Nona helped herself to stew and a heel of bread, squeezing in between Clera and Ketti. “Sister Wheel would rather cut her nose off than skip singing the fourth psalm before eating. She’s the last nun in the whole faith who would plot against the church.”
“Maybe it’s not the church she’s conspiring against.” Ara pulled out a chair from the other side of the table and leaned in for the bread. “Maybe she doesn’t consider you a part of the church, Nona. You do manage to destroy every prayer she makes you learn.”
“I get the words right!”
“You make them sound like death threats. Even if everyone didn’t know you hate her it would only take them listening to you in Spirit class to be sure.” Ara sat down.
“I don’t hate her.” Nona chewed and swallowed. “I just really, really don’t like her.”
“Anyway,” Ara said. “Forget about Sister Wheel, we get to go to the Academy in four days!”
“I’ve been.” Nona shoved a big spoonful of stew into her mouth and, finding it too hot, sat breathing rapidly in and out over it while Ara made furious eyes at her, motioning for more information.
“And . . .”
Nona finally won the battle and started to chew, her tongue a little scalded. “It’s not so great.”
“How did you get to go there? I wanted to visit with my father and they wouldn’t let us!” Ara looked up at Hessa, now emerging from a crowd of older novices and stumping towards the table. “She says she’s been!”
“I have too,” said Hessa. “It’s not so great.”
“What!” Ara let her spoon splat into her stew. “Outrageous. Is there anyone at this convent besides me who hasn’t had the tour?”
“All you have to do is get taken by someone who wants to sell you,” Hessa said. “And Nona hasn’t been, she’s just remembering my memory.”
Nona blinked and looked up. “But . . .” She frowned, knuckling her forehead. Hessa was right—it was the memory they had shared that night she and Hessa had left the dormitory together, all thanks to Hessa’s thread-work, something else Nona had yet to have any success in, requiring as it did the ability to move very close to the Path without actually touching it. “I guess you’re right.” She looked across to where Ruli sat staring into the steam rising from her bowl. “Ruli? What are . . .” The steam coiled into a pale serpent and a sick agony coiled through Nona. She found herself falling, wordless, pulling plates and bread with her. It took an age to hit the ground.
• • •
“NONA! NONA!” ARA on her knees, holding Nona’s face between two hands.
“. . . matter with her?”
“Sister Rose . . .”
“No!” Nona’s hand snapped out to catch Jula’s ankle as she made to leave.
“She doesn’t need Rose.” Clera—more to contradict Jula than out of reason.
“What are you talking about?” Ara released Nona’s head and sat back on her heels. “You’re ill.”
“She’s fine. Just slipped.” Clera, standing, waving novices from the other tables back to their seats.
“I’m not ill. I was poisoned,” Nona hissed.
“Well that’s even better reason for us to take you to the sanatorium,” Ruli said, squatting down next to Ara, her brow furrowed with concern.
“I’ll get thrown out if the nuns find out what I did.” Nona curled around her pain, which was easing now but still cramping through her. Right now being thrown out didn’t seem an unreasonable price to pay to feel better.
“We can’t leave you poisoned.” Ara exchanged glances with Ruli. “It could kill you. And who did it? You really think this is something to do with Raymel Tacsis?”
“I don’t have to stay poisoned.” Nona tried to get up and with Clera’s help regained her chair. “We know how to make antidotes.” Two years of the Poisoner’s classes ensured that.
“You need to know what poisoned you. We know thirteen different antidotes. We can’t make all those, and half of them aren’t even safe to take with the others.” Hessa reached for her crutch and struggled out of her chair.
“There’s the black cure,” Nona said.
“Which we haven’t been taught,” Hessa replied. “And can kill the patient or leave them blind.”
“Besides, Sister Apple has all the ingredients.” Ruli, back on her side of the table, leaned in, keeping her voice to a loud whisper.
“We don’t even know where she keeps them.” Clera went back to eating.
“In a cave,” Nona said.
