Red Sister

  A cheer went up. “Time?”

  “Two hundred and six,” Ara called down.

  Nona blinked. Far below, partly obscured by Nona’s toes, Clera was doing her victory dance. A new personal best for completing the blade-path, and a new record for the current Grey Class to boot. She’d beaten Croy’s record by four counts.

  “Your turn!” Ara pulled the lever to arrest the pendulum and reset the dial.

  “Bleed this!” Nona swung her legs up onto the platform and walked with sticky feet to the start of the course. “I’m going to do it this time.”

  She stepped out, cautious, feeling her way. As ever, the whole blade-path felt as if it were somebody else’s glove, something that refused to fit her no matter what she did. And if it were a glove then it wasn’t just a case of being the wrong size for her, it was the wrong hand too. With too few fingers!

  Nona got just past the halfway point. A record for her at least. And fell with a wail of frustration.

  Clera, still by the lower stop-lever, followed Nona back up the long flight of wooden stairs offering advice. Nona ignored her.

  The ice will come, the ice will close

  She called on her serenity mantra. She’d found serenity while in the agony of a marjal-quantal blood-war.

  No moon, no moon

  She’d found serenity under the critical eyes of a score of Academics.

  We’ll all fall down, we’ll all fall down

  She’d found serenity in the face of Luta gathering shadows to strike terror into her heart.

  Soon, too soon.

  “Shut up!” Nona spun on a step, Clera nearly running into her. “Shut up, Clera, or I swear I’ll push you down these stairs.”

  Clera stepped back, hands raised. “Fine, all right. I was just trying to help.” Hurt in her voice, her expression hard to see in the stairwell’s gloom.

  Nona turned back and continued to stamp up the steps.

  We’ll all fall down, we’ll all fall down . . .

  When she was up on the platform once more Nona stood with her back against the wall rather than sitting at the edge with the others. She stared at the blade-path, ignoring everything, her mantra trembling unvoiced behind her lips.

  “It’s your turn.” Clera, braving Nona’s threat, stood from the edge and came to wave her hand before Nona’s face. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” Nona stepped forward. She stopped just before the pipe, her feet black with resin. “I’m serene.” She took her first step. “I’m so fucking serene that if I miss my footing I’ll just walk on the air instead.”

  Nona felt as if she were wrapped in a blanket of golden light. She saw the world both with perfect ease and as if she were viewing it from the end of a long tunnel, removed from the currents of its need, distant from its immediacy.

  She took a step. Took three more. Another.

  And fell. She thought she might waft like a feather, but she plummeted as fast as ever. The only difference was that she didn’t mind so much.

  Clera fell off before Nona had even reached the lever to time her run. She bounced and flipped over the edge of the net, landing on her feet. “Too eager. Always happens after I complete.” She paused. “Anyway, I have to rush, Flinty’s taking me to town.” Her smile dropped away. “Father’s back in Rutter—that’s the jail they put him in when all this started, the worst one.”

  “I thought they were about to clear him?” Nona would never understand the details of the case. It wasn’t debt as she understood it—the debts of friendship and duty—Clera’s father seemed to be caught in a shifting miasma of paper debts, penalty clauses, interest, dividends, and fines.

  “It’s all politics.” Clera shook her head, her victory on the blade-path washed away. “I’m scared he’ll die in there. It’s not a good place. Rats and disease. And his main creditor has filed for twenty lashes and more fines . . .”

  “I hope he’s all right.” Nona reached out to touch Clera’s shoulder. “I’m sorry I shouted at you.”

  Clera managed a grin, eyes bright. She stuck her tongue out, turned on a heel, and hurried off to meet with Sister Flint and the other novices allowed into Verity with an escort.

  • • •

  NONA KEPT AT her blade-path practice until lunch, with others coming and going. She had ten tries and got no further than a third of the way. The pipes swung wrong, the sections revolved wrong, the whole thing was just wrong. No matter how slowly she took it, how carefully . . . the ground just kept reaching up to claim her.

