Holy Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  Nona hugged the trunk of a screw pine and squinted up through the dense needles. Kettle’s upper half appeared through the Shade chamber’s middle window, tiny in the distance and pink in its nudity.

  Nona slunk farther into the undergrowth, stifling another sneeze. Pepper. Joeli hadn’t meant to kill her, just panic her and leave her to be found amid the inevitable mess. The lord’s daughter couldn’t have known for certain it was Nona in there, or whether she had been identified or not, but she’d been willing to take the risk on both. Clearly she felt that even if she was named as having been in there she would be protected, whereas whoever had broken in would be thrown to the wolves. Or more likely thrown into the Glasswater, or at least metaphorically from the Rock of Faith.

  With the pepper still tickling her nose, Nona made her way down the slope. She needed to be somewhere else by the time Kettle thought to check for her along their thread-bond. In the meantime she did all she could to deaden the connection.

  At the foot of the Seren Way a sudden panic gripped Nona and she patted her habit pockets. The damp patch and the crunching within told her all she needed to know. The vial into which she had poured those precious eye-drops had broken as she rolled across the cave floor. The others had been right. The drops weren’t essential to penetrating the high priest’s vault. It was vanity that had drawn her to that cave. A desire to be normal, to meet another person’s gaze without seeing that momentary widening of their eyes.

  Sister Apple said she had locked the drops away because of risk that they might take Nona’s sight. But Nona knew now that she had been blind all along.

  11

  THE ESCAPE

  Three Years Earlier

  THE HERDER’S HUT wasn’t more than a low circle of drystone wall topped with a cone of sticks and bracken. The goat shelter proved even more rudimentary—a slanting roof on four poles, sides of woven sticks, a simple door at each end with space to look over the top.

  Zole lay down on the soiled bracken bedding and motioned for Nona to join her.

  “This is the worst hiding place ever.”

  Zole patted the withered foliage beside her.

  “This is stupid.” Nona crouched down. Old droppings speckled the bracken, which must be bitter stuff if the goats left it. “It’s the first place they’ll look.” The hut and shelter stood alone, the only structures in a wide, desolate valley. The famed Scithrowl crowding seemed to be something of a myth, or at least not to carry up into the high places of the Grampain foothills.

  “It is the first place they will look,” Zole agreed. “Which is strange when it is, as you say, a stupid place to hide . . .”

  “So what are we doing here?”

  “There is no place they will not find us, but in this place it is likely that only one of them will find us.”

  “Oh.” Nona lowered herself to lie beside the ice-triber, steeling herself against the shipheart’s closeness.

  They passed a minute with no sound but the moan of the wind and the creaking of the walls. The scarlet stain at Zole’s wrist drew Nona’s gaze.

  “So the shipheart breaks pieces off you . . . off who you are . . . and you throw them away?”

  “It’s a ridding of impurities,” Zole said, her voice low.

  “But a person’s flaws are part of them.” Nona couldn’t keep the horror from her words. “My temper is a bad thing, but it’s part of who I am, like Ruli’s gossiping or Leeni bedding other girls even though she loves Alata. Jula’s obsession with learning, Ghena’s sharp tongue . . . if you got rid of all those parts of you and approached this ideal . . . isn’t that everyone becoming the same?”

  Zole offered the smallest of smiles. “We have to let go of that pride, that ego. It will never bring happiness. Consider the Ancestor, who walks the length of the Path towards a perfect future, rather than the breadth of it from life to death. Is not the Ancestor a melding, a commonality in which the good is intensified and the bad fades? This is why the Ancestor’s statues are smooth-faced, features poorly defined. The Ancestor is not an individual.”

  “But that’s when we die . . .”

  “What happens to Ghena’s sharp tongue, to Clera’s selfish ambition when they join the Ancestor? In that wholeness the good is stacked on the good, and the undesirable, the individual, the ego, is all washed away. With the Old Stones we of the ice pare ourselves towards that perfect core before we die rather than after. The wise say that if anyone ever rid themselves of their last raulathu they would no longer need to die. They would be the divine.”

  “You really do think you’re the Chosen One,” Nona gasped.

  Zole shook her head. “Approaching divinity makes us all the same. If I am the Chosen One then at the heart of us, we all are.”

  Nona looked away. She was lying amid goat droppings in a tiny shed in the wilds of Scithrowl discussing divinity . . . with a mad girl.

  “I—”

  “Horses!” Zole motioned Nona lower.

  The hoofbeats were faint but drawing nearer. A single rider. As the sound came closer a faint background could be heard, more riders following.

  The novices waited. Nona felt the shipheart’s aura dim as Zole somehow reined in its power.

  Horses drew up nearby. Lots of them, filling the air with their snorting and the jingle of harnesses.

  “Search it.” The words thickly accented. Farther east the Scithrowl spoke a different tongue but in the shadow of the mountains the language of the empire clung on.

  The thump of riders dismounting, their grumbles coming closer.

  A moment later the upper half of a man obscured the patch of sky above the door at the far end of the goat shelter.

  “You do not see us.” Zole muttered the words, a certain strain behind them.

  “Nothing here!” the man called out.