“Well, duh.” Clera spoke around her mouthful.
“We can search. I’ve been further in than you have—I saw a few places where she might store them.” Nona rocked to distract herself from the pain, still sharp but easing.
“You’ve been further?” Ara frowned.
“When she was held for trial,” Hessa said, frowning too, though she’d been frowning all the while.
“Oh.”
“There’s the lock,” Jula said.
Clera snorted.
“Well there is,” Jula persisted. “That gate’s always locked. We wouldn’t even be able to get to the Shade chamber without Sister Apple or Bhenta to let us in.”
“We?” Clera looked up from her bowl, wiping her mouth with the back of a hand. “You’re going sneaking in the undercaves, Jula? You’ve never broken a rule in your holy little life.”
“Nona needs us.” Jula looked down.
“She needs me,” Clera said. “I can open that lock.”
“How?” Ara asked.
Clera pursed her lips and paused, glowering beneath the black shock of her hair. “I’ll steal the key from Bhenta.”
The novices shushed Clera, whose voice had grown quite loud, but nobody seemed to have noticed amid the hubbub of the four classes all eating and talking and clattering.
“I’ll open the lock,” Hessa said, voice low. “I can do it. That doesn’t change the fact we don’t even know what antidote we need to make.” She stumped off towards the main doors.
The others watched her go, paused for a moment to glance at each other, then nodded. Hessa wasn’t given to boasts. If she said she could do it, then she could.
Zole arrived, pushing through the novices standing to leave from the next table. Grey Class shot her sideways glances and the conversation ran short.
“Tonight,” Nona said, then turned her attention to the stew.
• • •
NONA STOPPED AT the scriptorium that evening on the way to the dormitory. She knocked and waited. A light rain laced the wind, on the edge of freezing. She huddled in the doorway and had raised her hand to knock again when the heavy door shuddered open.
“Nona!” Sister Kettle smiled down at her, though not from such a height as she used to. “Get in.”
Nona slipped through the gap and looked around the room as Kettle shut the door behind her. Four large, sloping desks took up most of the space, each with open scrolls secured across them, quills and inks to hand. Sister Scar sat at the only occupied one, a heavy book in a lectern before her, lanterns on stands to either side. She spared Nona the briefest of glances before returning her gaze to her scroll. Clera said the nun had named herself for the scar that divided her cheek, skipped a blind white eye, and ran through her short grey hair. Jula said that Scar had taken the wound on a mission long after she took holy orders and the name related to some other scar or secret.
“What can we do for you, Nona?” Kettle’s eyes held their usual mischief. “You have a book you want transcribed?”
“I wanted to use the library.”
Kettle clapped her hands, delighted, earning a reproving glance from Sister Scar. “I taught you to read and now you want to tackle a book! This must be what it’s like when your baby takes a first step! Come on! Come on!” She hurried towards the door at the rear of
the room.
Nona followed Kettle into the convent library, a chamber of similar size to the first but lacking any window, its walls hidden by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Another door stood open to a long gallery lined with deep box-shelves on which hundreds of scrolls rested.
“So, we have holy texts, spiritual writings, the lives of saints and of revered sisters of our order.” Kettle swung an arm to encompass the whole of the opposite wall. “Over there we have treatises on fight styles throughout the Corridor and beyond. Here are the histories and genealogies of the Sis. Over there works on the mysteries of the Path—don’t expect to find any sense in them.” She pointed out sections on the wall to the right. “The grey books are up there on the highest shelf. And here . . .” Kettle spread her fingers over the leather spines of a dozen or so books behind a locked rail, “. . . we have fiction!”
“Why are they locked in?” Nona asked. She had thought the poisons books might be. But these . . .
Kettle grinned and lifted her hands from the books with some reluctance. “‘Tell me a story’ began every seduction ever.”
“The abbess doesn’t keep those sorts of books!” Nona felt herself colouring.
