Grey Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  Kettle took a right turn down a narrow passage delving steeply into the mountain’s depths. The floor fell in uneven, muddy steps, a steady trickle of water spilling down them.

  “I am the Chosen One.” Zole stopped by a fissure in the wall, a vertical slot wide enough for an arm but not a shoulder. “That is what they say. So either have faith in me, or stop worrying. If the Argatha’s prophecy is a piece of nonsense then I am just a child from the ice, of no particular value.” She reached into the crack beside her, the nitre-caked walls scraping her arm.

  “You’re of particular value, chosen or not.” Kettle clasped the girl’s shoulder, knowing anything more affectionate would unsettle her.

  Zole twisted her mouth into an almost-smile. Her hand was empty now, the black-skin and cross-knives stowed away. She slid deeper into the crack and laid her palm against the rock where it gripped her. “Worry about yourself, sister. And Nona.” Her brow furrowed and, with obvious effort, she pushed. And somehow the rock moved. The whole fissure widened, the wall bulging to accommodate the displaced volume, as if the whole thing were semi-liquid.

  “How—”

  “Yisht was my mentor.” Zole eased her way into the crack. The blood began to trickle from her left nostril again as she taxed her powers. “And there is a shipheart in this place. Can you not feel it?”

  Kettle thought for a moment. She felt nothing specific, but it was true that she saw through the utter darkness of the caves with greater clarity than she had experienced before. And prior to Yisht’s theft of the Sweet Mercy’s shipheart Kettle’s shadow-working had always improved when she neared the vault in which it was kept.

  “Be careful!” she called after Zole.

  “They will not find me.” The fissure narrowed, rock groaning, as the novice moved from sight. “I will find them.”

  “Watch for traps . . .” Kettle stared at the crack, unremarkable now, with only a handful of fractures to mark Zole’s passage. She wanted to call her back. Whatever her talents, however chosen she might be, she was still only a girl, a novice, and this was the Tetragode, a place where the most legendary of the Grey would fear to walk. Sister Cloud had done battle with Noi-Guin centuries ago and barely escaped with her life. Kettle had accepted when she understood her destination that she would not be coming back. She found it harder to accept the same for Zole or Nona.

  “Ancestor watch over you.” A whisper. And with throwing stars in hand, Kettle carried on down the slippery descent.

  * * *

  • • •

  EVER SINCE APPLE had pushed Kettle partway into the dark world to save her life Kettle had felt the shadow as something fluid, alive almost. Every shadow-worker experiences some element of that sensation but for those steeped in shadow it was more intimate, more real. The darkness was something that flowed through you, blotted into your skin, ran in your veins. In the depths of the Tetragode Kettle could feel the Noi-Guin’s web of shadow-links all around her, alarms pulsing from one to the other. And something more, something dark and awful, like a spider lurking in the midst of that web, some many-legged monstrosity ready to scurry out to devour any foreign body trapped in its strands. Something singular. In charge.

  Kettle continued to go deeper, taking care to leave as few traces of her passing as possible, choosing the narrow paths over the broad, winding her way down among the roots of the mountains. She wrapped herself in the clarity trance, filling every detail with meaning. Twice she found traps. The first barbed and rusty blades anchored beneath the soft mud covering an area of tunnel floor, the second a fall of rocks, ready to drop at the tug of a thin, black chain that crossed the stony ground. They marked the limits of the Noi-Guin territory, designed to thwart infiltration via any of the unknown ways snaking beneath the Grampains.

  There are times to attack fast and relentlessly, allowing your foe no moment to regroup, but that is a tactic best suited to a place you know well or have studied in diagrams to the point at which you could navigate it blind. Having rung the Tetragode’s doorbell, the best policy, the one Sister Apple would suggest from her study of the grey tomes, was to lie low, let the defenders expose and exhaust themselves, and then to learn what needed to be learned before striking and striking hard.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE WAITING GAME is a difficult one, especially when a friend is in danger. The Noi-Guin would not know that Nona was the target of the intrusion—they had many enemies after all—but she would be high on the list of reasons for the attack. Probably they would move Nona, maybe even kill her and be done with it. Kettle didn’t think so, though. If they thought Nona the target then Nona was also the bait. The Noi-Guin were vengeful. And even if they were not vengeful an attack on the Tetragode was an attack on their reputation and could not be allowed to go unpunished. If Nona were killed then perhaps the attackers would melt away, uncaught, and that could not be permitted.

