Holy Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  Zole allowed a moment to rest. Nona collapsed into the lee of an outcrop. She huddled there, shivering, and stared at Scithrowl, stretching endlessly to the east. The land lay green and grey, shadowed by scudding cloud, and further coloured by the rumoured cruelties of its people. If the stories were to be believed their queen was a monster, darker by far than Sherzal.

  Sister Kettle had told Nona the story of her mission years earlier to learn Queen Adoma’s secrets, passing images of that time along the thread-bond that bound them. Memories shared in such a manner strike hard and often burn as bright as the recipient’s own until it becomes hard to tell them from genuine recollection.

  Kettle was not the first or the last Grey Sister to be sent to Adoma’s capital, but she had come closer to the queen than any other of the order had managed in a long time. Close enough to stand within her court in the guise of a Noi-Guin and listen to the queen hold forth to her nobles.

  Among the glittering crowds beneath the palace’s gilt roof Kettle had seen half a dozen of the Scithrowls’ most feared Path-mages standing shoulder to shoulder with the nobility. Each of these full-blood quantals wore a golden medallion marking them as members of Adoma’s Fist, a band of quantal and marjal mages whose reputation was known far beyond the borders of both Scithrowl and the empire. It was said that when Adoma’s Fist struck even the ice shook.

  Their leader, Yom Rala, had stood before the throne on the first step of the dais, a place of high honour. Kettle described him as a chewed stick of a man with a predilection for scarlet finery.

  “He may look weak and foolish,” Kettle had said, “but when he turns his gaze your way it’s as if he’s uncoiling every secret you own, and where he steps the ground is left smoking. Pray the Scithrowls’ wars in the east keep the Fist on Ald’s borders rather than our own!”

  Adoma had spoken on the subject of the west and of Scithrowl’s destiny to claim the coast of Marn.

  Nona had seen the queen through Kettle’s eyes. A tall woman, blunt-faced, solid, conveying a sense of physical power, of barely suppressed energies. Black-haired, a frothing mass of curls contained by hoops of gold, her pale skin stained and streaked as if rubbed with fresh ink. This, the Scithrowl said, was Adoma’s sacrifice. In order to secure the strength to lead her people to victory she had dared the black ice and been marked by it.

  Adoma’s enemies called her mad, blood-drunk, cruel beyond measure, ready to inflict any torture that imagination could frame. Her people called her ruthless, relentless, born to deliver the full length of the Corridor into their keeping.

  When she spoke, though, addressing her court in the fluid Scithrowl tongue, Kettle found her articulate and entirely reasonable.

  “If I were a Scithrowl I would follow her,” Kettle had said. “She’s right. The ice is closing on us and how else are we to live but to forge east or west? The world is cruel, our choices harsh, and every alternative leads to someone’s death. The only objection I have is that it’s us that she plans to forge a path through.”

  However inspiring her speeches might be, the truth of the battle-queen lay in the black ice, that place of horror where even Kettle had lost her way, and from where Adoma was said to gain her power. Kettle would share no memories of that darkness, only the conviction that nothing save evil could come from it.

  * * *

  • • •

  ZOLE GLANCED AT the cloud base billowing just a hundred feet above them and made to move on. “Come.”

  “I saw it. The devil.” Nona hadn’t meant to speak. Maybe the sight of the black ice put it in her mind. “I saw it at your wrist when you climbed onto the road.”

  Zole hesitated, just missing a beat, then continued her descent. “I did not think that I had any more left in me.”

  “Any more?” Nona hurried after her, gritting her teeth against the shipheart’s pressure.

  “It seems that it might take a shipheart from each of the bloods to wholly purify us. Or perhaps it is just me who needs that.”

  “Purify? What are you talking—” Nona slipped, one tired foot tangled the other, and she was falling. She clung to the moment but although she fell through treacle she still fell, her hands too far from any surface to save her.

  “Careful.” Zole closed the gap with hunska speed and caught her wrist.

