“A million words won’t push the ice back, not even the breadth of a finger. But one word will break a heart, two will mend it, and three will lay the highest low.”
Abbess Glass had spoken and Nona had made promises. Promises to a friend. Promises she meant to keep.
* * *
• • •
THE BELL THAT drew Nona from her dreams spoke with a steel tongue. Bitel! All around her fellow novices were jumping from their beds, shedding nightgowns, grabbing habits, shouting questions. All except Joeli, who sat on her bed, fully dressed, her hair already brushed to its usual golden magnificence. She watched with a private smile as Nona struggled first into her smalls and skirts, and then the latest in a series of habits, this one already too short for her.
“This is bad.” Ara hopped across to Nona’s bed, trying to get her foot into her shoe.
“You should be ready to run,” Nona said.
Ara stood, frowning, her foot half in the shoe. “Where’s Jula going to run to? My father lives in a castle . . . Jula’s has rooms above an ink shop in Verity. And Ruli would have to cross fifty miles under Durnish occupation.”
Nona didn’t have an answer. She could have pointed out that Ara would have to cross more than twice that distance under Scithrowl occupation to reach her father’s holdings. And would likely find it smoking ruins, or home to one of Adoma’s royal cousins. If Lano Tacsis had spoken the truth, the main Jotsis stronghold had already fallen.
Ruli joined Ara, white-faced at Nona’s bedside, and all the while Joeli smiled. Nona laced her shoes and wondered yet again if Joeli, with her key to Sister Apple’s stores, could really have been poisoning the abbess’s medicines. Or had Glass’s death, like so many evils in the world, been a simple matter of blind chance? Certainly the abbess had thought so. I’ll meet my son again in the Ancestor, so don’t cry, Nona Grey. She had taken Nona’s hand in the withered claw of her own, still scarred by the flame of that candle long ago. The fight matters. But in the end it is never truly won or lost, and victory lies in discovering that we are bigger than it is.
“Where’s Jula?” Nona could see no sign of her, and her bed lay empty.
“An hour after we got back last night she took a lantern and went off to read that book.” As Ara answered, Jula appeared at the doorway, dark circles around her eyes, hair in disarray, and a look of mild panic on her face.
The opening of the door sparked a mass exodus, with Alata first out, pushing past a confused Jula. Within moments Nona and the rest of them were hurrying down the stairs, joining the stream of younger novices and the crush at the main door as everyone spilled out into the day.
Bitel’s harsh chimes ceased almost as soon as Nona left the dormitories. In the east the sun still occupied the notch that the Corridor put in the horizon and every shadow pointed to the abbess’s house.
Nuns and novices had begun to line up, organised by class, as Nona arrived. Bitel had rung out only a handful of times in her decade at the convent and on no occasion had the bell heralded anything good. Nona watched for church-guards or the soldiers from last night. Finding none, she studied the disposition of the Red Sisters. If Abbess Wheel meant to detain them, then given her low opinion of Nona’s piety she wouldn’t expect mere obedience to hold her in place while the yokes were brought out. Her heart sank as she saw that the Red Sisters were arrayed around the novices in a loose circle. Sister Tallow stood close at hand.
“It looks like a trap,” Ruli hissed.
“Ruli, the abbess doesn’t need to trap us if she thinks we’ve done wrong.” Jula sounded bone-tired, as if she had been reading the whole night. “Abbess Wheel speaks for the Church, and we obey.”
Nona understood then that breaking the rules once to get the book was as far down the road to damnation as Jula was prepared to go. If Abbess Wheel ordered her surrender, she would not be running. It spoke volumes that Jula had been prepared to come with her when she said she couldn’t find the book alone. Of all of Nona’s friends perhaps Jula was the only one with true faith, not only in the Ancestor but in the Church as an institution. Something she intended to devote her life to in the black habit of a Holy Sister.
“All the Reds are here. Even the ones who should be on patrol.” Ara kept her voice low, shuffling into the line beside Nona. “The Greys are positioned too, from what I can see.” She motioned upwards with her eyes towards the big house. “Bhenta’s on the roof.”
