Holy Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  “Arabella Jotsis.” Lano ignored Nona’s advance. “I hear that the Scithrowl dance in the charred ruins of your uncle’s halls. These are dangerous times. Especially for little girls.”

  Nona found her tongue. “You—”

  “And Nona . . .” Lano turned his dark eyes her way. He glanced at his right hand and the two crooked fingers, injured when he had first tried to take hold of her years before. “I had them dig up your little friend, you know? What was her name? Saya? Saylar? . . . Saida, that was it! I had a cup made from her skull and gave her bones to my dogs.”

  Safira moved in beside Lano, frowning, hissing something.

  “Nona!” Ara held her back with increasing effort. “It’s obvious what he’s doing! Don’t give him what he wants!”

  Nona understood. They were here for the book, that was what was important. But she physically couldn’t move away, any more than she could fly. Images of Saida flooded her mind. Saida in the cage, offering comfort. Saida screaming in Raymel Tacsis’s grip. Saida’s body beneath the sheet before the gallows. She gathered herself to leap among the first of Lano’s guards.

  Lano’s grin broadened and he mimed taking a drink. “I said—”

  It was Jula who stepped forward. “Honoured Lano of the House Tacsis. I understand that your soldiers are skilled and that those you have beside you likely share Safira’s training. I am sure that you have about your person sigil amulets that you have been assured can absorb and deflect hostile magics. But I must caution you. Nona Grey could tear this street open to the bedrock to see you dead, and level the houses all around us. She could blast you with such force that the amulets your gold has purchased would burn and fall to dust. And before I could take a single step to stop her you would all be smoking offal amid the ruin.” Jula shot Nona a look. “You should know that I would do everything with my power to bring her to the emperor’s justice after such an outburst. But it would be scant consolation to your corpses.”

  Safira must have been saying something very similar because, with a snarl, Lano allowed himself to be steered away, across the street towards another road.

  Nona watched them go, attempting to regain control of her breathing. The soldiers at the rear of the Tacsis cordon glanced back at her as if even now she might give chase. Nona still wanted to. Jula had been right that she would have killed Lano, but she wouldn’t have used the Path to do it. She would have cut his heart out with her bare hands.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE NOVICES RESUMED their journey in a strained silence that lasted for several blocks. Eventually Nona stopped walking and stared at Jula. “You’d do everything in your power to bring me before the emperor’s justice?”

  Jula turned. She folded her arms. “Yes, I would! We’re being invaded. We need every citizen, every soldier. The rule of law is vital to civilization at all times, and when else more so than at times when we’re under such strain? You know I’m right, Nona.”

  Nona fought to keep the smile from her face. “You’d take me in?”

  Jula nodded. “I would.”

  Nona shrugged and grinned. “And when we’ve stolen this book you’re going to confess and throw yourself on the court’s mercy?”

  Jula harrumphed and started walking again. “That, Nona Grey, is a very different thing!”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE FRIARY OF St. Castor stood in one of Verity’s least desirable quarters, an area given over to industry and warehouses, edged by slums. The stink of tanners curing hides hung over the streets so thickly that Nona felt she should be able to see the fog of it in the air. The shadows had joined hands to usher in evening’s gloom and behind closed shutters the first candles were being lit. Ara, Jula, and Ruli walked almost arm in arm, trailing Nona by a few yards. They covered their noses and cast nervous glances at the alleyways. Not that any of them had anything to worry about. Even Jula would be able to knock down a common criminal or two. Nona supposed it to be a sort of anticipatory guilt setting their nerves on edge.

  “Try to look natural . . .” Nona glanced over her shoulder at the trio.

  “Yes, Mistress Blackeyes.” Ruli stuck her tongue out and ringed both her eyes with finger and thumb. “Normal.” The more scared Ruli got the more jokes she made.

  Nona shook her head and led on. With her stolen wimple she probably looked like a mistress leading novices out. She’d kept growing when the others stopped and stood a head taller than Jula, half a head taller than Ara, with Ruli in the middle.

  “Stop touching it!” Ara hissed.

  Nona found her fingers at the headdress again. After the disaster at the Shade stores, wearing a wimple was likely to be as close as she ever got to being a nun.

  Ahead the friary loured over its neighbours, an ugly brick-shaped building, built of huge sandstone blocks cut from the Rock of Faith. Travelling brothers from all of the empire’s monasteries were afforded accommodation within the friary walls when their duties brought them to the capital. Generally those duties would be delivering illuminated manuscripts to patrons, or educating the children of the Sis, but at such troubled times Red Brothers, along with their Grey and Mystic counterparts, might well outnumber their Holy cousins on the friary guest list.

  “Wait here,” Nona told them.

  “Yes, mistress.” Next to Ruli, Jula stifled a giggle. The enormity of the crime she was about to take part in seemed to have left her slightly hysterical. Nona would make sure they were all deep in their serenity trances before they approached the records hall.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE STREET DOOR stood a good ten feet tall, oak weathered to a pale grey and studded with rusty diamond-headed bolts. The monk who opened it looked older and more weathered.

