Holy Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  “Explain again, Markus!” Nona called out.

  Markus, halfway down the hall and being manhandled away at speed, spoke over the guardsman’s shoulder. “You want to help us.”

  Edran’s anger clouded with confusion. “Wait . . .”

  Mika released the monk, brushing at his habit apologetically. “Let me help . . .”

  “We need to get this book stored safely in the vault before nightfall,” Markus said.

  The old man threw up his hands. “If you must, you must!” He frowned at Nona as if remembering the shove. A guardsman rounded the corner, puffing, but Edran waved him away impatiently. He turned to Markus. “Wait here. I’ll get my keys.” And with that he retreated to his room, closing the door.

  “You should go now.” Markus sent the guardsman back to his post.

  Nona bent to scoop up the amulet, and as Markus turned back to her she opened her hand to display it, a sigil wrought in silver.

  “It’s the mendant sigil.” Markus squinted at it as if the thing were too bright to look upon. “To negate manipulation of thoughts and emotions. Abbot Jacob and the senior monks at St. Croyus have similar protection. The novices would be in charge otherwise.”

  Nona closed her fist around it. Part of her wanted to take the thing as her own. Security against Joeli’s manipulations and whatever else might come her way in the future. But such a valuable object would be missed and in the resultant hue and cry her visit to the archives would undoubtedly be discovered. With reluctance she set the amulet down by the doorway. “Let him find it later.”

  * * *

  • • •

  EDRAN KEPT THEM waiting ten minutes, finally emerging in his ink-stained work-robes, jingling a heavy bunch of keys.

  “This really is most irregular. Let me see your order.”

  “It’s here, archivist.” Jula produced the document and held out Aquinas’s Book of Lost Cities.

  Edran studied both, raising a white eyebrow as he leafed through the pages of the latter. “Hmm. Amazing that such works keep cropping up.” He snapped his fingers. “Let’s be about it, then!”

  He led them through more corridors, unlocking two sets of doors and descending a flight of steps. “I’ve told them a thousand times that it’s madness to store books in the catacombs, but do they listen?” With his lantern raised, Edran hurried along a tunnel lined with empty niches, coming to a halt before a heavy door on which he rapped: four knocks, a pause, three knocks.

  After a long pause someone unbolted the door and Edran pushed through. The antechamber beyond lay bare save for candles arrayed around the walls and a chair on which a single guardsman had been sitting. Opposite the door they entered by stood the iron portal to the high priest’s vault.

  “Hernas, I’m making a deposit.” Edran held out an impatient hand towards Jula. “The book, girl.”

  The guardsman adjusted his iron helm and stepped in close, frowning. Unlike the hirelings at the entrance this was a church-guard, perhaps forty, weathered by the Corridor wind, the lines of old cuts recorded in white seams across his hands and face, his tabard displaying the Ancestor’s tree, a sword at his hip. He stood in contrast to the soft boys and geriatrics they’d passed on the way in. “The vault stays shut after hours, archivist. You know that.”

  “I . . .” Edran hesitated.

  “He’s making an exception,” Markus said. “It will be all right.”

  The last words buzzed with power, each pulling at a multitude of threads. Nona found herself nodding—it would be all right.

  The church-guard’s hand slid towards the hilt of his sword. Nona moved fast. Like Edran, the man before her seemed immune to Markus’s influence: like Edran he was likely wearing the mendant sigil. If she could get the thing off him, and quickly, the possibility remained that Markus could smooth things over. The helm! It had to be the helm. It looked too well made, out of place on a church-guard with no other armour save a chain-mail vest beneath his tabard. She crashed into the man, contriving to cut his chinstrap and tear the helm free before they both hit the door behind him.

  “Tell him, Markus!” Nona seized the man’s wrist, trapping his sword in its scabbard.

  Markus blinked in surprise at finding both of them on the ground. “You should help us.” Spoken through teeth gritted against the strain of command.

