Holy Sister

by Mark Lawrence

  With a start Nona realised that the assassins were already much closer than she had imagined they might be. She turned and began to sprint, winding herself around the curve of the pillar at her back. The sharp retort of cross-knives hitting stone followed her, beginning at the spot where she had been standing just a heartbeat before. Without warning another of the Noi-Guin broke from the darkness beside a pillar immediately ahead of Nona and attacked with breathtaking speed and the advantage of surprise, his weapons serrated kill-spikes designed to anchor in flesh. It was all Nona could do to twist out of their path and fall to the ground. Another assassin came at her with a black-tipped spear. Nona, knowing she couldn’t evade the blow, reached out hoping she might somehow deflect it.

  In that instant something black hurtled into the assassin. A small novice. A hunska. Nona didn’t even know her name. Two more leapt at the man with the kill-spikes, one of them screaming as she was immediately impaled.

  “No! Run!” Nona was on her feet. She struck a cross-knife out of the air with her hand.

  More novices came charging in, knives in hand. They would all be dead in seconds. With a scream of her own Nona started to run again. The girls wouldn’t retreat if she made a stand. She couldn’t have all their deaths on her hands.

  Nona fled as if all the demons of the black ice were at her heels, and in truth there wasn’t much to choose between that and the reality of the situation. She sprinted through the pillar forest and broke out into the open ground in front of the abbess’s house. Here she was at her most vulnerable. Once the Noi-Guin emerged from the pillars they would have a clear shot at her. As she ran Nona reached for the strap across her chest. Kettle had given her the Grey Sister’s full field equipment. She jagged left, right, left. Cross-knives hissed past her. She knew that even as she slowed herself, hoping to evade the missiles, others among the Noi-Guin would be sprinting towards her flat-out on straight lines. Her fingertips counted along the vials in the harness and searched for the coded markings. Sister Apple had had them hunt out specific vials in the most difficult of circumstances on many occasions. The rule was that you drank whatever was in the vial you picked, no matter whether you picked right or wrong. A cross-knife hammered into Nona’s shoulder and she stumbled, almost dropping the vial she’d torn free. She flipped the top and knocked back the contents, sliding to the left as more knives hit the rock around her.

  Nona reached the convent buildings with at least two Noi-Guin hard on her heels, the furious tempo of their feet still muffled as if there were no circumstances under which the assassins could ever be considered noisy. Another cross-knife hit her, a razored punch into the back of her thigh.

  A sharp turn along the alley between the laundry and winery buildings allowed Nona to pull the trick that had won her many races with her friends, kicking off the wall to make the tight corner without losing speed. She shot into the dormitory building, up two flights of stairs, crashed through into the Holy dorm, and leapt through the window above her study desk, shattering the shutters. She landed on the roof of the cold store across the way, rolling over the roof ridge with a scream as the cross-knife tore free from her shoulder. Two more rolls dropped her from the gutter and she hit the ground running, heading back towards the far end of the laundry. Her thigh was a white agony but she ran on with hardly a limp. Flaw-blades sliced into stone, allowing Nona to slingshot herself around a corner into the mangle room and then on through the washing gallery, down some steps and into the well room. Here laundry bags had been piled around the wall of the well, each tied by a length of rope that dangled down into the shaft. Without pause Nona jumped down the well, grabbing the ropes as she fell. The heavy sacks came with her, sliding some five or ten yards before choking together as the shaft narrowed. Nona jolted to a halt, cursing at the agony from her shoulder. A second later she let go and fell the rest of the distance.

  She caught the stonework at the very bottom of the shaft with her flaw-blades and swung out over the pool into the cavern beneath the centre oak.

  “Hello?” Spoken into the darkness. Her fingers found the hilt of the knife in her leg and she gasped despite herself. If she drew it out she would likely bleed to death. If she left it in, then any venom still on the blade would continue to feed into her.

  “Nona?” A weak voice, trembling.

  “You tell me. You’re the one who can see.” A grin broke through Nona’s pain. She turned towards Ara’s voice.