Kettle shook her head. “Well, not here at least.” Again the grin. “But be warned, young Nona: a book is as dangerous as any journey you might take. The person who closes the back cover may not be the same one that opened the front one. Treat books with respect.”
“I can just . . . read them?” Nona asked.
“Any time you want. Just make sure to put them back when you leave. And don’t damage them. They’re my babies. My old leathery babies. And I have a very unpleasant poison from Sister Apple for anyone who so much as folds a page.”
“How do I reach the ones on the high shelves?” Nona scanned the highest shelf that ran the circuit of the room just below the ceiling.
“Grow!” Kettle gave her an amused stare. “You won’t want to read any of those books, little Nona. Not until you’re taller.” With that she returned to the door. “I’ll be in here with Sister Scar if you want me.”
• • •
“DID YOU FIND it?” Ara was waiting by the dormitory door when Nona came back. In the hall behind her the other novices were all in bed already, or changing into their nightgowns.
“Yes.” Nona walked past Ara into the room, holding her arms tight across her chest. A fever had sunk its teeth into her and clutching herself seemed to help keep the shivering to a minimum. She fell into her bed, too cold and trembly to want to undress, though her habit stuck to her where she’d been sweating. Clera and Ara watched as she dragged her slate from the habit’s inner pocket. With a groan she leaned down to place it beneath the bed so the carefully scratched instructions wouldn’t be blurred.
“You got it then,” Clera whispered.
“Yes.” Nona fell back. The recipe had been in a tome by Sister Copper of Gerran’s Crag, written more than two hundred years ago. The warnings had been more dire than Hessa’s—but she had it. She had the black cure.
33
“HURRY UP!” CLERA stood with her face pressed to the gap between two bars of the gate across the tunnel mouth. On the other side steps led down to the Shade class chamber. “Quickly!”
“She’s coming as fast as she can,” Ara said.
Hessa stumped towards them, her bad leg swinging with her crutch. With her back to the wall Nona peered at the convent buildings all around them, dark and silent. Somewhere an owl hooted, and in dark corners rats scurried. Ara uncovered the lantern, just a touch, to guide Hessa in.
“Watch the steps.” Nona moved to catch Hessa should she fall.
“Here.” Ara opened the lantern’s cowl enough to let its light flood out over the gate.
The sun wouldn’t show for an hour: focus had passed, its heat faded from the stones; the stars hid in a coal sack sky. These were the grey hours when mankind lay fast in slumber and the world stood open to the bold.
Should any novice in the Grey Class dormitory rise to use the Necessary they would discover the lantern gone. Apart from that, the danger was discovery by whichever nuns were scheduled to open the bakehouse that morning, or by Sister Tallow or one of her Red Sisters on their nightly patrols.
Hessa came up to the gate. When the lantern’s light caught her face it showed the curve of a half-smile, the tranquillity that Sister Pan taught would lead the true-blood to the Path. Hessa set her hand over the lock.
“Don’t blast it!” A sudden fear seized Nona, and with it the image of a wrecked gate and Sister Apple standing before it with the morning sun at her shoulders.
“The Path runs through us like our signature, written upon the world.” Hessa appeared to be quoting Sister Pan. “We are complex and changing, and so is our signature.” Hessa’s hand drew Nona’s attention. It didn’t glow but somehow it seemed brighter and more real than everything around it. “A lock, though. A lock is a simple thing, no matter how it may be constructed. It is locked or unlocked. Its thread spells one word or the other. And if . . . I grasp . . . that thread and pull.”
The click of the lock’s surrender made them all flinch.
“I’ll go back now,” Hessa said.
“You all will.” Nona took the lantern from Ara.
“I will not!” Ara reached to take the lantern back.
Nona held it away from her. “One can search as easily as three. I don’t need you.”
“Nonsense, we can cover more ground if there’s three of us. We don’t have long!” Ara’s brow furrowed into the two vertical lines that developed just above her nose when she was being stubborn.