  Kettle thought that the most probable course of action for the Noi-Guin, if they believed Nona to be the likely target, would be to torture her in the hope of drawing the attackers out. They would consider the possibility that she was thread-bound to at least one of her would-be saviours. The only other alternative would be to accept that the Noi-Guin who had brought her in had allowed herself to be tracked to the Tetragode by more conventional means, and that was unthinkable.

  Kettle settled herself deep at the end of a chain of choices committed to memory and waited. She crouched in the chill, utter darkness of a passage where perhaps no person had ever been before in all the long millennia since the stream that carved it had found a different course. She wrapped herself in clarity, ears open to the smallest suggestion of sound, her mind touching the darkness, sensitive to any vibration that a shadow-worker’s power might cause. She ate, chewing slowly on the trail-biscuit from her pack, letting the moments slide by and accumulate into hours. And Nona, summoned along the thread-bond by the terror that Kettle had experienced approaching the Tetragode, albeit suppressed and channelled into more useful forms by her training, now found her grip on the nun’s perception slipping. As fear mellowed into calm, and boredom became the most immediate threat, Nona’s place in the back of Kettle’s mind became smaller and smaller. At the last she began to feel the cold of her cell and the shivering of her own flesh, which unlike Kettle’s was wrapped in nothing but the torn remnants of a smock.

  * * *

  • • •

  NONA’S EYES SNAPPED open. “Damn.”

  What? Where were you? Keot burned across her throat, just below the collar.

  With Kettle. She’s here with Zole. They killed a Noi-Guin and now they’re hiding. Kettle thinks the other Noi-Guin will torture me to bring her and Zole into the open.

  You had better escape then.

  Nona uncurled, finding her muscles stiff, her arm and hip sore from supporting her on the stone floor. She stood and faced the wall, feeling for the iron pin that secured the chain leading from her ankle cuff. She didn’t know if the winding trick had worked, or even if it could work, but it was all she had. With every ounce of the speed at her disposal she repeated the process, winding the chain around the pin so fast that the disc she built against the wall had no time to collapse. At the last circuit she gripped the outer edge before the links could shift, and applied all her strength to turning it.

  Nothing. Just a double handful of chain dangling from scraped fingers.

  Again! Keot flowed across her skin, trying to reach her right hand but finding himself blocked by the wristband.

  Nona tried again. And again. She lost count of her efforts.

  Any hunska, even a full-blood, tires quickly when using their speed at its limit. Eventually Nona slumped on the floor, exhausted, her fingernails splintered, hands sore. She lay, reaching for her serenity trance, waiting while her body gathered its resources for more bursts of speed. She heard people approaching, many of them, on soft feet. Her serenity shielded her from the jolt of shock but the fear still rose
, a tide of it. She gained her feet and prepared to fight.

  The door remained closed. Nona heard the newcomers arrange themselves outside her cell, exchanging a muttered comment or two. And then . . . nothing. Kettle was half-right perhaps. The Noi-Guin were ready for any attempt to free her, but not ready to hurt her. Not yet. Their reticence made little sense to Nona. What were they waiting for? Tellasah could claim the kill that had been denied her for so long. She could do it before her peers. If she wanted to torment Nona she could do that too. Why wait?

  Nona sniffed at the water they’d left her, stale stuff in a mud-clay jug. If she broke it the pieces would be too brittle to serve as weapons, too crumbly to bear any edge that might cut an enemy or even her own wrists. The water might be laced with drugs, but if she didn’t continue to drink it she wouldn’t be much use. She took a sip and returned to her battle against the pin.

