Holy Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  Nona sighed and nodded. “I was thinking of Zole.” She had been thinking of what it would be like to be one with the Ancestor. The perfection that Zole and the ice-tribes sought in life both fascinated and repulsed her. It seemed like a kind of death, and life was for living. But the faults she clung to brought her pain as often as pleasure. She had been thinking of Regol too. Forbidden by her own oath now that she was a sister, a bride to the Ancestor. Regol, Markus, all men were her brothers now. Had Zole cut that particular weakness out of herself first? she wondered.

  Bitel’s harsh chiming cut through Nona’s thoughts.

  “Twice in one day?”

  “I’ve been at this convent thirty-eight years,” Sister Rose said. “I’ve never heard that bell sounded twice in a day.”

  Nona helped the nun to her feet, then took off running for the abbess’s steps.

  * * *

  • • •

  A DOZEN CHURCH-GUARDS and a tall man in armour waited in front of the big house, the armoured man still mounted, his cloak of gold and green streaming in the wind.

  “The emperor’s colours!” Ruli came up beside Nona. Nobody was trying to group novices into their classes. The chaos felt more unsettling even than the sight of church-guards and the emperor’s man. The convent had always been a place of order.

  Abbess Wheel came from the direction of Blade Hall, flanked by all the Red Sisters still residing at the convent. She climbed a few steps to get the elevation needed to see over her gathering flock.

  “We’re in for it this time!” Jula came up, panting. “Joeli must have told.”

  Ara joined them. “I think there are bigger fish than us to fry today.”

  Abbess Wheel stamped her crozier for attention, unnecessarily since every eye was turned her way.

  “Today is a glorious day!” Wheel shouted above the freshening wind, her voice thick with the passion she usually reserved for reading the most dramatic passages of the Book of the Ancestor. “Today, sisters and novices, we get to stand before the Ark and defend our faith with blood and bone.”

  “Oh hells,” Jula said weakly.

  “All senior novices and all nuns of a fighting age will accompany me to the Ark where we will join with our sisters in the Red under the direction of General Wensis.” Wheel’s eyes gleamed and she gripped her crozier like a weapon, as if all her long years had been leading up to this moment and her life’s ambition had been to march her fellow nuns and the children in their care onto the battlefield. “Sister Iron will oversee the immediate equipping of our force from the convent stores.” The old woman raised her arm. “Follow me!” And she stalked off towards Blade Hall, followed by Sister Iron. She at least had the decency to look worried.

  “Oh joy.” Sister Apple somewhere behind Nona, in a dry tone. “A lifetime dedicated to the arts of discretion . . . and now I get to stand up in broad daylight and stop arrows for the emperor.”

  “I won’t let any arrow near you.” Kettle, fierce and upset.

  Any more of their conversation was lost beneath the general outbreak of worry and complaint as three quarters of the nuns and half the novices surged after their abbess.

  * * *

  • • •

  NONA EMERGED FROM Blade Hall wearing the oldest Red Sister habit she had ever seen. It must have been defying moths at the back of the storeroom for decades. Tatters trailed both sleeves, perhaps sliced free by the blows that cut the last occupant from their mortal remains and sent her to join the glory of the Ancestor.

  At her hip hung Sister Tallow’s sword. The nun had pressed it on her, ignoring all protest. “The best artist needs the best brush.”

  Sister Pail took Nona’s arm as she stepped through the crowd of novices comparing weapons outside the doors.

  “The abbess wants to see you.” She gave a tug, then started to jog away. “Hurry!”

  Nona glanced back to see Ruli emerging, a Barrons-steel sword in her hand. Jula had a group of Mystic Class novices around her, admiring the long-hafted battle-axe that she’d been issued. Ara had yet to come out.

  “Come on!” A distant shout.

