Holy Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  Sister Pan carried on towards the wall, her stride longer and more sure than Nona had seen it in her ten years at the convent. The sinking sun threw the ancient woman’s shadow before her and in the dying crimson of its light she seemed no longer old.

  “Sister!” Nona caught up with Pan, keeping her gaze on the wall, alert for arrows. “I have to take you back. It’s not safe.” She reached for the ancient’s arm, prepared to carry her if need be.

  “Stay. It will be all right, child.” Pan walked on.

  “Yes, it will.” Nona suddenly understood that Pan going to the wall alone was a fine idea. She wondered why she hadn’t seen it before. She stood there, puzzling. A moment later Nona decided that the plan had a small flaw. She would go with Pan, even though she had been told to stay. Then it would be all right.

  Pan registered Nona’s return with a raised eyebrow, then a shrug. She gestured towards the stonework rising before them. “Can you see where the blocks will fall?”

  “What?”

  “It’s written right before us. If you look at how the threads run through the granite you can see where it will break. Seeing where the parts will fall is a little harder, Nina, but threads run into the future as well as the past. You can see the trajectories they will . . . Ah! Here. No, a little to the left.” She pulled Nona to a particular spot.

  “It’s Nona. And—” The rest of what Nona had to say was lost in a cracking that split the world, a rumble as deep as the black ice, and the screaming as the great wall of Verity began to tumble inwards. The section of wall that exploded was a hundred yards wide and centred right in front of them.

  Nona slowed time’s steady march to a crawl. Huge blocks descended on gravity’s arcs, their languid rotation spraying smaller stones and broken fragments, plates of ancient plaster scything through the air, others bursting, dust trails spiralling in their wake.

  True to Sister Pan’s reading, although blocks the size of carts hammered down all around her and Nona, nothing save a few pebbles and two fist-sized fragments came directly at them. These Nona managed to deflect.

  Even before the impacts had stopped vibrating through the soles of Nona’s feet, a thick cloud of dust began to rise. For a minute or so they stood blind, surrounded by dust so dense that even the howling winds couldn’t strip it away. The world returned in snatches and then, in one fierce, hot blast, the air was clear. Nona and Pan stood alone, both of them coated grey.

  Adoma’s Fist emerged from the smoke, picking their way over and around the rubble. First a lone woman in her leather battle-dress, then two men, one in courtly attire, the other in a robe so overblown that he might be mistaken for a street magician were it not for the sigils marked in gold thread. Over a dozen others followed with the thin man in the red armour leading them. The quantals were to the fore now, the marjals working their magics to the rear. A fire-laced hurricane rose around them, a shell to protect from arrows, with Nona and Pan inside its perimeter. All eyes were on them, the Fist variously amused, surprised, or dismissive.

  The “street magician” seemed outraged. “Is this all the emperor sends to stand before us? A child and a crone?” He spoke the empire tongue with harsh angles but clear enough.

  “Wait!” The thin man in red raised his gauntleted hand as several around him made to summon their power. “Can it be? The Path-mage of Sweet Mercy? I had heard you were dead!”

  “Not quite, Yom Rala, not quite.” Pan smiled but there was sadness in it.

  Yom Rala. Nona remembered his name now and the fear that had coloured Kettle’s voice when she spoke of him. The man had a deadly reputation.

  Yom Rala addressed his colleagues. “You will have heard of Sister Pan. In the Antral Wars they whispered her name. She brought Darlamar low before most of us were born, and the Mage of Elon too. When enough time has passed for her to be counted as history they will set her name among the most famed Path-walkers of this empire and speak it with that of Sister Cloud and Sister Owl.”

  “She looks as if walking to her grave would be beyond her!” cried a young woman in a sigil robe of fiery yellows and oranges.

  Several of the younger Path-mages laughed.

  “We will show Sister Pan respect!” Yom Rala barked. He repeated himself in Scithrowl, then addressed the nun in softer tones, his accent almost unnoticeable. “I would offer to duel but it is said you haven’t walked the Path in twenty years.”