“Sister Cauldron,” Nona corrected. “Don’t underestimate her.”
Abbess Wheel did not emerge until all the novices were gathered and in order. Sisters Superior Rose and Rule stood one step below the abbess’s doorway, Sister Apple a step below them and with her, Sister Iron. It hurt Nona to see the woman in Sister Tallow’s place and she looked again for the older woman in the crowd, finding her still close, beside Sister Rock.
As Wheel’s assistant, Sister Ice, opened the door Sister Pan came up the steps to join Apple and Iron. She cast a grim eye over the assembled novices.
“Ancestor . . .” Jula muttered a prayer.
“She doesn’t look happy,” Ruli hissed. “Is she there to own up to the forbidden book?”
If she was it would be the last nail in their coffin. Who else could have stolen Pan’s book but Ara or Nona? And Sister Pan never joined the abbess on the steps, not even when it had been Glass, someone she liked, rather than Wheel, someone she did not.
Wheel emerged and scanned the crowd with her customary glower. Nona’s fingers closed about the abbess’s seal in the depths of her habit pocket. It was hard to tell from the old woman’s face whether she had discovered it missing. She looked close to fury most of the time anyway.
The abbess thumped her crozier for attention. It put Nona in mind of High Priest Jacob stamping his staff at Abbess Glass’s trial.
“Novice Nona, approach.” Wheel glared in her direction.
Nona’s heart sank. She didn’t know if she would try to fight her way past nuns she had known for years, or surrender to injustice. She couldn’t take her friends with her. Certainly Jula wouldn’t come. The knowledge paralysed her.
Her cheeks prickled with shame or shock. Nona wasn’t sure which. Half-dazed, she walked towards the abbess’s steps. After Zole the old woman had abandoned all talk of the Argatha prophecy. There had never been a moment following Nona’s return when Wheel had indicated that she might be the Chosen One. The abbess had shown no interest in the interpretation that said four shiphearts rather than four bloods were the key to the Ark. With Zole gone the whole matter was over as far as Sweet Mercy was concerned.
Abbess Wheel scanned the assembly with a sour eye. “These proceedings are highly irregular but we live in pressing times and haste is required.” She gestured imperiously with her crozier to a spot before the lowest step. “Stand there.”
Nona stood, summoned by the steel bell, the focus of the whole convent upon her, head bowed.
“Well, Sister Pan?” Wheel said. “Get on with it.”
Pan frowned and hunched her shoulders. She raised her voice. “Novice Nona has entered the Third Room of Path Tower. She is judged . . .”
Nona readied herself to run.
“. . . to have passed the Path-test. And I offer her the Blue of a Mystic Sister.”
Sister Iron coughed. “The novice has passed the Blade-test and is acceptable to wear the Red. I offer her a place as a Martial Sister.”
Nona looked up. Bewildered.
Sister Apple fixed her with a narrow stare. “Novice Nona has passed the Wire-test and I can find no legitimate reason for her not to be offered the Grey of a Sister of Discretion.”
“There you have it,” Abbess Wheel snapped. “Choose. And hurry up. You’re not the last to take her orders today. There’s war on our doorstep.”
Nona glanced past Wheel, past the roof of the abbess’s house. Smoke streaked the sky as
if Verity’s chimneys had crept to the foot of the plateau overnight. She opened her mouth, then closed it. How close must Adoma’s troops be now?
“Well, girl?” Abbess Wheel stamped her crozier again. “You have what you wanted. Take it.”
Nona returned her gaze to the steps, to Sister Pan, bowed beneath her years, dark eyes watching from a dark face, to Sister Iron’s level stare, to Apple, pale in the morning light, her headdress as ever unequal to the task, a red coil escaping.
Abbess Glass had said this day would come. She had said it on her deathbed and Nona had nodded and said that she believed it and felt guilty because she did not.
“I . . .” Nona looked from one sister to the next. Unexpectedly she thought of Zole, the girl from the ice-tribes with her quest to achieve perfection in this life rather than in the embrace of the Ancestor in the time beyond.
