Holy Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  In the midst of her circle of carnage Kettle paused. “Where are . . .” Nona struggled to remember the names of the quantal novices from Mystic Class. “Sheryl and Haluma?” She loaned power to Kettle’s voice and a marjal compulsion that demanded an answer.

  “Here.” Sister Oak coughed the word bloodily from where she lay with one arm around the corpse of a young girl. “There.” She nodded to a wounded novice, propped against the wall.

  Kettle reached Haluma in three strides. She knotted her fingers in the back of the novice’s habit and hauled her to her feet. Blood spilled down the girl’s leg from a deep cut but she had hold of her wits.

  “I am going to throw you at the Path. You are going to take what you need and open a way back to our lines. Understand?”

  “N . . . no.” The girl stared at her wide-eyed. “What are . . . what are you talking about, Sister Kettle?”

  Nona set the palm of her other hand to Haluma’s forehead, reached out with the shipheart’s power, and shoved the girl at the burning line of the Path. She felt Haluma’s first step, watched as she ran on, trying to tame her speed, nudged her back when she started to fall. After eight steps Haluma missed a twist completely and jolted back into her body. Immediately she started to shake apart. Nona clasped both hands to the sides of the girl’s head, pressing hard to support her weight but pressing still harder in ways that mattered more, holding her together.

  “Own your power.”

  And Haluma did.

  An instant later she released it in a blast of light and heat. The channel that Haluma cut through the Scithrowl lay littered with blackened body parts but was otherwise clear.

  “Drag the wounded!” Through Kettle, Nona grabbed the nearest novices and shoved them towards the backs of the last few Scithrowl between them and the emperor’s soldiers. She moved back through the convent group shoving one after the next towards the defensive line until she found herself face to face with a shocked Sister Tallow.

  “Keep the passage open until they’re through.”

  “Sister Kettle?”

  “Do it!”

  Nona moved on, pressing Ketti and Ghena into dragging Sister Oak. They had to pull Sheryl too as the nun refused to release the girl’s body, unable to admit that she was dead. The sudden wave of emotion that seized both Nona and Kettle, seeing Oak cling to the novice’s broken corpse, threatened to shake Nona back to her flesh. She held tight.

  Wheel ordered other able-bodied novices to pull away more of the injured. Alata hurried past with Leeni in her arms and Scithrowl closing on her. The closest man hurled his spear. Using Kettle’s hunska speed, Nona caught it and hurled it back without reversing it. The wooden haft felled its former owner, knocking the helm from his head and shattering the orbit of his eye. Kettle cast around for Apple. Had she been taken back to the defenders’ main line? There was no time. Too many soldiers crowding in. Nona summoned twin flaw-swords again and threw herself into the advancing mass of enemy warriors.

  * * *

  • • •

  “NONA!” SOMETHING HIT her, bounced off, and shattered. “Nona!”

  Nona had the feeling that the person had been calling her name for a while. She blinked the violet light from her eyes and looked up.

  “Nona!” Regol stood at the edge of the chamber against one of a number of tapestries depicting great seascapes. He had a vase in one hand ready to throw. It looked very valuable. A stained-glass ocean decorated the dome above them. The first stars had started to show in a black sky.

  Nona spun around. Her eyes fixed on two marble statues of wrestlers sizing each other up across an archway leading from the chamber. More statues, alternating with portraits, punctuated the corridor leading away from the exit.

  Regol’s been bedding some Sis whore. Force him to speak the truth.

  Nona felt her face contort with the ugliness of her suspicion.

  Cut his lying tongue out.

  She turned back towards Regol with a stare that should have transfixed him.

  Kill them together.

  “I hate you!” The words broke from her, dripping venom.

  Nona snarled, shaking her head to rid it of the voices. She tried to bite down on their anger; it was something she didn’t own. With an effort she lowered her gaze from Regol’s confusion to the stains rising slowly up her wrists from where her fingers made contact with the shipheart.

  “Stay here! If you follow me I’ll kill you.” And then without looking back, she turned for the archway and began to run.

