Red Sister

  “Run!” Jula wasn’t given to issuing commands but everyone obeyed this one. Even Tarkax.

  Moments later the whole ranging party was sprinting towards the distant treeline. Nona kept her eyes forward, concentrating on the ground ahead. The squall took them all by surprise. One instant they were racing for the trees and the dark spaces between, the next instant the wind rose white about them, a howling swirl laden with sharp fragments of ice. Visibility reduced to arm’s length, the wind’s roar drowning out shouts and screams. Buffeted and blinded, Nona swiftly lost any sense of direction. When a tree loomed at her she barely avoided running straight into it.

  What followed was a nightmare of running and hiding and falling ice. Within a hundred yards the blindness of the storm had been replaced by the blindness of the forest, the pines so tight-packed that Nona could hardly squeeze between them. Dry branches raked her as she forced a passage. The wind’s rage and the thrashing of tree-tops allowed only the edges of distant shouts to reach her. Imagination filled every shadowed space with Durnishmen, wild-eyed, knives and axes ready.

  When the storm relented Nona found herself cold, exhausted, wet, and alone. She broke from the forest an hour later and tried to orient herself. Eventually she found a trail and followed it.

  Nona trudged on, bowed against the wind, feet numb in damp and muddy shoes. Here and there the wheel-ruts lay full of brown water, rotten ice breaking beneath her tread if she put a foot wrong. Her eyes watched the road, her thoughts chased the others. Images rose of her friends skewered on Durnish spears. She shook them from her head. Ruli and Jula would run. Clera and Ara would feed a Durn his own spear. They’d be all right, and the best way to find them again was to head towards their goal. If they had fallen in the forest she could wander aimlessly among the trees for a month and still not stumble upon them.

  Nona followed the tracks with most evidence of recent traffic. She knew at this distance it was sufficient to head for the Grey, and that would be hard to miss if she kept generally east and a little north. She checked her directions to the next town with an elderly charcoal burner, located by the thin stream of his smoke slanting through the trees, and later with a farmer bringing a score of ragged goats in off the moor. The farmer offered Nona a place by his hearth, but she mistrusted his eyes, fever-bright above high cheekbones. Neither man had word of her friends.

  Nona watched for more raiders—in fact she watched for anyone at all. The charcoal man had wrung his soot-dark hands and warned of Durnish pirates marauding the fringes, killing the old and taking the young to sell in the flesh-markets in Durn. But Nona didn’t feel too unsafe. The raiders were at her back. With the ice-wind blowing, all but the most desperate among the peasantry had taken a break from their labours to hide inside their homes, waiting for the weather to break. The Corridor was never as empty as when the ice-wind blew, and whilst the wind might carry a killing edge, at least it delivered a clear view of any stranger approaching bearing killing edges of their own.

  As the light failed and a new wildness infected the wind Nona found a drystone wall to shelter behind. It had been built as a windbreak for sheep and several of the beasts huddled there when she arrived. They watched her with goggling eyes, rectangular-pupiled and wholly lacking in comprehension, but they soon reached an accommodation: she would ignore them, they would ignore her, and all of them would crowd together out of the gale.

  The wall was an ancient thing, perhaps older than the scraps of woodland close by, built in years when the wind blew too fierce for any tree to raise its head. Nona had considered making her camp in the copse that ran back along the stream, but the sheep preferred to keep clear of the trees and she mistrusted the closeness of them, the slow knowledge of their growing and their endless creaking.

  Nona sat there in the gathering darkness, wrapped in coat and blanket with her back to the wall and the moan of the wind across the slopes and the singing of the wind among the trees and the sharp whisper of the wind between the stones. Around her the sheep shuffled their cloven feet to press themselves close.

  The sky grew clear. She ate half of her remaining food—hard bread and a boiled egg—then went to sleep hungry.

  The wind spoke through her dreams, sometimes pulling her from them, only to release her into the next. And although each dream was different from the one before, some dark, some wild, some full of disconnected joy, a thread ran through them all, marrying one to the next. A single twisting line, dividing and joining, running unbroken like the flowing script from Sister Kettle’s quill, spelling out word upon word until the words became a river and the river a story and the story her life.

