“Do you see it?” Ara, almost at her ear.
“No.”
“Look harder.” A hand touched Nona’s shoulder and in that moment what she saw became an edged brilliance and a hot darkness, one cutting through the other like a fracture—though she couldn’t say which cut the other—and both driven through her head, hammer-hard, splintering against the back of her skull.
“—ona!”
Nona opened her eyes, slitted against the brightness of a grey sky.
“Nona?” A dark shape looming over her.
“Where?” Nona could feel hands on her arm, lifting her up.
“I’m really sorry!” Ara sounded it too, though she sounded like a really sorry princess. “I forgot about your shoulder!”
Nona got to her feet, snarling in pain, ready to fight. The girl had pulled her up by her bad arm and her wound felt as though the arrow were back in it and red-hot.
“You didn’t—” Nona bit off the words. She couldn’t see any mockery in Ara’s eyes, no hint of a smile, just concern . . . Ara hadn’t put her hand on the wounded shoulder. She couldn’t see the bandaging under Nona’s habit: she had just assumed she had because Nona collapsed, and so she had used the other arm to help her up, the wounded arm.
Nona brushed herself off. “I’ll use the door you do.”
Together they covered the remaining distance and went through the east door into the portrait room at the base of Path Tower. The painting directly facing the east door was of a woman’s face, half-black, half-white, the black half with a white eye, the white half with a black one. A strip of grey ran between the two halves, but coming nearer Nona saw it was just that the boundary between the halves wasn’t a straight line as she had first seen it, but infinitely convoluted, black fingering into white, white into black.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Ara came to stand beside Nona. “It’s Sister Cloud. She was a two-blood. Full-blood hunska and full-blood marjal.”
“That sounds . . . pretty full!” Nona smiled.
“It just means she had the full talents of both tribes.” Ara shrugged. “Sister Pan says there’s one born every generation or so.”
“And this generation has you?” Nona looked at Ara, harder than she had before. How deep did that confidence go? Was she frightened somewhere in there, beneath the face a noble’s life had taught her to wear?
“We should go up.”
Ara let Nona set the pace on the steps, following behind. As Nona made her slow turns around the rising spiral she tried to think back to the grievances she had harboured against the girl behind her. Ara’s crimes appeared to be confined to being beautiful, being born rich and being the Chosen One. Everything else, Nona realized, was something given to her by Clera, or something assumed. She had assumed that the remainder of half-heard jokes were at her expense, that the laughter that faded as she entered a room had been at her.
“Ready?” Ara asked, her smile nervous.
Nona found that she had come to a halt just below the classroom. She also found in that moment a sudden realization. Arabella Jotsis was very easy to like.
“Ready,” Nona said, and they went up together.
Sister Pan was waiting for them, sitting without formality in a student’s chair, and gestured for them to pull up chairs of their own. She looked impossibly old, like the corpses men find in the ice tunnels, blackened skin on bones, folded in on themselves like flowers before an ice-wind. “It’s blowing out there!” When Sister Pan smiled even that had something of a skull about it. “The Corridor will narrow tonight.”
“And the moon will clear the path,” Ara said, giving the proper reply.
“And the moon will clear the path.” Sister Pan nodded. “Did you know that the moon is falling?”
Nona glanced at Ara. “No . . .”
Again the skull-grin. “Not to worry. It’s been falling all your life, and mine.” Sister Pan raised her hand, leathery but darker than any leather, cupped just a little as if shining moonlight down upon the world. “It’s been falling ever since they put it up there. The light presses against it, the sun’s wind too. And as it drifts close it starts to scrape the very edges of our air, touching the highest of Abeth’s winds. Then . . . then it will be swift.” Sister Pan brought her hand down onto her knee.
“Can we do anything?” Ara asked, staring at the hand on Sister Pan’s knee.
“No. At least, nothing good.” The old nun shrugged. “So . . . I called you to this place to hear what you’re called.”
