Red Sister

  “Giljohn. I hope your arrival was unremarked. What do you have for me?” The priest spoke with casual authority, making no effort to hide his distaste.

  “The boy, your worship. Marjal true-blood. Thought of you straight away. He’s the sort you send to that monastery on the coast. More than a touch in him, make a fine Mystic Brother this one would.” On the road Giljohn had ruled them with an iron hand and dealt with the farmers of the Grey as if he were a lord dispensing favours. But here, with the stone house rising before him and formal gardens to his back, he seemed a peasant himself, servile and ill at ease.

  “I’ve had seven boys off you, Giljohn. Abbot Tae reports that only two showed any touch of marjal, and one of those was half-wild.” He descended the steps, staring at Markus. “The wild ones have to be broken early if they’re to be kept. Break them properly and their minds can be retrained to more useful ends. But it’s a lot of effort.”

  “Strong signs with this one, your worship, strong signs. Half-blood at the least! Clever too. Could take to sigil-work double quick.” Giljohn nodded.

  The priest, though short beside his guard and Giljohn, loomed over Markus. He looked an old man, his hair grey, face craggy, but his eyes were sharp, slicing across Hessa, discarding her. His arm when he reached for the boy was snake-fast. “Sigil worker?” His hand fastened about Markus’s wrist. “Or wild boy?” A sharp jerk brought Markus staggering forward with a cry.

  Fast as the priest was Four-Foot moved faster, leaning in to bite the fingers clutching Markus’s wrist. The priest released him with an oath, and Four-Foot set to braying loud enough to bring maids to the upper windows to stare.

  Giljohn, all apologies, stepped in to check the hand the priest held cradled to his mouth but the guardsman sent him reeling back with a straight arm to the chest.

  “Never seen that mule bite anyone before, your worship, Ancestor’s truth!” Giljohn looped an arm about Markus’s neck and pulled him back behind him. “It’s the marjal in the boy—like you said, your worship. Wild. But emfy can work on people too, if it’s trained right. That kind of influence can be gold in your pocket.”

  “It’s ‘empathy,’ you idiot, not ‘emfy.’” The priest lowered his hands, one clutching the other, red-fingered. He had blood on his mouth too, and an ugly look beneath it. “And there are a hundred touched whispering to beasts for each prime that can turn a man’s mind. And ten primes for each full-blood that can own it . . . But I will take the boy. And the mule.”

  “Ah. Well the lad’s twenty crowns, your worship. Like a son to me . . . he is. But Four-Foot, he’s not for sale. Been with the old fellow twelve years now.”

  “You’ll take ten for the boy and a crown for the mule. You’ll get a young one for pennies at the Brown Fair. My gardener and his son will help you push your cart there.” The guardsman stepped in close behind the priest’s shoulder.

  Giljohn swallowed, still holding Markus behind his back. “Ten. Ten I can take, from a man of the cloth. A sign of my devotion to the Ancestor. But Four-Foot—”

  “You’ll sell me that mule, Giljohn, or you’ll never sell anything in this city again. A word in Captain Herstin’s ear and the guard won’t even let you past the city gates. So, enough with this foolishness. A crown for a vicious mule that’s a season from being rendered for glue and hound meat.” The priest waved to his servant. “Pay the man.”

  “Don’t do it!” Markus broke free of Giljohn and ran to Four-Foot, taking the mule’s head over his shoulder. “He wants to hurt him.”

  The adults paid no attention. The servant produced a worn leather pouch from within his velvets and brought forth the first crown to count into Giljohn’s palm. The child-taker held out his hand reluctantly, face twitching with warring emotions.

  “Don’t!” Markus shouted, eyes wild. “It was my fault, not Four-Foot’s!”

  The servant laid the crown on Giljohn’s creased and dirty palm: a silver coin, polished with use, traces of tarnish in the grooves picking out the emperor’s features. He counted out the rest, each chinking against the next. At ten Giljohn closed his hand.

  “See . . . Four-Foot is family—”

  “The animal bit me.” The priest held his hand up, sticky trickles of blood reaching down as far as his wrist. “Accept your coin, child-taker. Or are you so wealthy that you’ll sacrifice your livelihood over an elderly mule?”