  The dream faded, so completely she could hardly be sure there had ever been a dream, but the thread remained, and the thread was the Path and the Path led her to the moment. Nona opened her eyes. The eastern sky held the very faintest hint of a glow. She had slept through the focus moon, through the shifting and grunting of the sheep, through the wind and the sleet. Somewhere in the night a bright sound had broken across the wind’s voice. Metal on metal. Nona moved slowly to her knees and peered through the gap between two stones at the top of the wall. To her left the ridge was a black suggestion against the darkest grey of the sky. To her right the field sloped down towards a thin stream and the straggling copse.

  By the treeline a complication of shadow drew her attention. She watched, eyes narrowed. There’s nothing so good as a night-dark forest for taking your imagination and giving it form. Nothing. Just black shapes and silence. Even so, one by one the sheep left the wall’s shelter and trotted away along the slope, angling towards the ridge.

  Nona didn’t follow. She had no reason to break cover, no reason to offer motion to any enemy who might be lurking.

  The dawn’s light spread with agonizing slowness, touching one thing from black to grey, touching the next, making two branches from one threatening limb, making a half-fallen trunk from a silent and watchful monster. As the sun lit the ridge it brought with it the suggestion of green beneath the thin and patchy ice. And still, though it advanced moment upon moment, the light failed to make sense of the dark tangle where the first trees stepped from the field.

  Nona drew a breath, sharp and cold across her teeth. That fold was a man’s knee, the next an arm, that curve a shield. Perhaps half a dozen of them lay sprawled in death, tangled amid the undergrowth, one hand raised among the thorny coils of the briar.

  What to do? Move on in ignorance? Investigate and accept the exchange of risk for knowledge? Nona scanned the ridge, then stared again into the stubborn gloom between the trees. Anyone could be watching . . . but why?

  She called on her clarity. In her mind she began to juggle, directing her hands to the task, guiding each ball through the necessity of its arc. First three balls, the pattern she saw Amondo try to teach the village children, then four, the pattern he employed while delivering his banter to an audience, drawing them in for his show. Then the five with which the juggler dazzled, and the six with which he struggled, sweating and anxious, crowning his performance. By nine the world about her lay bound in crystal, no contrast enhanced, no shadow lightened, no detail magnified, the same but different. She stood and everything around her shouted out its meaning, every part of the puzzle yielded its secrets. She walked in a clarity so fierce it burned her eyes. Nothing had changed, yet everything had, and the world no longer held a place to hide from Nona Grey.

  There were five men lying dead, warriors all: raiders, from their garb and the salt stains still bedded in their cloaks. Nona approached on slow feet, the mystery of the forest unfolding before her.

  The attacker had killed them with thrown daggers and a thin sword. Precise blows, no frenzy, no mercy. The slaughter had begun among the trees and ended at the margins. Nona came closer, close enough to smell the rankness of the dead men, the blood, the unwashed stink of travel, the sewer stench that gives the honest and undignified truth of sudden dea
th on a sharp edge. Ice-rimed blond hair scattered across blue eyes. Sword and axe lay unattended, some hands open and white, some clenched around a last moment of agony, dark with gore. No breath misted from them.

  Nona snagged the loop of a pack with her toe and drew it closer. She took the dried meat and hard biscuit out of its wrap of oiled cloth, and added it to the crumbs of her own supplies. Still ravenous she reached for another pack—and froze. Out of the depths of her clarity a single fact rose to take her by the throat. Somewhere close another human heart was beating. From what evidence this fact had been assembled Nona couldn’t say. She knew only that it was true. She stood, watching the silence of the trees and of the shadowed spaces between them.