  Sister Pan bowed to the Scithrowl mage. “This is untrue, but I cannot duel you.”

  Yom Rala tilted his head. “You can still manage a few steps? Remarkable at your age, sister. But I should have expected no less.” He glanced at Nona. “Have you brought a champion to stand in your stead?”

  “Nina? She’s a little girl. She really ought to start running now.” Pan motioned for Nona to go and suddenly it seemed like a really good idea. Even so, Nona stayed. The suggestion’s power blew her will away like clockseeds in a Corridor Wind, but something stronger anchored Nona to the spot. She hadn’t realised that she loved the old woman before. But she did. And Nona Grey could no more walk away from that than from her own skin.

  Through the wide hole torn in the city wall Nona could see Adoma’s horde surging forward. Tens of thousands armed for war, running full tilt towards the breach.

  “She’s a crazed old nun.” One of the senior mages came to stand at Yom’s shoulder. “The softmen say she hasn’t reached the Path in a decade and more.”

  “It is true,” Pan said. “I haven’t reached the Path since before this girl beside me was a twinkle in her father’s eye.”

  Yom bowed his head with regret and waved one of his flame-weavers forward. “Kill her and be done.”

  “I haven’t reached the Path in twenty years because in all that time I have never left it.” Sister Pan glanced again at Nona. “Run, child. Please.”

  And Nona was running, even as she knew it was wrong and that she should stay with her teacher, even as her eyes clouded with tears . . . she ran. That “please” had made her go. She ran faster than she had ever thought she might without the Path to speed her way.

  She felt the step that took Sister Pan from the Path. The Path where she had walked every day and every hour of Nona’s life. What that might be like lay beyond Nona’s imagining. She only knew that not even the Ancestor could own that much power. Sister Pan had walked in glory all this time, knowing that to leave would be the end of her. That single step from the Path sent shock waves through the world. Waves that would ride the thread-scape around the entirety of Abeth’s globe. There would be no quantal, not even an ice-triber at the edge of some distant hot sea near the planet’s pole, who would not know that some great thing had fallen.

  What saved Nona, more than the distance she was able to put between herself and Sister Pan, was that even though Pan could not hope to own what the Path had given her, she somehow managed to give it direction.

  The blast lifted Nona from her feet and threw her the length of the street, almost to the feet of the abbess and the Chief Academic. All of them were felled. Nona struggled for her breath and, despite the pain all along the side where she hit the ground, was among the first to rise. She gazed back the way she had come, towards the yawning breach and the fires fringing it. Nothing lay beyond save a great wide trench torn yards deep in the black earth of the empire and smoking all along its length.

  23

  HOLY CLASS

  IN THE AFTERMATH of Sister Pan’s spectacular demise Nona became aware of three things. First that although Adoma’s Fist had been so broken that not even a tatter of sigil robe fluttered to the ground where they had stood, and although the many thousands charging for the breach had been reduced to fragments of charred bone, the Scithrowl horde remained tens of thousands strong and against all sense, rather than running for their homeland in panic, they were once again advancing. The second thing was that Sister Pan’s death had
struck her like a knife between the ribs. Nona thought of the dried flower that had fallen from the nun’s hidden book and found she had tears running from her eyes. The third thing she realised was that neither Jula nor Ruli were among the novices regrouping before Abbess Wheel.

  “Where’s Jula?” Nona tried to shake an answer from Alata. Discarding the disoriented Alata, she caught hold of Ketti, who was bleeding from a gashed forehead. “Where’s Ruli?”

  “I . . .”

  “Concentrate!” Nona’s own senses were ringing, and not just from the physical force of the explosion. Her blood still resonated with the energies released. Perhaps the Path itself had quivered like a plucked string. Nona had been shaken to her core and felt in no condition to exercise any of the gifts her quantal or marjal heritage had bestowed upon her. “Ketti!”

  “I . . . thought they were helping them . . .”

