Red Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  “Arabella, and you, and Regol—” Nona started running for the doorway, both hands over her mouth, cheeks burning, pursued by Sister Apple’s laughter, Clera just a fraction behind.

  “She poisoned us!” Clera shouted after Nona as they climbed. “The bitch poisoned us.”

  “She did say she would make something new while we all trained for the forging.” Nona couldn’t shut herself up, even as she ran. She glanced back, fearing pursuit, never more vulnerable.

  Nona broke from the stairs out into the daylight, the sun’s red light fierce after the shadow-filled cave. Clera barged past her, turned by the collision and hopping for balance. They ended up facing each other, ten yards apart in the courtyard, which was otherwise empty but for Sister Mop crossing from the laundry.

  “Why—”

  “Don’t! I’ll put this in your eye!” Clera’s hand emerged from her habit clutching a throwing star—not the five-pointed design to be found in the Blade stores, but a smaller four-pointed make.

  “Where did you get that?” Nona couldn’t help herself. Besides, Clera wouldn’t throw it at her.

  Clera’s mouth spasmed, her lips writhed. “Partnis!” She screamed the word.

  “Why—”

  “What—”

  Both girls started questions, but knowing they would have to answer the other they broke off, spun around, and ran in opposite directions, Clera sprinting, Nona hobbled by the agony pulsing through her.

  Nona vomited even before she reached the edge of the convent, but it was an hour before the bitterness left her mouth and she could once again tell a lie.

  “I am not a monster.” The words tasted sickly sweet on her tongue.

  She met Clera hanging by the gate to the Poisoner’s caverns, trying to build up the courage to go down. The courtyard lay empty, the rest of the novices at the cloisters or still at their evening meal.

  Nona joined her, still in pain but now able to walk without hunching over. “Where did you get that throwing star? Why have you got it?”

  “I told you.” Clera pressed her lips together, scowling furiously. “Partnis Reeve gave it to me. He wants me to fight for him. My father told him I wouldn’t take the red when I’m done here.” She sucked her teeth, wincing at some over-strong flavour. “Anyway . . . why did your mother sell you then?”

  Nona turned towards the gate, which had been left ajar. “Let’s get this over with.” She led off and Clera followed.

  Sister Apple sat behind her desk reading from a scroll, the lesson chamber returned to its normal layout.

  “Novice Clera, Novice Nona, good of you to return.” She set her pointer stick, a slim length of wire-willow, over the scroll to mark her place. “I’ve just been reading about sweet aloe, a plant that’s been lost to the ice. Apparently it’s very good at mellowing bitterness. I would have liked to try it in my truth toxin—which, as you will have noticed, is not the sort of thing you can slip someone unawares.” She set her hands upon the desk and stood up. “Perhaps the cathedral archives still hold some seeds . . .” She crossed the room to stand before them. “What did you learn, girls?”

  “Not to trust you,” Nona said.

  The nun laughed. “I’ve been trying to teach you that since the first day you came down those stairs, Nona Grey. Will the lesson stick this time?” Her eyes slid to the left. “And Clera?”

  “The truth is a weapon and lies are a necessary shield.”

  “Put like a poet,” Sister Apple said. She reached out and laid a hand on each girl’s shoulder, ushering them closer together. “But when I asked what lesson you learned . . . I wanted to hear ‘patience.’” And with that she banged their heads together.

  32

  “IS THE SEA like this?” Nona sat with the others, legs dangling out over the drop to the distant waters. The moonlight revealed the far side of the sinkhole but darkness held the rest. The Glasswater lay many fathoms deeper than the fall from its rocky lips to the rippled surface. Nona found that hard to imagine.

  “Ha!” Ruli often spoke her amusement and rarely laughed. “The sea is huge.”

  “I know that. I’m not stupid.” Nona had seen the maps. Sister Rule’s charts reached all the way around the Corridor, though those of the most distant lands were centuries old. “I meant as deep.”