  “Help me up.” The rasp underlying each word spoke of a damaged lung. Broken ribs most likely.

  “You’re all wet,” Nona said, finding Ara in the dark. She lifted her friend, trying not to put too much weight on her wounded leg. The pain now made it seem as if it hadn’t really hurt until she stopped running.

  “The novices lowered me into the pool like I told them to.” Ara leaned against her. “Like you told me to tell them to. And they set up the bags . . .” She straightened and gasped. “If someone wants to find us, then a few sacks of dirty habits aren’t going to keep them out for long.”

  “No.” Nona limped a step forward, bringing Ara with her. “So let’s not stay here long.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE TWO NUNS struggled on together, Nona wholly blind and navigating only by memory, Ara able to see but less sure of the route. Nona kept one hand pressing a cloth to the wound in her shoulder. The lead she had opened and the blockage in the well meant that the Noi-Guin would have to track her. Once they reached the undercaves they would have Clera guide them. Nona let a little blood spill here and there. She wanted a trail Clera could follow rather than having to cede the lead to one of the assassins more skilled at tracking even though unfamiliar with the surroundings.

  In a narrow passage a hundred yards on, nausea overwhelmed Nona. She leaned against the wall and retched, spraying the ground before her.

  “Nona!”

  “I’m all right . . .” She felt dizzy and sick. The black cure she had taken while running fought its battle with whatever venom had coated the Noi-Guin’s little knives. She bent double, hands on her thighs. Only her gasps, the rattle of Ara’s breath, and the drip, drip, drip of the caves broke the silence. And in her head Nona’s devils whispered fears to her. Fears so secret she had hardly acknowledged them even to herself.

  Clera will betray you.

  Arabella Jotsis has hated you from the start. To her you’re the same muddy peasant now as on the first day you arrived.

  You’ll die down here, in the dark.

  Tacsis, Jotsis, Namsis . . . all of them the same.

  Yisht almost throttled you to death in these tunnels. You think you can escape eight Noi-Guin?

  The Singular is with them. He’s worse than the other seven put together.

  Leave the girl. She’s slowing you down.

  “Shut up!”

  “What?” Ara stiffened.

  “No, not—” Nona shook her head. “Never mind. Let’s keep moving.”

  Nona limped blind through damp and narrow spaces with an untold weight of rock above her and a desperate need not to lose her way. In places both of them had to drag themselves across the floor like wounded animals. The knowledge that the most deadly assassins in all the Corridor were pursuing them proved unhelpful. Each of the killers would be wholly in their element, the ancient darkness flowing through their veins. Imagination filled the quiet between her breaths with soft sounds of stealthy approach. Several times Nona turned back along her path, determined to study the thread-scape and see how close the threat lay, only to tear herself away, unwilling to spend the time uncovering information that wouldn’t change her course of action. Ara made no complaint at any of these pauses, simply hung on Nona’s shoulder drawing slow painful breaths that scraped in and rattled out. Nona thought of Apple, lung-struck in the chaos of battle. With a sob she hauled Ara on.

  Finally they reached Nona’s goal. She fel
t the pulse of the shipheart from within the rock wall in which she had sunk it.

  “Stand back.” Nona dug her fingers into the stone as though it were clay and pulled forth the shipheart, her hands black around its alien light. Immediately the glow made familiar surroundings that had seemed so foreign when revealed only through her touch. The devils in her flesh retreated from the shipheart though it had been the one to spawn them.

  “You carried that here?” Ara leaned back against the opposite wall, her face deathly pale, lips almost black.

  “I didn’t want to!” Nona screwed her face up as the whispers inside her head became shouts. “I’m not Zole . . . I can’t heal us with it. I’m sorry.”

  “Hells,” Ara muttered. “I’d rather hurt than touch that thing again.”