  She joined the others at the Grey table, last to lunch, which had never happened before. Clera sat alone at the far end of the table staring at nothing over a bowl of soup. Nona went to join her.

  “How did it go?” Nona reached for bread and started to ladle soup from the great glazed bowl between them.

  “Family’s important, isn’t it?” Clera’s gaze didn’t move from the nothing that had trapped it.

  “Well.” Nona thought back to her mother and felt the muscles of her jaw bunching. “It should be.”

  “My mother’s not a strong woman,” Clera said. “You’d think she would be. But she really isn’t.”

  “Oh.” Nona wasn’t sure how long this conversation had been going on without her.

  “There was a time when she was my world. When I was a little girl I used to lie in bed crying because I thought she might die and I didn’t know how I would exist without her. It sounds stupid, but I did.”

  “Have . . .” Nona put her spoon down unused. “Has something happened to your father?”

  “They’re going to let him go,” Clera said. She walked her penny across the back of her knuckles. “All debts written off.”

  “Well . . . That’s brilliant!” Nona said. “Isn’t it?”

  “It is.” Clera smiled but only her mouth made the effort. She walked the penny back again.

  “That—” Nona saw that it wasn’t a penny, not Clera’s old copper penny nor the silver crown that replaced it. “That’s gold!”

  “Yes.” Clera vanished the sovereign into her habit. “I took a penny and I bred it into a multitude.”

  “Well . . .” Nona met Clera’s gaze. “That’s great news!”

  “Yes.” Clera looked away and picked up her spoon. “I wonder how far Yisht has got to go before she reaches the coast.”

  • • •

  AFTER LUNCH NONA returned to Blade Hall and the site of her most repeated failure. She joined the others practising and carried on failing.

  Later in the afternoon Sister Kettle came to watch them. She stood at the bottom and worked the timing lever for them, watching twenty novices fall in a row before Sessa from Holy Class came and completed a run on her first try.

  “A hundred and eighty,” Sister Kettle read from the dial.

  Nona tried next and fell off after a count of thirty. She’d barely made it to the spiral before a counter-weight swung and the pipe lifted beneath her. “Sixty-nine!” she gasped as she dropped from the net to land beside Sister Kettle. “How did you do it?”

  Sister Kettle shrugged and grinned. “I ran.”

  “Not helpful!” Nona scowled. “And Sister Owl . . . twenty-six . . . that must be a lie?”

  “Or she ran faster . . .”

  Nona trudged up the stairs. Other novices came and went but towards evening the press began to slacken off. An hour later only Ruli and Nona were left. The others, perhaps driven off by the foulness of her temper, had gone to the bathhouse before bed to soak off their efforts on the blade-path.

  Nona stood scowling at the twisted pipe. “It’s ridiculous. It’s just metal and wires. Why do we spend so long at this stupid game? It doesn’t mean anything.”

  “Isn’t that what games are for? Wasting time?” Ruli shrugged. “Besides, Sister Kettle says it’s more than a game. So
does Sister Pan. Perhaps if you think of it as a game that’s why you’re not winning?”

  “You think I should make it life and death?” Nona asked. “Stop it being a game? I could cut the net down . . .” That would make it matter. Fall and die. There hadn’t been a safety net when she had gone up against Yisht in the tunnels or Raymel in his chambers. “I should cut the net.”

  “Ha! Ha!” Ruli laughed without humour. “We should go.”

  “You should go,” Nona replied.

  “Come with me?” Ruli looked worried.

  “I’ll be fine.” Fast, furious, and without reservation. That was how battle was. That was how the most crucial struggles of Nona’s life had been. “Let me try a few more times on my own.”

  Ruli glanced at the door, ducked her head, and started towards it.

  “Wait,” Nona said before Ruli left the platform. “Give me that grease of yours . . .”

  Ruli frowned but reached into her habit and handed over the small earthenware tub. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

  Nona waited for Ruli’s footsteps on the stairs to fade away. “Fast.” She stared at the tarry soles of her feet. “Without reservation.” That was how she had arrived at the Path, swift with anger, and she always tried to slow, and always fell. But perhaps she didn’t fit the convent’s measure. Perhaps she couldn’t bend to fit their mould.