  The servant pushed the last coin into Giljohn’s half-open hand. The rain that had threatened for so long began to fall.

  “Tie the beast up over there. Use a heavy rope.” The priest gestured to the pillars holding the roof above his rear door.

  Giljohn took Four-Foot’s halter in his hand, ignoring Markus’s cries. “Sorry, lad,” he muttered as he took the mule. Four-Foot let himself be led, but whinnied his distress, rolling a dark, liquid eye at Hessa. She clutched herself tight, not wanting to see but unable to look away.

  Giljohn left Four-Foot tied to the nearest pillar with the thick tow-rope used to get the cart, and sometimes other travellers, out of deep mud. He returned to the cart looking a poorer man despite the additional silver in his pocket.

  The gardener and his boy came to roll the cart back out through the gates, but the priest didn’t seem inclined to wait. “You know, Giljohn, how to break someone? Of course you do—the Scithrowl had you a while, did they not?”

  Giljohn said nothing, just bent his back to the task of pushing, but before his shoulder set against the cart’s edge his hand reached up to touch the empty socket of his left eye.

  The rain thrummed down around them, dripping from Hessa’s nose, running down the bars of the cage.

  “You break a man, or a boy, most easily by breaking something that they love. Better still if it loves them too.” The priest’s voice didn’t turn them but the crack of wood against flesh and the startled bray did. He had his staff raised again as Hessa looked around, both hands at the end, swinging it over his shoulder.

  “No!” Markus darted forward but the guardsman caught him by an arm.

  The priest swung again with all his strength, bringing his staff down across Four-Foot’s back. The mule, already straining, threw himself against the rope, braying his surprise and pain. The priest struck again, and again, and Four-Foot strained against the rope, eyes wild and staring. Markus was screaming, struggling to be free, but over the cracks of each blow and Four-Foot’s loud distress Hessa couldn’t understand the words.

  “You don’t—” Giljohn stood and raised his voice and his hand before letting both fall. Rainwater trickled from the socket of his eye in place of the tears that should have been there. “You don’t . . . Pulling’s all he knows . . . He thinks you want . . .” Giljohn shook his head, lowering his face to hide his emotion.

  “Stop him,” Hessa begged, but Giljohn, the thickset gardener, and his lean son, all looked away, each of them broken in some manner that Hessa, even with her useless leg, was not.

  The staff made its own rain of blows, thick and heavy, the tempo regular, not frenzied. The priest, breathing hard, marked each blow with a word. “You. Bit. Me. You. Filthy. Animal.”

  Four-Foot, the fur across his back and sides dark with blood, threw his weight against the rope, anchored to the immovable pillar, not braying now but heaving desperate breaths through a muzzle thick with crimson-specked foam.

  Giljohn and the gardener pushed the cart. The boy unbarred the gates. All of them needing to be away from there.

  Hessa, in the cage and paralysed with grief, found she couldn’t draw breath, couldn’t move. Her chest hurt. Her face contorted into a grimace so fierce it hurt. The priest’s cruelty had reached inside and twisted something vital, drawn it to a breaking point, reducing her to snot and tears. Through half-blind eyes she watched Four-Foot strain, hard enough to burst his heart, uncomprehending beneath the blows, knowing only what his simple life had taught him: to pull.


  With his own animal cry Markus got his teeth into the guardsman’s knuckle. Rain-soaked, he was hard to hold on to. He twisted free while the man whipped his hand away, cursing. Markus ran, not for the priest but for Four-Foot, throwing his arms about the mule’s neck, pressing his face to an ear. The priest’s next blow hit Markus’s hip, not with the same fury as those for Four-Foot, but loud and hard and agonizing. Even so, Markus hung in place.

  Hessa didn’t see it, she didn’t hear it, it registered on none of her senses—but inside, in the core of her, she knew the moment that Markus found the edge of his power. Whether it was a word whispered into Four-Foot’s ear, or something that bled between them from hand to hide, Hessa couldn’t tell. What she saw was Four-Foot raise his head, unflinching as the next swing of the staff cracked more ribs. The mule snorted, the kind of snort he would give for a fresh meadow of long grass or a delicious bank of celembine, and pulled again . . .