  Ruli shook her head and Clera snorted, though Nona knew she had never been to the shore. “Deeper,” Ruli said. “My father used to say something he took from a book.” She frowned, trying to remember. “Whatever befalls it the sea will close upon itself and keep its secrets, erasing with a curtain of waves all that has passed. The deep sea waits. Patient, hungry depths unknown to those who skid over its surface and think they know the whole. There are empty miles, dark places where light has never been, and man’s eyes will never know them. What wonders there . . . I forget the rest.” She pushed her hair back over her shoulders and leaned forward to stare down past her toes. “He wants me to come back, when I’ve finished here. He says there’s more in Abeth than the Church of the Ancestor. But I think I’ll stay. If I can’t be a Grey Sister then I’ll be a Holy.”

  “You don’t think there’s more out there to see?” Hessa asked from her perch on a nearby rock—she didn’t ever sit on the edge, perhaps shy of her withered leg, or knowing that if she fell she would drown.

  “Oh I do,” Ruli said. “More than I could ever know. But there’s more than I could ever know here too.” She pulled her nightdress tighter around her, the wind warmed by the approaching focus but still too cold for comfort.

  “That’s how they get you,” Clera said. “They say you’re free to leave and families pay the fees year after year, but how many do leave? There’s always something—the faith, the mysteries, pride—this place always seems to manage to hook them.” She put her head back. “Not me though. As soon as I’m offered the red I’m out of here.”

  “You see Yisht watching us?” Ara hissed. “Don’t look!” As Ruli started to swivel.

  “She’s always watching us,” Hessa said. “Well, watching you and Nona anyway.”

  “Isn’t she supposed to be watching Zole?” Clera threw a loose stone, arcing down into the water.

  “Ghena said she saw her climbing on the dome,” Ruli said. “She said she told Abbess Glass and she wouldn’t listen.”

  “Wouldn’t listen?” Nona asked.

  “It’s all the sisters.” Ruli nodded. “They’re all terrified that Sherzal will take Zole back. That’s what I’ve heard. Though why they care I don’t know. Maybe the high priest would be angry? Anyway, Zole’s getting private lessons from Sister Pan, did you know that? And from the Poisoner!” She crossed her arms. “And that’s why they won’t do anything about Yisht. They think if they throw Yisht out then Zole will go too. So Yisht can climb all over the Dome of the Ancestor if she wants.”

  “Ghena’s always making up stories.” Clera shook her head. “I hope I’m out of Grey Class before she leaves Red. But she’s right about one thing: Yisht is up to something. She is always prying.”

  “I think she’s hunting for something,” Hessa said.

  “You think Yisht will tell the abbess about this?” Ruli asked. “Us being here?” Sneaking out of the dormitories at night wasn’t unheard of but it certainly wasn’t allowed.

  “Well, if she does it’ll be your fault,” Clera said. “You could have shown us in the bathhouse, there’s plenty of steam there.”

  “I can’t do it in the bathhouse. I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because the air’s always moving.”

  “The air’s moving here too—or didn’t you notice the wind?”

  “Not down there!” Ruli pointed to the water. “Well, not so much. I don’t know . . . maybe—”

  “Maybe you just can’t do it anywhere,” Clera said.

  “We’ll find out in a moment,” Ara said. “So there’s no need to argue.�
�

  She was right. The focus was approaching, the moon nearly overhead, the sinkhole’s shadows slinking away, hugging the near wall. Beneath their feet a second moon, a red rectangle, danced in the water.

  The warmth built on Nona’s shoulders and became heat. She narrowed her eyes. Clera and Ara lay back, eyes closed, arms spread, embracing the brilliant light.

  Nona watched as the water began to steam, caught between two burning moons. Within a few minutes the whole of the sinkhole had filled with mist, a new surface billowing below her feet and rising swiftly. She was glad not to be in her habit now: the plateau was hotter than the bathhouse and sweat beaded on her arms, trickling across her ribs beneath the thin material of her nightdress.

  When the steam reached the lip it rolled out like a hot wet blanket before being stripped away by the wind, swirling and confused in the focus. Ara and Clera sat up.

