Red Sister

  For his part, Raymel kept his gaze on Nona. His left eye had no white or iris, just a black pupil surrounded by scarlet. Nona could almost imagine something inhuman watched her through it. The right eye was all Raymel though, blue and full of malice.

  “Fight!”

  At the fight-master’s shout Nona rushed forward. Denam moved like a stone sinking in thickest honey, barely flinching before Nona delivered her kick to his belly. She might as well have kicked a wall. She spun beneath a huge and questing hand to land a series of punches to the nerve centres of the major muscles in his right thigh, following with a vicious kick to the back of his knee. The gerant reacted with such sloth that Nona stayed to drive three more punches into the most vulnerable areas of his left leg, blows that should leave the big muscle of the thigh dead and useless for the best part of an hour. Finally she skipped away from a lumbering swing of his arm.

  “Even Regol can hit harder than that.” Nona had expected Denam to collapse but he came on unhindered and she had to dive aside to avoid the wide spread of his arms.

  Spinning beneath his guard again, she focused an attack on his right leg, hitting hard enough to hurt her hands, but the thick slabs of muscle seemed impervious. She kicked at his kneecap with all her strength and leapt away from another attempt to seize her.

  Nona stood back, catching her breath. Denam weighed at least four times what she did and she lacked the physical strength to hurt him. Punches that would floor another novice he hardly noticed.

  “You’re not the first hunska I’ve fought, holy girl.”

  Nona pursed her lips and came forward again, weaving around the hands grasping for her. Denam kept his legs tight, wise to the groin strike from her previous fights. Even so, Nona hammered a trio of punches into the fullest-looking part of Denam’s loincloth then rolled away. The gerant’s roar joined and temporarily drowned out that of the crowd, his face shaded more deeply crimson than seemed possible without actually bleeding . . . but he came on undeterred.

  Nona kept at it, dancing around Denam’s clumsy lunges, peppering the lower part of his body with her best punches and kicks. But it gained her no advantage and she felt the slow but inexorable rise of exhaustion. No hunska can dance between the moments for too long before their body fails, and Nona had already had a trying day.

  Even as she ducked and wove Raymel Tacsis occupied the corner of her eye. At each break when she won clear and waited for Denam to catch up she risked glances towards her enemy. He wore an ugly smile now, anticipating the moment when her resources would be so drained as to allow Denam to snag her. The Noi-Guin assassins and corrupting the Ancestor’s high priest must have lightened even the Tacsis purse, but how much had it cost to have Denam swear to break her back when he caught her, or put out her eyes with his thick fingers? A sovereign? Nona wouldn’t be surprised to learn it was pennies, or perhaps just the cost of a polite request.

  Another round of bouncing from the ropes, from one corner to the next. Nona felt herself slowing. Even Denam, crimson and sweat-soaked, seemed to be running out of rage-fuelled energy. Still, in the tight confines of the ring she had little doubt that the gerant would eventually catch her—unless his heart exploded.

  The general roar of a hundred voices converged now on a singular cycle of oooohs and aaaaahs, like the watchers of a ball game, as Nona escaped Denam’s outstretched fingers by ever narrower margins.

  “Enjoy your running!” Raymel’s shout reached her through a lull in the crowd’s voice. He’d moved closer, only a few yards from the ropes now. “You won’t be doing any more after today.”

  The taunt stopped Nona dead, right in Denam’s path. Her eyes flickered from Denam to Raymel. The man had killed Saida as surely as if he had throttled her himself. And here he stood in his riches, waiting for his hireling to maim her. Common sense told Nona to slip from the ring, retreat to the convent’s safety. But a red anger rose in her, drowning out the voice of reason.

  The ginger gerant howled his bloodlust and thrust a hand towards her.

  Nona sank into the moment and timed her jump. She landed with legs bent, one foot against the back of Denam’s hand, letting his momentum carry them both forward. As he whipped his hand up, trying both to dislodge and catch her, Nona straightened her legs, driving off the broad back of Denam’s hand. To the onlooker it would look as if he literally batted her into the air with a fumbled attempt to seize her.