  Hours passed. Many of them. Perhaps days. The guards outside changed shifts, Nona snatched fitful sleep, her stomach growled and true hunger, her childhood friend, returned to her for the first time in years. Nona wound her chain a hundred times, tried a hundred times to twist the pin to the left or right. The iron resisted her.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE BANG THAT hauled Nona from the dark confusion of her dreams was the cell door being thrown open. Light streamed in. More light than Nona remembered being in the world. She flung up her arms, screwing her eyes tight behind them.

  “Ice! It stinks in here!” A man’s voice, cultured and full of good humour.

  Nona sat up and squinted through weeping eyes at the dazzle of light. It came from a single lantern, held aloft by a tall figure. Two figures—one portly, one slim—stood beside that one, and robed Lightless stood to both sides, perhaps four of them, more filing in.

  Nona pulled the scraps of her smock around her and retreated on her backside into a corner.

  “And this animal, rotting here amongst her own sewage, killed my Raymel?” The humour left the man’s voice. “Lano? Is it her?”

  The slim figure leaned in, a dark-haired man in fine clothing. “It’s her, Father.”

  “She is yours, my lord.” The woman holding the lantern wore a black-skin facemask. A Noi-Guin. A belt laden with cross-knives hung over her shoulder, down to the opposite hip. “You may dispose of her as you wish. My contract has been fulfilled. The Tetragode regrets the delay.”

  Nona knew the two men though she couldn’t see them clearly yet. She smeared away the tears that the light had filled her eyes with.

  “It was not well done.” Thuran’s voice narrowed to sharpness. “But at least it has been done.” He stepped back. “Secure her.” And the Lightless surged forward.

  Still half-blind, Nona tried to stand but the Noi-Guin, that Nona now knew must be Tellasah, hooked a foot into a loop of the chain and jerked Nona’s feet from under her. The Lightless had her a moment later. They were not unskilled, having been trained for years in the Noi-Guin arts, and all of them had at least a touch of hunska. Nona broke someone’s wrist and struck an unguarded throat, but dazzled, chained, and fresh from sleep, she couldn’t fight them off.

  Four Lightless pinned Nona to the stone floor, the two injured retreated, and Thuran Tacsis crouched over her, his son Lano, lean, dark, watching hungrily over his shoulder. Tellasah held a long thin cane tipped with a needle towards Nona. The Noi-Guin kept the needle point hovering about eighteen inches above Nona’s hip, ready to jab her should she somehow start to break free, presumably with a fast-acting poison.

  Nona stopped struggling and stared at the red, bearded face of the old man hunkered down beside her. A Sister of Discretion on a mission in which capture is likely often conceals two things in her mouth. First a waxed tablet of crail root powder, secured below the gum. Crail root stops the heart. It’s not painless but it is swift. And second, requiring great skill to use, a needle in a leather tube. It’s not possible to spit the needle without poisoning yourself, but anyone it hits will suffer the same fate. The needles are coated with chamon, a venom milked from eels that feed at the bottom of ocean trenches only accessible from rare spots where warm upwelling water melts holes in the ice. Chamon brings about a slow death: the victims bleed into their lungs and suffer nightmare hallucinations. Most of the poisons the Grey Sisters use are chosen for swiftness. Chamon is not swift, but unlike many of the faster toxins it has no antidote. Nona would happily have spat such a needle if she had one.

  “I have a party to attend, Nona. A very important gathering filled with very important people, and I really must show my face. But I will be back to see you later.” He took something from the pocket of his jacket, a disc of black iron maybe four inches across and almost an inch thick, set with raised sigils around the edge, one side having a leather cover held in place by a strap. Thuran Tacsis removed the cover with care, revealing a spiralling set of sigils, each like a twisted spider, something deeply unwholesome in the way they held the eye and seemed to writhe.

