned and walked down the spiral stair, squeezing past Ara and Jula. She defocused her vision as she always did when she followed Sister Pan to the sealed rooms. Normally that gaze would be fixed between the ancient’s shoulder blades. She focused her thoughts on the Third Room, the place where it should lie, the shape of it, the wall where a door would likely be set.
Nona was so deep in her search it was a shock to find someone on the stairs blocking her way as she followed the spiral down. ‘Abbess …’ The abbess rarely came to Path Tower.
‘Where’s Pan?’ the abbess snapped, eyeing the girl before her with evident distaste.
‘Mistress Path is in the scriptorium, Abbess.’ Nona met the hostility of the old woman’s stare.
‘Hmmph.’ The abbess turned away, evidently unable to find fault with Nona’s reply, her bad temper further inflamed by this failure. She glanced over her shoulder, new suspicion in her pale eyes. ‘What are you doing here, girl? Stealing?’
‘No, abbess.’ Nona had stolen from the abbess that morning, and she would be stealing from Path Tower this afternoon with any luck. But right now she wasn’t stealing.
‘Praying, in the dome, that’s where you should be.’ Shaking her head, the abbess stamped off back down the stairs, thumping her crozier on every step.
Ara came into view behind Nona, smoothing her palms over the stonework. ‘Was that Abbess Wheel?’
‘Yes.’ Nona returned to her own search.
‘Ancestor’s blood!’ From behind Ara. As close as Jula got to an oath. ‘We really shouldn’t be doing this.’
Nona searched more quickly than her friends, leaving them behind her. About halfway down her vision shook for a moment. After that, nothing. Not even a tingle. She returned to the spot and studied it with thread-sight. Nothing. She visualized the Path and tried to see past it into the wall. Nothing. She placed both hands upon the stone and exerted her will, pressing as hard as she could. ‘Open, damn you!’ At the same time she set one foot upon the glowing glory of Path, the river of power that joins and defines all things. Nona felt something give, a lurch within her as if she had fallen through thin ice. The cry of victory died on her lips though. She was still standing on the stairs, her hands against the cold stone. Feeling foolish, she reached for her serenity and tried again. Nothing, not even a twinge. She wiped her palms on her habit and continued down the stairs, calling on her clarity trance to reveal any faint trace that might indicate a place to exert her magics.
One of the others stumbled behind her. ‘Keep it quiet,’ Nona hissed without looking back. ‘Abbess Wheel might still be lurking downstairs.’
Nona reached the bottom step without finding any further hint of an entrance. The abbess seemed to have decided against waiting for Pan and to have taken her leave of the tower. Nona sighed and turned to climb the steps again. Something caught her eye. A new portrait hanging amid the others. Just to the right of the door that the abbess must have left by. She walked across to the painting, marvelling that she had never seen it before. It seemed impossible that she had simply missed it in the past given that she had visited the tower almost every day for the best part of a decade. Perhaps Sister Pan had hung it recently. There was something familiar about the woman, her face pinched but friendly, high cheekbones, blue eyes. She had pale hair, curling close to her skull but with wisp after wisp trailing off into the air to create a faint haze of threads that filled the space all around her.
Nona cocked her head. The nun looked thirty at least. And yet …
‘Hessa?’ Nona’s eyes blurred with tears. ‘How—’ She bowed her head, wiping at her face. Hessa had died as a child and Nona had missed her friend every day since. Her death at Yisht’s hands had taught Nona many of the bitter lessons that stand as milestones along the road between girl and woman. Her own fallibility wasn’t the least of those lessons. How many times had a friend died because she lacked what had been necessary to save them? How often had her own faults tripped her up? Her pride, her anger … Losing Hessa taught her the hollow lie of vengeance, a conceit to distract oneself with, an addiction that offered no cure.
‘I miss you.’ But as she looked up again the world lurched, a new layer of ice breaking, and somehow the room was a different room and she was on her knees beside a bed.
‘Nona?’ Abbess Glass lay in the bed, grey-faced, the comfortable weight wasted from her, leaving skin on bones. ‘Don’t cry, child.’
Nona snapped her head up, looking wildly around. The abbess’s bedroom in the big house. This was where she had died. This was how she died. Taken by disease, something that ate her from within and that neither Sister Rose nor Sister Apple could touch with all their pills and potions.
‘I don’t understand …’
‘Meaning is overrated, Nona.’ A cough convulsed the abbess for a moment, rattling in her chest. She had said exactly that, meaning is overrated, Nona remembered it, but not the question she had asked to prompt it. ‘There might not be a meaning to the world, or in it, but that does not mean that what we do has no meaning.’ Glass fell silent and for the longest minute Nona thought she would not speak again. When she did it was weak, faltering. ‘The Ancestor’s tree is something humanity planted and that we have watered with our deeds, our cares, with each act of love, even with our cruelty. Cling to it, Nona. Cling …’ And then she did stop, as Nona remembered, and the gleam had gone from her eyes.