  “Get in there and check, you lazy whoreson.”

  Nona tensed, ready to attack as the Scithrowl irregular kicked open the door, grumbling curses.

  “You do not see us. This place is empty.” Zole spoke in a quiet but conversational voice, her hands in fists, fingers white.

  The man stamped in, bent almost double to avoid the low roof. He smelled of old sweat, stale beer, and some overripe meaty scent Nona couldn’t place. He moved forward, kicking at the bracken, his gaze passing over both novices several times. Zole rolled slowly to one side as he approached. She gave Nona a push to indicate she should roll to the other side. The man stepped between them, frowning. He wore a skirt of leather strips panelled with iron plates. He kicked the bedding everywhere but in the places the novices lay.

  “Nothing.” He left by the far door, vindicated.

  Outside it sounded as if a dozen or more riders had dismounted and stood in debate.

  “. . . there’s no sign they left again!” A raised voice.

  “Well, they’re not here.” A woman’s voice, deep and belligerent.

  “We should burn it to be sure.”

  Zole began to mutter to herself. Tiny veins in her eyes surrendered under mounting pressure, lacing the whites with crimson.

  “Burn it? It’s a hut and a stall.”

  “There’s nowhere to hide.”

  “. . . plenty to burn on the other side of the mountains . . .”

  A rumble of agreement. “Split up, comb the valley.”

  The riders climbed back into their saddles and within moments the company had thundered off.

  Nona started to rise.

  “No.” Zole kept her voice low. “They could have left someone to watch.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Rest.”

  Nona set her head on her arms and tried to relax. She wondered if there really was a Scithrowl sitting on the slopes watching the hut. She supposed there might be.

  Zole’s demon had moved to circle her neck, a
scarlet scald as if she’d escaped a hanging halfway through.

  “So, when you force your latest devil out, what parts are you cutting away?” Nona asked. “Is the Zole who came across half of the empire to rescue me from the Tetragode in here?” She put her hand to Zole’s throat, then tapped her forehead. “Or here?”

  Zole said nothing but narrowed her gaze in concentration and the scald slid away from her neck.

  “Is the Zole who once every three years makes a joke the one to be cut out or left behind?”

  “Once they are separate the raulathu must be purged. Their voices grow louder, their ills more extreme.”

  “But what you cut away . . . that’s life. Keot, my devil, for all his ills, was alive, with hopes of his own. You’re telling me he was cut away, abandoned? And the perfect beings that remained when all that was excised . . . what became of them, shriven of their flaws?”

  Zole rolled onto her back. “They say the Missing left. But some believe they are all around us, unseen, unknowable, existing in their own harmony. Others think the Missing went beneath the sea and live there in golden cities, burning the very water itself for heat, enough to last them until long after the last star has gone dark.

  “In the far north there are peoples that believe it is the Missing whose heat bubbles up to melt the domes beneath the ice, and sometimes to give us the open water that sustains the deep tribes.”

  “Sister Rule said it was volcanoes at the bottom of the sea that did that.” Nona tried to imagine golden cities beneath miles of ice and dark water.

  “Mistress Academia has her own wisdom.” Zole shrugged. “How can we know the truth?”

  Nona fell silent. She didn’t know what death held, what would become of her if the Ancestor gathered her in. She didn’t know if the ice-speakers were right or what Zole would become as she shed every last one of her flaws, her jealousies, every shred of malice . . . But it didn’t feel right. Not to her. Perhaps it was her pride talking, her own multitude of sins, each with their own small voice, but imperfect as she was, Nona wanted to stay here, whole, untouched, while her heart beat and her lungs drew breath.

  “Where do you think the Noi-Guin are?” Nona found it hard to believe the assassins had given up. They had hounded her for nearly half her life simply for having the temerity not to die. Zole had stolen their shipheart.

  “Waiting,” Zole said.

  “Waiting?” Nona would have accepted “coming.” “Where? Why?”

  “They are waiting because they know now that we are dangerous. They want the Scithrowl to weaken us. To deplete our reserves. The bulk of the Noi-Guin will be waiting at the ice, because they know it is the way I would choose to get past Sherzal’s soldiers and back into the empire. They will want to keep us on the move. To exhaust us. They are at their most dangerous when waiting.”

  “So we’ll have to get through them to get to the ice sheet?” Taking on Noi-Guin with the advantage of surprise had been difficult enough. Walking into an ambush would be suicidal. Especially with the Scithrowl in pursuit.

  “It would be best not to have to,” Zole said. “That’s why we’re going to the black ice.”

  “The black—” Nona broke off to sniff. “Something’s burning!” She turned to see white feelers of smoke rising through the woven sticks of the wall.

  Zole moved into a crouch. “Our rest is over.”

  12

  THE ESCAPE

  Three Years Earlier

  THE FIRE DROVE the novices out but whoever had thrown the incendiary had not waited for them to emerge. As Zole had suggested, the Noi-Guin were playing a longer game. The column of smoke would bring back the Scithrowl riders and more besides. The two girls made directly for the barrens, favouring speed over stealth. In the distance green turned to brown. And behind miles of dead, unwholesome land the grey ice rose in towering cliffs stepping up nearly two miles to the great southern ice sheet.