Nona pulled the gate open just wide enough to admit herself. “We’ve got one lantern. We can’t split up. Better just one of us gets punished if caught.” She pulled the gate closed behind her as Ara reached for it. “Help Hessa get back. She could trip in the dark.”
Clera seemed to accept the logic, or realize how much she didn’t want to find herself in the Poisoner’s black books. Either way, she took Hessa’s arm and started to help her back up the steps.
“But you’re poisoned!” Ara protested. “That’s the whole point. What if you get worse down there? What if you need us?”
“If I get caught then that’s my excuse: I was poisoned. I need this stuff. You two haven’t got an excuse.” Without waiting for an answer Nona hurried down the tunnel, feet sure on the familiar stairs.
• • •
ONCE PAST THE door to the Shade class cavern Nona had just a single old memory to follow. Sister Apple had led her and Abbess Glass along this tunnel in iron yokes. To reach the recluse where they spent the night Sister Apple had taken them past half a dozen junctions where tunnels split and wandered into the black secrets of the Rock of Faith.
At the bottom of the steps Nona spent a moment watching the dance of her lantern’s flame then turned from it and watched instead the memory of its dance written on the darkness. Of all the paths to clarity that Sister Pan had shown her this one worked best for Nona. Over the course of the next few minutes the trance wrapped her in its cold, tingling embrace, every shadow growing ripe with meaning, every detail in the walls crying out for her attention.
The air held a metallic smell, the scent of deep places. Nona shivered, though the damp air held no particular chill. In her mind’s eye she saw herself and her tiny flicker of flame entering a vast labyrinth. Sister Rule had once shown them a cast of the tunnels within an ant mound, so complex, so hugely intricate, that Nona wondered how any ant ever found its way out. Today she was the ant.
She walked slowly, examining the ground. The Poisoner’s storage chamber wouldn’t be too far from the class chamber, and the path between them would be well trodden. The muddy grit that gathered in the undulations of the rock showed signs of frequent passage. It was at the turnings she would have to pay close attention.
The f
irst choice had to be made where a fissure, barely wide enough for an adult to squeeze through, opened in the tunnel wall. Nona knelt to study the floor. A drop of water hit the back of her neck, ice cold. In the shudder of the lantern’s light what she saw surprised her. A few inches into the fissure the rounded edge of a shoe had left its impression where ancient mud gathered in a fold of the rock. The imprint was clear and quite sharp. If it had been there for a long time surely the drip-drip-drip of the tunnels would have blurred its edges . . . Nona drew a deep breath and, turning sideways, slipped into the fissure.
The crack led downward at a shallow angle, the floor consisting of loose rocks caught where the walls grew closer together. Nona went as swiftly as she dared, expecting to find the way widening and discovering instead that it narrowed. She couldn’t picture the Poisoner making her way back and forth with her arms filled with supplies for the novices’ cauldrons. And yet someone had come this way.
The walls scraped her on both sides, her breathing the only sound, no scent but that of her smoke and the faint smell of damp stone, aeons old.
Nona pressed on though the way got tighter still. It seemed that the fissure would taper off and narrow to nothing and she became increasingly worried that she might become wedged, unable to turn or retreat, held in the stone’s cold embrace until her light failed and thirst drove her mad.
“Whoever it was must have turned back.” The darkness swallowed her voice.
Her fears mocked her, driving her on.
Close to the narrowest point Nona spotted soot on the wall. It was hard to miss, given that her nose was just an inch from it and the back of her head was scraping the opposite wall. The smoke from her own lantern rose along the wall, overriding the earlier blackening.
“They must have turned back here.”
Even so, Nona wriggled on for another yard. No more smoke-blackened walls here. She started to inch back, but paused and sniffed. Her own lantern gave off the acrid tarry smoke of burning rock-oil, but a sweeter scent hung on the air, just the faintest memory of it. Old smoke, but not the cheap stuff novices burned: Nona had smelled such smoke in the entrance hall of the abbess’s house, and in Heart Hall when the high priest sat in judgement.