  “This is the Harm. It has been in my family for generations. The pain it causes is said to be unsurpassed. Worse than burning or acid. Worse than any venom. And it doesn’t leave a mark.” Thuran held the device above Nona’s stomach. He frowned. “It’s very effective but I’ve never really enjoyed it. Pain should leave a mark. Pain should be ugly and irreversible. So when I come back from mingling with lords and ladies, the highest of the Sis, when I’m done with the wonderful music, the exquisite food, conversing with my peers, I will return to this cell and hurt you in more primitive and more satisfying ways. We will start with cutting pieces off you. Everything it won’t kill you to lose. For now though . . .” A shrug, and he pressed the iron disc down onto Nona’s stomach.

  Pain filled her, spreading rapidly from the contact site. It felt as if the disc were red-hot, flowing out to cover her entirely. Somehow it combined the first awful shock of a burn with the lasting agony, maintaining both together. Each part of Nona’s body made its own contribution as the effect reached through her. Bones snapped, fingers burst, teeth shattered, her tongue blistered, her eyes scalded. The torment lasted far longer than Nona could endure. She had no way of knowing how long and could do nothing in its grip.

  When at last Thuran Tacsis lifted the device from her spasming stomach the pain lifted, leaving only nausea and tingling. Nona lay there gasping. The limbs she thought broken looked untouched. The eyes through which she looked were unharmed. Where the Harm had touched her she had expected a charred circle of raw flesh, but the skin there showed just faint impressions of the sigils that had been pressed against it.

  “You see?” Lord Tacsis replaced the leather cover and returned the disk to his pocket. “No marks. As if it never happened. Cutting off a nose may not hurt quite as much, but there’s a horror to it. Don’t you think?” He smiled and let the Noi-Guin help him to his feet. “I’ll be back soon, novice. I’ve paid more gold than you can possibly imagine for this and I intend to get my money’s worth.”

  Lano paused, dark eyes still on her. “It’s a nice toy Father has, but now it’s back in his pocket you’re not in pain any more, are you?” He held up his right hand, the middle two fingers crooked over as if he couldn’t straighten them. “You did this to me.”

  Nona remembered. Lano had shed his disguise and attacked her on the abbess’s steps, in front of the judge his father owned. She wished she’d done more than slice his hand. She wished she’d cut his head from his shoulders. She wanted to say it, to spit defiance at him. But pinned on the floor at his feet, her body still spasming with the aftershocks of the agony that had run through the marrow of her, she lacked the courage. And she hated herself for it.

  A heartbeat later, with full-blood hunska swiftness, Lano was leaning over her, his face close to hers, the point of a thin blade inserted into her left nostril. She felt his breath on her lips. “Before you die I’ll take your fingers, one by one, and then your eyes.” He stood and at the last moment pulled his knife up through her no
se. The sudden burning pain made her cry out. Hot blood spilled across her face, the taste of it filling her mouth.

  “Back soon!” A grin and Lano hastened after his father.

  * * *

  • • •

  NONA LAY HELPLESS and shaking for a long time after the last of the Lightless left her cell. She hunched around herself, soiled and weak, and made no move until at last Keot’s voice sounded in her skull.

  You have to admire their cruelty.

  They’re sick. Evil.

  Those are just words. Thuran’s desire is a pure thing. Just because it is at odds with your own does not make it lesser.

  He’s a monster. So is Lano. Nona rolled, surprised to find no lingering pain save the burn of her cut nostril. She levered herself to her hands and knees. Why didn’t you pass into him if you admire him so much?

  We’re bound until death, Nona. But when the old one kills you . . .

  The two of you deserve each other. Nona spat and started to follow her chain hand over hand to the wall.

  So pious! You can’t claim to be much different. You have felt that same desire to hurt, motivated by revenge. I found a home in you because of it, because of how you killed Raymel Tacsis.

  Nona paused before replying. It was true that part of her had rejoiced in taking Raymel’s life. There had been an unholy joy in plunging the knife into him over and over. She had told herself it was for Hessa. But in the moment it had been an end in and of itself. People are complicated. We’re all made of parts we like and parts we don’t. She tugged absently at her chain. Zole said you were a part of the Missing. All of you devils. Parts they didn’t want any more.

  It was Keot’s turn to fall silent. He went so quiet while Nona returned to working at the chain pin that she wondered if he might have left entirely.