“I’ve chosen,” Ara said. She looked at Nona. “Shouldn’t we . . . do this in private?”
Sister Pan turned her head one way, then the other. “Nobody here but us.”
“But . . .” Ara frowned. “But we’re not supposed to tell anyone our names. It’s a secret until we take our orders . . .”
“The Chosen One and the Shield don’t have secrets from each other.”
Nona kept her mouth closed. She didn’t care who knew her name—though she wouldn’t tell it. The abbess had wanted to know if she could keep a secret, and she could.
“I’m not the Chosen One,” Ara said. “I would know if I was. And besides, I can’t do anything a marjal can.”
“Doesn’t matter one way or the other,” Sister Pan said. “That prophecy is what’s put you in danger—what’s keeping you safe for now is this convent, not the walls, not the sisters, red or grey or otherwise. It’s that woman in the big house. Glass has a long reach, and a subtle one. Time was when I could have put a big enough hole in this rock we live on to swallow this tower whole. And even then I wasn’t half as deadly as that woman. Not half.” She tilted her head as if listening to distant music. “The prophecy put you in danger because people half-believe it. Make them believe it wholly and it will start to look after you. Both of you.”
“And we need it to look after us . . . because the abbess might . . . change her mind?” Nona asked.
“Because the wind will always blow and the moon will keep on falling.” Sister Pan dusted her palm against her thigh and looked to them, expectant. “Now, what are you to be called as sisters? Nona?”
Nona hadn’t thought about it, not in her days at the convent surrounded by Kettles, Apples, Glasses and Wheels, not on the walk to the tower or the climb up the stairs.
Pan smiled. “Often sisters choose a name that makes them think of home, of something safe, something they cherish.”
“I . . .” Nona tried to think of the village, of her house, her mother cutting the reeds, weaving one into the next. She thought of the Rellam Forest—of the savagery and the death—she thought of her mother’s face when they brought her child back from the wild, clothed in other people’s blood.
“Choose carefully, Nona. Let the Path lead you to a name.”
Nona opened her mouth. “Cage,” she said. “Let them call me Cage.”
Sister Pan pursed the wrinkled gristle of her lips. “Cage.” She turned to Arabella Jotsis, who watched them both with a serenity Nona envied. “And you, dear?”
“Thorn,” Ara said. “I will be Sister Thorn.”
GREY CLASS
IT IS IMPORTANT, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient skill. For Sister Thorn of the Sweet Mercy Convent Lano Tacsis brought Pelarthi mercenaries, warriors drawn from the ice-margins east of the Grey, from a tribe considered savage by their savage neighbours. Brawlers, murderers, hard men and hard women who kill for coin. Heretics who set the worship of past warlords, not yet three centuries beneath the ground, above the veneration of the Ancestor on whose shoulders all humanity stands and who makes each man brother to the next.
The throwing star, or cross-knife as the Noi-Guin have it, is typically a weapon of distraction, to put off-balance, to cause minor injury; but in the hands of a Red Sister such projectiles become deadly.
The bando
lier above Sister Thorn’s blackskin held two dozen stars, pointed for penetration rather than bladed for blood, each set about a central ring weighted with lead. They spat from her fingers as she ran between the pillars, the Pelarthi shocked by the sudden swiftness of her. Eye, throat, forehead. Punching in through soft flesh and hard bone. Eye, throat, a mouth opened to roar for battle swallowing the star’s swift rotation amid broken teeth. Forehead, throat. Here a gerant, huge in his armour, pot helm visored, a heavy gorget about his neck. The star arced as it flew, taking him in the wrist just beneath his gauntlet, tearing tendon and artery, leaving his great-sword slipping from numb fingers.
• • •
THERE IS, IN the act of destruction, a beauty which we try to deny, and a joy which we cannot. Children build to knock down, and though we may grow around it, that need runs in us, deeper than our blood.
Violence is the language of destruction, flesh so often the subject, fragile, easy to break beyond repair, precious; what else would we burn to make the world take note?