  The pillar shifted. The thick mass of stone, fifteen feet high and wider than a man, jolted forward. Amid the spilling rain terracotta tiles came flowing from the roof above, a waterfall in red. The priest went down beneath them. A heartbeat later the rope snapped and Four-Foot collapsed gently, his legs folding beneath him. Markus followed him down. The mule took one more shuddering breath. And died.

  The scene narrowed. Narrowed again. The priest’s gates closed behind the cart.

  • • •

  “NO! NO!” HESSA shouted but the hands kept hold as she struggled. “No!” She opened her eyes. Hessa was leaning over her, the moonlight bright behind her. “Hessa?” And Nona knew herself again. “I thought . . . I was you.” She reached up and they held each other as they had back in Giljohn’s cage, weeping together as if tears might somehow wash away the pain.

  12

  “TELL US THEN.” Clera put down her fork and stared pointedly at Jula.

  “What?” Jula crammed in another mouthful of bread. “Wuff?”

  “You know,” Ruli said.

  “Her story.” Clera tilted her head ever so slightly towards the far end of the Red table. The four of them were huddled at one end, Arabella held court at the other, her group the larger.

  “Ara says—”

  “Ara? Who’s Ara?” Clera’s face hardened.

  “Arabella,” Jula replied. “Everybody calls her Ara. You know that.”

  “Her friends do.”

  Jula shrugged. “She’s okay. It’s not her fault she was born so rich. Anyway, do you want to hear her story or don’t you?”

  Clera tapped at her plate. “Go on.”

  “Well . . .” Jula looked around, savouring the attention. “Well . . . the priests have been going on about the Argatha for years, right? But over the last few months they’ve really been building up excitement, sending assessors out to the provinces, even to the wild towns along the border.”

  “Argatha?” Nona hunched in, waiting to be told how stupid she was.

  “It’s an old prophecy,” Ruli said quickly. “A Holy Witch called Sister Argatha made it, back when the first emperor took the Ark from the Sarmarians. It says that the Ark will open when the four tribes demand it with one voice.”

  “Couldn’t you just get a gerant, a hunska, a marjal and a quantal to do it?” asked Nona.

  “Right! That’s what I said.” Jula nodded. “But they tried that ages ago and it didn’t work. So ever since then the priests have been saying ‘one voice’ means one person exhibiting all the bloods.”

  “Everyone knows it’s just theatre to take people’s minds off the war that’s coming,” Clera said. “Every time there’s a crisis, and the emperor wants to shut up dissent, all of a sudden there’s a big hue and cry over searching for the Chosen One. That’s what my father says . . .” She trailed off, staring at the table.

  “So . . . the abbess thinks Arabella’s going to show up as both the mage-bloods?” Nona asked.

  “Pan seems pretty sure she’s quantal, and more than a touch,” Jula said. “A touch doesn’t count. You could have a touch of all four and nobody would get excited. Sister Kettle’s a hunska prime with a touch of marjal, and nobody’s calling her the Argatha’s Chosen One.”

  “She is?” Nona asked. “How do you know?”

  “Kettle can shadow-weave. It’s the easiest marjal trick and even touches can do it near the shipheart.”

  “Does the abbess think Arabella will show up gerant too?” Nona frowned. Arabella was far from the tallest in the class. “Unless she’s six and nobody told me then she’s not gerant.”

  “She’s close on eleven,” Jula said. “But sometimes gerant doesn’t show till you’re grown and just don’t stop growing . . . Anyway.” She pushed her hands together as if trying to steer the conversation back on track. “Anyway, Ara’s family saw how quick she was and because she didn’t look hunska that got them worried. So her father took her to the Academy.”

  “Stupid thing to do,” said Clera. “Once the Academy knows, everybody knows. Too many fingers in that pie.”

  “Your father say that too?” Ketti slid her chair noisily over to join them, wiping her mouth.

  Clera turned on her, eyes fierce, and Ketti raised her hands. “My father collects taxes. He says if the emperor wasn’t standing behind him he’d be called a thief every day.”