  “Go on then,” Clera said.

  “I’m . . . trying.” Ruli lifted her hands, the mist streaming about them, rising steadily in the void of the sinkhole, shredding around the novices where the wind took it. Ruli’s pale brow furrowed and grew more pale, sweat running down the sides of her face.

  “I don’t see anything,” Clera said.

  Nona didn’t either, but she could feel something, a tingling in her fingertips, spreading to her palms, an itching across the back of her mind. Her stomach chose the moment to knot itself into a ball of agony, nearly doubling her up and almost pitching her into the sinkhole.

  “There!” Ara pointed. Just below them the mist had clotted into a shape . . . a something.

  “It’s a person.” Nona gasped it past gritted teeth.

  The figure drew closer, a more solid whiteness amid the rising steam. Featureless, perhaps a man, perhaps a woman, it reminded Nona of the Ancestor’s statue in the dome.

  “I . . . told . . . you!” Ruli grinned, the strain evident.

  “Do a horse now!” Clera said. “No! Do Sister Wheel . . . No! Kettle and Apple. Kissing!”

  The figure broke apart and Ruli released a breath.

  “That’s great, Ruli.” Ara leaned past Nona and put a hand to Ruli’s shoulder. “You’re a marjal touch at the least, a half-blood maybe!”

  “You’ll have no problems with shadow-weaving,” Hessa said from behind them. “You’ll be a Grey Sister for sure if you want to be.”

  “I want to see more.” Clera lay back, an arm over her eyes. The focus was approaching its peak, soon the light would be moving on. On the ice-margins the thaw would be in full swing, the tribes at the lakes, busy gathering the moon’s bounty before the freeze set in again. “What else can you do?”

  “Just that.” Ruli lay back. “And even that gives me a headache.”

  “You should tell the abbess,” Hessa said.

  Ruli snorted. “The abbess only cares about the Path. The whole convent only cares about the Path.” She shrugged. “The Poisoner will know soon enough if I can work shadow, and she’ll help me.” A smile. “Kettle and Bhenta will too. Us greys stick together!”

  They crept back to the dormitory in the last of the moon’s warmth, already shivering as the wind regained its voice and moulded their damp shifts around them.

  It took an age for Nona to sleep, coiled around her sickness. Raymel had poisoned her somehow, and somehow she needed to fight back.

  • • •

  THE NEXT DAY Nona found herself yawning in Path. She often did, even without the excuse of lost sleep. Serenity proved elusive and the Path always beyond reach. Sister Pan had told her a hundred times that she tried too hard: “Serenity isn’t something that can be seized, taken, snatched up by force of will. It is a gift that you must be open to.”

  Even so, however hard Nona tried not to want it, serenity had yet to reach out, take her in its arms and set her gently upon the Path.

  Sister Pan summoned the girls’ attention from their meditations with a cough. She stood before the great ironbound chest which sat at the front of the room, black against the stained and sunlit glass. “There is a line that divides and a line that joins, and they are the same line and the line is a path.”

  Nona found Sister Pan’s pronouncements more and more frustrating, more so now that she knew she had a genuine ability to touch the Path. In Red Class Nona had let the old nun’s philosophizing wash over her, just waiting for a chance to escape to blade-path, but now she felt bound to listen, hoping against hope that she might actually say something useful.

  “There is a thread that runs through all things, that binds each story to every other, a thread that runs through the veins and the marrow and the memory of every creature.”

  Nona sighed. It was all very well Sister Pan making pretty speeches but it would be much more helpful if she would just tell them what they needed to know. If you understood something you should be able to explain it; if you didn’t understand it then you had no business teaching it. Either way, having the old woman spout poetry at them didn’t help at all.

  Nona found her head nodding and jerked upright, blinking and trying to keep her eyes wide. Whatever poison the Tacsis had got into her seemed to work erratically, the symptoms coming and going without rhyme or reason.

  • • •

  IN FRUSTRATION AT her failures with serenity Nona had on several occasions stolen away from the convent buildings to try to revisit the Path in the only manner she had ever reached it.