Your death has not been waiting for your arrival at the appointed hour; it has, for all the years of your life, been racing towards you with the fierce velocity of time’s arrow. It cannot be evaded; it cannot be bargained with, deflected or placated. All that is given to you is the choice: Meet it with open eyes and peace in your heart, go gentle to your reward. Or burn bright, take up arms, and fight the bitch.
• • •
THERE IS IN every delicate thing, no matter how precious, nor how beautiful, a challenge. Break me. No bride of the Ancestor can see life as anything but the fragile, wondrous gift that it is. From the alpha to the omega we are all brothers, sisters, children, born of unity, bound for unity. And yet . . . and yet . . . those who take the red are trained to listen. Break me.
• • •
THORN CARRIED IN each limb every hour of her training, every day and year bound into the muscle of her arms, written along the length of her legs, beaten into the hardness of stomach and thigh. She knew five dozen ways to kill, she knew them with a lover’s intimacy, and in the execution perhaps lust also played its role—for what is lust but a hunger? And hunger must be fed.
Any weapon begs use. The blade itself incites to violence. And those who mistake the red children of Sweet Mercy for anything other than a weapon are fools of their own breed.
• • •
FLICKED WRISTS, ARMS cracked like whips, and throwing stars take flight, possessed of their own fierce rotation, bound on twisted parabolas. No mother gave her child so much direction, or set them spinning along their course through the world with such care. Governed only by the forces that steer the true stars through dark heavens, Thorn’s bright offspring wing their way: deterministic, to known targets, trusted and independent, requiring no more of her attention.
Spears are thrown in surprise, arrows released in confusion. She is among them and gone, a fleeting target in black and tattered red. Spears fly high, hit pillars, find the flesh of allies rather than foe. One Pelarthi, ice-blooded, hawk-eyed, looses at the flickering of her enemy, leading her mark. The arrow glances from Thorn’s shoulder as she turns, the blackskin stiffening to resist the missile’s speed. The temporary rigidity of her armour hampers Thorn’s reply. Her star tears skin at the corner of the archer’s eye, rips her ear, and hurtles on into the chest of the man behind.
And at last Thorn’s hands are empty, her bandolier slack, two dozen of the Pelarthi in possession of her steel, some lying sprawled, trampled by their kin as they choke on blood; others still standing, hunched about their wound, the fight gone from them, replaced by hurt, the sorrow of steel, tears of blood.
She draws her sword. The blade is long, thin, describing a slight curve, its edge cruel enough to bite through steel. Though it whispers from the scabbard somehow it is loud enough to cut a moment’s silence. This. This is where the Red Sister’s heart beats—on the edge. With her other hand she pulls the knife from her belt.
Pelarthi surround Thorn on three sides, bathing her in the light of their torches, stepping over their dead, their footprints crimson on the limestone. Many and more. A human tide, scores hurrying to flank her, glimpsed between the pillars. The foremost of them are slow now, watching, eyes upon the brightness of her blade, on the cutting edge upon which the fire’s light is divided.
Thorn stands savagely still but she walks the Path and with each step she gathers to herself the raw and fundamental power that both divides and joins creation. She is still, but the energies that build within tremble across her, making the air shake and the light dance.
The Pelarthi watch her—the tall and the short, the wiry and the strong, bearers of axe and sword, of spear and bow. Paint-faced women, lips snarled about their teeth, pant for violence, hair wild or in braids, some spattered with the blood of friends. Grim-eyed men, clutching their sharpened iron before them, grind their jaws, muscles twitching beneath chain and leathers, waiting, waiting for the moment.
They expect her to run. They know she will run. And she does. But at them.
• • •
THERE IS A joy in destruction and when Thorn raises her head to regard the ruin all about her there is a white smile among the scarlet dripping of her sweat. The blood is not hers, not all of it. The speed of a hunska, the stark efficiency of the sisterhood’s blade-lore, and the channelled power of the Path have combined in one young woman to make a slaughter such has never been seen upon the Rock of Faith. She stands panting, both blades crimson from point to hilt, weary enough to fall, but with close on a hundred mercenaries dead about her. In places they are heaped.