  24

  HOLY CLASS

  NONA RAN THE length of the hallway to the bronze doors at the far end. Both of the guardsmen who had delayed Sherzal’s men were still on duty. Nona slowed to a walk as she drew closer. Nothing in her appearance qualified her for entry and the two men were drawing their swords before the unease they felt at the shipheart’s approach turned to fear and then terror. The slowness of her advance allowed them to retain enough of their wits to be able to unlock the doors. They ran through, leaving the doors wide open behind them. Nona followed them.

  She gathered her recollection of what she’d seen through Ruli’s eyes, and it proved sufficient to get her to the iron door of the library. Considering the lock, she pulled its thread without so much as a twitch of her fingers. Once in she took the last lantern, upended the reading table, and struck a leg from it. A flaw-blade jabbed into the far wall soon uncovered the hidden alcove. Nona didn’t waste time on the complex tangle of threads that might or might not yield to her efforts and undo the lock for the stairs. Instead she simply set the wheels to the same numbers that Sherzal had. She squeezed through and was already a third of the way down the square spiral of steps before the door in the library floor had finished opening.

  Her devils spoke with separate voices now, their opinions tearing at her in ways Keot had seldom been able to. Ignoring them, Nona hurried down the long corridor. The Ark-lights still shone but she spared no time to marvel at them. She held the shipheart in one hand with the lantern hanging from her wrist. In the other she held the table leg, which she repeatedly threw ahead of her and retrieved. The process stopped when the leg came apart midair, reaching the ground as a scattering of neatly sliced cubes.

  The far end of the corridor looked to be closer than Nona had thought it should be, and there was no door there. Rather it was as if a blank wall had risen up since the others passed this way, sealing the passage closed.

  Nona went to the sidewall where Sherzal had tapped out her rhythm and did her best to reproduce it. Nothing happened. She cut the muddy hem from her tunic and tossed it forward to check if anything had changed. It fell to the floor in pieces. She snarled in frustration. One of her devils tried to turn it into a scream of primal rage while others fought to take hold of her limbs.

  Nona bit down and focused her will. She sat and rolled the shipheart to the opposite wall where it would exert less pressure on her thoughts. After a moment to regroup she reached for her clarity and for her serenity. She pictured Amondo’s hands moving as they would have to if the juggler were to sustain not three or four balls in the air but nine. She passed the image of the missing flame and the lines of the falling moon from one side of her mind to the other. The keys to both trance states circulated through her, drawing every worry, every demand and secret terror, into their orbit as she achieved both states simultaneously.

  The memory of Sherzal striking the wall became Nona’s sole focus. Her joint trance gave it a crystal clarity. Sherzal’s hand hit the beat, the vision repeating, recycling until the tempo ran through Nona’s veins like the erratic pounding of a second heart.

  Nona stood up and struck the required pattern. The opening appeared in the wall and she pressed the glowing disc inside the recess. A second cloth test showed the trap to be disarmed and Nona hurried on.

  Before she cleared the area protected by the blades
something struck her, not a flaw-blade but still sharp and invisible. Ruli’s agony. It reached out across their thread-bond like a spear thrust.

  When Nona was new to the skill, the distress would have hauled her mind across to join Ruli without allowing her any choice. Now, she had the mastery to resist the pull, but it had never been in Nona to ignore a friend, even if not doing so meant that she had to share their pain.

  In a heartbeat Nona occupied Ruli’s flesh. They had her on the floor with wrists and ankles bound, hands behind her back. The guardsman who had been kicking her stepped aside to reveal Sherzal smiling broadly. Behind her Jula, similarly tied, sat at the feet of several more guards.

  “Well, this is rather silly.” Sherzal came closer, her smile fading into concern. “Look at you, all bloody.” Nona reminded herself that the emperor’s sister had all but owned the Inquisition and had watched them burn her court rivals alive on trumped-up charges over matters as slight as unkind, though likely accurate, gossip. The concern on her face was entirely manufactured. “You understand that Dillon here is just softening you up? The idea is to save us having to go through the part where I ask you about the book and you pretend that you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  “But—” Ruli’s protest was cut off by a heavy kick to the stomach.

