Red Sister

  She pressed forward, gripped on both sides now, twisting where the crack in the stone was too narrow for her hips. At one point the rock’s jaws gripped her head and she could neither advance nor retreat. Fear proved to be sufficient lubricant and she escaped a moment later. Her courage gave up before the fissure started to widen again but by that point forward had become the only option and, weeping in terror, cursing herself for her stupidity, Nona inched forward.

  Finally the walls released her and she stumbled into a wider space. Another tunnel. Above her a shaft opened in the tunnel’s ceiling. It looked neither hand-hewn nor natural, having instead a strangely “melted” character, the walls being smooth and uneven. Debris covered the tunnel floor, rubble from the shaft above, in places fractured, in others smooth, in others bearing pick-marks. Nona could make little sense of it.

  The shaft was too high above her to reach, a rockfall blocked the tunnel to the left, and Nona’s nerves weren’t yet ready to attempt the return, so the passage to the right remained the only option.

  She pressed on, scraped and dirty, passing smaller fissures, and once a curtained waterfall where freezing water from the plateau above leaked down. A moment of panic seized her as she imagined the vast weight of the Glasswater somewhere close by. How thin were the walls that held that reservoir in place? What would it take to set those waters flooding along these ancient courses to drown her in the dark?

  “Apple never came this way. Not for stores.” The sound of Nona’s own voice convinced her and she started to edge back.

  That was when she heard it. Just once, and distant. The sound of metal on stone. She held her breath and waited, ears straining. Nothing. She strove for deeper clarity, wrapping her mind in the mantra Sister Pan had taught her. A single flame in the dark. A single note hanging in an empty place. A single sparkle upon a wind-rippled lake. Still nothing . . . no, nothing, except the faintest voice of the pouring water several twists and many yards back along her path. The sound came again. Metal on rock.

  Snarling as if to drive away her fear with anger, Nona pressed on. Twenty yards on, the tunnel widened still further but the broad mud floor showed no sign of anyone’s passing. The sounds came more frequently now, or Nona heard more than just the loudest of them. A pick on stone. Someone was digging, but the echoing passageway gave no clue to the direction.

  Further on and the sounds faded. Nona retraced her steps and found a rocky gullet in the fissure wall, above her head height. The sounds were louder here. She undid the cord that bound her habit and tied one end to the lantern’s carrying loop, the other to her ankle. She leapt, catching the edge of the higher tunnel, a thing no wider than a sewage pipe, and hauled herself up, the lantern swaying beneath her.

  A minute later and she was inching along the tunnel on her belly. The crashes came so loud now that she cowled the lantern and moved ahead blind.

  After what seemed a cold, wet age, in which she banged her head on the rock twice and scraped her knees raw, a whisper of light reached her amid the shouts of pick biting stone. She could see the end of the tunnel, glowing so faintly that only in the blind depths would it be noticed.

  Mastering her breathing, Nona crawled to the edge, where some larger, newer tunnel had cut through the old one she was in. Down in the larger passage a lone figure in black was hacking at the wall, already nearly out of sight in the short cut they had made. Debris from the excavation littered the water-smoothed floor behind them. The work must have taken weeks.

  Nona watched, fascinated, becoming aware as she did so of a new sensation. Until this point her mind had been filled with the pressing knowledge of the weight of stone above her and how long and narrow the return to the surface—if she could even remember all the twists and turns. But now something larger commanded her attention. Louder than the crash of the pick, heavier than the fathoms of rock. A fullness. An otherness. Something ancient and full of an energy that made her hands tremble and her skin burn.

  The digger paused and turned to scoop up a leather bottle set on a rock at the mouth of the cut. She raised a hand, pushing sweat-soaked hair from her brow, and drank.

  Yisht! Even as Nona named her in her mind the woman’s eyes swept towards the tunnel mouth. Nona shrank back, pressing herself into the rock, holding her breath. She waited for a moment, long enough for Yisht to return to drinking from her water bottle if she was going to, then started to reverse.