  Airborne, Nona sailed across the upper rope, staring at her target. Raymel had time to lift his head and start to move his arms but caught by surprise he had no chance of stopping her. Twisting in the air, Nona brought her feet to the fore and hammered both into Raymel’s chest. She caught him around the back of the head to keep her place. Immediately, long before his hands could reach her, something else took hold, as if some unseen and clawed hand had sunk its talons into her mind, cutting through memories, letting emotion bleed out. She felt them. She felt whatever it was that now shared Raymel’s skull, the passengers that had ridden him back from his long stay trapped on the border between life and death. They lurked under his skin, watched her from his crimson eye.

  Nona and Raymel remained in contact for only a split second, but some instinct told her that, although both eyes lighted on her, only the red eye truly saw her, and more, it recognized her. Something woke inside Nona as her gaze locked with whatever lay hidden inside the ring-fighter’s skull. Their communion lasted only an instant, but her speed drew it out into an age. A deep and twisting sensation enveloped her, half-pain, half-sickness.

  A dozen different thoughts crowded through the small fragment of time that Nona had left for thinking. She should spring away. She should kill him. She should mark him.

  Nona’s hands decided for her. “For Saida.” She plunged her talons into Raymel’s throat, drawing them across the thickness of his neck, then sprang away, leaping backwards over his rising hands. She tumbled in the air and landed on both feet, just before the ring, arms spread for balance but looking as if inviting applause.

  A shadow fell over her. Glancing up, she saw a hand big enough to engulf and crush her head, and behind it, Denam, crimson and furious, leaning over the ropes to snatch hold of her. For once Nona had no time to move. But, close as Denam was, Sister Tallow reached her first. She caught Denam’s wrist in a pincered grip, taking his little finger in her other hand. A moment later he was on his knees in the ring above them, crying for release in a voice hoarse with agony. Sister Rock drew Nona away towards the main doors. To the audience, to Denam, perhaps even to the nuns, the whole exchange would have looked like an accident. Nona swept out of the ring by the gerant, crashing into a member of the crowd, springing away.

  Half-pushed, half-carried to the exit, Nona kept her eyes on Raymel Tacsis, the blue-robed man fussing about him. Something was wrong. Blades that could sink six inches into a stone wall seemed to have been turned aside, as if Raymel’s flesh held something inimical to their nature. Instead of a devastating wound they appeared to have left just a shallow cut, hardly parting the skin. With the red tide of her anger ebbing Nona realized that she could have been standing there with gory hands before a hundred witnesses to the murder of a lord’s son. Even the sisters would have turned against her. If she had managed to escape the hall then the emperor’s soldiers would have hunted from the Marn beaches to the Scithrowl borders for her. And yet . . . still some part of her knew disappointment.

  Raymel for his part ignored the Academy man before him and stared at Nona in turn, with his scarlet eye and the blue. He kept one hand clasped to his throat, the smallest trickles of blood just starting to seep between his fingers. And as each of them stared at the other that sharp nausea twisted in Nona’s gut once more.

  31

  “WHAT DO THEY even eat?”

  “What?” Nona looked back at Clera, next behind her in the queue waiting for Bhenta to open the gate and let them down the stairs to the Poisoner’
s cave.

  “What do they find to eat out there?” Clera asked.

  “Who?”

  “The ice-tribes. They can’t just munch on ice.”

  “They hunt.” Nona’s father had hunted on the ice.

  “What do they hunt?”

  “White bear, hoola, lynx. That sort of thing.”

  “To eat?”

  “My da sold their pelts.”

  “And what did the bears eat?”

  “They come down into the margins and forage.”

  “I’m talking about the deep tribes. Zole said her people roam a thousand miles north.”

  “Uh.” Nona frowned. “Fish, I think. And since when do you speak to Zole?”

  “Fish? Isn’t it all supposed to be frozen?”

  “But there’s sea underneath,” Nona said.