  “Yes . . . sister?” The frown beneath white eyebrows suggested that in a long life of thinking that nuns seemed to get younger every year he’d yet to see one this young.

  “I need to speak with Brother Markus.”

  A pause while he looked her up and down. Even from the height of the street step he had to crane his neck to meet her eyes. On finding them wholly black his brows lifted. “Hmmm.” He turned away and closed the door. His “wait here” reached her through the thickness of the wood.

  Nona huddled in the doorway eyeing the street. If Jula’s reports were to be taken seriously the Scithrowl hordes could be pouring past this door within days. Nona found it hard to believe. The emperor had legions at his disposal, the brothers and sisters of the Red, all the might of the Academy. Fortresses and castles dominated the Corridor from the Grampains to the Marn. The empire had endured for close on a thousand years and withstood half a hundred wars.

  “I thought you were supposed to be hard to sneak up on.” Markus’s voice startled Nona from her pondering. Already the ancient was closing the door behind him lest the mere scent of a nun corrupt the brothers within. For an instant Nona pictured the old brother in an embrace with Abbess Wheel. They would probably get on. “Something funny?” Markus asked.

  “Ah, no. Actually rather the opposite.” Nona led out into the street, stepping over a fetid puddle. “We need to do it today.”

  “Today?”

  “Today.” She glanced back.

  A moment of worry crossed Markus’s face but he pushed it aside and made a smile so warm it brought colour to Nona’s cheeks. “Today it is, then. It’s not as if I need to prepare anything.”

  A few more strides brought them to Ara, Ruli, and Jula, the latter two staring at Markus with wide-eyed fascination while his gaze lingered on Ara’s golden beauty, not for long but for rather longer than it took Nona to grow irritated.

  “Novices.” A large smile and a small bow.

  Nona felt a pulse of the marjal empathy that Markus worked so well, at a low enough level to be an unconscious thing. She remembered how he had
been in the cage before his talent flowered. A rather awkward, argumentative boy. She supposed that they had both changed beyond recognition.

  * * *

  • • •

  “WON’T YOU BE missed?” Markus asked. The sun had set and in the broad streets of the merchants’ quarter stray leaves spiralled here and there in the wind’s swirl.

  “No.” Nona was less confident than she sounded. Ghena and Ketti had been primed with cover stories about the four of them going to bed early. They had also been encouraged to exercise all the skills Sister Apple had tried to impart to them in creating the illusion that the missing novices’ beds were occupied. Ruli and Nona had long ago fabricated fake heads from dried gourds onto which they had glued their own hair, saved from past punishment shavings. But there remained the distinct possibility that Sister Rose might come up to check on Nona after her unauthorized departure from the sanatorium, or that Kettle might drop by seeking clues to the day’s theft, or that Rock might burst in on one of the not infrequent chastity patrols ordered by Abbess Wheel. Nona hoped that the looming crisis would distract the nuns from the doings of novices and focus them on matters of more existential importance.

  The houses grew larger, older, and somewhat more shabby as they approached the old cathedral. The building had lost its status over a hundred years before at the time the Church constructed the spectacular Sacred Blood whose spires threatened to overtop even the Ark. The old cathedral had been given over to various purposes, including housing former priests too decrepit to care for themselves, the management and payment of Church staff across the empire, and, crucially, the storage of documents deemed too important to destroy but for which regular access was not necessary.

  Even this close to the city’s geographic heart, and so far from the walls that not even the towers could be seen, soldiers stood on many corners. Patrols hurried past in full armour and the colours of the Seventh. The citizens watched and worried. Verity was the only city Nona had spent time in so she didn’t know if other cities had moods, but Verity did, and it was scared.

  “Tree of Gold.” Jula pointed to the elaborate cathedral tower peering over the roof of the mansion ahead.

  “It doesn’t look like a tree,” Ruli said.

  “That would be architecturally challenging,” Ara said.

  Markus’s deep voice sounded behind them. “At one time, the central tower bore golden branches similar to the arborat. I believe they were wooden and covered with beaten gold. The taproot runs down through the great hall and is said to burrow beneath the catacombs.”

  Nona glanced at the cuffs of her habit. The arborat was stitched there, a dozen of the tree symbols embroidered to encircle her wrists. Their taproots strained towards the first ancestor, though they thinned and vanished before reaching her elbows. She tried to imagine the arborat a hundred feet tall, the Ancestor’s tree gleaming in the sun. “Serenity,” she instructed, and reached for her own.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE FORMER CATHEDRAL stood at the centre of a broad plaza where a handful of stallholders still lingered, dismantling their awnings and counters. Guards stood at attention on the main steps, six of them. Their presence was probably dictated by the fact that the clergy’s wages were held somewhere within, rather than the need to watch over dusty books, but they would guard the high priest’s vault just the same.

  “Ruli, I want you high and watching. There might be thread-works on the vault. We could trigger an alarm. If anyone comes running do what you can to slow them up with mist and shadows.”

  Ruli nodded. “I’ll try.”

  “Ara, you’re on diversion. If we have trouble it could bring soldiers. If that happens they’re going to need a better reason to head somewhere else. Perhaps a light-and-thunder show would do it.”