  “Who?”

  “That woman and the guardsmen.” Ketti touched her forehead and looked at her crimson fingers in astonishment.

  “What woman? What did she do?”

  “She was helping Ruli up.” Ketti gestured down the street. “Over there. By the gateposts with the carved lions.” Between Nona and the gate stood the cart in which Sister Pan had ridden with the shipheart. It sat listing on a broken wheel, the iron casket nearby, lying on its side on the flagstones.

  “Where did they go?”

  “I . . .” Confusion clouded Ketti’s eyes. “I thought they came this way. The men were carrying Jula.”

  Over by the garden wall Abbess Wheel called Nona’s name. The foremost of the Scithrowl horde were now charging through the charnel-filled trench where their brothers and sisters had perished just minutes before. Sister Iron and Sister Tallow were leading the way towards the breach, with soldiers emerging from the side streets to support them. The setting sun threw their shadows towards the enemy and stained all their steel with blood. On the nearest stairs from the city wall defenders queued to descend and join the stand.

  Mally came running back from the main group. “The abbess wants you to bring the shipheart, Nona . . . I mean Sister Cage.”

  Nona ignored her, taking Ketti’s face in her hands and steering it towards her own. Once Ketti had been much taller than her. Now she had to look up. “Concentrate! The men, what were they wearing?”

  “Scarlet. Guards’ uniform.”

  Nona released her. Ketti wiped the blood from her hand and started back towards the other novices around the abbess. “And silver!” she called over her shoulder before drawing her sword from its scabbard.

  “The shipheart, Nona!” Mally pointed, unwilling to go near the fallen casket.

  Scarlet and silver. Sherzal’s colours. The men who had caught Nona in Rellam Forest just outside her village, the men who had set her on the long path to the place where she now stood: beneath the dirt and blood those men had worn Sherzal’s colours too.

  “Sherzal’s guards have taken Jula!” Nona tried to open the thread-bond she had forged with Ruli using the commonality of their marjal blood. Immediately deafening echoes of Sister Pan’s final act filled her skull and she doubled up, both hands pressed to the sides of her head.

  “Are you . . . all right, Nona?” Mally, at her side now.

  Nona looked towards the breach where the Scithrowl charge was already within the long shadow of the walls. Abbess Wheel was leading Nona’s classmates and teachers towards that gap. The people who had been Nona’s life since she was a small girl. Before them lay only torn earth, broken stone, and certain death. The Scithrowl were numberless, unstoppable. She saw Ketti at the back. Alata and Leeni side by side, ready to die as they had lived; together. Ghena looking short beside Sister Oak. A fresh pang of sorrow stabbed through Nona. She saw Sister Pan’s sad smile. None of them wanted to die. Not even Pan with a hundred years behind her. But at least they would die together, and fighting.

  With an oath Nona turned her back on them all and ran from Mally towards the emperor’s spires. On the way past the broken cart she scooped up the shipheart in its casket.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE SHIPHEART’S AURA beat at Nona, tearing at the roots of her personality as she ran, eager to reshape her. She endured it for two streets, then threw the casket over a high garden wall. A mansion lay behind the garden, and behind that an open plaza that stretched to Crucical’s gates. The ring of imperial guards that had turned her away before would be waiting for her. She scaled the wall and dropped beside the casket before moving away to crouch by the trunk of an elm tree. Dusk filled the garden and for a moment the battle seemed far away, already half a dream.

  Nona muttered her serenity poem, “She’s falling down, she’s falling down, the moon, the moon . . .” and wrapped herself in the cool distance of the trance. “Ruli . . .” She opened the thread-bond to her friend.

  * * *

  • • •

  “OH, THANK THE Ancestor!” Ruli lifted her head from a one-eyed contemplation of the patterned floor.

  “What?” Jula hissed. “What?”

  Close by, in front of a pair of tall bronze doors, half a dozen of Sherzal’s guards stood tense and ready as their captain engaged in heated conversation with three men in the emperor’s green and gold who barred his way.