“Well?”
“A Holy Sister,” Nona said. “I want to be a Holy Sister.”
A burst of exclamation rose behind her, a swell of muttered questions, quickly silenced as the abbess came down from her steps, pushing past the sisters superior.
“A Holy Sister? You wish to be a Bride of the Ancestor?” The old woman raised her hand and Nona resisted the urge to block the blow.
“I do, abbess.”
Wheel clasped her bony fingers to Nona’s cheek. “A Holy Sister!” She raised her voice. “A Holy Sister! For faith is what is needed in the darkest hours. Faith!” She stared past Nona at the ranks of novices behind, daring any to disagree. Her gaze returned to Nona. She drew back her hand. “Perhaps I was wrong about you . . .” A shake of her head. “Perhaps.”
The old woman embraced her as every abbess must embrace each soul called to the Ancestor’s service.
“May I serve, abbess?” Nona went to her knees as all novices do to receive their orders, rising again as nuns.
Wheel stood above her. She patted the front of her habit, then frowned as if remembering some annoyance. Her fingers paused over a lump beneath the cloth. The frown deepened. She reached to her neck and drew from beneath her collar a necklace of prayer beads, the Ancestor’s tree in gold on a silver chain, the keys to her front door, and . . . on a knotted leather thong, her seal of office. Nona had tied it around Wheel’s neck during their embrace just a moment before. She hoped that she had hidden the act in the moment as Mistress Shade had taught her. Times when all eyes are upon you are often those when such sleight of hand is most easily accomplished.
“A day of miracles!” A rare smile twisted the abbess’s lips. She took the seal and pressed it to Nona’s lips. “Stand, Sister Cage, stand!”
And Nona stood. Sister Cage of Sweet Mercy Convent, Bride of the Ancestor. Holy Sister.
“Novice Arabella!” Abbess Wheel called. “Approach the steps.”
16
THE ESCAPE
Three Years Earlier
NONA CROUCHED IN the margins of the shipheart’s glow and watched the devils slowly leach from Yisht’s corpse into the ice, a sliding patchwork of grey moving across the woman’s hands. Rats abandoning a ship that had sunk.
One patch of colour lingered on the back of Yisht’s hand even as others flowed over, under, and around it. In the end it remained, sinking by fractions towards the two fingertips that touched the ice and through which the rest had drained into the greater blackness.
For a moment the blasting of vents and the gurgling of meltwater in hidden channels fell almost silent.
“Keot?” A whisper. In this frozen place of horrors, so deeply buried, anything familiar could be counted a comfort. Even a devil carved from the mind of one of the Missing eons ago. “Is that you?”
Nona sensed no reply. Whatever fault line had let the devil into her when she killed Raymel Tacsis no longer seemed wide enough to admit Keot. Killing Yisht had been an empty thing. Even now, with the woman’s torso cooling in front of her and her severed head lying somewhere in the dark, Nona felt no satisfaction in the deed, just the echoing loss of her friends.
Nona watched while Keot finally drained away, and she wondered whether it had been him who had made the knife slip from Yisht’s fingers as she tried to block that final blow. Some things were beyond knowing. Nona left Yisht’s body untouched. The woman might be carrying things of use, but the Noi-Guin often set traps for the unwary in an unused pocket with venomed needles, and Nona had no wish to find out if it was a habit Yisht had acquired too. She stood and waited, timing the blasts from the vents, and crossed to the shipheart.
Even moving the shipheart awkwardly before her with the tip of her sword brought Nona far deeper into the thing’s radiance than she felt she could endure for long. The light dazzled rather than illuminated, seeming unaffected by niceties such as whether her eyes were open or closed. The shipheart drove from her mind the insidious whispers haunting the dark all around her, but replaced them with a louder muttering that bubbled many-voiced from her own interior darkness.
“I don’t know where I’m going. I’ve forgotten why I’m going there.” Nona spoke so that her own voice would sound louder than any of the competition. She nudged the shipheart ahead. It rolled a few feet and stopped. On the blade of her sword Yisht’s blood looked black in the strange light.