  She had taken to slipping her friends and venturing out on the narrowing spur of the plateau. There, she hunched against the wind, gazing out over the garden lands of Verity and the Corridor narrowing away to the east between ice walls. If she looked down she could see the convent vineyards, huddled against the plateau walls, sheltered from the weather.

  Pain and anger had driven her to the Path before. Anger had only to be reached for: the fact that Raymel Tacsis still drew breath was enough in itself. She had wanted to kill him at the forging and days later her fingers still itched at night for want of his blood. But she had found her blades unable to do more than scratch him. Had it been the man at his side, working some enchantment? Or the devils sharing his skin, armouring their host against her?

  Either way Nona had failed Saida. Within yards of the place where Raymel had hurt her Nona had taken his throat in her hand . . . and still he lived. She only had to think of her own failings as a friend and the anger was there for the taking. Pain too.

  It took time. Time to kindle the rage and let it burn to white heat, time to let her pain rise from the deep and hidden places where she kept it. But she could do it, and on each occasion that she did so the Path would coalesce out of the chaos of her mind’s eye. For a moment it would appear, stretching out before her, whipping this way and that, a white serpent in its death throes. And in the next instant she would be hurled at it with frightening speed.

  The first time she had touched the Path on one of these excursions she made a glancing contact and the energy of it burst away from her in a boom that had rattled shutters back at the convent and sent birds spiralling towards the ground, killed in mid-flight. The noise had been so loud that nobody knew where it had come from. Sister Rule had suggested some kind of collapse in the many caverns that riddled the plateau.

  On the second and subsequent occasions Nona had managed to drive the Path’s energies into the rock, shattering limestone, reducing some of it to powder, but not causing any damage that would be evident from the convent. On a dozen or more attempts though, despite her best efforts to slow her approach, to gain her balance as on the blade-path and make cautious progress, she managed just one step, or perhaps a glancing second step, before the Path threw her.

  “Nona?”

  “Yes?” Nona looked up, rediscovering the room, the glorious colours of the windows, the novices on all sides in their chairs, and Sister Pan standing before her. “Yes, Mistress Path?”

&nbs
p; “You appeared to be slipping over the line from serenity to slumber.” Titters of laughter around the room.

  “Sorry, Mistress Path.”

  “I said that you would be accompanying me to the Academy.”

  “Me?”

  “And Hessa and Arabella. I take the Grey Class quantals every year on the twentieth seven-day. If we have any quantals, that is. It is important that you be exposed to marjal enchantments, and likewise the Academy masters believe their students should know something of Path magics.”

  Bray sounded and Sister Pan frowned at the fading bell before waving her hand in uncharacteristic irritation, dismissing the class. Clera’s chair almost spun in her wake as she beat the scramble to be first down the stairs.

  • • •

  NONA FOUND CLERA already attacking a bowl of stew when she reached the refectory table that evening. Darla had secured a drumstick that looked to have come from a swan rather than a chicken, and seemed determined to gnaw through to the marrow, her cheeks and chin running with grease.

  “You’re late. Not like you.” Darla managed to get the words around her drumstick. Of all the novices only Darla seemed to have more of an appetite than Nona.

  “Sister Wheel caught me for a lecture.” It wasn’t true though—she had been trying to walk the Path again, reaching it angry. As usual her attempts to slow down and take control saw her pitched off within moments. A crazing of shattered stone and cracks that ran a yard or more into the bedrock were all she had to show for it.

  “I saw Wheel whispering with Yisht behind the pigsties.” Clera didn’t look up from her bowl, speaking between spoonfuls. “I think they’re plotting together.”

  Nona looked around for Zole but the girl wasn’t there. Sherzal often sent her food-parcels to cater to her “ethnic diet” and Zole could be found eating from them in the cloisters. It looked like dried fish usually, sometimes with disturbing hints of tentacle. At other times it looked like cubes of fat, blackened with age, and the stink made Nona’s eyes water. Nobody ever asked to share.