  Nona shook free and wordlessly scrambled away from the shipheart, its fire burning in her blood.

  “Do you think that in all the vastness of the ice there are no more of these?” Zole jerked her head back towards her pack. “None of your ‘shiphearts’? You think they exist only in this narrow strip of Abeth where green things still grow?”

  “Well . . .” Nona hadn’t really thought about it. “But the ice covers . . .”

  “There are ways down. And the ice-tribes are the descendants of those who refused to run before its advance, peoples who walked the green face of Abeth thousands of years ago. They took their treasures up onto the ice with them.”

  Zole moved on and for what seemed an age it was all Nona could do to keep up with her. The ice-triber stopped where a trickle of freezing water spilled from a crack in the rocks. “Drink.” She began to fill her waterskin.

  Nona found a still smaller trickle spilling from an overhang and stood with her mouth open to receive it. After a few gulps she stepped away. “You have a devil in you, one of those . . . did you call them klaulathu?”

  “You had a klaulathu under your skin, Nona Grey, an echo of the Missing. This”—she opened her hand and the palm lay scarlet—“is a raulathu, it is not of the Missing. It is an echo of me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Zole narrowed her eyes; she looked past Nona, up at the slopes above her. “The clouds did not slow them as much as I had hoped. They have found us again.” She turned and dropped away, landing on a huge boulder twenty feet below the ledge that Nona’s stream trickled over.

  Nona peered over the drop. “Damn.” She glanced up at the dark spots moving on the higher slopes. With a shrug she gathered her aching body into a focused knot, stepped out into space, and let the fall have her.

  * * *

  • • •

  THEY LEFT THE clouds behind them, clinging to the mountains’ shoulders, and early sunshine welcomed the two novices into the eastern foothills. Nothing dared the rugged terrain save a few varieties of wire-grass and the goats that pursued them up from the plains. Zole led the way although she had no better idea of the geography than Nona, both of them relying on memories of Sister Rule’s endless maps. They moved quickly, following streams down into the valleys, alert for any herders checking on their flocks.

  “It could be the empire,” Zole said. “It looks no different from the other side.”

  “A couple of centuries ago it was the empire.”

  “Perhaps the people will not be so different either, for all that Sister Wheel calls them eaters of children and deviants.” Zole veered up towards the crest of the valley.

  “Maybe.” Nona felt it hard to shake off the expectations built by a hundred fireside tales so easily. She fixed her eyes on Zole’s back and forced unwilling legs to match the girl’s pace down the slope. Sherzal’s soldiers appeared to have given up the chase, not prepared to venture onto Scithrowl territory. Of the Noi-Guin there was no sign, but Nona doubted that they would relent so easily. Even if their shipheart weren’t at stake.

  “This devil of yours . . .” Nona returned to the conversation abandoned on the rock-faces far above them.

  “A raulathu.”

  “It’s some part of you that the shipheart has . . . broken off?”

  “An impurity of the spirit. In this state it can be purged, leaving a person closer to the divine.”

  “And.” Nona paused to clamber over a shoulder of rock. “And you’ve touched a shipheart before? On the ice?”

  “My tribe calls them kla
uklar affac, ‘the footsteps of the Missing.’ Most on the ice know them more simply as ‘Old Stones.’ And yes, I have touched such a thing before. Two such things, in fact. When the ice-speakers find a child that can approach the Old Stones they test them. Each new raulathu takes longer to split from a person than the one before and is more difficult to purge. I gave twelve to the fire. It was hard to do. Neither of the tribe’s stones could find more.”

  “How old were you?” Nona knew that when Zole described a thing as “hard” it meant that anyone else would have been killed by it.

  “Nine. The ice-speaker banished me to the Corridor. He did not say why. My uncle took me to the empire margins. I was sold to Sherzal’s agent in a village called Shard.”

  “Do you . . . do you think that’s why you have no threads?”