  “We’ll get to the questions in a short while. And if we don’t get answers Dillon will have to take out his knife. And if that doesn’t work . . .” Sherzal gestured past the guards with Jula to the door behind. Safira stood poised and ready, and at her side a sulky-looking Joeli Namsis. Nona’s hatred for the girl curled Ruli’s lip. Joeli must have been just ahead of her all this time.

  “. . . Safira has her poisons and needles. And look! She’s brought your friend to play. I really want to keep young Joeli fresh for what comes later, but if we must then she can pull what we need out of your skull. Though I’m told it may leave you rather broken.”

  Ruli groaned and rolled her head, bringing the other half of the chamber into the view of her one good eye. The pristine floor lay spattered with blood from the killing of Crucical’s guards, and long smears indicated that the trio had been dragged away through a door opposite. A kick took Ruli in the back below the ribs, and as she jerked her head up Nona saw something that pushed the rising agony back down into being a mere distraction. Glowing molten and gold at the end of a long length of chain that had presumably been used to drag it to the chamber lay the Sweet Mercy shipheart.

  Another kick crunched into Ruli’s ribs, doubling her up with pain. Sherzal moved around so that her feet came into Ruli’s eye-line.

  “A little bird has told me that you and your friends have been busy stealing books. And by your friends I mean Nona Grey and Arabella Jotsis, both of whom owe me a great debt for damaging my alliance with Adoma.”

  “Damaging?” Ruli spat out a bloody laugh and Nona loved her for it. “Adoma . . .” She hadn’t the breath to say it but Adoma had driven her armies through the Grand Pass and taken Sherzal’s palace at the very start of the invasion three years earlier. As soon as the Noi-Guin shipheart was lost to them, the alliance to secure the Ark had fallen apart. It was “damaged” in the same way a snail is damaged beneath a descending heel. Officially, of course, the treachery had never existed, but if Crucical truly believed that, then he had never really known his sister at all.

  “Yes, damaging.” Sherzal frowned. “But with the right incentives Adoma can be brought back into line. We have what she really wants right here, and all the doors are locked tight. Further, you will notice the cylinders attached to the walls.” Sherzal waved an arm. Ruli fixed on one of maybe a dozen white cylinders somehow adhering to the sides of the chamber, each longer and thicker than her leg. “My brother entrusted these into my care. They date from the Second Age when our ancestors mastered the secret fire again. At the push of a particular button they will explode with as much force as a quantal Path-walker can direct.” She drew from her gown a short, fat stick with a red button at the end. “They were supposed to seal the Grand Pass and make it a tomb for ten thousand Scithrowl. I told my brother they failed to function, and at the time I said it I believed it to be true, thanks to some clever thread-work. But sweet Safira, keeper of my secrets, showed me their hiding place and I brought them here.

  “I doubt they can open or destroy the Ark but they can certainly bury it deeply enough that it would take Adoma many years to dig her way back to it. So she needs me, just as she needs my shipheart and I need hers. I give you this information because if you tell me what I want to know there could be a place for you in my service, little unruly Ruli.”

  Ruli shook her head. “If it was true, if you really thought they would still work, that they might explode, you wouldn’t be here. You would be on the other side of the city, or in the west, if there are any forts still holding there.”

  “Sadly it requires the ignition button to be close. It won’t even work through a wall. Once perhaps, but not now. All these wonders are fading . . . Besides, I know what happens to losers. It isn’t pretty. If it must come to that, then my end will be swift and glorious and my grave deep.”

  “So . . . the shipheart you stole. The two the battle-queen owns . . .” Nona spoke using Ruli’s mouth. “That only makes three.”