  “To arms!” the church-guard yelled. “To a—” Nona banged his head against the door hard enough to silence him.

  “Well.” Nona slipped a vial of boneless syrup from her habit and administered it to the dazed guard. “Perhaps we should have come back tomorrow.”

  “I don’t understand . . .” Edran started to back towards the door.

  “Sorry.” Jula caught the archivist’s arm and twisted it behind him. “Do you file the books using the Occadavian system? Or is this place still on Dooey ordering?”

  “How dare you!” The old man bristled, craning his neck to glare at the novice behind him.

  “Sorry . . .” Jula gave an apologetic smile and twisted his arm higher until he yelped. “But I really do have to know.”

  “Dooey! Dooey!”

  Jula eased the pressure. “And is that with chronological ordering and the aleph categories for research?”

  “I don’t . . . yes!” Another twist replaced truculence with a squeaked affirmation.

  “Got what you need?” Nona asked.

  “If he’s not lying,” Jula said.

  “I don’t think he is.” Markus approached, staring the old man in the face. “No.”

  Nona shrugged and, knocking aside Edran’s hand, smeared the last drops of her boneless across his lips.

  They laid him beside the guardsman, both face down.

  “We should have asked him which key,” Jula said as Nona pulled the bunch from Edran’s limp fingers.

  “It’ll be the biggest one.” Nona brought up the best candidate, black iron and nearly six inches in length.

  The guess proved right and Nona pushed the door open on hinges that squealed louder than Edran had. Fortunately the vault’s secure location put it out of earshot of all but a handful of clerics, and Markus had made Edran send those on their way.

  “Ready?” Nona looked pointedly at Markus, still crouched over the paralysed men.

  The monk nodded, lifting his hands from the backs of their necks, still muttering something. A sigil amulet, twin to Edran’s, glimmered on a chain hanging from his fingers. He replaced it around the church-guard’s neck before standing and stepping away. Nona followed Jula into the vault, Markus close behind her.

  “What did you do to them?”

  “I was trying to make sure that the only thing they remembered about you was your dazzling blue eyes.” His gaze flickered to her face and he forced a quick grin.

  “Will it work?”

  He shrugged. “I hope so.”

  Nona turned back. “Let’s give them a different story to tell.” She took from beneath her habit a Scithrowl carver, the leaf-bladed dagger issued to Adoma’s shock troops. Years ago Zole had given her the blade after taking it from a boy who probably got it from his father. She set it by the guard’s feet before retreating into the vault and pulling the door closed. Just inside the chamber beyond she dropped a copper groat, worn and stamped with the head of Adoma’s father. It bounced and rolled against the wall. She didn’t see which way it landed, but heads or tails it would still point eastward.

  “What are you doing?”

  “A little misdirection. Let them think it was Scithrowl agents in disguise.”

  “Very careless Scithrowl agents!”

  “The horde is on our doorstep, everyone’s jumping at shadows, it won’t take much to send them running the wrong way. Let them think spies were here and that soon Adoma’s Fist will blow open the city gates for their queen,” Nona said. It probably wasn’t
far from the truth in any case. She turned towards the towering shelves.

  In the space before the shelves a thick and slightly narrowing length of ironwood wandered down from the ceiling and continued into the stone floor. The deepest root of the tree of the Ancestor, part of the golden arborat that once spread above the cathedral. The taproot leading back to the source. Nona wondered what she might find if she dug down after it. She shook away the thought. “We need the book, Jula!”

  Jula, who had been gazing in hungry amazement at the stacks of tightly bound tomes, jolted back into the moment and began to move between the rows. The shelves bore labels relating to the books they held, each tome carefully wrapped in skeilskin to fend off the damp. The air hung heavy with mildew, mould, and the stink of foxed paper. Markus began to sneeze and Nona, feeling her own nose begin to tingle, moved to the vault door and fresher air, opening it a crack.

  “I’ll listen out for any trouble.”