  She began to pick the tar and resin from the sole of her left foot. When she came to the blade-path wrapped in serenity she fell serenely. She put more care in, went slower, fell. Sister Kettle had completed the blade-path in sixty-nine counts. She must have run. Sister Owl in twenty-six, the legend said. She must have flown. Nona started to clean her other foot.

  Ten minutes later she set the pendulum swinging and stood at the edge of the platform, staring at the pipe an inch before her toes.

  “No.” She backed away, backed some more, backed another step and her shoulders met the door. “No.” She opened the door and retreated down the steps. “Fast. Without reservation.”

  Nona came up the steps at speed, toes curled for grip. She came through the doorway, accelerating into a sprint. She leapt and hit the pipe with both greased insteps. She slid, gravity seizing her, accelerating her with terrifying swiftness. And now, at last, she dived into the moment, letting the pendulum crawl between its ticks.

  Nona shot towards the corkscrew turns. There are some things that must be done quickly or not at all. If someone asks you if you love them you cannot hesitate. There are some paths that must be taken at speed.

  Nona began to rise with the curve, her feet running before her, and for the first time, although it felt very far from safe . . . it felt right!

  • • •

  BRAY’S LINGERING CHIME chased Nona from the arch of Blade Hall out across the courtyard. She raced down the dark alley alongside the laundry and came slipping and sliding around the corner just as Suleri was reaching to close the dormitory’s main door. The door wouldn’t be locked but anyone arriving after Suleri—now the convent’s senior novice—closed it, was counted as late to bed, their crime recorded on the records delivered to Abbess Glass each seven-day. Suleri, new to her power, wasn’t inclined to leniency.

  “Wait!” Nona leapt up the steps and ducked under the novice’s arm, skidding so fast along the corridor she almost passed the door to Grey dormitory.

  Suleri banged the door shut. “You’re not wearing shoes, Nona!”

  Nona didn’t deign to reply. It wasn’t something she’d failed to notice. She banged through into the Grey dorm hall. “Guess what!”

  “We’re going on the ranging tomorrow at first light.” Ara turned from the conversation she’d been having with Mally by the door.

  “Uh. We are?” Nona looked around the room. All the novices had ranging-coats either laid out on their beds or wrapped around them.

  “Your coat’s on your bed. Sister Flint brought them round. There’s an oilskin too.”

  Nona hurried to her bed, excitement at the prospect of actually getting out of the convent for once driving her own news from her thoughts. Sister Tallow had taught them the basics of making a shelter the previous year, though the lessons now seemed a very long time ago and the details frighteningly vague. “Do you remember anything about navigation?”

  “No,” said Clera, bent over her coat, having some sort of problem with the toggles.

  “Where are we even going?” Nona picked up her own coat, a heavy black thing that would hang around her ankles. It looked as fine a garment as she’d ever worn, but where she came from when the ice-wind blew you found shelter and hid. Warm as the range-coat seemed she didn’t relish the prospect of open miles with nothing between her and the ice-wind except cloth and padding. “Do we know our target yet?”

  “We’re all aiming for the Kring.” Clera tugged and a wooden toggle came away in her hand. “Piss on it!”

  “The what?” The name had something familiar about it—something from Nana Even’s tales.

  “You should know! I was relying on you to get me there!” Clera pressed the toggle back where it came from as if it might magically re-attach. “It’s up past the Grey. A thing the Missing left behind. A column of black iron taller than a tree and as wide.”

  “I’ve heard of it.” Nona frowned. She remembered the description now but nothing else. She wondered if Yisht’s amulet, cold in her pocket, had been cast from the same metal. “What’s it for?”

  “The answer to that . . . is missing.” Clera threw down the toggle and spat. “Anyway, the ranging isn’t about navigation or even surviving the wind. We can ask directions. We can even beg shelter. Who’s going to refuse a novice of the Ancestor?” She framed her face with her hands and batted her eyelashes. “It’s about surviving them.”