  Zole made no answer. She had reached the ridge from where she could look down into the next valley and away towards the fortress to the north, the closest in the chain. “It seems that the battle-queen has ears in Sherzal’s palace, and swift access to them.”

  Nona scrambled up to join Zole on the ridge. She straightened, wiping the grit from her palms. “Oh.”

  A column of riders was spilling down the far side of the valley, a skirmish band on the shaggy ponies that dwelt wild in the region and could run all day over such terrain.

  “Sixty.” Zole turned and dropped back below the ridge.

  “We can’t outrun them.” Nona wasn’t sure she could outrun a three-legged mule right then.

  Zole narrowed her eyes. A momentary frown and she was moving, back down into the valley again, angling towards their original path tracking the stream. On this side of the Grampains the rivers ran their course a while before vanishing beneath the ice sheets. On Sister Rule’s globe you could reverse the glaciers’ advance and set your fingers to ancient oceans picked out in blue enamel. Nona imagined they still lay there under miles of ice and that the sun-warmed waters of the Corridor must eventually reach those hidden seas.

  “If we’re going to fight we should do it here,” Nona called after Zole.

  “Sixty is too many,” Zole called back. “And more will come. I would rather rest.”

  Nona shrugged and followed. Sixty was too many, and rest sounded good.

  8

  HOLY CLASS

  Present Day

  TOTAL DARKNESS. AN enduring silence wrapped Path Tower’s Third Room.

  “Dead dog’s bollocks!” Nona broke the silence, banging her shin into something hard. The curse was one of Regol’s favourites, though he only used it when he thought she wasn’t there. One day Nona hoped to delight Clera with it.

  She bent to rub her leg, then reached out to examine the obstacle. A barrel-lidded casket. She wasn’t sure if she’d seen it in the moment before the light died or imagined it after. Her fingers explored the metal banding and found a heavy lock. Would there be more troublesome protections? Thread-traps? Sigil marks? Or did Sister Pan consider the fact that it rested in the third chamber of Path Tower sufficient defence?

  Nona sat on the cold stone floor. She could put a foot to the Path and summon light but how that might end, so soon after the strange paths she had just pursued, Nona didn’t know and didn’t want to find out.

  The lock was a big piece of cold iron. Nona defocused her sight to bring the thread-scape into view. The lock blazed with them. Threads for the metal itself, leading back through the journey from the locksmith’s, through the workshop, splitting through the smithies where various parts were beaten into shape, rejoining in the white heat of the forge, tracking back along rivers to the distant quarry that the ore had been dug from. All of them tangled with the lives of those who laboured to make the lock, and tangled with the old song of the earth where the iron’s constituents had lain for years uncounted.

  A sudden light lanced through it all, washing out the detail and causing Nona to shield her eyes.

  “Thought you might appreciate a lantern,” Ara said in a shaky voice. She held it up and glanced back at the wall she had come through. “Well, that was . . . unnerving.” She drew a deep, centring breath and gazed around at the sigil-covered walls in appreciation. “These are more complex than in the other rooms. There are sentences written here . . .”

  “How did you get in?” Nona demanded as she stood.

  “The same way you did, I expect.” Ara blinked.

  Nona doubted that very much. “Tell me, exactly.”

  “Well. I went up and down a few times, and I noticed you had vanished. I found a spot where I thought there might be a door and tried everything I knew to open it. It didn’t seem to work but when I got back down to the portrait room it was different . . . there was a new picture there that . . . Well, anyway, I didn’t stop to examine it. I just turned straight round and ran back up the stairs. And all along the stairwell were doorways into scenes from my life, as if I could just step back into them. Passing them by was hard. I mean really hard. And I think if I had hesitated they might have just sucked me through. But I didn’t stop. And halfway up was an archway showing you in front of that box. I stepped through and here I am.” She smiled. “Same for you?”