  The fissure up which Nona had climbed lay just feet away. Before approaching it she retraced her steps ten yards down the passage, her heart pounding, expecting at every moment to meet a knife winging out of the dark. She pulled a thread from the stone, just one of the multitude that glimmered in her witch sight. It told the tale of the rock from its constituents and formation to the carving of the channel by ancient waters. She drew it forth and knotted it to a thread in the opposite wall. A tremor of wrongness vibrated across the length of it, then went still.

  With her heart pounding, certain that the Noi-Guin would be on her at any moment, Nona went to the fissure’s edge. She exerted her rock-work skills, breaking stone from the fissure’s sides and at the same time reaching her rock-sense out along the passages that threaded like veins through the plateau. She could sense the silent bulk of the Glasswater; the sinkhole lay just a few hundred yards off, but even with the shipheart’s aid the water and bone of any human bodies approaching along the tunnels proved too small to register. Giving up on the search she dropped the shipheart, giving it a flick to send it rolling down the passage under her. It clattered off out of sight, far enough that no whisper of its light still reached up from the tunnel beneath. Nona allowed herself a sigh of relief at being free of the thing.

  “Ara, you have to go down.” Nona pointed after the shipheart.

  “Down?” Ara groaned. “I can’t.”

  “Seriously.” Nona patted through the dark towards her and grabbed a handful of habit. “It’s a ten-foot climb. The floor’s another eight foot below the bottom of the fissure.”

  “I can’t!”

  Nona started to drag Ara towards the crack. “You have to climb.”

  “The drop will kill me!”

  “Stay here and it will be the Noi-Guin who kill you instead of the drop.”

  “Noi-Guin?” Ara sounded faint.

  “Eight of them.” Nona hauled Ara to the edge, wincing at the girl’s groan of agony. “I made footholds for you.”

  Ara descended painfully. Nona wriggled in after her. She hung by her blades from just beneath the lip of the fissure. Below her Ara reached the roof of the passage underneath them and cried out in pain as she tried to hang down into it. A dull thud followed, then silence. The hurt that flared along the thread-bond almost made Nona lose her own hold and suggested that Ara had fainted from the pain.

  Nona waited, hanging from invisible claws, one shoulder starting to ache with the strain of her suspension, blood dripping from the other, her thigh a mass of white-hot agony, her stomach sick, her body weak with echoes of what the Noi-Guin’s venom wanted to do to her. It seemed to take an eternity before anything happened, and all the while the voices of her devils grew louder in the silence, their demands harder to ignore. They made her sanity seem insane. Why wasn’t she running?

  * * *

  • • •

  “YOU KNOW WHERE the bitch is heading?”

  Nona had already known they were coming. She had felt her thread return to its natural place when the first of them had passed through it. Nona had tied her knot to fail at such intrusion and, as it snapped back, the thread she had set sent ripples through something deeper than the stone. Sister Pan had tried to teach her the trick but it was from Joeli Namsis that Nona had finally learned the subtle arts of thread-traps, watch-threads, and warning threads. She’d had to fall foul of a lot of them before she mastered the technique. As Keot had once told her: your foes shape your life more than friends ever could.

  Nona had known they were coming but until Lano Tacsis spoke she hadn’t dared to hope that he had joined the hunting party. He must have shed a royal fortune in sigil-stamped armour at the well-head, but he would still have enough protection in the form of sigiled amulets and robes to stop a Path-blast. Not that Nona could manage one of those.

  “There’s an exit near the base of the plateau. It’s where I’d go.” Clera’s voice. “She’ll have set traps for us somewhere. Wires maybe.”

  Nona steeled herself, against her pain, against her weakness, against the voices in her head telling her, not unreasonably, that Clera had betrayed her again, that Clera would not have followed her instruction.

  Nona waited. A figure began to step over the fissure. With all the speed and strength left to her Nona lunged up, ignoring the scream of her injured shoulder, and seized the person’s ankle. In the same movement she retracted her flaw-blades and let the whole of her weight haul both of them into the depths.