Nona stood, an old sob shuddering through her. Sister Rose had been sleeping in the chair by the window when the abbess died, the sleep that crept in behind too many nights without rest. She had woken at Nona’s sob and sucked in a huge breath of her own. Now though, the chair lay empty and at the door it was Sister Pan who stood, her eyes bright and wet.
The old nun spoke, her voice strangely distant. ‘You’re getting further from the door, Nona.’
‘What?’
Sister Pan turned towards the window. Out beyond the rooftops of the refectory Path Tower rose like the line of darkness offered by a door beginning to open, or almost closed.
Nona frowned, torn between confusion and grief. She knew this for a memory of that awful day but it seemed more real than all those days that had queued between her and it. Glass had been taken by a foe Nona couldn’t stand against and the heart of Sweet Mercy had broken. She had thought when the shipheart was stolen and the convent left cold, its magic gone, that no greater blow could be struck against it. But the abbess had always been the true heart of Sweet Mercy and the emptiness she left behind was more profound than any Nona had known.
‘You’re getting further from the door.’ Sister Pan stood in the doorway but her single hand pointed at Path Tower. And in an instant the tower raced into the distance, becoming tiny, almost lost to sight. The room had gone, Abbess Glass and Sister Pan with it, and instead Nona stood in sunshine gazing out across a formal garden. She staggered, seized by vertigo, but prevented herself from falling.
She took a step forward, focused on a ficus tree in full bloom. The sound of a heavy blow hitting flesh arrested her. A second blow and an agonized cry turned her around.
Standing before the grand colonnade of his mansion High Priest Jacob swung his staff again. The wood thunked into Four-Foot’s side, a dull sound like a hammer hitting meat, and the mule grunted his pain.
‘No!’ The horror of the moment pinned Nona to the spot. Another blow descended and her flaw-blades shimmered into being around both hands. ‘No!’
Nona tensed as the high priest raised his staff, Four-Foot snorting bloody foam about his muzzle. She knew it was memory or dream but it seemed more real than her life, more solid, more important. Losses like Hessa and Abbess Glass, horrors like Four-Foot’s death, were nails struck into her life, pinning those moments to her forever, the punctuation of sorrow. She could no more tear herself from the scene before her than rip the skin from her body.
Markus, impossibly young, struggled at the limit of his strength to escape the grip of the high priest’s guard, wild in his passion. Giljohn stood at the cart, held by bonds of the sort that no child can see, the kind made of debt and of a bitter understanding of the world’s truths, the kind that tear at a life as you struggle against them and leave wounds that won’t heal.
Nona thanked the Ancestor that here in this strange dream the chains of duty and service had no purchase on her. Every muscle gathered itself as she prepared to leap at High Priest Jacob, ready to rend him into pieces.
It was raining that day. The heavens wept to see such cruelty.
At the back of Nona’s mind a small voice asked why it wasn’t raining.
Her leap never happened. Unbalanced, she fell to her knees, hands upon the dry stones of the path. It had been raining. It had. The water had run from Giljohn’s empty socket like the tears he should have shed. Nona looked up. She knew it to be memory. She knew there was nothing she could do for the mule straining against his rope, or Markus twisting in the grasp of Jacob’s guard. Even so, her mind clamoured for revenge, for the joy of bloody retribution. She stood, blades ready, intent on attack.
Some distant glint caught her eye. Over the wall of the garden. Over the roofs of nearby mansions, out across the five miles of farmland to the Rock of Faith. Her gaze drawn to the tiny bumps that at this distance were all the Convent of Sweet Mercy had to offer. Again the glint. The sun reflecting on a window, perhaps. A stained-glass window high in Path Tower? Something told her she needed to be there. A path seemed to stretch out before her in that direction.
You’re getting further from the door.
Gritting her jaw against the sound of blows raining down on Four-Foot, Nona ran. She refused to look away from the Rock and from the convent’s faint outline. She climbed the wall with a great leap and a lunge.
As Nona dropped into the next garden the convent vanished behind the chimneys of the neighbouring mansion. She made to rise but the wall’s shadow deepened into night, miring her like the thickest mud. ‘No!’ She struggled, desperate to return to the convent, but the darkness took her into some other place and a night filled with screaming and with fire.
Nona stood between two dark buildings. She looked slowly around, less worried by any danger than by what new tragedy might unfold, by what black milestone of her life this nightmare had brought her to.