  Going backwards through the tunnel, without the space to turn, pulling a smoking lantern whilst trying not to make a sound was not easy. The glow at the tunnel’s end grew brighter: Yisht must be approaching! Nona scrambled backwards as fast as she could while still not making a clatter. If Yisht climbed up she might see or smell traces of Nona’s lantern. How long then before a knife came flying through the air? And if not a thrown knife then Yisht herself. The woman had practically defeated the whole of Grey Class together. She could easily murder Nona down here and her body would lie undetected long after her bones had crumbled.

  Nona’s feet eventually found open air and she dangled over the edge before slithering down into the lower tunnel, jolting her chin badly on a protruding piece of rock. Moments later she was hurrying back towards the fissure, her lantern bleeding just enough light through its cowl to stop her knocking herself senseless. She raced on, chased by shadows, slipping and sweating, sure at every moment a hand would close upon her shoulder.

  • • •

  “DID YOU GET them?”

  “Yes,” Nona hissed back. “Shhh!”

  Clera rolled from her bed and crossed to Nona’s. Ara slumped down in hers, yawning and stretching beneath her blanket. Hessa appeared to be fast asleep.

  “Everything go all right?” Clera whispered close enough to Nona’s ear to make it tingle.

  “Yes, go back to bed.” She counted out the stolen ingredients into her clothes chest. Blackroot wrapped in linen, red garlic powder in a paper wrap, quicksilver in a greased leather pouch, aclite salts, and sulphur. The stores cave had been the next one along, large, easily accessed, the ingredients laid out on shelves in labelled bags, bunches, vials, and pots. If she hadn’t been led astray by the mark of Yisht’s shoe she would have been in and out in a quarter of the time.

  “How are you feeling? I could stay with you?”

  “I’m fine. Go to bed.”

  “But you got everything? Even the quicksilver?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.” Clera squeezed her arm, hesitated, then went back to her bed. “You stink of mud by the way.”

  Nona stripped off her habit and stuffed it beneath her bed. Cleaning it was a problem to be dealt with in daylight. She slipped beneath her blanket, the wool rough against her skinned knees, the darkness full of images of tunnel after tunnel, narrow rocky throats caught in the flicker of a flame, closing ever tighter around her. She turned on her side and coiled herself up, presenting as small a target as she could to the dark. On the nights since the forging it had been the pain she had curled around, the first and growing pangs of whatever poison it was that Raymel had got into her. Nothing swift of course—he would want to know that she suffered long and hard before she died. Sister Apple had told them plenty of horror stories about toxins that would do just that. Venoms that would rot the flesh from bones over the course of weeks, others that would cause first blindness, then peeling skin worse than any burn, and finally madness and death months later. Now she realized that apart from her knees, hands, arms and jaw . . . nothing hurt. Her head, her guts, and her joints, all of which had been in slow twisting agony, really were fine. She’d said she was fine to get Clera back to her own bed . . . but it was true . . . all she felt was that lingering sense of fullness that had invaded her when she spied on Yisht. A sensation she had felt only in one place, and never as strongly—before the black door into the Dome of the Ancestor at the far end of the nuns’ cells.

  Her last thought b
efore sleep claimed her was to wonder whether Yisht had used the gate and whether she or Sister Apple would notice it had been left unlocked.

  • • •

  ON THE WINDSWEPT promontory in the break between Blade class and the evening meal Nona, Ara, and Hessa clustered around a shallow depression, partly sheltered by low walls made by piling up rock Nona had shattered with Path-energy on one of her many secret practices.

  The fire had proved a nightmare to light and their few stolen pieces of kindling had burned out before setting fire to the coals stolen from the kitchen store. In the end Nona and Ara sat shivering while Hessa sought the serenity needed to reach the Path herself and eventually set the coals burning with a measured release of Path-energy.