  Nona set hand to hilt and ran. It had been a long time since she had worn a sword outside Blade Hall.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE CORRIDORS OF the abbess’s house were crowded with nuns and church-guards. Abbess Wheel was waiting for Nona in her office under the painted gaze of a score of previous occupants. Abbess Glass’s portrait hung over the door where Wheel’s gaze would rest each time she looked up from her papers. Nona looked up at it as she came through—a good likeness that removed a decade or more but caught with perfection the stare that seemed to be fixed on something distant only she could ever see.

  “I’ve been told to leave you behind,” Wheel said without preamble. She held up a roll of parchment. “In the event that the sisterhood is called to the emperor’s aid it is fitting that the Shield be left to guard the younger novices.” One bony finger moved to indicate the high priest’s seal. “He means ‘to guard the shipheart,’ of course.”

  Nona felt as if she’d been punched in the stomach. “No! Abbess! I can’t stay here while all my sisters are facing the enemy on the battlefield. I won’t!”

  Wheel raised her hand. “I must admit it seemed a strange instruction. To single out a particular novice, and even if High Priest Nevis had somehow anticipated your elevation to the sisterhood, to give such a significant duty to such a young nun.” She rested her gaze on Nona. “I haven’t held a high opinion of you, Sister Cage, but you showed a wisdom beyond your years when you chose the Black. Truly, faith may reside in the most unlikely of receptacles . . .” She looked at the parchment in her hand. “I sense politics at play here. Favours bought and sold. And if there’s one thing I despise almost as much as heresy it’s politics. Unfortunately, there seems to be no choice but to obey.”

  Nona’s mind raced. To be left on the Rock of Faith watching over children while her friends fought and died together before the emperor’s walls was not an option. “It’s the shipheart the high priest wants guarded. And it’s the shipheart that puts the novices most at risk . . .” Nona glanced at the window and the Dome of the Ancestor beyond. “We should take it with us!”

  “What?”

  “Take it with us. The shipheart. You know I can bring it up from the vault and put it somewhere safe at the palace. We need it on the front line: all the quantals will fight more effectively, and if we lose there the enemy will get the shipheart whether it’s with us or hidden here.”

  Abbess Wheel tilted her head, considering. “Do it.”

  Nona stood in shock for a moment. Wheel had actually agreed with her! For once she had done what Nona needed her to do. It struck her then that this was at least part of what Abbess Glass had wanted, what she had purchased with the promises she had extracted. How else could Nona Grey have obtained the goodwill and cooperation of Abbess Wheel?

  The abbess frowned and tapped a finger to a ledger on the desk before her, the record of novices. “The young ones will still need guarding, though. Someone capable. Maybe—”

  “Ara could do it! Sister Thorn, I mean!” The idea struck Nona from nowhere. They didn’t all have to face the Scithrowl. She could save Ara. If the Ark fell Ara would lead the novices away to the west. Even the Durns would be better than the Scithrowl: they had their own gods and weren’t given to burning people over the finer points of Ancestral doctrine. Ara could do it. A weight lifted from Nona’s heart.

  Again the abbess tilted her head. “She should have followed your example when called to her name, sister. Today of all days it’s faith that’s needed.” More tapping of fingers on the ledger. “I suppose you’re right. Once upon a time I thought she was the Chosen One come to save us all. Let her save the children at least.”

  “Thank you, abbess!” Nona could have wept. She mad
e for the door as Wheel waved her dismissal.

  Nona ran down the steps, weaving past startled sisters. She felt ready to endure the shipheart’s awful power, ready to stand with her sisters against the Scithrowl shock troops, ready for anything. All that scared her now, the only thing she felt unready for, was telling Ara that she had saved her.

  18

  THE ESCAPE

  Three Years Earlier

  THE GREAT WHITE sheet, in which every part of Abeth save the green thread of the Corridor was wrapped, seemed to Nona as terrible a place in its own way as had the chambers and tunnels within the black ice. The very personal malice of the multitude of devils was replaced by the impersonal malice of an endless freezing wind beneath a bone-pale sky that stretched to forever in all directions. The openness of it staggered her, even though she had stood in places within the Corridor where the walls could not be seen. This was something different. A relentless exposure that made her feel like a single tiny dot of ink upon a vast unwritten page.