  The raiders had been moving through the edge of the copse where it reached back along the stream. They had been attacked as they moved to leave, aimed at the sheep-wall where Nona had been sleeping. Ten yards past the first splash of the raiders’ blood Nona left their trail, written in the patchy ice and half-frozen mud, to strike deeper into the forest. She tore through bramble, broke a path among the sharp and brittle branches of the stunted ardna bushes where they grew thick between the elms. To her own ears she sounded like an army on the move. Every instinct told her to leave, to carry on along her path, reach the target and leave this mystery for others. But why would anyone lie in wait for her in a freezing wood when they could have found her sleeping?

  Nona saw blood on the leaves first, then blood against the trunk of one tree, smeared across another. Then the boot. Then the leg. Then, coming around the bole of a great frost-oak, the body, sitting propped against the tree, head down, face hidden within the hood of a convent ranging-coat.

  She stood, suddenly terrified, her heart unwilling to beat. A moment later what she had taken for her sixth corpse of the morning rolled its head back.

  “H-hello . . . Nona.” Sister Kettle watched her, eyes dark in a pale face, the blood around her mouth a shocking crimson, the smile that was always there, there no longer.

  “Kettle!” Nona rushed to crouch beside the fallen nun. “What—” The white hand clutched around a knife hilt stole her words. The blade jutted from Kettle’s side, the coat below glistening with blood. The pommel, an iron ball, was all that showed of the knife: the rest was lost in her grip.

  “Little Nona.” Sister Kettle discovered her old smile. “You found me.” She coughed, sputtering scarlet, her lips very red. “Oh. I shouldn’t do that.” A grimace. “It hurts.”

  Nona found her eyes misting, one hand on Kettle’s shoulder, the other in her hair. “You’ll be all right. You’ll be all right.”

  “You need to run, little Nona.” Kettle’s eyes scanned the trees, her head unmoving.

  “No.” Nona shook her head. “You killed them. They’re all dead. I checked.”

  “Th-that wasn’t me.” Kettle licked her lips. “You don’t have any water?”

  Nona bent and started to dig out her canteen.

  “That . . . wasn’t me.” She smiled. “N-natural hazard. I wouldn’t have stopped them finding you. All part . . . of the ranging. T-tough break, but these are . . . tough times, Nona.”

  “Who did it then?” Nona glanced around while she held the canteen to Kettle’s mouth. The clarity had left her in a moment, taken by shock when Kettle raised her face.

  “Noi-Guin. That’s why I was set to follow you.”

  “Why?” The word sat in front of too many questions and Nona couldn’t pick which one to ask.

  “Wanted you for herself. Proud, these Noi-Guin. A small girl escaped her two years ago. Wasn’t going to let that stand, no matter what promises Thuran Tacsis might have made the emperor.”

  “Where is she?” Nona’s gaze returned to the knife in Kettle’s side. She had held its twin, pulled it from her bed . . .

  “H-hurt.” Kettle showed her teeth, red with blood. “I got her good. But . . . she ran.” She winced. “You have to run too. She could come back. Others with her.”

  “I’m not going.” Nona hunted for a reason. “I’m safer with you.”

  “No. They don’t know where you’re going. They trailed us from the convent or knew we land the novices along the Rattle. But the target’s always different. Cover your tracks and head north a way, then make for the Kring. You should be able to catch up with Ara. She’s safe, Sister Apple is shadowing her. Takes more than a storm to shake Apple off.”

  “Apple! Are we all under guard?” Nona frowned. Even now, with blood dripping from the trees it felt wrong. Like cheating.

  “Little Nona . . .” Kettle grinned as if reading her mind. “Not all. Just you because of the assassins. And Ara . . . because of her . . . father. And the Chosen One.”

  “And the Chosen One?” Nona frowned.

  “Heh.” Kettle spat blood. “Appy will kill me. But . . .” She shrugged, winced, and glanced down at the knife. “. . . she’ll have to hurry.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Arabella’s not the Chosen One. You’re not either.” Kettle put her hand on the one Nona had on her shoulder. It felt like ice. “You’re both . . . shields, if you like. It’s Zole. She’s a straight-up certified four-blood.” And a tear rolled down Kettle’s cheek. “Stepped out of legend. She’s come to save us, Nona. I know it.”

  “Zole?” Nona blinked, wondering if Kettle had grown delirious.