As she approached the bubble-shaped chamber where they had first encountered Yisht, Nona took care that the shipheart not run away from her. If it went over the lip where the tunnel met the chamber it would roll down to the bottom and vanish down the throat that had claimed Zole.
Nona sheathed her sword and took a knife in her left hand. “I have to do this.” She gathered around her all that could be found of her serenity and bent to pick up the ball of light. It seemed to weigh nothing and to burn her bones. With a snarl she stepped over the edge into the void beyond.
She slid nearly to the maw at the chamber’s base before her knife found sufficient purchase to bring her to a halt. All around her narrow streams of meltwater divided the ice, cutting deeply into it before spraying out into the shaft. A dozen voices filled Nona’s head and she could hardly tell which of them, if any, was hers.
“. . . ooona!”
“What?” Nona tried to concentrate. She needed to edge around the hole and somehow climb the far side of the chamber one-handed in search of another exit. She wondered if her father’s explorations had ever left him this terrified, this lost . . .
“Noooo!” A distant echoing cry amid the cacophony inside her skull. “Na!”
“What?” Nona lifted the shipheart for greater illumination but the shaft dropping away just beyond her heels devoured its light and gave nothing in return. “Who’s there?” She bit down on further questions. Even she knew better than to talk to the voices. It made them real. Helped them break free.
“. . . ole!”
“I know you’re a hole.” Nona lay cold against the wet ice, anchored by the point of her knife, the shipheart burning in her hand and in her mind. “I’m talking to the hole . . .”
“Zoooole!”
“Zole?” Nona sat up.
“. . . heart!”
“What?” she shouted.
“Need the . . .”
Nona felt suddenly terrified. “You’re in my head, aren’t you? One of my devils . . .”
“. . . eeeeed . . .”
Nona stared into the inky nothing before her. “You want me to drop the shipheart into that hole? After all I’ve been through to keep it?” A laugh spluttered past teeth beginning to chatter with the cold once more. All around her the ice had paled to a translucent grey. Of course the devils wanted her to throw the shipheart away. It was all that was keeping them from sliding beneath her skin and turning her into something worse than Yisht.
“Noooonaaa?”
The voice seemed to echo up from the depths where Zole had fallen, but so many other voices clamoured for attention. How could she accept
any of them as real?
“Zole?” She leaned forward, yelling into the hole.
“. . . ooow it to meeee . . .”
“Throw it to you?” Nona’s laugh came edged with hysteria. “You’re dead!” The shipheart burned her and splintered her thoughts, but it was also precious beyond measure and the only source of light in this place of endless darkness.
The voice in the hole fell silent while those in Nona’s skull grew louder.
“Zole?”
Nothing.
“Zole?”
Only the clamour behind her forehead as her mind began to break into the fragments that would drive her mad. It was the silence that convinced her. Zole would never plead. The ice-triber had said her piece and there was nothing more to say.
Nona looked into the glare. Zole had called it an Old Stone. No part of Nona wanted to let it go, even as it hurt her. She tilted her palm and felt the voices falter. The greatest treasure she had ever held rolled across her fingers. The shipheart fell from her hand, rolled to the edge, and dropped suddenly from view. A rapidly descending band of violet light lit the black gullet, finding the occasional gleam from faults and fractures. A moment later it was gone and Nona sat alone, blind in the dark.
* * *
• • •
TIME NEEDS SOMETHING to be counted against. Nona had nothing except for the slowly building pressure as the devils made their return to the ice beneath her. The shipheart’s presence had driven them from it and now they reclaimed what was theirs. She felt their malice like tiny claws, trying to slice a way under her skin.
“I won’t die here.” Numb fingers fumbled a second dagger from her belt and turned to begin the climb back to the tunnel. She would rather stagger back into the Corridor half-dead and fight the Noi-Guin than face insanity alone in the freezing dark.
She reached, stabbed, and hauled herself up. With no light she might miss the entrance entirely but trying would at least warm her a little.
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