  “My way was a bit more complicated.” Nona shrugged. “The book’s in here if it’s anywhere.” She nudged the casket with her foot.

  “And we really want to steal? From Sister Pan?” Ara asked.

  “None of us wants to. I can’t see another way.” Nona knelt before the casket again and checked it over. No sigil marks. She brought the lock’s threads back into view, hunting for traps or alarms.

  “Won’t she notice it’s gone?” Ara asked.

  “What’s she going to say? ‘Which one of you took the forbidden book I wasn’t allowed to have on pain of banishment?’” Nona identified the threads that would undo the mechanism’s riddle. Three of them. The key must be a complex piece of ironwork. “Besides, how often do you think she looks at it? It might be a year before she notices it’s gone. It might be ten years!”

  “So we steal a book to help us steal a different book, which also might not exist.” Ara sat down, her eyes taking on that “witchy” look as she joined the hunt for any protective thread-work on the casket.

  “It exists,” Nona said. “Abbess Glass wouldn’t have lied to me.”

  “That woman lied whenever it suited her, Nona. There was nothing personal in it.” Ara’s fingers twitched as she sorted threads, plucking one, examining it, setting it aside for the next. “Besides, she was very ill; she could have been confused. She kept calling me Darla the last time I was allowed to visit her.”

  “Jula knew about the book already. She tried to tell me about it years before,” Nona said.

  “It still doesn’t make sense to me. Sherzal was going to take the Ark and use four shiphearts to control the moon. She didn’t need a book.”

  “The four ingredients of yellow cake are butter, flour, eggs, and sugar. If I gave you those four necessary things you still couldn’t make a cake that Sister Spoon wouldn’t laugh at.”

  “Neither could you.” Ara took on the nasal tones of Sister Spoon. Ruli was the better mimic but Spoon was easy to do. “Novice Nona, that is an excellent cake, perhaps the best yellow cake I have ever seen . . .”

  “. . . if the goal in making such a cake were to produce something suitable for hand-to-hand combat,” Nona continued, holding her nose. “However, if I were to wish to eat a cake rather than bludgeon someone to death with it—”

  “Then I would do better to scrape something together from the convent pigsties,” Ara finished.

  “Not the point.” Nona tried to look serious. “Sherzal wanted the Ark, the palace, the throne. The rest she was just hoping would sort itself out. The Ark was something she needed to get Adoma as an ally. The shiphearts are the necessary ingredients. What we’re after is the cookbook.”

  “It looks clean to me.” Ar
a ran her hands over the casket. “Try the lock.”

  Nona took hold of the three key threads. She didn’t need her hands but it helped her focus. Any lock is a riddle. The threads made that riddle simple, or at least less difficult, and allowed the answer to become clear through suitable manipulation. It took Nona seven tries. Ara had just opened her mouth, her lips shaping the “l” of “let me try” when the required click sounded.

  It wasn’t until she opened the lid and gazed upon the contents that Nona first felt guilty. Seeing the bundled letters, a carefully folded scarf of Hrenamon silk covered with a child’s embroidery, the small figures of a horse and a baby carved from dark pearwood, a dozen other personal effects, Nona knew herself for an intruder of the worst kind, trampling a garden of memories.

  “It must be at the bottom . . .” Nona could see no sign of a book.

  “We should go.” Everything Nona had just felt resonated in Ara’s voice.

  “We have to do this.”

  “It’s nonsense anyway.” Ara stood up to go. “If the moon’s secrets were written down in a book they would have been used at the time it was written. Or at least a hundred years later Emperor Charlc wouldn’t have been forbidding the subject and hiding all the books in a vault! He would have used the secret himself. He wouldn’t have left it to two novices in his grandson’s reign!”

  Nona looked up at her friend. She wished they could go. She wished they could just shut the box and walk away. “If I swore to you that the Ancestor had told me the true alchemy was written in a book . . . that all we had to do was follow the recipe and base metals would transmute to gold before us . . . would we be rich?”