  “Miles underneath! How do—” The clanking of the key in the lock ended the discussion.

  Bhenta hauled the gate open and glared at the novices until they started moving. Clera claimed that Bhenta’s dead white skin and the alarming, unnatural blue of her eyes were the lingering aftereffect of one of Sister Apple’s poisons, and her position as assistant was a kind of compensation. But Nona had it from Sister Kettle that such colouration wasn’t uncommon if you walked the Corridor for a thousand miles east, and that Bhenta would be taking the headdress next year as a Sister of Discretion.

  Sister Apple stood waiting as Grey Class filed in behind Bhenta. Heavy curtains hung over the three shaft-windows tunnelled out to the cliff wall and a shifting gloom filled the place. The three work-benches had been positioned against the walls, chairs stacked on top, lanterns set between, leaving a large empty space. Even the Poisoner’s desk had been cleared of its usual vials, jars of pickled organs, and various oddments. Nona stood with the others, uneasy in the flickering shadows. At long last they might perhaps learn something other than poisons. Even so, Nona didn’t peel the wax from her fingertips. It never paid to let your guard down in Shade class, and anything you touched could be one of Sister Apple’s little traps.

  “Light is the interloper.” Sister Apple spoke in the low voice of someone who is certain that they will be listened to. “Those of you who have heard me give this speech before, attend to your training.” She waved at the group and four or five of the novices backed towards the rear of the chamber where the darkness lay thickest. Nona caught Leeni’s smile as the novice ran her hands up across her body from thighs to chest to face and somehow the night seemed to follow, her skin, usually nearly as pale as Bhenta’s, growing hard to see, as if the lanterns’ shuddering light could find no purchase on her. Beside her Alata’s dark brown skin seemed to shout its presence in comparison.

  A sick sensation crawled up around Nona’s stomach, the same feeling she’d been experiencing since the Caltess forging. In the days since her return it had only got worse. Perhaps Raymel had poisoned her somehow when she had cut him, or had her poisoned earlier in the day. Maybe that’s what he had been there to watch—her dying in agony. If so he’d miscalculated the dose. Nona had told no one but Ara and Clera. Ara had wondered if it might not be an enchantment. The Noi-Guin were said to be able to lay marjal spells that would see the flesh rot from a strong man within a week. Clera had laughed and said that most girls of their age felt the same symptoms every month and to get used to it. Both suggested going to the abbess but Nona wouldn’t hear of it. If any of the nuns had realized that Nona’s collision with Raymel was other than accidental, or that she had tried to kill him, they didn’t appear to have told the abbess. Nona wasn’t about to either. Abbess Glass had endured horrors, narrowly escaping an even worse fate the last time Nona enraged the Tacsis family. And now Nona had gone and cut the throat of Thuran Tacsis’s firstborn son . . . again, albeit not as deeply as she wanted to. The fight was hers to finish.

  “. . . light is a temporary kindness.” Nona found that the Poisoner had taken up her theme and was waxing lyrical. She shook herself and tried to pay attention. “It is made new in the flame of a candle or the sun’s hot eye. Before it comes there is darkness. After it leaves there will be darkness. The night is patient, endlessly so. And shadow, shadow is the war, the wound, where the two contest, where the light bleeds.”

  The Poisoner paused to tuck a stray coil of red hair back into her headdress. “Look around you: shadow is never still. Each shadow has two makers, the light and that which blocks the light. Both move. And if we leave this cave of dancing flames and restless novices, still we find no shadow without motion. The sun moves, Abeth moves, clouds come and go. To conceal yourself you must understand this motion. You must learn when to be still and when to move. In Shade I will teach you patience and stealth. We will study them until they become your religion and Sister Wheel marches down my stairs to call you heretics.

  “There may be times when your life depends on your ability to stay hidden, or when someone else’s life depends on the subtlety with which you insinuate yourself past a defence. If you take the red or the grey this will certainly be the case, but however you serve the Ancestor know that both patience and the talent for passing unnoticed will prove among the most valuable skills you’re taught as novices.”