  “We’re going the wrong way.” Nona spoke through the cloth that Zole had given her to bind around her face.

  “We are going the right way.”

  “We’re heading away from the Corridor,” Nona said.

  “We need to make a fire,” Zole said.

  “How in the name of the Ancestor will we do that? I mean it would be nice . . .” Just the thought of it made Nona pause to visualise crackling flames. “Should we find two icicles and rub them together?”

  “This close to the Corridor the tribes cache timber and coal. Out on the far ice there are far fewer caches and they will hold whale oil and dried blubber.”

  “And how are we going to find one of these caches?” The idea seemed ridiculous. With the exception of the Grampains thrusting through the ice some miles to the west the sheet seemed entirely featureless.

  “They often lie along pressure ridges.”

  “But . . . we’re not following a pressure ridge. I can’t even see any.”

  Zole said nothing, just carried on tramping across the snow. Nona, lacking any alternative, bowed her head against the wind and followed.

  A mile farther on Zole halted. “Look.” Ahead of them the wind had eroded the snow across several acres, exposing the ice beneath. White striations lay in parallel lines, running through the translucence all around them. “Pressure lines. The thickest of them often turn into pressure ridges.”

  They carried on. The wind was beginning to get the cold into Nona’s bones in a way that even the freezing wetness of the tunnels had not. Her fingers became strangers to her again. She knew from Sister Tallow’s lectures that frostbite could set in in less than an hour. First the flesh turned a dead white, later black, and finally it would rot, poisoning your blood if the affected area were not amputated or cut away.

  “You were right.” A pressure ridge had begun to make itself known. Ahead of them great plates of ice lifted like broken teeth, a fractured line following a roughly straight path off into the distance.

  Zole walked as close to the ridge as the surface allowed, affording them a degree of relief from the wind. They walked another mile, then another.

  Nona glanced left then right, across the endless white relief. Here and there the wind tore plumes of snow crystals from low drifts and set them racing across the ice in rivulets.

  “You really lived here? Whole tribes live here?” Just crossing an expanse of the sheet felt like a foolish gamble. To spend a whole life in the vast unchanging whiteness, always freezing, always torn by the wind, didn’t seem remotely possible.

  They followed the ridge for another mile.

  The sun grew low in the west, skimming the ridge’s shadow across the ice for dozens of yards. Soon it would throw the shadow of the Grampains across them and night would descend.

  At a point no different from any other Zole stopped. She stalked around, head down, kicking snow aside here and there.

  “You should dig in this place.” Zole stamped.

  “Me?”

  “We do not have the correct tools. It would be foolish to risk our swords when you have blades that are sharper and more durable.”

  Nona sighed and knelt at the spot. She extended her flaw-blades and began to cut the ice. Zole used her knife to prise free the blocks that Nona incised. Within a few minutes they could see a dark mass below them. It turned out to be a sack of charcoal packed with a small amount of kindling.

  “Now a shelter.”

  Zole employed Nona and her blades to cut slabs of ice from the ridge where the untold pressures beneath had broken them clear of the sheet. By the time it grew dark they had, through Nona’s labour and Zole’s expertise, constructed a small shelter with three walls and a half-roof. Zole produced an iron fire-bowl with three legs and made a tiny charcoal fire. They placed it in the middle of the shelter and squeezed into either side of it. The change was marvellous. Nona felt as if she might almost survive the night.

  * * *

  • • •

  “WAKE UP.”

  Nona groaned. All of her hurt. Even groaning hurt. Even in the turmoil of her nightmares, waking up was not something she wanted to do.

  “Wake up!”

  “No.”