Across an open space in front of her another building burned, the flames so bright that even the dying focus of the moon seemed pale. And although the night gave her nothing but angles and the ferocity of fire, Nona knew exactly where she stood. To her right, the home of James and Martha Baker. To her left, the stone walls of Grey Stephen’s house, he who had fought the Pelarthi in his youth. Rellam Village burned around her. The shapes moving across the background of blazing huts were those of children she had grown up with, of their parents, and of the soldiers the emperor’s sister had sent to cut them down.
Nona knew it for illusion or forgery or memory or all three woven together. Somehow she had fallen into a trap. Perhaps it had happened when she touched the Path. Sister Pan had endless stories of the dire ends to which it could lead the unwary, and used them regularly to scare any quantal novice in her care. Nona had to get back to Path Tower but the chance was gone and every shift of scene took her further from the convent, putting mile upon mile in her way and allowing no time to cross them. Whatever had gone wrong it must have happened when she had tried to walk through the wall to the Third Room. She had wandered into some realm of nightmare manufactured out of her past.
Nona ran through the darkness and smoke and confusion, ready to meet any challenge. Though she told herself that a lie surrounded her the truth of it seduced her senses. There was nothing counterfeit here. Beneath the stink of burning this place smelled of home, of a childhood now wrapped about her bones. This was hers, like it or not, her foundation though it stood in mud and ignorance.
Somehow no soldier came near her. Within moments she stood at the door to her mother’s cottage. The two rooms where she had spent so many years, growing from mewling infant to the girl who had taken half a dozen lives in the forest upon her doorstep. It was the price of one of those lives in particular that the whole village was now paying for her.
The thatch above had begun to smoulder, sparks from the Bluestones’ house starting to land among the straw. The interior lay dark. ‘It’s not real.’ Nona approached the entrance. Something would be different. Something would be wrong. Every scene so far had someone out of place, some detail changed. It was a clue, a riddle. Somehow. She stepped in, steeling herself, pulling her serenity around her like a shawl. ‘It’s not real.’
It took a moment for Nona’s eyes to adjust to the gloom. A single candle burned, spilling wax where it had fallen at the doorway to her mother’s workroom, the place where she wove the reeds. Nona’s mother lay sprawled, one arm reaching for the exit, her fingers nearly touching the toes of Nona’s shoes. A ruinous wound had opened her back, the blood pooling around her, the candle’s flame dancing across it in reflection. And despite all her protestations a hurt noise broke from Nona’s chest, a wet splutter, a numbness in her cheeks as she fell to her knees, hot tears jolted from her eyes by the impact with the hard-packed earth. Nona’s serenity shattered. She stayed on all fours, heaving in broken breaths. Her mother lay dead. Her mother. No matter what had passed between them there had always been a bond of love buried beneath the denials. Gentle times remembered, shared smiles, laughter, hugs. The bonds that formed a branch of the great tree of the Ancestor, a chain of humanity reaching back through aeons to the singular taproot of the arborat.
Nona panted away the hurt and rose to her knees. This was the test. This was the trap. She wiped her eyes, sought her centre.
‘Somewhere, it must be somewhere.’ She stood and cast around her. Something must be wrong. Something out of place? The serenity trance insulated her against grief but her eyes kept returning to her mother’s body, small and broken. ‘There’s nothing …’ Nona fell back to her knees, drawn down despite her trance by a weight she couldn’t understand. Tears returned to fill her eyes, blurring her vision as she gathered the woman who had been her everything into her lap.
‘… tired …’
‘Mother?’ Nona blinked away the tears. But the brown eyes she found herself looking down into were not her mother’s, the hand that enfolded hers was huge.
‘Darla?’ Nona choked out her friend’s name.
Darla’s brown eyes clouded with confusion, a kind of wonder, staring at some distant place above Nona’s head. The smoke and fire around them wasn’t that of Rellam Village. It was Sherzal’s stables starting to burn. The eighty miles to Path Tower had become hundreds.
‘She’s gone, Nona.’ Kettle put her hand on Nona’s shoulder.
‘Darla …’ Another raw wound. Nona ground her teeth. Darla’s hand still held hers, warm, solid, real. Maybe she could still be saved … Maybe this time it would be different.
To drag her eyes from Darla’s almost broke Nona. To turn her face from a friend who needed her, a dying friend. ‘It’s not real.’ Nona swung her head around, trying to call the clarity trance though her heart ached and pounded. ‘None of it’s real.’
‘Nona …’ Kettle shook her head slowly as if the sorrow had made it too heavy. ‘We have to go.’
‘There!’ Amid the swirls of smoke and the red tongues of fire a door that had not been present when all this happened, a door with no place in Sherzal’s stables and no place to lead.
‘Nona!’ Cries from the great carriage before the main exit. ‘We need you.’
Letting Darla’s head fall felt like the ultimate betrayal. Every part of her wanted to stay. Every part of her wanted to face the danger with her friends. To save them. To do it better this time.