  The Poisoner stood dark before them framed by the golden and beaded light where it threaded the smallest of gaps around the curtains’ edges. “For today I want you to find a place to sit. Seek your patience as Mistress Path has taught you, and watch your older sisters as they hunt each other, or watch them as best you can. All hiding is nine parts seeing. So watch. See.”

  “Aren’t we going to learn shadow-weaving?” Clera stood her ground as the others started to move off.

  Nona stopped and turned back. “Sister Kettle says there was a Grey Sister who could set her own shadow loose and it would go off by itself and do . . . things . . .” She trailed off, noting the Poisoner’s stillness. Up in the convent she was Sister Apple. In the cave she could be the Poisoner or Sister Apple depending on the moment, but in the dark it was difficult to think of her as anything but the Poisoner, and Nona knew that if she could see the nun’s face her eyes would have taken on that hard gleam that always reminded you just how dangerous she was.

  “I instruct patience and you answer with impatience?” The Poisoner lifted her hands before her, gathering shadows like cobwebs as they rose. Darkness streamed between her open fingers. “We don’t weave shadow, we weave the light. How can a person cast no shadow? Only if they weave the light so that its path still leads to the spot it would have struck were they not there.” All the while she spoke the darkness thickened in her hands. “To cut your shadow loose requires little skill, only the right knife. And those, fortunately, are far more rare than foolish novices are common. It is perhaps the most foolhardy and stupid of courses for a shadow-worker to take. A loosed shadow can be a vicious weapon but once free it’s apt to cease listening to its owner and is soon lost to the greater darkness.”

  The Poisoner closed her hands into fists, squeezing the clotted night within them into an inky darkness that bled between her fingers. She squeezed harder, her lip curling in a snarl, then opened her fists once more. On each palm lay a small black pellet, as if a hole had been punched through her hands.

  “Take them.” Mistress Shade glanced from Clera to Nona. “If you want to work shadows you must swallow the night. No?”

  Clera came forward, uncertain, and took the small ball of darkness from the nun’s left hand, shadows misting up around her fingers. Nona took the other one, finding it cold and hard.

  “Swallow them.”

  Nona put hers in her mouth. Immediately a vile bitterness spread across her tongue, crawling up the insides of her cheeks. The nausea already twisting in her gut became razored wire bound tight around her innards. The pain made her want to scream. She wanted nothing more than to spit the pill out, but she clamped her jaws shut and, retching, tried to gather enough saliva
to swallow the thing. Her tongue felt as if it were shrivelling in her mouth. With a gurgle of disgust she managed to choke the darkness down. But Clera just spat a great black mess on the floor.

  “Ancestor!” Clera spat and spat again. “That’s disgusting.”

  “So is spitting on my floor, Clera Ghomal.” The Poisoner wrinkled her nose. “No matter. The truth is a bitter pill to swallow, is it not, Nona?”

  “Yes, Mistress Shade,” Nona answered through numb and wrinkled lips.

  “And Clera should have had a sufficient dose too.” The Poisoner leaned in towards Clera. “Have you ever cheated in one of my exams, novice?”

  “No.” Nona answered first though she had had no intention of doing so.

  “Yes,” Clera said, her eyes widening. “I swapped crucible jars with Ara last month while she wasn’t”—Clera clamped her hands over her mouth— “looking. And in the antidotes test I—” Clera kept talking behind her hands, her words muffled but audible.

  “You would do well to sew your lips together, novices. Truth is an axe. Without judgement it’s swung in great circles, wounding everybody,” the Poisoner said. “Allow me to demonstrate. Nona, what question are you most worried that I’ll ask you?”

  “I’m afraid you’ll ask me what really happened to make my mother sell me.” Nona struggled with her jaw as her tongue twitched in its eagerness to volunteer the whole story unasked.

  A momentary frown crossed the Poisoner’s brow. She held her hand up. “I have a more interesting question: Who have you had a crush on, Nona?”