  The foothills descended into rolling fields in the shelter of the Grampains. With the Corridor wind in the west, hardly a breeze stirred the hedgerows. Jump-corn stood amid a riot of crops that had launched themselves from the fertile darkness of soil such as Nona had never seen. Villages lay almost every mile, the roads well maintained and set with inns, staging posts, and tiny watch-forts. Zole led the way past such places so swiftly that the locals had time only to raise their heads and wonder. Twice groups of children followed, throwing stones. Nona let them bounce off her back. And once a young man in a patched uniform three sizes too big for him chased after them, waving his arms and shouting at them in such thickly accented empire tongue that Nona could understand little past “stop.” He grew breathless, angry, and finally laid a hand upon Zole’s shoulder, which saw him hoisted over a wall into a haystack.

  “Here.” She tossed Nona the leaf-bladed dagger she’d plucked from the youth’s belt—Scithrowl army issue.

  With the barrens just a mile ahead and a dark crowd of horsemen thundering through the village on the ridge behind them, the novices found their way blocked by six Scithrowl knights. Nona’s childhood had been peppered with stories of the heretic knights beyond the mountains. In Nana Even’s tales they were always giants in iron armour, their faces hidden behind visors cast in the likeness of snarling beasts, and with the heads of empire children hanging from their belts by the hair.

  The truth was six dour men in weathered steel, all looking to be in their thirties or forties, their scars and bleak-eyed contemplation of the novices marking them as veterans. Likely they had served in the endless eastern wars against the kings of Ald.

  “Stop!” Their leader nudged his stallion out into the road from beneath the copse that had hidden them.

  Zole didn’t break her stride. She ran straight at the knight with a remarkable turn of acceleration. To his credit the man cleared his scabbard before she got there but Zole had vaulted his horse and ducked beneath the belly of the next before any blow could be struck. Nona wove after the ice-triber, swaying out of the path of the swinging sword.

  They got fifty yards before the knights turned their horses and began to give chase.

  “Trees?” Nona hissed the suggestion between breaths. Ahead the fields gave way to bramble and thorn bush studded with the occasional stunted copse. Nothing that looked sufficient to slow the horses more than it slowed the novices.

  Zole spun, bracing on her heel as she continued to slide in the direction she’d been running. She raised her hands, fingers extended. As one the horses stopped, just as if they’d seen a wall appear before them. The knights went over their mounts’ heads, crashing to the beaten earth in their plate armour. Nona winced.

  “Animals are easier than people.” Zole wiped a trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth. It didn’t look as if it had been easy. “Come.”

  Nona followed as Zole led off again. Behind them riders boiled from the last village down into the road. Scores of them. She wondered if the Noi-Guin had misplayed their hand, letting the Scithrowl wear her and Zole down. Perhaps the battle-queen’s people would kill them and take the Noi-Guin’s shipheart for their own.

  The vegetation died within the space of a quarter mile. Trees stood lifeless and brittle, branches vacant of leaves. The thorn bushes petered out. Brambles became black, twisted things, bloated with ugly growths, then gave up their purchase on the cracked ground altogether. The novices ran through an acre of dead grey grass, fraying where the wind worried at it, and beyond that the soil lay bare.

  Nona turned at the drumming of hooves, not ready to risk a spear in the back. Zole stopped a few yards ahead of her. The riders slowed and spread out, seeming unwilling to advance, the animals nervous. Perhaps a hundred Scithrowl had joined the chase. Nona wondered if the knights had managed to get out of the way or if they had been trampled where they lay.

  “How many horses can you scare off?”

  “Perhaps we will fin
d out.” Zole came to stand at Nona’s shoulder. “They are herd animals . . . but I do not know their minds well.”

  The Scithrowl stopped a hundred yards off, among the last scraps of bramble and thorn. Many unslung short bows.

  “They look scared. Perhaps they think this place is haunted,” Nona said.

  “Do you doubt it?” Zole began to walk backwards, at a slow and even pace.

  The first few arrows winged around them as the archers sought their range. One came close and Zole snatched it from the air. She reversed it, took two paces forward, and flung the missile back, her arm cracking through the air. A second later an archer among the riders toppled from his saddle.

  “I didn’t . . . know we could do that . . .” Nona said in a small voice.

  A dozen archers loosed at once, more following, and for the next few moments Nona was occupied with the business of knocking their arrows aside. It brought a memory of the ordeal of the Shield all those years ago. Nona had never imagined when Zole arrived that it would be her whom she would be shielding—not that Zole needed her help.

  They backed away and the business of defence became easier with a slight slowing of the arrows and decreasing accuracy, but harder as their stamina for such speed eroded. Nona slapped away an arrow zipping towards her chest, and moved her foot to avoid another that might have skewered her knee. The shafts were angling out of the sky now as the range lengthened. Nona had to squint to see the black dots against the sun. She hoped the archers’ quivers would empty before her own reserves ran dry. She twisted back from the hips to avoid another shaft and swore as it tore a hot line across her shoulder.