Holy Sister

‘They don’t.’ Nona slipped between the doors as they opened to admit more thrill-seekers.

‘Why did you—’ Markus broke off to draw his robes around him, the black habit of a Holy Brother. He followed her out into rain-laced wind, a loud brrr escaping at the cold shock of it.

‘An old dispute that needed settling,’ Nona said. It was partly true. Mostly she had wanted to hit someone, hard, again and again. Markus probably knew that already; classified Church reports named him as one of the most effective marjal empaths currently in the Ancestor’s service.

Nona led Markus around the corner of the great hall where they would be sheltered from the gale. The walls loomed dark above them, the sky crossed with tatters of cloud beneath the crimson spread of a thousand dying stars.

‘Why did you want me? Send the message, I mean?’ Markus seemed less sure of himself than she had expected. Someone who could read her like a book should be more confident? She certainly wished her own empath skills would tell her more of his mood than she could glean from the intensity of his stare or the tight line of his lips.

‘That day at the Academy.’ The words blurted from her. ‘Did you make that girl attack me?’ Nona forced her mouth closed. She had had it all planned out, what she would say, how, when. And now her idiot tongue had cut through all of it.

‘She … she was already attacking you.’ Guilt came from him in waves.

‘She was using the darkness to scare me. Or trying to. But then she went mad.’ Nona remembered how an animal fury had risen across the girl’s face. ‘You did that!’

‘I did.’ A frown now, his brow pale and beaded with rain.

‘She tried to shadow-rend me. I could have been torn apart!’

Markus raised his hands. ‘I made her angry. I didn’t know she could do that.’

‘Well, she could!’ Nona felt her own anger rising from the well she thought emptied in the ring.

‘I’m sorry.’ He looked down.

‘But …’ It felt like honesty, but Nona supposed he could fake that better than anyone she’d ever known. ‘Why?’

‘Abbot Jacob told me to.’

‘Jacob?’ A chill ran through Nona. ‘High Priest Jacob? I mean the one who used to be?’

Markus nodded, still looking down.

‘But … he’s not … you don’t have to …’

‘He was appointed to St Croyus as abbot a year after Abbess Glass had Nevis replace him as high priest.’

‘St Croyus? But Jacob’s a monster!’ Nona couldn’t see how the former high priest could have risen from disgrace so swiftly.

‘A monster with friends in high places. Including the Tacsis.’ Markus shrugged. ‘And he’s not a stupid man, just a cruel and greedy one.’

‘So he bought you from Giljohn, sent you to St Croyus, and followed you there to take over?’ Nona had seen the high priest beat Giljon’s mule to death and leave Markus broken. And that was just on the day he’d purchased him as a frightened boy of ten. How must it have been to grow up under that man’s command?

‘I’m sorry.’ Markus looked up and met her eyes. She gave him points for not using his power to try to influence her. She would know. At least she hoped she would know. He couldn’t be that good, could he? Markus coughed. ‘So, did you ask me down here to beat me senseless? Kick me in the groin? Or is my apology enough?’

A man hurried around the corner before Nona could answer. He approached them, hunched against the rain.

‘Regol?’ Nona asked. She’d looked for the ring-fighter in the crowd before she took on Denam but not spotted him.

‘At your service, my lady!’ He made a sweeping bow, managing to keep both eyes on Markus.

Nona couldn’t help but smile. ‘I’m not your lady, or anyone else’s.’

‘A remarkable victory, novice.’ Regol straightened. ‘Our ginger friend can be a stubborn fellow.’ His eyes held a certain distance, a reassessment perhaps.

‘You saw?’ She had wanted him to.

‘The whole thing. And did you hear the newest recruits cheering in the attic?’

Nona flexed her hands, grimacing. ‘I thought he wasn’t ever going to go down.’

Regol winced. ‘The real question is whether he’s going to get up again, and what he’ll sound like.’ He squeaked the last part then turned his gaze on Markus as if noticing him for the first time. ‘I would ask if this monk is bothering you, but I guess if he was he’d be on the ground looking for his teeth.’ Again that look, as if he saw a different person before him tonight.

‘I’m sure Nona can have a disagreement without punching anyone in the face.’ Markus returned Regol’s stare. ‘Not everyone who climbs out of the ring just steps into a bigger one.’

Regol shrugged, that mocking smile of his firmly in place. ‘The whole Corridor is a ring around Abeth, brother. And when the ice squeezes, everyone fights.’

‘Go away,’ Markus said.

Regol opened his mouth with some reply but a puzzled look overtook him. He turned to go, then spun back as if he had forgotten something.

‘You would rather be watching the fights.’ Markus spoke without emphasis but the waves of power bleeding from him shocked Nona with their intensity. It was as if someone had opened a furnace door and an unexpected wall of heat had broken across her.

Regol turned back and walked off without comment.

‘He won’t be pleased when that wears off,’ Nona said.

‘No.’ Markus nodded. ‘But it would have been worse if he’d stayed longer. He didn’t like me at all, and we both know why.’

‘Oh.’ Nona laughed, though it came out wrong. ‘Regol’s not like that. He flirts with all the girls. The ladies of the Sis practically worship—’

‘It’s you he wants, Nona. You don’t have to be an empath to know that.’