Thorn straightens, snarling against the pain of broken ribs. She is cut, her cheek opened, a puncture wound high on her thigh. Her speed is diminished: the Path has thrown her and lies now beyond reach, but her foe have known terror and will not approach. The remainder watch her from back amongst the pillars. Jackals stalking a wounded lion, too timid for attack, too hungry to run.
The spear takes her between the shoulders. She should have heard it being thrown, sensed its approach, known it was coming. But it came too swiftly—hunska-fast. Blackskin turns iron hard, moulded about the spear point, driven half an inch into her flesh but arresting the missile, denying it her life. She turns as she falls, sprawling amid the gore.
Someone is leaving the Pelarthi ranks. A woman.
“S-sister?” Thorn’s vision is blurred with blood, with sweat, with exhaustion. The woman is not Pelarthi—but she holds a second spear. Thorn blinks and in that moment recognizes one who was once her sister.
It is important, when killing a nun, to ensure that you bring an army of sufficient skill.
The dark-haired woman hoists her spear.
“Don’t!” Thorn raises her hand, not asking for mercy but in protest. This is wrong. “Don’t do it, C—”
The spear is thrown.
21
“WELCOME TO GREY Class.” Sister Flint rose from her desk to take Nona’s merit scroll, set with the seals of the five mistresses in acknowledgement of her satisfactory performance in Blade, Spirit, Academia, Shade, and Path. “You will be sitting by Alata, over here.” The class mistress steered Nona from the door to her own seat. By dint of being considerably over six foot tall, though nowhere much more than one foot wide, Sister Flint managed to make Nona feel smaller at twelve than Sister Oak had when she first arrived in Red Class not having reached her tenth birthday.
Clera, Ara, Hessa, and Ketti grinned at her from their desks, while the remaining eight novices favoured her with the stony looks reserved for any new meat. Clera had been the first of them to move up and let nobody forget the fact. It had been Academia that held Nona back the longest—though she loved both the subject and Sister Rule. Nona had even mastered the much-hated saint’s days, ceremonies, and catechism in Spirit under Sister Wheel’s unforgiving eye before she passed her Academia finals. It had been the writing more
than the reading that defeated her for so long, the business of wrestling her thoughts into a wriggling white scrawl of lines across the test slate.
Sister Flint returned to her desk but didn’t take her seat. “Grey Class meet here on the morning of every first-day for general instruction. I also provide individual tuition in subjects you may be experiencing difficulty with.” The sister paused and glanced out of the window. Grey Class met in a room at the back of Blade Hall that offered views out across to the Glasswater sinkhole and beyond the narrowing point of the plateau to the farmlands north of Verity. Presently the rock lay sun-spattered with just a fleeting shadow here and there where the wind chased a cloud from the sky. “Today, however, we will finish a quarter-hour early. I shall leave you to introduce yourself to new classmates and gossip with old ones.” Sister Flint closed the heavy book on her desk, letting the leather cover fall with a thump. She said nothing more as she left the room, perhaps eager to catch a moment in the all-too-rare sunshine.
Conversation erupted along with the scraping of chairs as the door closed behind the nun. Clera reached Nona’s side first, elbowing her way through the bigger girls. The eldest of the novices were around fourteen and some looked older than their years.
“Thank the Ancestor, Nona! You saved us. Flint was on about girls getting their blood. It was vile. She just wouldn’t stop with the detail. I’ve decided I’m not doing it.”
Ara ducked around a couple of older novices and sat on Nona’s desk. “I’ve been having mine since the last ice-wind. It’s not so bad. The cramps are—”
“Will you just stop?” Clera made a face. “Anyway, I’m safe. Flint said they come later if you’re thin.” She eyed Ara’s curves.
Ketti, taller and still more slender than Clera, raised a brow at the suggestion. “She said that?”