  “Anyway!” Jula raised her voice, then lowered it, glancing down the table at Arabella’s group, deep in their own conversation. Only Hessa and Ghena sat alone at the middle of the table now, opposite each other, focused on their plates. “The emperor called her whole family to court. So Malcan Jotsis, Arabella’s uncle who’s head of the family, gathers everyone at his estate out in Ledo and then leads them all to the palace, but on the way they’re intercepted by Sherzal’s house-troops, like a hundred of them . . . all the way from the Scithrowl border. And this was just days after the testing at the Academy!”

  “What did they do?” Ruli asked.

  “Nothing,” Ketti said, earning a scowl from Jula as she stole the story. “Because the Jotsis had already sent Ara on in secret with four trusted men to meet with the abbess so she could join the convent.”

  “Which,” said Jula, pushing both hands back across her bristly scalp, “puts her out of the emperor’s control and even his sisters aren’t mad enough to try to steal a novice. And however much High Priest Jacob is pressed he can hardly give her up what with all the noise the priesthood have been making about the Argatha.”

  “Exactly.” Clera stood up, brushing crumbs from her habit. “None of them really expected to find a candidate, so they didn’t have a plan for what to do if one turned up.”

  • • •

  ACADEMIA THAT MORNING saw Clera and Nona first through the door. Sister Rule waited behind her desk, massive even when seated, her headdress bulging as much as her habit as if it too had a lot to confine. The abbess’s cat, Malkin, lay on the desk in an arthritic coil.

  “Good morning, Mistress Academia,” they both chorused, taking seats at the front of the class.

  Sister Rule watched them with dark eyes and said nothing. Behind them other novices began to file in. Nona’s gaze was drawn again to the globe on the mistress’s table, Abeth wrapped in ice with its thread-thin girdle of green. Nona had always considered the Corridor to be vast—endless really. It was hard to imagine how much space there had been before the ice advanced.

  “Why . . .” So many questions twisted half-formed across her tongue that Nona didn’t know what she would say before the words came. “Why isn’t the moon round too?”

  Sister Rule’s voice overrode the smirks from behind her. “That, Nona, is an excellent question. Though you should say, why is the moon not also a sphere?”

  “Sphere.” Nona rolled the word in her mouth.

  “Why do you think the moon should be a sphere?” Sister Rule asked.

  “Well . . .” Nona d
idn’t really know—it just seemed right. “Well . . . the world is. And in the sky Badon is round sometimes and a crescent other times . . . if you really squint at it. And at the Hope church they say that Badon is a whole world like ours, not a star like the Hope, and that Badon isn’t coming to save us like the Hope is because Badon is ice and more ice and locked to our sun just like we are . . .” Nona took a breath. “So . . . I just thought that everything really, really big seems to be round . . .” She looked up at Sister Rule—who it had to be said was really big and, whilst not spherical, beginning to head that way.

  Sister Rule only had to reach for her yardstick to silence the titters.

  “You know that, with the blessing of the Ancestor, our forebears put the moon in the sky in the distant long ago, Nona?”

  Nona nodded, she wasn’t wholly ignorant, though she didn’t know the name for the shape of the moon.

  Sister Rule reached into her drawer and picked out something. She raised her hand and held it towards the class. “The moon.” A silver circle-square in her palm. She turned it sideways and Nona saw with surprise that it was a dish, paper-thin. “Watch!” Sister Rule held the “moon” behind Abeth’s globe, positioning it where the morning sun slanted down from the windows, filling it full of light. She tapped the globe and Nona saw a bright red spot, moving as Sister Rule moved her hand and the “moon” held in it. “All the light it gathers is thrown down onto this one spot. The focus. Put your hand there, child.”

  Nona stood and did as she was told. “It’s warm! Hot!”

  “And that’s how the moon keeps the Corridor open. The sunlight from a large area focused by a vast mirror into a small area. There’s no reason for it to be circular.” Sister Rule put the mirror away. “We stand between two huge walls of ice, Nona, and winter has been coming for fifty thousand years.” She held her hands as if they were the two walls and pressed them together with disturbing finality. “Today, though, we’re talking about rocks!”