‘No, he’s just …’ She trailed off as Markus shook his head, his smile half-sad. ‘Anyway, you got rid of him easily enough.’ A twinge of disappointment had run through her at that.

‘Easily?’ Markus leaned back against the wall. ‘He put up a hell of a fight. I would never have suspected it of a Caltess brawler.’ He put his fingers to his temples. ‘I’ll probably have a headache all night …’

Nona said nothing, only glanced towards the corner. After Joeli had made Regol abandon Darla mid-fight at Sherzal’s palace the ring-fighter had asked Nona to help him. He hadn’t wanted to be manipulated like that ever again. Nona had spent hours training him to erect barriers against that kind of thread-work. He would take this defeat badly.

Nona defocused her vision and looked at Markus amid the glory of the threads, the Path’s halo. Marjal empathy was essentially thread-work that concentrated only on living threads and manipulated them more intuitively, based around emotional clusters. It was, in many senses, a tool designed for a specific job. Whereas a quantal thread-worker had ultimately more potential and flexibility, the task was always more fiddly and harder work. The threads around Markus formed a glowing aura, brighter and more dynamic than any she had seen before. The host of threads that joined him to her – some years old, some freshly formed – ran taut, shivering with possibility, unvoiced emotions vibrating along their length. Markus would read it better than she could, but he would feel the answer rather than seeing it before him in the complexity that filled the space between them.

In fact, Sister Pan had revealed that all marjal enchantment was simply the power of the Path and the control of thread-work, but collected together into useful tools in the same way that iron and wood may be turned into many different implements, and many of those are of more immediate use than a log and a bar of iron and the option to shape both.

‘Nona?’

Nona realized that Markus had said something she missed. She looked back.

‘You asked me here …’

‘I did.’ She stepped closer and he pressed his shoulders to the wall, every thread he had bent towards her, like the reflex of a river-anemone to touch. ‘I need your help.’

Markus frowned. ‘I can help you?’

‘I need to do something dangerous and illegal.’

Markus’s frown deepened. ‘Why would you trust me? Because we rode together for a few weeks in a cage when I was ten and you were eight? I nearly got you killed two years later.’

‘I trust you because you didn’t ask me why I thought you would help, just why I would trust that help. And also because you didn’t lie about what happened at the Academy.’

‘All right.’ He met her eyes. ‘Why would I help you? It’s dangerous and against the law.’

‘You’ll help me because when they put us in that cage we never really came out of it again. And because your Abbot Jacob is still tied to the Tacsis name and so are his plans for further advancement. Doing this will help make sure that never happens. Hessa told me what happened to Four-Foot when Giljohn took you to Jacob’s house.’

‘I suppose you think me weak, serving a man who did something like that? I suppose you would have beaten him to death?’ Markus didn’t try to hide the mix of anger and shame bubbling through him.

‘Maybe I would have killed him, but you’re a better person than I am. I’m not proud of my temper.’

Markus twisted his lips into half of a doubtful smile. ‘So, you need me, and you trust me. What is it that you need me for, and trust me not to betray you over?’

Nona glanced over her shoulder into the night. From inside the Caltess the crowd’s roar swelled. Another bout coming to a bloody end, no doubt. ‘I have to break into the Cathedral of St Allam and steal something from High Priest Nevis’s vault of forbidden books.’

2

Three years earlier

The Escape

In the dark of the moon by the side of the Grand Pass two dozen citizens of the empire huddled away from the wind. Dawn would show them an unparalleled view of that empire, spread out before them to the west, marching between the ice towards the Sea of Marn.

Nona stood close to the rock wall, pressed between Ara and Kettle. Her leg ached where the stump of Yisht’s sword had driven in, pain shooting up and down as she shifted her weight, the whole limb stiffening.

Abbess Glass had gathered the survivors in a bend where the folds of the cliff offered some shelter. There were among their number men and women who owned substantial swathes of the Corridor, who had been born to privilege and to command. But here in their bloodstained finery, with flames from the palace of the emperor’s sister licking up into the night behind them, it was to Abbess Glass they turned for direction.

‘It will take Sherzal’s soldiers a while to navigate around Zole’s landslide but they’ll come. It won’t take long then to alert the garrisons and send riders down the road to Verity. There’s no chance of making the capital that way.’

‘We don’t need to reach Verity.’ Lord Jotsis spoke up. ‘My estates are closer.’

‘Castle Jotsis is formidable,’ Ara said, looking between her uncle and the abbess.

Abbess Glass shook her head. ‘Sherzal will bottle us up anywhere but the capital. She might not be insane enough to lay siege to your castle, my lord, but she would likely encircle your holdings to prevent word reaching the emperor. And besides, I fear that closer is not close enough.’

‘So we’ve escaped only to be hunted down on the road?’ One side of old Lord Glosis’s face had swollen into a single bruise but she still had enough energy to be temperamental. ‘Unacceptable.’

‘It’s the shipheart that Sherzal wants above anything else.’ The abbess nodded to where Zole waited, some thirty yards closer to the landslide, her hands dark around the glowing purple sphere she had recovered from the Tetragode. ‘If we give her good reason to think that it has gone in another direction she won’t spare many soldiers for chasing us. Maybe none.’

‘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, windswept, 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 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 carriage 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 blonde 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 further 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 back-up 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 rules 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 Reeve 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.