  The fissure crawled around them as if they sank in honey. Nona left her victim to fend for themselves, concentrating instead on her own landing. When her head cleared the fissure she hunted the shipheart’s glow. As the rubble-strewn floor approached, Nona extended her good leg to absorb the first impact. She knew one leg would not be sufficient. Her other foot hit the ground and she strained to keep her body from hammering into the rocks. The wicked little knife bedded in the back of her thigh cut deeper as her muscles tightened around it.

  With a howl Nona sank to her haunches and immediately launched herself at the shipheart. She slapped a hand to it and with an effort that she thought might shatter her already-clenched teeth she brought the fissure walls tumbling in. Quicker than thought she rolled, hand extended towards Ara, slumped senseless beneath the opening. At the touch of Nona’s rock-work several large chunks of stone became dust, sifting down through the air while smaller pieces bounced everywhere but on Ara.

  A black-cloaked figure rolled to a halt beside Nona.

  “What in the—” It scrambled rapidly away. “Ancestor’s balls! That’s a fucking shipheart!” Clera arrived against the opposite wall on her backside, straining to get farther away. “My brain feels like it’s being cooked!”

  Nona glanced up at the jumble of broken stone choking the fissure in the roof above them. The effort of bringing it down had left her with a headache that was bad enough to compete with her shoulder and thigh for attention.

  “That’s your plan?” Clera followed her gaze, her face pale and beaded with sweat. “That’s not a plan!” She slapped a dirty palm to her forehead. “No! I can’t believe I’ve been this stupid. What is it you do to me, Nona? Some marjal mind-trick? That’s it isn’t it, a mind-trick?”

  Nona ignored her and crawled to Ara’s side. Her friend’s headdress had come loose and her golden hair was crimson with blood from some new head wound. Nona took a vial from her Grey Sister supplies and opened it beneath Ara’s nose. The sharp smell that rose made Nona’s eyes water, and with a cough and a splutter Ara came back to herself, pushing the vial away.

  “You’ve just bought yourself half an hour, an hour tops!” Clera stamped away, then stamped back. “They’ll find a way round, they’ll track us, they’ll kill us.” She kicked a rock and limped off cursing. “You’ve just killed me! What were you thinking? This isn’t a plan!”

  “No,” Nona said. “This is a plan.” She raised the shipheart, her grip so tight that she thought her finger-bones might break. For a moment the light within the stone flickered and dimmed. Nona reached out along silent, lightless tunnels, her rock-sense questing. She found the di
stant wall she wanted . . . and broke it. It felt as if the effort had broken something inside her in return. She fell to the floor, hot blood welling from her mouth, and the shipheart rolled from her nerveless hand.

  The Rock of Faith rumbled.

  “Nona?” Ara asked, her voice trembling. “What have you done?”

  Nona lay where she had fallen. “Sinkhole.”

  “The Glasswater?” Clera breathed. “What did you do?”

  Nona got a hand under her chest and pushed herself from the ground. It seemed that she weighed as much as ten nuns should. The rock beneath her palm trembled.

  “The tunnel above us is about to become a river again.” She used the wall to help herself to one leg. “Then a bit later, so will this one.” She reached to drag Ara from the ground. “So we have to get out of here fast.”

  25

  HOLY CLASS

  NONA KNEW THAT the darkness, and the speed with which water under pressure will travel through a tunnel, meant that all they would know at the end was that the distant rumble would suddenly become a whoosh and a heartbeat later they would all be dead.

  Already the air was in motion, blasting them from behind no matter how fast they moved.

  “We’ll never make the Seren Way!” A frantic Clera paused twenty yards ahead of Nona and Ara. The shipheart’s glow caught faintly on her face and hands, making her a suggestion in the dark.

  Ara shuffled forward in a kind of broken jog, groaning every time she misstepped on the uneven ground and jolted herself. Nona kept pace with an awkward gait, crippled by the pain in her head and swinging her injured leg around stiffly, unwilling to bend it.

  “Hurry!” It was clear that Clera was moments from speeding away to leave them to it. “Faster!”

  “We’re not going to the Seren Way!” They would never make it that far, Clera was right about that. “We just need to reach the holothour chamber and the ring.” Nona held the shipheart higher. “With this!”