  “That’s what convinced the abbess of Sherzal’s good faith,” Kettle said. “She put Zole into the church’s care.”

  “With Yisht to guard her . . .”

  “Yisht has a great reputation for her skills.”

  “And now Zole only has Tarkax . . .”

  “The Ice-Spear’s reputation is greater still.” Kettle drew a sharp breath. “And nobody knows Zole is the Chosen One. If anyone is out hunting it’s Ara they’ll be after.”

  Kettle fell quiet for a long moment, long enough for the questions to start crowding in on Nona: How could she help? Could she drag Kettle if she made a travois from branches . . . the raiders had rope . . .

  “You have to go.” Kettle broke the silence. “Run. Find Ara.”

  “I’m not leaving.” Nona sat back on her haunches, arms folded.

  “It’s not a request.” Another breath hitched past gritted teeth. “In the absence of the abbess or senior sister I . . . represent the convent’s authority.”

  “I’m still not going.”

  “It’s a direct order.” Kettle furrowed her brow. “In the name of the Ancestor.”

  Nona shrugged. “I’ve never been that convinced by this Ancestor business. I prefer the Hope church myself. Or perhaps the tunnel gods.”

  “Nona!” Kettle tried to sit up and fell back with a gasp. “This is serious. You have to go. The Noi-Guin will call others.”

  Nona shrugged again. “I’ll kill them if they come.” She paused, thinking over Kettle’s words. “How would your wounded assassin call for help?”

  “They’re shadow-workers. She could reach out to another, if they had the bond.”

  “How far?”

  “It depends. A mile? Ten? Most shadow-workers could send a simple call for help a fair distance.”

  “So call her.”

  “Who?”

  Nona levelled a narrow stare at Kettle. “Sister Apple.”

  “But Arabella—”

  “The Noi-Guin want me, not her. And they’ll track me from here if I run. So we need someone here to stop that happening. And if Ara needs protecting—well, I’m the Shield aren’t I? I passed the ordeal. You didn’t.”

  “But—”

  “Call her!” Nona shouted it.

  “I don’t want her to see me die!” Kettle shouted it back.

  Nona sat back, stunned. “You . . . you’re not going to die.” The words came rough from a dry throat. “It’s just a small knife.”

  “I
t had venom on it, Nona. It’s eating at me. I can feel it in my bones.”

  “Wait!” Nona fumbled in her habit, her fingers clumsy with grief. “I’ve got the black cure!” She brought the vial out.

  “Little Nona.” Kettle’s old smile returned. “Where in the world—”

  “I made it.” Nona twisted the cap. “You’ve got to drink it!”

  Kettle gave a weak grin. “I’d rather drink ditchwater. You should throw that away. It’s dangerous stuff even when not made by novices.”

  “But—”

  “I’m a Sister of Discretion, Nona. I’ve already taken the black cure. I took it when I first saw her. It’s why I’m still alive. But it’s not enough.”

  “Sister Apple would know. She could do something. She’s the Poisoner! She could—”

  “They still call her that?” The ghost of a smile now, a weak thing.

  “Call her!”

  “No.”

  “Call her, or I swear by the Ancestor I’ll track and kill this Noi-Guin. And then I’ll find the Tetragode and start killing the rest of them until there are none left.”

  “Nona!”

  Nona shrugged. “I’m going. I saw her blood trail. It went west towards the river.” She got up.

  “I believe you’re serious.” Kettle looked surprised, though Nona could see no reason for it.

  “I swear that I will do what I say.” Nona sprang away, starting back along the path that she had broken through the undergrowth.

  “Nona!”

  Nona turned. All around Kettle the shadows gathered, a dark mist bleeding through the wind.

  “Can you reach her?”

  Kettle sat with her head back against the bark, her face white as death, a tear running from the corner of her eye. “I can always reach her. A thousand miles wouldn’t matter.” She raised an arm, unsteady, and beneath it a shadow blacker than the night stretched out, reaching for infinity, as if the sun had fallen behind her. “It’s done. She knows I need her. She knows the direction.”