  Sherzal held out four fingers and started to count them down. “Well, there’s one”—the guard marked the count with a kick to Ruli’s thigh—“here that Abbess Glass kindly donated. And number two”—a kick to the ribs—“and three”—and the head—“are with Adoma. The fourth—” The guard stamped on Ruli’s ankle. “The fourth shipheart I need will be delivered to me by Lano Tacsis and the Singular of the Noi-Guin from the sack of the Convent of Sweet Mercy.” Sherzal leaned over and waited for Ruli’s groaning to subside. “So you see, Adoma needs me. I have quite a bit to bargain with.”

  The convent! Even as she shared Ruli’s pain Nona found it crushed to insignificance beneath the terror that Sherzal’s words brought crashing down on her. Lano Tacsis at the convent. The thought of Ara standing lone guard against the Tacsis forces and the Noi-Guin had her tumbling back towards her own body. Ara! She had forced Ara to stay. She’d thought she was saving her!

  Nona clung to Ruli even as her fear for the convent tried to steal her away. Sherzal was still talking.

  “But it has come to my attention that even when we open the Ark, actually controlling the moon may be an annoyingly complicated business. My little bird tells me that Abbess Glass set you children on the path to finding a book that should help on that front. Quite a wonder, that woman. I’m so glad she’s dead. But her annoying cleverness is the reason I can’t afford not to take this book seriously. Owning that knowledge would really be the cherry on the cake. Which is why I had you two brought here. Disappointingly you don’t have the book on you, but you can tell me where it is. And if young Jula really is as studious as Joeli tells me she is, then I think it’s worth investing the time to torture her on the assumption she has the information we need locked behind that plain little face of hers.”

  Nona bit down on Ruli’s pain and spoke into her mind.

  I can save you. I’m going to try the doors but if I can’t get through I’ll need to take control of your body. You really have to trust me for that to happen.

  Ruli made no attempt to hide her relief. You can do the hurting and I’ll sit back and watch you kill this bitch. But even if you take over you’ll still be me . . . and I’m a bit tied up.

  That’s why I want to try the doors first. Stay strong.

  Hurry, Nona! He’s getting his knife out . . . and that’s supposed to be easy compared to what Safira is going to do to me! I’m not strong like you . . .

  * * *

  • • •

  NONA RETURNED TO her flesh with a shuddering breath. She turned her stare towards the blank wall ending the corridor, reaching out with her rock-work. It didn’t require
much skill to understand the nature of the barrier. Even from fifty yards away she knew. The corridor had been sealed with a slab of iron two feet thick.

  Nona paused, considering her options. From Kettle’s thread-bond a pulsing mix of grief, anger, and fear nagged at her heightened senses along with the rush of combat. The pain from Ruli’s beating still throbbed at the end of her thread-bond, but the rising terror of the approaching knife eclipsed it. Nona steeled herself to join her friend, but even as she gathered herself something far stronger than fear or rage hammered through her. It came from the bond she had with Ara. The bond that had registered nothing but a sullen silence since Nona left the Rock of Faith. Now suddenly it echoed with Ara’s first step upon the Path, and the reverberation rang through her louder than any bell.

  By the time Nona had pushed her way into Ara’s mind, her friend had dropped from the Path into a fight so one-sided it made the defence outside Crucical’s palace look like a meeting of equals. Ara fought alone amid the forest of pillars against not scores but hundreds of Pelarthi mercenaries.

  Lano Tacsis was behind this. Sherzal had said so. His coin had brought the Pelarthi from the ice margins. Abbess Wheel had said that the high priest had ordered that Nona be the one to stay. Tacsis gold and Tacsis influence had steered High Priest Nevis’s hand to set Nona alone before the convent and its shipheart. Only the long reach of Abbess Glass had enabled her to step clear. Nona remembered the promise she had made to a dying woman. The promise that she would choose neither Red nor Grey nor the sky blue of the Mystic Sister but instead take the black of a Holy Sister. Even on her deathbed Glass had seen who would replace her as abbess and how much favour such a gesture would win from her. Without that goodwill it would be Nona at the convent miles from the shipheart, unable to work any of the wonders she had been working along her thread-bond and those she still planned to work.