  It’s nothing. Nona spoke the words inside Ruli’s skull.

  “It’s . . . nothing,” Ruli said. “I just remembered that we have a friend looking out for us.” She tried to open her other eye but it stayed swollen shut.

  “A friend?” Jula glanced up at the nearest guard. “What do you . . . oh!” She closed her mouth and pressed her lips firmly together.

  I’m coming to get you both. Just make sure to show me everything. Nona could have deepened the bond and steered Ruli’s gaze where she wanted it but she could feel her friend’s apprehension. Any deeper and she would lose control over how much they shared through the bond, and sharing fear would do neither of them any good. They both had plenty of their own.

  The guard captain appeared to have won his argument because the emperor’s men stepped back and pulled open the doors. Ruli found herself being hauled roughly to her feet, and Nona realised for the first time that her wrists had been bound together behind her back.

  Before being led through the doors Ruli took a long look back the way they had come. A wide corridor lined with paintings and statuary stretched off towards a distant chamber lit by a curious blue light.

  “Move it!” A guardsman shoved her and Ruli staggered into another chamber, this one with a domed ceiling offering the darkening sky through a round window high above. Streaks of black crossed the patch of midnight blue, and the smell of smoke, absent in the corridor, could be smelled again.

  Crucical’s palace appeared to be even more of a warren than Sherzal’s. It seemed that the idea was to impress the emperor’s grandeur on the world by covering as much of it as possible with endless chambers, halls, galleries, shrines, and corridors. Ruli’s good eye flickered left and right, picking out detail. The place seemed almost deserted; no doubt the guards were protecting the exterior. The other occupants were probably huddled together in some inner sanctum since misery loves company and since the empire had run out of places for people of quality to flee to.

  Eventually, after descending three flights of stairs they came to an iron door manned by two guards in scarlet and silver. Behind the door lay a library. Not the grand, showy kind that Nona had glimpsed on her rare ventures into rich men’s homes but something more akin to the high priest’s vault or the small collection within Sweet Mercy’s scriptorium.

  Among the dusty browns and blacks of leather-bound tomes, Sherzal’s diamonds and gown of silver-white seemed wholly out of place.

  “Novices!” She greeted them with a wide, gleaming smile. The Scithrowl might be cutting a path towards the palace but Sherzal had taken the time to
have her rouge applied, her lips painted scarlet, the dark red curls of her mane brushed to a high shine. “Ruli . . . and . . . Jula.” She pointed at them in turn with a long, sharp-nailed finger. “I’m glad you could join us.”

  “We need to be with our abbess!” Ruli’s voice came out as a squeak. She deepened it and tried to inject some outrage. “The Scithrowl are through the city wall.”

  “Yes, yes. Adoma and her tedious horde.” Sherzal turned and walked to the back of the room. “You girls will do a lot more good here, I can assure you of that. It’s no coincidence that I chose to meet you in a library . . .”

  She pushed aside two piles of books, letting them topple to the floor. Behind her the iron door opened again and a young woman clad in a grey tunic with a black chain-mail shirt of very fine gauge entered. She took the novices in with dark eyes above high cheekbones.

  “Safira . . .” The recognition leaked from Nona’s mind to Ruli’s lips. The memory of the woman carrying Jula from the aftermath of the explosion rose in both their minds. A day before she had been in the company of Lano Tacsis.

  Safira raised a brow at Ruli, then turned to Sherzal. “I have the code. I had to kill the knight-protector.”

  “No matter.” Sherzal returned her attention to the area of wall that had been obscured by the piled books. She unsheathed a knife and started to pry at the stone blocks. “Now, where are you hiding?” She tutted and tried the point of her blade a little farther along. Without warning the block opened, the whole thing just a stone front attached to a wooden door a foot long and six inches tall. Behind it lay a set of three gleaming steel wheels set into a steel plate marked with numbers.

  “Ten, twenty, four,” Safira said.