  She waited, calling back the tatters of her serenity trance so that she wouldn’t be tempted to urge Jula to hurry up. Outside Ara and Ruli would be imagining all manner of disasters that might have befallen them.

  Time crept by, seeming slower than the deepest Nona’s hunska blood could bury her between the seconds. She discovered her foot tapping without instruction. Outside the door either Edran or the church-guard made a soft grunt, probably an angry shout muted by the boneless.

  More moments crawled by, mounting slowly into minutes. “How’s it going?”

  “I’m getting there. I’ve found the right section, I think. I’m having to unwrap everything, though, and then wrap it back up so they don’t know what we were after.”

  A distant shout rang out and at the same time Ara pulsed along their thread-bond an image of soldiers crowding in through the cathedral doors above.

  “Hurry! Someone’s coming!” Nona hissed.

  The distant sound of booted feet approaching at a run. Lots of booted feet.

  “Dung on it!” Nona stepped back and pulled the door to, locking it. “We’ve been found out . . .” It didn’t seem possible.

  “Found out?” Markus hurried over. “Ancestor! They’ll hang us all! How can we be found out?”

  “We’ve been betrayed.” Nona stared around the shadowed corners of the vault. There must have been a lot of them coming or Ara and Ruli would have delayed them more effectively.

  “We’re done for. We can’t get past them!”

  Nona started to walk the perimeter of the vault, trailing her fingers across the wall. “Jula! Hurry up with that book!”

  Markus followed, panic in his voice. “Leave the damn book. If we don’t touch it we can say this was all about turning in the other book. Just that we were rather too zealous about it . . .” He trailed off, hearing how weak the excuse sounded once said out loud.

  Someone outside shouted into the pause. “Open up!” A fist pounding on iron panels.

  “Barricade the door, Markus.” Nona took hold of his shoulders and pointed him back at it. “They’ll get another key soon enough.”

  “How will that help?” But he went, taking hold of a ladder used to reach the top shelves.

  Nona’s mind raced, shredding her serenity. She might battle a way through the soldiers who crowded the antechamber and corridors beyond, but it would hardly be an escape. Murder would be added to the charge of theft. Her own sisters would be set to hunt her down. All she had worked for lost.

  She continued pacing, stepping away from the wall where the shelves demanded it, returning to set her fingers to the stone once more. Marjal rock-work allowed for more than the manipulation of stone. Nona sank her senses through the blocks lining the vault and into the ground beyond, a mixture of subsoil and rubble used for the cathedral’s foundations. She moved on, her perception continuing to quest through the walls.

  “Found it!” Jula had to shout over the hammering at the door. She lifted her lantern in one hand, in the other a fat book bound with black leather.

  “Wrap the others. Put them back,” Nona shouted.

  “I don’t know how long this door will hold!” Markus had the ladder wedged against it and was struggling to move one of the smaller freestanding shelves, books spilling to the ground as it lurched and wobbled.

  The door looked undamaged to Nona. She hoped they’d take hammers to it and that by the time another key was found the lock would be jammed or the door panel too warped to open.

  On the wall opposite the entrance Nona found what she was looking for. A void beyond the stone blocks. The space beneath the cathedral would have housed store chambers, vaults, sewers, drainage channels, and catacombs where the rich and the holy were interred. Nona wished she had the talent to tell how far off the void was, whether it led anywhere, and what lay between her and it. All she could say was that it was a reasonably large space and probably not more than a yard from where her fingertips pressed the wall.

  Nona didn’t want to follow through with her plan but their options had narrowed to almost none. Joeli had done this. Nona felt sure of it. She had thought that if the Namsis girl discovered their actions she would wait longer, eager to unravel more of their plan and unmask them before the abbess. But even if Joeli missed out on seeing her enemies come to grief this way, she would undoubtedly relish the idea of having them caught like rats in a trap, bottled up in the very room they had tried so hard to enter.

  Something hit the door with considerably greater force than any previous blow. Nona glanced back at Jula’s and Markus’s shocked faces and the great dent in the door behind them. The ladder clattered to the ground and the shelf shed more books.