  Ara nodded. “I’ll be up there.” She pointed to the roof of a mansion facing onto the plaza.

  “Markus, you’re with me. All we need is for everyone we meet to be agreeable.”

  He nodded. “That rather depends on who we meet, but I can be pretty persuasive.”

  “And Jula, you’re the brains.”

  “I am?” A moment of panic threatened from the far side of Jula’s serenity. “I am.” The repetition bore more confidence.

  “Let’s do it, then.” Nona led towards the cathedral doors wondering where it was that Jula renewed her confidence and whether there was any more left there. This was dangerous. The killing kind. Stealing Sister Pan’s book could see them thrown out of the convent and possibly into a cell. Being caught stealing from the high priest’s vault would see them executed, no doubt in some unpleasant manner prescribed by an antiquated church law.

  Nona tried to steady the tremor in her hands. So much at stake and all for a promise to an old woman. Staked on a promise and on the faith that even at the end of her life Abbess Glass could still outplay all comers in the long game.

  As she mounted the broad steps Nona reached for the order imprinted with the abbess’s seal of office. Jula had Sister Pan’s book in a leather satchel beneath her arm.

  “Sister?” One of the guards stepped down to intercept her. “It’s too late in the day to go inside. All the clerks have gone home.”

  “I’m delivering a forbidden text to the high priest’s vault.” Nona nodded towards Jula, who held out the order blazoned with the abbess’s seal.

  “I’m sorry, sister.” The man frowned at Jula’s paperwork. “You should have sent ahead to make an appointment. You’ll have to return in the morning.” He blocked her path. He lacked an inch or two on her in height but stood far broader in the shoulders, a steel breastplate protecting the space between them.

  Markus stepped up, an easy smile in place. “Guardsman, this blue-eyed nun can’t wait in a war-torn city with a forbidden book. It could fall into the wrong hands. It needs to be placed safely in the vaults.”

  A moment’s silence hung between them. Markus started to nod and the guardsman hesitantly took to nodding too. “Blue eyes . . .” A frown and then with more confidence he said, “Yes. It would be better stored away, brother.”

  The guardsman led them up the steps. The other guards opened the doors, two men to each, then closed them at their heels. And although Markus had won their entrance with a power that should see the three of them safely in and safely out again, Nona couldn’t help but feel that those great doors closing behind them were the jaws of a trap that they had willingly stuck their heads into.

  “We’ll roust Brother Edran from his chambers and get that book where it belongs.”

  “Brother Edran?” Nona asked.

  “He oversees the high priest’s vault. Spends more time locked up with those books that he does with people.” The guardsman shuddered.

  The cathedral’s great hall had been divided up long ago, timber frames set to support new levels and partition walls. The guardsman led them into a maze of corridors, smoke-stained and sparsely lit with lanterns. They passed a few elderly clerks, one busy locking doors and extinguishing lights. Here and there guardsmen slouched along on patrol, old men and boys now that the wars had claimed those fit for battle.

  Their guardsman stopped at a door deep within the structure and hammered on it.

  “Edran? Edran! Customers for you!”

  A long pause followed. “He’s a bit deaf.” The guardsman shrugged apologetically. “EDRAN!”

  This time a series of clatterings mixed with complaints grew louder until the door jerked open and an old man in a bed-robe stared up at them, his bald head surrounded by a fringe of white hair, with more of the stuff erupting from both ears.

  “These folk have a book for the vault,” the guard said.

  “Has ale finally turned your brain to mud, Mika?” Edran squinted at Nona, Jula, then finally Markus. “Tell them to come back in the morning.”

  Mika frowned and eyed Non
a with a measure of suspicion. “It is irregular . . .”

  Markus spoke, his voice vibrant, each word sinking into the mind. “It is important. The book must go in the vault now.”

  “Nonsense! The day some monk, too young to shave, comes to order me about in my own archive . . .” Outrage overtook the old man’s tongue. “Get out!”

  Markus blinked and shot Nona a worried look. “It. Is. Important.”

  “It will be important in the morning. Right now it’s just irritating.” Edran advanced, pushing Markus before him. “Get out! Mika, drag this boy out of here or so help me . . .”

  Jula backed away, looking mortified.

  Nona couldn’t believe how easily the old man was shrugging off Markus’s best efforts. Despite herself she believed his words, more deeply than she believed her own name. She stared at the librarian, hunting for some clue to his resilience.

  “Yes, Edran. Apologies.” Mika interposed himself between the two men and took hold of Markus.

  Nona moved quickly. She moved in front of Edran, meeting his outraged stare with her wholly black eyes, and pressed one hand firmly to his chest.

  “What?” His eyes widened at the sight of hers. “How dare you!”

  At the same time Nona reached around with her other arm to pinch the silver chain she had seen at the back of his neck above the bed-robe’s collar. With the links between her fingertips she applied enough sharpness to part them and let the chain fall. In that instant she gave the old man a shove hard enough to rock him back on his heels. “It’s important!”

  Somewhere between Edran’s bare ankles and slippered feet an amulet tinkled unnoticed to the floor trailing a silver chain.

  “Guards!” Edran’s shout was hoarse with rage.