  They started to brew the black cure using pots stolen from the kitchens—safer to steal these than try to filch the correct equipment from the Poisoner’s stores. Lacking scales, Hessa weighed the ingredients using a measuring rule balanced at its midpoint on an eating knife. Hessa had a collection of pebbles that she had previously weighed in Shade class and claimed that by placing them at the correct distance from the rule’s pivot point she could, with some arithmetic, measure any desired weight on the other side. In theory it seemed, at least to Hessa, easy. In the Corridor wind with awkward ingredients that wanted to blow or roll away and couldn’t be heaped in one single spot on the wobbling rule . . . it appeared to Nona to be closer to guesswork than any science taught in Academia.

  It took longer than anticipated. Relying on the wind to clear the dangerous fumes meant frequent hurried moves as the direction shifted.

  “An ice-wind’s coming,” Ara said.

  “They might send us on the ranging if it lasts.” Nona tipped another silver drop of liquid metal into the stinking black mess simmering in the pan.

  “Maybe.” Ara shuddered and hugged herself. The rangings almost always started during an ice-wind. Novices had gone missing on the journey before and been found days later frozen to the ground. Or not at all.

  In the end all three of them missed the evening meal and returned to the convent in the dark, their habits reeking of blackroot, the ruined cooking pot abandoned over the cliff, the coals still glowing behind them, hidden in their hollow. Nona held the black cure in a tiny perfume vial that Ara had brought to the convent when she first arrived. When boiled down to a sludge and strained through a cloth, taking care not to let the liquid touch skin, there had been precious little to collect.

  “You won’t really take it? You know they call it the kill or cure, don’t you?” Hessa asked, working to keep up with Nona and Ara. “Even if I got the proportions right it’s a terrible risk. Just tell the abbess what you did. She might be angry but she won’t throw you out.”

  “I’ll think about it. I don’t feel so bad today.” The pain, the sickness, all of it had gone overnight, but Nona hadn’t the heart to tell the others after the risks they had taken for her. Besides, with an enemy who resorted to poison it never hurt to be prepared in advance. She had little doubt that Sister Apple and others among the Sisters of Discretion carried their own collections of small vials just in case—the black cure among them.

  • • •

  WITH STOMACHS RUMBLING they crept into the dormitory and changed their habits, Nona having to borrow an old one from Ara. The three tainted habits they wrapped in Nona’s mud-smeared one from the previous night and took to the laundry. If any nun recognized the smell of blackroot and took a close look at the bundle they would find the entire litany of the girls’ crimes written there. Fortunately blackroot was not a common ingredient and Sister Apple seemed never to be on laundry duty.

  Nona walked behind Ara to the washroom, her sleeves flapping around her hands, but not as dwarfed by the Chosen One’s clothes as she once would have been. It took the best part of an hour to pound the soiled garments clean in the wooden tubs and wring them through the mangle until they were dry enough to hang.

  They worked in the dark, elbow-deep in cold water, backs aching despite all of Sister Tallow’s training. A light might draw unwanted attention.

  “I saw Yisht.” Nona spoke into the dark, her voice barely audible above the splashing.

  “I did too, with Zole in Spirit class,” Ara replied. Sister Wheel allowed Yisht into the class, saying that everyone could do with more instruction in holy matters.

  “I saw her in the caves.”

  “What?” Ara’s splashing stopped.

  “I took a wrong turn and found her digging.”

  “Digging?” Ara asked. “Why? Where?”

  “I think she’s cutting a path to something under the dome—there’s something hidden there, something powerful.”

  “Blood and teeth, Nona! And you waited all day to tell me this . . . why?”

  “Because if I’d said it when Clera was here half the convent would probably know by now.”

  “Clera keeps secrets,” Ara said. “Ones she wants to keep.”

  “She . . .” Nona’s denial petered out, the image of that strange throwing star flashed before her. She hadn’t ever asked about it again, and Clera hadn’t ever asked her about the true story of how she had ended up in Giljohn’s cage. It seemed a fair exchange. “She knows how to keep her own. Other people’s she’s not so good with.”