  Nona found herself being dragged from the cold to somewhere much colder. She opened her eyes, trying to remember where she was.

  “The focus is coming.” Zole pulled her to her feet.

  The moon, already bright, was growing brighter by the moment.

  “I was sleeping,” Nona complained, her voice weak and wavering.

  “We need the warmth,” Zole said. “And to keep dry.” She tugged Nona higher up the slope formed by the pressure ridge. The ice splintered around them as Zole used her water-work to make a flat platform. “Do not fall.”

  The moon’s heat built around them. Nona sighed with pleasure, spreading her arms. Zole hung a damp shawl over both the outstretched limbs, clothing she had not taxed herself to dry earlier. “Let them dry but put them under your coat when the mist rises.”

  The heat built from a luxurious warmth towards something fierce. All around them the sound of dripping water started up. The ice began to melt beneath their feet, meltwater sheeting down the slope. A short while later the water stood an inch deep in places and started to steam.

  “Ancestor! I thought I’d never feel warm again!” Nona screwed her eyes shut and opened her coat. The simple pleasure of not being cold made her want to cry. She gave silent thanks to whichever of her long-distant forebears had set their moon in her sky.

  A mist rose above the steaming waters and Nona rolled Zole’s shawls beneath her tunic then closed her coat around them. She stood, first knee-deep, then chest-deep in the milky ocean rising about her. She met Zole’s gaze briefly and the white tide drowned them both.

  From the inside the mists took on a bloody tinge. Nona stood, enjoying the heat though knowing that when the wind found its strength again and stripped the ice clear, her hair would freeze solid.

  Eventually the focus began to pass and the brilliance paled. The steam flowed on a strengthening wind, a white sheet that began to tear, then tatter, then shred. For miles all around the ice stood like a dark mirror showing the firmament of crimson stars anew, a second moon fading in the reflected depths.

  “It’s like we’re standing on a lake.” Even as Nona spoke she saw the first white threads of ice spreading out across the surface, frost-fingered. She doubted that the water stood much deeper than an inch anywhere. A distant gurgling reached her.

  “It will soon be as it was. We should get back into shelter.” Zole brushed the frost from her hair, then ducked back into the ice house they had made. Its walls were thinner now, but still good against the wind.

  Nona stood watching a while longer as the tracery of frost spread across the water’s surface, growing from multiple sites now,
with the farthest-reaching tendrils joining hands. Soon the moon’s work would be undone.

  “Doesn’t it drain away?” It seemed wrong somehow. So much heat wasted. So little impact. If the passage of the moon really did melt an inch from the ice sheet every night, who knew what might be accomplished?

  “Some does. Most refreezes. We are nearly ten miles from the Corridor.”

  Nona joined Zole in the shelter and pressed against her. They huddled around the embers in the fire-bowl. Even before sleep took Nona back, no patch of open water remained. The ice had frozen again and the wind swept a thin dusting of snow back across its smoothness.

  * * *

  • • •

  NONA WOKE TO a deafening cracking and splintering.

  “What?”

  “The ridge is growing. We should move.” Zole had almost completed her packing. In the east the sun was struggling to break free of the horizon. “Now.” Shards of ice peppered the walls of their shelter, shattering away where new blocks lifted from the main sheet.

  “Do not look back.” Zole left the shelter and strode away.

  Nona followed. Chunks of ice hit the back of her coat with considerable force as she came into the open, others flying past and skittering on for hundreds of yards.

  Once clear Nona and Zole halted, turning to face the way they had come. Beyond the line of the pressure ridge, and a second and third beyond that, the Grampains rose, implacable stone teeth shearing through the ice.

  “I don’t want to climb those.” Nona felt cold just looking at the peaks. Her fingers and toes were numb already.

  “We will wait here.” Zole folded her arms.

  Nona sighed. “Come on, then.” She started to move off. Zole stayed where she was. “Good joke.” She beckoned the novice on.