  “Who?” Nona asked.

  “Them!” Clera waved her arms around. “Everyone else. The world. Abeth. It’s full of hungry people. And hungry people are dangerous people.”

  “I think . . .” Nona trailed off. Zole was walking towards them with purpose.

  “Where is Yisht?” Zole regarded them without emotion, her black eyes startlingly similar to the warrior’s.

  “I’ve no idea,” said Clera. “We were discussing it just now. She can’t be much of a bodyguard if she can’t guard her own body, can she?”

  “If you have done something—”

  “Yes, yes.” Clera waved her away. “You’ll show us a fancy move from the Torca and then Nona will turn you inside out. Now push off, why don’t you?”

  Zole gave them both a look that managed to be both calm and threatening at the same time, then turned and went back to her bed.

  “I hope we lose her on the ranging.” Nona watched the ice-triber go.

  “Most novices band together by the end,” Clera said. “We can split into our own groups in the first days but we’re all headed to the same place so it gets crowded towards the target.”

  Nona shrugged, pushed her ranging gear off the bed onto the floor, and started to strip out of her habit. A minute later she was under her blanket, and a minute after that, dreaming.

  • • •

  SISTER FLINT GATHERED Grey Class after breakfast the next day. Hessa said her goodbyes as they left the refectory. She gave Nona a one-armed hug and Nona took it woodenly, never having grown accustomed to the business of hugging.

  “Be safe out there,” Hessa said.

  “It’s the ranging—there’s no safe about it.” Nona made her mouth into a smile.

  “Well, be careful.” Hessa released her. “If you fall off a cliff and break your arms . . . I’m going to know all about it.”

  “You’ll have a chance to work on breaking that while we’re away,” Nona said. “And if you can’t do that yet then at least make it so we can share good experiences rather than just bad ones! Don’t just send me your nightmares. If I??
?m lying shivering in a snowbank somewhere, I want you to go for a soak in the bathhouse and for me to be the one that gets warmed up.”

  “I’ll try.” Hessa grinned. “I’m going to miss you. I’ll be lonely here without you lot.”

  “At least you won’t have to race Nona for the last potato every night.” Ara hugged Hessa and drew Nona away. Sister Flint was waving them to the exit.

  “Follow the Path!” Hessa called after them, leaning on her crutch. “If you get lost, follow the Path. That’s what it’s there for!”

  The nun took them to the abbess’s house where they stood hunched against the ice-wind in their ranging-coats. The novices all had their weather blankets and bundled supplies on their backs. Nona had been issued with a short skinning knife, two wire traps, a tinderbox, and a small iron pot.

  “I’m freezing already,” Clera said from inside her hood.

  “Who’s that?” Ara pointed to a figure coming around the side of the abbess’s house.

  “It’s a man!” Jula sounded shocked.

  “Tarkax,” Nona said.

  The warrior wore the same black sealskins and fur jacket he had worn at the Caltess and seemed unbothered at being in the teeth of the gale. He grinned at the girls, his teeth a white slash in a dark red face. “Lovely day for it, ladies!” And skirting their huddle, Tarkax went up the stairs to knock on the abbess’s door.

  Moments later Abbess Glass emerged, swaddled in padded robes, the hand around her crozier hidden in a thick black mitten. Sister Tallow followed her out in a ranging-coat.

  “Novices!” Abbess Glass had to shout above the wind. “This will be a great test for you, but one in which I am sure you will all do well. Sister Tallow and Sister Flint will have trained you in the skills required to reach your target: it remains for me to remind you that no matter what conditions you may face on your ranging, no matter what the trials, you are representatives of the church, ambassadors of the faith, and most of all, novices of Sweet Mercy Convent. I expect you to act accordingly. And remember. If anyone lays a hand on you . . . you have my permission to cut it off. Be safe. Sister Tallow will be waiting for you at the Kring.”