  Ara snorted. “So why didn’t you tell us when we were out there brewing? That should have been private enough for you!”

  “Hessa would have made me tell the abbess.”

  “Damn Hessa! I’m making you tell the abbess!”

  “Tell her that I broke into the undercaves planning to steal expensive convent-owned ingredients because I attacked the man she burned herself to protect me from after I attacked him the first time? For all we know Abbess Glass might have asked Yisht to dig her an access tunnel or given her permission to go prospecting in the caves. She might have opened that gate with a key.”

  “She didn’t though.”

  “No. In fact I saw a new shaft leading up and I’m sure it’s under the guest quarters. Yisht must have dug down from her room and set to exploring.”

  “Well that’s it then,” Ara said. “She’s as guilty as sin.”

  “But the abbess would probably let her off. Whatever hold Sherzal has over her, it’s a strong one!” Nona heaved a waterlogged habit out into the rinsing tub. “We need to do something about her ourselves.”

  “How? She’d kill us all in a fight!” Ara wrung out her habit on the twisting loom, her face just a handful of glimmers where light from the distant scriptorium filtered from the laundry windows.

  “That one I’m still thinking about.” And Nona bent to her rinsing.

  They emerged, with sore hands and wrinkled fingers, just in time to meet the rest of the junior novices coming from the cloisters for lights out at the dormitory.

  Nona was at the rear of the group by the time they reached the building, slowed by the sickness that had been returning all day. She climbed the steps to the door one at a time. Three things happened together. A fragment of ice sliced past her face, the beginning of a sharp cry rang out, and Ara’s foot hammered into Nona’s side. The impact was enough to send both girls flying in opposite directions. Before either novice hit the ground a chunk of rotten ice bigger than Nona’s head struck the spot in which she’d been standing. The explosion of shards peppered them both.

  “Ancestor!” Ara gasped. “That was close!”

  Nona lay on her back lacking the breath to reply, her gaze on the icicle-fringed edge of roof far above. Had there been a shadow there? Just for an instant? Or perhaps tired eyes and strained imagination put it there.

  • • •

  NONA AND ARA picked themselves up, got under the door arch, and brushed each other down.

  “What a day.” Ara led the way in.

  Nona went to her bed, wrapped in thought. Had Yisht just tried to kill her? Di
d the woman suspect she’d been spied on in the caves? If so, it must be only suspicion or surely she would have taken more direct action . . .

  She flopped down, exhausted and hungry, pushing Yisht from her mind. A whole day gone and not a moment of practice for the Academy visit. Except for Hessa, of course, who hardly needed it. Nona could see the Academy school as she’d seen it in Hessa’s memories, all grandeur and gravitas set in stone, with the emperor’s Academics lined up, waiting to be impressed. And she saw herself before them, one small novice in a habit still damp and smelling faintly of blackroot who could, if she worked herself up into a frothing rage, shatter a few of their expensive flagstones.

  34

  ON SIX-DAY THE ice-wind blew again in earnest, for the first time since Zole’s arrival. In the fire-scorched practice pit where they had brewed the black cure Nona crouched, trying to find the rage she needed to reach the Path. It proved hard to find the heat she required, held there in the wind’s frozen teeth. Before her, away across the plateau, the convent huddled under a bleak sky like a beast marked for the slaughterhouse. At last, she abandoned her attempt and raced off towards the Academia Tower, hoping not to be late for the class.

  It turned out that she was first, clattering up the stairs into a classroom occupied only by Sister Rule.

  “Good morning, novice.” Sister Rule glanced up from behind the desk where she tended to settle her bulk and remain for the duration of any lesson, using her yardstick to point to the headings set out in chalk upon the board to her side.

  “Good morning, Mistress Academia.” Nona found her seat at the back of the class.

  “Brisk out, is it?”

  “Yes, Mistress Academia.” The curved sheet of ice that had formed across the side of Nona’s head chose that moment to fall away and shatter on the floor.