  “You should stand back and cover your ears,” Nona said.

  She had only to picture Joeli’s face to summon the anger she needed. Nona shut her eyes and against the red mist she saw the bright line she sought, burning through her vision. The door shuddered again, another mighty blow reverberating around the vault, and without hesitation Nona leapt at the Path.

  As always the Path’s touch lit her whole being, as if the Ancestor had reached out and plucked her like a harp string. The power that thrilled through her brought with it such unalloyed joy that it threatened to wash away all trace of the necessary fear that would allow her to fall from it again. Fear that even as the Path’s energies burned through her they consumed from within, fraying the fabric of her being. Fear that on returning to the world she would neither be able to hold or shape what she had taken. Fear that with insufficient care she might never again find Abeth but fall into the dark places Sister Pan warned of, places from which there was no return.

  Jula’s scream brought Nona tumbling from the Path, building up an awful velocity as she fell back into her flesh. For an instant Nona stood, shuddering with power, light bleeding from her skin to fill the vault with crimson and shadow. In the next moment the Path’s momentum caught her up and flung her at the wall like a stone from a sling.

  Nona lay sprawled and smoking. With a groan she stood up, still armoured in the Path’s strength, half-deafened, shaking off rock and dirt, chunks of both still falling behind her. Back through the dust-filled tunnel she had made she could see the glow of Jula’s lantern.

  “Come on . . .” Her voice escaped as a hoarse whisper. “Hurry!” Louder this time.

  Jula came running through, head down, Markus behind her bent low, stumbling across the rubble. Another blow rang out from the vault, followed by the sound of an iron door crashing to the ground.

  Nona glanced around as Jula’s light started to reveal the space about her. They were in a brick-lined tunnel with a low arched ceiling. Rectangular recesses punctuated the walls, places where coffins might have been slid for eternal rest, prior to their relocation when the cathedral closed.

  “Quickly.” Jula moved past Nona.

  “Come on!” Markus too, galvanizing her into action.

  Shaking
off the last of her disorientation, Nona gave chase. Shouts echoed back in the vault as the soldiers began to pour in, ready for battle.

  The tunnel met a second and they turned left. That tunnel met another and another. Left, right, their choices mounted as they hurried into what proved to be something of a labyrinth.

  “We’ll never find our way out!” Markus turned, white-faced. Ahead of him Jula splashed on through ankle-deep water.

  “We will,” Nona said. “And this is good. We can lose them in here.”

  “I can’t stay down here.” Markus seemed more terrified than when they’d been moments from capture. Nona could feel the fear bleeding from him, infecting her as only a marjal empath can, filling her mind with images of being trapped, held tight in unbroken darkness far below the ground.

  She shook him. “You’re a monk. Have a little faith.”

  “I’m a monk stealing from the Church. I’m not sure the Ancestor would want to help me,” Markus whispered, but a shadow of a smile came with it.

  “There’s a grating here,” Jula called back. “It’s too high to reach . . . but I can see the stars.”

  “There you go.” Nona tried to hide her own relief. “The Ancestor approves.”

  14

  THE ESCAPE

  Three Years Earlier

  THE TUNNEL INTO the black ice was hard to see. They found it easily, though, announced by the great fan of ink-dark debris strewn before the mouth of it.

  “They dug this?” Nona gazed with horror at the opening, little more than six foot high. The malice pricking at her made her want to scratch the skin from her arms. Even without Zole’s story she would have known that the black depths of the ice were filled with devils. She felt them, countless, hungry, far worse than Keot, and eager for flesh to occupy. “People actually dug this?”

  Zole only nodded and walked on in. Nona followed, trying to imagine the effect on those that had laboured here with picks, the black frost melting all across them.

  “I can’t see . . .” After twenty yards Nona felt as if her eyes had simply stopped working. Turning, she could see the circle of daylight behind her, just a patch of brightness, illuminating nothing, holding no meaning.